Page 84 of Days You Were Mine

It’s almost comical sitting here with Rick, drinking tea in the middle of the night, him timing my contractions on his watch.

‘That was a huge one, it lasted thirty seconds. Won’t be long now.’

And though the pain is exquisite, I react not at all as each wave breaks over me. This is all I’ve wanted, for my body to be ripped apart by pain.

The first hurdle at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital is that they try to send Rick away.

‘Only family members or spouses,’ they tell him, and when I begin to cry, he shouts, ‘But I’m the baby’s father, for God’s sake. Doesn’t that count for anything?’ and I don’t know if they believe him or if they are just trying to put a stop to my unending tears, but he is allowed to stay.

The midwives think I am odd, strange, disturbed. The pain crescendos as my cervix dilates and my womb contracts and the muscles around my belly turn into a coating of iron. And I am addicted to it.

‘No!’ I shout through another contraction, waving away the gas and air, the offers of other medication: pethidine, an epidural. But otherwise I am entirely silent – ‘stoical’, the midwives tell Rick – just the slide of a solitary tear when I think how Jake will never see this baby.

The final moments of delivery, the overbearing desire to push – not that I want to, just that I have to – and Rick crying out, ‘Here’s the head. Oh my love, the baby is coming.’

The baby is out, the cord is cut, there is a newborn cry, tiny, tinny, a kitten’s mewl.

‘It’s a boy, Alice,’ Rick says, and I don’t need to look because I always knew that.

He’s first to hold the baby, wrapped up like a package in a perforated white blanket, just a flash of deep pink skin to behold. He walks around the small, hot room gazing down at the bundle nestled in his arms.

‘You look like Joseph in the school nativity,’ I say, and he laughs, his loud, shouty laugh.

‘Here you are.’ He places my son on my chest. ‘Your turn.’

He unwinds the blanket from the baby’s face and we look at him properly for the first time. And right at this moment he opens his eyes and then there is no mistaking him, and I bite my lip, but the tears won’t stop coming, and Rick is crying too.

The midwife is back with a clipboard.

‘Mother’s name Alice Garland, father’s name Richard Fields, time of birth six seventeen. Just checking all the details before we send this off.’

I see Rick look at me and I give a tiny, sharp nod.

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘That’s right.’

‘And do we have a name for baby yet?’

‘Charles Jacob Garland,’ I say after a moment’s pause, and my voice comes out strong and steady even though I’ve spoken his name out loud for the first time since he died.

When the midwife has gone, Rick leans over the bed, over the baby, and puts his mouth against my ear.

‘Alice Garland, you are a survivor,’ he says.

And the thing is, Jake said the exact same words to me once before.

And if he said it, if he believed it, then, I tell myself, it must be true.

Now

Luke

It is not unusual for an adoptee to wait until the wheels have fallen off and the car has crashed catastrophically before he seeks help. This is because an adopted child grows up masking or burying their true feelings; in effect, they lock them up in a safe and throw away the key.

Who Am I? The Adoptee’s Hidden Traumaby Joel Harris

There are whole days when I cannot get out of bed. The tasks of showering and brushing my teeth and getting dressed overwhelm me. Sometimes I am paralytically sad, grieving with ceaseless tears that drop down my face for a man I never met. Other times I am subsumed by panic. Not the short, sharp attacks I am used to, two or three minutes of raggedy old-man breathing before the anxiety begins to subside. This is different, a pervasive terror that can last hours at a time. I cannot voice it because mostly I am unable to speak; words have become meaningless and impossible, a language unknown. I feel as if I am slowly losing my hearing, my vision and my mind. If only I could speak, I might break the penetrating quiet that surrounds, engulfs and suffocates. Instead I wait in desperation for Hannah to come and see me, thinking she will understand.But when she does come, I turn my head away and look at the wall, and after a while she kisses me and goes back downstairs to my mother. I am drowning in ignominy.

The doctor comes back again and this time he prescribes Xanax to be taken regularly throughout the day. These small blue pills bring the first moments of relief, knocking me into a thick, exhausting sleep. I sleep through the day and night, waking for water and sips of soup before plunging back into chemical darkness.

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