trudy

BONDING by Trudy Graham

When Judith’s mother died, she faced her own mortality. She thought about the past, about who she once was and what her dreams were, and discovered that her previous self was now no more than a close relative, a sister or brother, with whom she once shared that past.
    Judith hadn’t thought or said much about the sixties for many years, not because she didn’t remember them but because the language spoken back then had been lost. When she did occasionally think about those times she felt ill and frightened, just as she had when she was living through the grief and loss, as if she’d just dropped cold into a big hole with no way out.
    Her mother’s funeral had been a closure and, realising she needed something similar for the past, a way to release the pain, anger, hurt and rage, Judith sat down with a cup of tea to foster an illusion of warmth, and cast her mind back.
    For the first time in many years she thought of Frankie, Meg and Anna. In ordinary circumstances they probably would never have met. But those times had not been ordinary and so they had stumbled into each other’s lives. When they parted the pains and faults of each clung to the others like sticky cobweb. There were all the differences in the world between them, yet they were blood sisters.
    Judith swallowed the lump pin her throat with some hot tea. The identification, after thirty-five years, was still strong, still powerful.
     “We can’t depart this world without leaving a lot of rubbish behind,” Judith thought, wrapping her hands around her warm teacup. “We never go out as cleanly as we come in; and even when we come in, there’s the afterbirth.” She had a lot to clean up before it was her time to leave the world and she had no way of knowing when that would be.

* * *
Decades have a time-lag and the sixties, in the sense that history thinks of them, were just really getting underway when Jude turned twenty in 1965.
    Just days before her birthday she received the news that would change her life forever.
    She’d studied him as he slept, the night after she told him. His face was peaceful and relaxed, but remote. How could she know him? “How can anyone really know another?” she wondered. She could only know the man he tried to be when he was awake.
    Months later she travelled from Sydney to Rockhampton, where her life became entwined with those of Frankie, Anna, Meg and all the others whose names she had forgotten.
    That first night she had curled into the small bed that was suddenly too big, lay in the tide of her breathing, feeling the world turn with her, too big and too fast, hurtling her around to the dark side. She was nervous and felt strange, fragile, convinced that if anyone touched her she would break into small pieces.
    The days that followed were long. The world was still too big and dark and hostile but she learned to conform, adapted to her changed surroundings. She and all the others were waiting for something to happen, for a sign, a direction they should go in.
    For long months they waited, the staff all the while exhorting them to “do the right thing”.
    It was Meg, quiet Meg who acted first, who refused to sign the papers. The staff at the home were shocked. “Do you have somewhere to live? Money?”
    Meg shook her head. “Not yet. But I’ll manage, somehow.”
    “Don’t you know what happens to babies an unmarried woman keeps? Your baby deserves better than that.”
    Meg was strong. She didn’t listen. But Meg was older - twenty-six - so knew how to fight them. She took her daughter and fled back to Melbourne.
    Frankie thought Meg had been too soft. “She’s blown her chances, closed all her options,” she said.
    Frankie was a twin, but the B side, the flip-side sister! she said. She was wild and could have been beautiful, without the peroxided hair, the flashy clothes and the bright red nail polish. She talked too loud, said unconventional things, and laughed from deep in her belly.
    She looked tough, sounded tough, and acted tough. But it was all an act. Jude found her, the day after Frankie’s baby had been given to his new parents, slumped in a shower stall red with the blood that flowed from her slashed wrists.
    Who knew what emptiness her smart talk had been meant to hide?
    When Frankie came back to collect her things, weeks later, she was a ghost of her former self. She was wounded - no she was a wound! - and it was obvious there was a hole in her heart. Jude could almost hear the wind whistling through it.
    Jude felt the futility of it all. Why should society cause this conflict in her and those like her? She knew she had done the wrong thing but had been prepared to face up to her responsibilities. Why then should society try to stop her?
    So she continued to wait. Her baby grew inside her, curling its way into her heart, and she was torn. She imagined being in some horrible slum with people either nasty or being horrible to her, or worse, feeling sorry for her. She wanted her baby, but not the life that went with it. Babies meant no further possibilities, just living like all the other women she’d had plenty of opportunity to observe when she was growing up, only poorer of course.
    She thought he’d loved her. What she thought had been beautiful and loving had suddenly become ugly, the act criminalised with the conception of a child. It was like a brick wall suddenly thrown up where before there had been love and roses and future bliss and baby makes three.
    Rebelling, losing her virginity, had been Jude’s way of becoming an adult, the only way of becoming an adult that wasn’t controlled by others. She had never considered contraception. Contraception was for bad girls, girls who made a habit of sleeping with boys.
    “It’s the best thing for the baby,” her mother had said. “You have to think of the baby, not yourself.”
    Her father echoed this. “You can’t have a baby without a husband, with no money and nowhere to live.”
    Jude waited for all of this to be over, to be behind her. She would think of the woman waiting for her, up ahead in the seventies and eighties, waiting for her the way she was waiting now.
    Anna was next. There was something tentative about Anna. She was like a beautiful bird perched at the end of a branch, poised but ready at any second to take flight. She was only fourteen.
    Despite her pregnancy, Anna was an innocent. She attached herself to Jude, looking on her as the big sister she’d always wanted.
    In Anna’s family, doing your best was important. Being good and fearing what the neighbours might say even more important and Anna was exceptionally good; her manners were impeccable. It was her manners that got her into trouble. She had been taught that good manners are considering how other people feel.
    That’s what she had been doing when it went too far - considering his feelings. She’d thought that to stop him might harm him. She had no interest in sex, didn’t really know what it was all about, but she didn’t know how to be assertive.
    Anna’s pain began early one morning. When she came back a week later she was quieter than ever. She told Jude she had named her daughter “Judith”. That night, she called out in her sleep, woke and then cried in Jude’s arms. “They said I’ll soon forget. How long is soon?” she asked.
    Jude didn’t know.
    Jude’s own time came just days later.
    One week she had with her son, then some official person came with papers to sign. Jude said she hadn’t had time to consider it all, sort herself out. The woman said, “You’ve had nine months to sort it out.”
    In the idealised social system Jude lived in, it was expected that all girls be virtuous, all women be mothers, and all mothers be wives. In falling pregnant outside marriage, Jude fell outside the only institutional form of support available to legitimise and protect her mothering. Jude, as a mother, would be without legitimate status and her son, as illegitimate, dependent on the slender resources of a woman subjected to moral outrage and social and economic disadvantage.
    Jude signed the paper.
    She was allowed one full hour alone with her son. She bathed him while the tears dripped from her chin, then dressed him. While she fed him, she rocked him in her arms and sang him a lifetime of songs in a voice that cracked through a throat that burned.
    Her arms learned the shape of him for the long days that would follow. She breathed him in, filling her senses with all that he was. Knowing that her memory of him would end here, she weaved false ones, lived in her mind through all his baby years, followed him through school and all he might encounter there, walked with him into manhood. She told her son why she was doing this dreadful thing, of how she wished it could be different, and of how much better off he would be. She promised him she would always love him, and that she would one day find him.
In the days, weeks, months and years that followed, Jude discovered that hearts are tough, they don’t really break. Most times, they only bend, but the bending hurts.

* * *
Judith found her son twenty-five years later.
    It was a wonderful, and sad, and confusing time for her. The shame of giving birth to an illegitimate child had been replaced by the shame of giving him away. Finding him had been all she’d hoped it would be, and yet there had been something still missing, something that hadn’t gone away.
    Some of the pain had receded - the pain of not knowing - but some had remained. Even in sleep, it continued to visit her, bleeding drop by drop through her dreams.
* * *
Judith dashed the tears from her face, realising at last what it was that she had not found.
    She’d found the man, but not the child, the baby whose face and form were imprinted on her mind and soul. That baby was dead, gone forever, just like her mother. Neither could return to her. She could spend the rest of her life grieving for her mother and her baby, but in the end would still be where she was.
    To know that baby, that child, as only a mother can, as her own mother had known her, was an experience denied Judith. What she had lost could never be returned to her. It would always be lost and she would only ever have the scars and her empty arms to mark the void. He was her son, yet she had never been his mother.
    Despite that, for the first time the memories of the baby she had lost did not reduce her to painful tears but filled her with a peaceful comfort as she realised that she could cherish what she had had; a time for protecting, of watching, of nurturing her own body for the benefit of the growth and development of his.
    If she thought about it deeply enough she realised that the whole experience of her pregnancy, and her labour, had brought spiritual, emotional, psychological and intangible dimensions to the bond between them, and so created and provided the nucleus of ‘knowing’ each other.
    She would be content with that.

Bonding

by

Trudy Graham
Founder of
the Northern Writers Association Inc.