OUR TIME HERE AT THE farm is over. Otis will wake soon and we’ll pack the car and say goodbye cows, goodbye farm, goodbye beach, goodbye sea.
Goodbye, baby Ruth.
I do not much imagine what our life together would have been like. I do not think of you at two and four and seventeen living with me. It is a baby named Ruth I have been grieving, a potential life that never was.
My body knows Otis at every stage of his life, in my belly, on my breast, in my arms, wrapped around my neck and hips, hand in hand. My body was cut from you at birth, became confused, so all I have is a knowing that once I carried your life, your tiny life, and then it was gone.
I’d have made a mess of mothering you at nineteen. We’d have been poor and friendless. I doubt my teacher and her husband would have given much support, although you never know people, as Nana used to say. I’d probably have made new friends. I’m a good maker of friends, I’ve discovered. My mother would have helped. I’m sure she would have. But it would have been a hard life for you. I’d have had no job, no money and no ongoing support.
I’d have made a mess of mothering you, which is why when my friend Mary tells me that in all the years she spent working with teenage mothers, she only cared for one family in which the baby might have been better off with someone else, it resonates somewhere deep within me. For while I would have been the worst mother to you in so many ways, I was your mother, your best mother, and should have claimed you.
I am sure I did you harm, although I didn’t know it at the time, and you have said you do not agree with me that harm was done. We will have to agree to disagree about that. I am responsible for the months we shared my body in which I didn’t acknowledge you. I am responsible for leaving you in a hospital nursery for twelve days, cared for by those lunatic midwives with their gripe water and beliefs, leaving you in foster care with some woman who said a newborn baby was unhappy and waved a Bible over her, leaving you those thirty days until your other mother could come and take you in her arms and try to make it better.
I am responsible for giving you away to strangers.
In our big souls, as Stace calls them, did we know what we were doing, Miranda? Did we each come into this life with something to learn? Perhaps we did. I think I am learning to be happy rather than normal. Is that my lesson?
Whatever else will happen, whatever else has happened, you are on the Earth. What happened to us seared that dark and violent beach with fire. You clung to my unwelcoming womb like a limpet on a rock. You emerged from me in a wave of grief that’s taken all these years to find its shore. But you are alive. You are this vibrant woman your other mother describes and loves so well, this marvellous woman who makes her way through the world.
I wish you a life as filled with meaning as mine.