| Big Girls Don't Cry by Jeanie Wood
The Breakfast Room
While I was in hospital, Great Aunt Nel died and left the house at Croydon to my mother. Mum and Dad moved out of the rented Bondi flat and into the old house without me. It was a tall, single-storied house, well over a century old. The breakfast room with its five doors was the hub of the whole house. A passing through place. A place where we could play. As I grew up, I remember trying hard to work out why Mum called it a breakfast room when we ate breakfast in the kitchen. We only used the table when we had visitors who only came for lunch and dinner. I vividly remember the breakfast room on the day I came home from hospital. It is as though my life begins in that room. I am on crutches. A heavy plaster has been wrapped around my whole torso and left leg so that I am stiff from armpit to ankle on the left side. I have to negotiate the little step down from the hallway into the room and be careful of slipping on the floor covered with old faded linoleum. The walls are indeterminate beige, with rough bricks defined by dust along their edges. My late aunt's silver tea service is displayed on the sideboard, like an altar to household gods. A table with four matching chairs and a bright seersucker cloth is pushed up against one wall. A daybed with a checked brown wool rug stands under the wall of windows. And my mother says something like, "You can lay here, then you can be with us." Lying on the bed, I run my hand over the shiny inside of the windows and I long to go out and feel the hail-spot rough texture on the outside. I imagine the damp stains on the ceiling into pictures as I rest on the day bed at the end of the room, and my family talk to me as they pass in and out of the five doorways. Perhaps this is the moment of severance. The point where I detach the person I used to be. The little girl who only saw her parents once a week for two hours and rarely saw her brother. Perhaps I make the choice to start anew and put away the baby who must have been very naughty if she needed to be so submissively good to get better. I don't remember. I just remember the joy. The unbridled, unbelievable, unspeakable, overwhelming joy. The joy that stuns and silences so all I can do is smile. On the beige wall above the table hang two sets of pictures in cream bobbled oblong frames. The dust collects in the hills and troughs of the frames and makes them look like cream and gray fur. In each of the frames are five pictures set out on a white background. One has a blonde boy in five poses. Smiling, serious, reflective, looking at the camera, looking away. A picture-book baby - my brother. In the other frame there is also a child in five poses. This child is similarly about a year old. She is wearing a white voile dress with red and green and blue embroidered spots. The dress has little white cape sleeves and is smocked in red, blue and green to match the spots. On her feet are white socks with lace around them and little black patent leather court shoes with straps. Unlike the boy in the other picture, the girl looks like it is a strain to sit still. She is laughing outrageously in one of the poses, her head of copper curls thrown backwards as if she will tip over. In two other poses she is smiling like she wants to get up and run. Another has her staring intently at a toy, and another staring enquiringly at the photographer. This child will never translate into the picture-book of memory. I do not recognise this girl-child. She is lost somewhere in a vortex of misery and separation. She should have been me. The day I come home from hospital I look at the photographs and ask my mother who they are. My hair is straight and brown from illness. I have not been able to sit or walk properly for as long as I can remember. Today for the first time I can remember I am wearing my own clothes. I am only allowed to wear high lace-up brown boots. Although my mother constantly reassures me over the years that the copper-curled imp was me, I can never recognise myself.
Years later, my mother sells the old house with the Breakfast Room and presents my brother and I with our first year photographs. My brother hangs his in his hallway where everyone can see it. I hang mine in my garage around a dark corner where I glance at it when I need a tool from the shelf. It remains uncompromisingly alien. And somehow frightening.
Garden of Tears
Plant tears deep in earth - what will they bring forth?
deep roots of fears burrow years of toil
Why do you do this to yourself?
I scrub and scrub and still the stain of difference
The William Boyd Ward I always think of the orthopaedic ward in the Royal Alexandria Hospital for Children at Camperdown as The William Boyd Ward. William Boyd was the white haired American actor who played Hopalong Cassidy. When I was in hospital I had no idea who Hopalong was, but he visited the convalescent wing at Collaroy and so I knew that he was important because it was a Saturday, and Sunday was visiting day. I think Hoppie called out "Hi Ho everybody." I still have the fake silver medal he gave us with the bright red and blue ribbons that are faded and tattered now. When I came home I limped for so long my mother called me Hoppie. I remember seeing him on television some years later and wondering where Hoppie’s white horse was when he was in the ward with us. I had this vision of it grazing on the steep grassy slope overlooking Collaroy beach. But, Collaroy came later. I was originally admitted to the Children’s Hospital at Camperdown. The ward at Camperdown was in fact called the William Stewart Ward. I never saw William Stewart. His hair was probably white if they'd called a ward after him but he didn't give me a medal and I guess, if he owned a horse, he would never dream of bringing it to a hospital. I need to open the door to the William Stewart Ward to make sense of the snapshot memories from that place. They are like light fractured by crystal, coloured by years of refraction. Startling in clarity, but flickering away, they slip through the crevices of my mind and leave only stabs of distant misery and latent fear. No matter how I try to conceive them as a continuum, they remain still life paintings of pain. My first image is always the gates of Centennial Park. On the way to leaving me at the hospital, my father must have prolonged the moment just a little more and taken me for a last look at trees and grass and blue sky. . How I hate those gates. Wrought-iron lies, they spelled childhood picnics and family fun. I still have a cold chill run down my spine whenever I see those gates and their deceitful runic patterns. Next, I see myself standing between my parents, my hands in theirs. Mummy is on the left. Her hand is olive-skinned, thin and long-fingered – she plays the piano. I like holding her hand because she swings my arm as she walks – but not today. Daddy’s hand is big and square and engulfs my little fingers. His knuckles are knocked about from fixing car engines but the skin on his hand is fair like mine. His grip is like a safe embrace. We are walking into the lobby of a huge old stone hospital building on the edge of the city. “Where are we going Daddy?” Daddy shakes his head and tears in his eyes roll down the edge of his nose. He wipes them away with the back of his other hand. Mummy says, “You’ll have to stay here for a little while so you can get better. I want you to be very good.” I try to remember being very bad. They stop at the counter in the lobby and let go of my hands. I clamber up on one of the wooden chairs lined up back to back. A lady with an envelope veil, and black stockings under her white uniform, strides up and talks to my parents. “Just kiss her goodbye, the quicker the better,” she says firmly. Mummy and Daddy bend down and tell me to be good. The lady takes me firmly by the hand and I go with her. Over my shoulder I can see my parents hand in hand walking slowly out through the heavy wooden door. My mother used to tell me that the sister said the sooner she left the sooner I’d settle down. “No long explanations. Just kiss her goodbye and we’ll look after her”. Bracing speech with a ring of truth. My mother remembered another truth from that time: “Children don’t feel things like adults, they get over things fast.” She clung to that belief all her life. To me the sister said “That’s enough now, Jeanie. Big girls don’t cry.” (I was three and a half). “You want to get better don’t you?” But my medical records show it was days before I stopped crying - And a long time before I was comfortable. Although my medical records also show that I was in traction for some time, the next snapshot I have is being in the ward on a wooden frame. There are leather straps under my armpits around my chest, around my waist, hips, thighs, knees and ankles holding my legs spread in a V shape. The polished leather is thick and dark brown and done up with buckles. Each strap is lined with a thick bilious yellow felt. A sheet is thrown over the top to cover the straps. I remember the ward as a long narrow closed-in verandah off the main chamber. There were no decorations anywhere. A few years later my mother would take me to visit the private wing of the hospital and I would stand mesmerized by the May Gibbs drawings of “Snugglepot and Cuddlepie” that adorned the walls of Wade House. Surely, I thought, this was not the same hospital. When I was there the William Stewart Ward was overflowing with patients. In those days there was a Government Scheme to eradicate Tuberculosis and so public TB patients were treated free of charge. I remember the old verandah with its long brick wall with a few windows high up. Along the wall, beneath the closed windows, stands a row of beds with no tables between them. Each child is fixed into place in some way. Some are like me, strapped on a wooden frame. Others are plastered and tied into grotesque positions. I can only turn my head and see the world in profile. My world is full of strange and tortured shapes of other children. It’s not very sunny on the verandah. There are windows that the staff push along and leave open sometimes, even when it's still cold. The only way to get a nurse is to call "Nursie, nursie," and they need to be within earshot. The trick is to listen for footsteps on the polished floors, and to fit your cries between other children calling out. If you want a bedpan, you just have to wait for pan rounds or wet the bed. I learn to wee on demand. I also learn that crying is not allowed. Big girls don't cry, it upsets the other children. Then the whole ward starts crying and we're all in trouble. Sister is furious at the disorder. "What's all this commotion?" I know the meaning of the word commotion from that age of three. It's nearly as bad as crooked sheets. The worst noise is after weekly visiting. We have two hours for adults on a Sunday afternoon and no children, not even siblings, are allowed to come because they bring infection. I cry if my parents are late. I want them to be first through that door. I also cry when they go. The nurses say, "We'd be better off if the parents stayed away. They just upset the children. If you don't stop this howling we'll tell your parents not to come." We learn that to be quiet is to be good. But I still sob silently after my parents leave and my friend Patricia comforts me. Sometimes Patricia is in traction and sometimes she is in "froggy plaster". This is a cast from the armpits, down the body and both legs to the ankles with the knees turned out and bent. She has to lie on her tummy. If frogs stayed like this, I think, they'd never hop again. These frogs that are also children frighten me. Nobody has told me what's going to happen to me, only that I have to be good and do what I'm told if I want to get better. Maybe if I don't be perfect, they'll turn me into a frog as well. Maybe I secretly became one inside, because I have lived all my life with these reptilian-cold still-life visions of children at the edge of my memory. The treatment for TB was complete immobilisation and streptomycin. The frame successfully provided the lack of movement. Streptomycin was injected into my upper leg near my bottom between the leather straps with their bilious yellow felt. Just lately a nurse in the Blood Bank volunteered the information that I would be sure to remember the treatment. "I mean," she assured me knowledgeably, "it was dreadful stuff – thick and oily and we had to really push hard on the great big needles to get it through. You would never forget all about that." And icy memory started leaking out of the crevices of blissful forgetfulness and the woman's white jacket was suddenly filled with appalling remembrance. I slammed the door of remembering and held it against the fearful wind and simply shook my head. The doctor who diagnosed my TB was a Canadian who told my mother in his soft accent that he had been a prisoner of war. His diagnosis was made by an X-ray and a blood test called a Mantoux Test. It was a scratch on the skin of my inner wrist that came up in a huge purple blister – I still have the oval scar half way across my inner arm. After I was admitted to hospital a neighbor confessed that he had Tuberculosis. He had been told that it was not active, but this was reviewed and he was sent to a sanitorium in the mountains. His wife worked while he stayed home, and their son and daughter were educated at boarding schools. He had told my mother that he had another non-infectious lung condition and so my mother took him cups of tea and allowed me to sit on his lap and hug and kiss him. At Camperdown, the progress of the disease was monitored with a regular X-ray. I remember outings to the X-ray department. There are wedges of wood against the step down onto the verandah and these blocks make a little ramp up into the main room. The nurses have to push hard to get the trolleys up the hill, but suddenly my view is not quite flat. The doors from the William Stewart Ward to the corridors are an indeterminate putty coloured wood and are double opening with small glass panels at the top - far too high for any prone child to see through. As they push the trolley with my frame on it through the doors, the bump sends a pleasant jolt of movement through my spine and then we are in the corridor and the doors swing back into place closing off the view of the ward. Echoey walls of old butter and mustard, separated by khaki stripes at trolley height, go rushing past. Then we are through the last doorway and into the narrow corridor outside the main x-ray chamber. This corridor had also been a verandah but had been closed in with corrugated wooden walls and louver windows. The waiting area is so tight that the trolleys are lined up in single file, train-like along the windows. The windows are frosted so they are like walls of light, revealing nothing outside the building, but creating shafts of sunlight that spotlight dust motes dancing in the air. I can smell the starch of the nurses' aprons as they squeeze past the trolley and their bodies bump past the frame to which I am strapped. As a teenager at high school, I was chosen by school to visit the Radiography Department at the Children's Hospital. In a group, the four of us met outside the main entrance one wintry day, passed through the main foyer, and chattered past the old canteen with wooden chairs and tables on linoleum tiles. This was the place where my parents would buy me ice cream and chocolate topping and nuts in a glass dish, and bring it to the ward to feed it to me with a teaspoon during visiting hours. As I glanced in I could taste the creamy comfort of chocolate topping and nuts. A member of the nursing staff conducted us through to the X-ray department. When we reached the narrow corridor of the old verandah and were asked to wait by the windows I started to feel hot in my woolen box-pleat uniform. We filed into the X-ray room itself and I could hardly breathe. My school tie was strangling me and there were a million smells and feelings and visions chasing each other through my head. On the edge of remembrance were men in white coats. I could smell my own fear. It reeked of ether. I wanted to run, to flee, to leave the lights and machines and tables where they lay people's bodies. Those steel beds, where they push and pull your limbs about, and make you stop breathing while they take your picture. But I didn't cry. And I didn't whinge. I smiled and looked interested. And never heard a word that was said. Then I walked as quickly as possible back past the Canteen and out through the main entrance to the fresh cold air in the street. I told one of the girls I had been in the Hospital as a child and she just nodded. And the memories began to recede and the door was shutting again. More firmly, than ever. As I arrived home my mother opened the front door and I asked her how long I’d been in hospital. She told me eighteen months all together. Then I went to my room. Shut the door. Lay on the soft bed. And swore I'd never be a Radiographer.
The Portal Shut that door! I feel the draft of old transgressions winds of sadness rattling my window frames shaking all my coping blasting my defences unsettling this bastion - Shut that door! I will not cry! they cannot make me cry, those who taught me big girls never cry cannot make me cry now I am nearly fifty years bigger.
Shut that door! Who opened it? Who thought I needed light, that frightened child once strapped tight in the dark - I thought I had escaped - who opened up that door and found me still confined and crying in the endless night?
Collaroy The Children’s Hospital had a convalescent wing on the headland at Collaroy and, if Camperdown was bleak, I do remember laughing at Collaroy. The building was wooden and was fringed with striped awnings, flapping and snapping like sails over wide verandas. Below the wards, a long grassy slope cascaded down to a picket fence. There were flower gardens along the edge of the steps and along the paths The inside of the girls and boys wards at Collaroy are painted off-white and the floors shine in the sunlight. I can see the dust motes dancing in the outside door-frame and the squares of light from the windows. Stare at the dancing dust, and the other children disappear into the background. The froggy plaster, the frames, the traction. The nurses doing things to the other children are just indeterminate blurs. Fear gets pushed back. I’m a sunbeam dancing. Patricia is at Collaroy with me and we are playing a game. She is in traction and I am on the frame. The nurses have pushed our beds together and we have put a book across the little gap. We have a little lion that trundles along when it is on a slope, so we fold up the sheet on one side to jack up the bridge. Lion has four legs that walk – as we can’t - and he crosses and recrosses the book bridge. My bed is the jungle and Patricia’s is the river. We are making up a story as the lion trundles back and forth, growling and yowling while we laugh. Out on the veranda the sun is warm. They strip us off to soak up the healing rays. The sun is the secret weapon. Everyone is bathed in it, strapped down, laid out, brown as berries. Our parents may only visit once a week. All through that long winter, spring, summer and autumn. Two short hours once a week. And if the traffic is thick – maybe only one hour of crying and one hour of visiting. Our parents also talk to the other children from the country who never get visitors. We own nothing. We share clothes. My favourite is a red cardigan. If I’m a good girl I get to wear it. Clothes are put on backwards when you’re pinned down on the frame. Later on, in plaster you can wear clothes the right way around and actually wear a pretty dress on Sundays for visitors When Sunday visiting is over the matron and sisters all retreat somewhere. The nurses tell jokes and chase each other with glasses of water and have water fights between the cots and beds. Everyone laughs – it’s better than crying. And the thick black stockings of the nurses brush against our frames and they shush us as they try to hide and not toss water on our plaster. For an hour we laugh till tears run down our faces. Mr. Quirk comes in every Sunday evening and reads us stories from behind a screen and, although we never see him, his words and music are piped through the whole hospital. His last song is “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic”. At six o’clock their Mummies and Daddies will take them home to bed. We sing along but our Mummies and Daddies have gone home without us. A clown comes and sings, “Where is your heart?” and asks various children where their hearts are. We howl with laughter. And he sings “Twinkle, twinkle little star, How I wonder what you are, up above the world so high, like a steak and kidney pie.” We have a wards-man named Georgie who blows soup on a spoon to cool it. His lungs could start a hurricane and the thin broth flies through the air like a sprinkler, making rainbows in the air. Everyone wants to be fed by him. “My turn, Georgie, my turn.” Hopalong Cassidy comes to visit and gives us a medal. The Salvation Army Band comes regularly on Saturdays. The girls in the sombre dark uniforms smile as they lend us their instruments to play. I’m given a tambourine with incongruously bright rainbow ribbons that I shake high over my head on the frame. Half way down the hill there is a brightly coloured pixie playhouse. I lay there day after day, week in week out, month after long, long month, staring at the pixie playhouse, dreaming I am playing in it, tasting the fun. When I’m finally on crutches, I’m too big and the plaster down my body and leg wouldn’t allow me to bend to fit through the doorway. Collaroy is a beautiful spot. Surrounded by healthy wealthy houses, above a joyous shining beach, beneath an azure sky, its Australianness makes it wholesome and hearty. Then why am I so struck with terror when I revisit the place? On the edge of my memory, are children tied down, hung up, strapped, framed, plastered stiff in tortured positions hovering at the edge of perception. I fear straps. I fear the smell of plaster. I fear men in white coats. I fear crutches and stairs and slippery floors. I fear not being able to move my legs. I fear bedpans. I fear my parents not arriving. I fear late sun slanting on polished floors. But I still love dust motes – my friends, the dancers. For wounds so deep there must be scars. There is a scar on my chin where I fell up the steps at Collaroy. “Hurry, hurry. Don’t get that plaster wet,” called the sister with the envelope veil, as the summer storm hit and I was looking in the window of the pixie house. I tried to rush up the long slope of buffalo grass on crutches. And I slipped on the wet steps and landed on my chin, the blood mixing in paisley patterns with the heavy raindrops as the sister hauled me up the steps. There are scars all over my left thigh from plaster boils. My medical records show that one of my trips back to the main hospital was for an infection of boils to my complete upper leg. The trips backward and forward from Collaroy to Camperdown are inscribed in my memory. Terror going. Joy returning. There is also a name etched into my memory - Georgie Lane. He was an older boy who existed in a bed around a corner, neither in the girls or boys wards. And I could see him. At first he was blind and still had a radio. Eventually he also became deaf. My mother told me later that this was because of the drugs they used to treat his childhood arthritis. I loved watching the daily ritual as a nurse would write with her index finger on his bare, thin back to ask him what he wanted for tea. One day his bed was empty. Empty. Empty. I remember you, Georgie. And your empty unmade bed is a scar on the corner of my mind. Children were sent to Collaroy to convalesce. Now there’s another word I learnt at an early age. When I got older I was told convalescent meant you got better, but I couldn’t put together the experience I’d had and the notion of getting better. Perhaps because I was told over and over and over and over that nobody ever got better from Tuberculosis - it just remained dormant. “ What’s dormant mean Mum?” “ It means sleeping.” So I slept with the enemy all my life. We went to bed at five every afternoon, until I was nine. We read books and books and books. We did jigsaws on trays. My mother bought a whole series of jigsaws of famous paintings. One was called “Her First Ball” with potted palms and girls in white flowing dresses and ballet slippers. Another had a picture of a fishing port bounded by an open window with a cat on the sill. As I interlocked the pieces and the pictures formed I told myself stories about the people and places. They had lives outside the locking edges of the pieces. Only the enemy and I were locked together behind the frame. We were never allowed to run or jump or get overtired. Two older girls at primary school once obtained permission to teach me to skip rope. Their faces have faded, but their kindness lives on and I still overflow with love towards their patience and understanding for someone others called “cripple”. All those baby-boomer summers when other children rode their bikes along melting asphalt roads, the presence of the enemy precluded my riding a bike. All those netball winters - “If you break a bone the TB will move into the break.” Fourth Class, when I was the only person from our school chosen for the Opportunity School, and the headmistress told my mother I had the highest IQ of any person she had ever taught. My mother was terrified of letting me go to another school because it would mean train travel and if I fell on the station and broke a bone the enemy could be woken. The girls at school whispered that I was a liar - I was too fat and dumb to be chosen. I was surprised to see in the medical records that, until I was eleven, I was taken back the to the Children’s Hospital every year. I recall a lot of my middle childhood but don’t remember these visits. All I hear is the edge of ghostly voices telling my mother that most children had a relapse in their teenage years. Most teenagers tried to do too much. They got overtired. They generally broke out and ended up back in hospital. And for me, that hospital was Collaroy, and Convalescent had nothing to do with getting better.
What ails you on the edge of perception, in the darkening verges of the parking lots of the mind, find what ails you. where light has been cast out, but for a dim flickering of remembered sorrow, when tomorrow came slowly or never arrived, speak to those who failed you. deep in the forest of tangled emotions and rivers of tears, dark branches of fears and seasons of sorrow, there's a time to reclaim you. let light in, let sorrow out, from night's dim into daylight bravely step on out.
The Music Room Until the advent of television our family mostly used the lounge room for visitors. Even in the winter we never lit a fire there, instead we sat around the radio in front of the wood stove in the kitchen. There was however, one thing that drew us into the lounge room – the piano. It was some time after I was out of the full body plaster and a similar leather and steel brace that my mother bought the piano second hand. She considered the Ronisch a fine instrument. Mum was largely self-taught, but she could play all sorts of old-fashioned songs by ear and could also read classical music. I always wanted to make music as well as my mother. My mother had me taught piano because she said, “No matter how your leg is you will always be able to do this.” Although I loved playing pieces, I hated scales so much that I used the sustain pedal because I imagined it covered mistakes. I stopped learning piano when I started high school. “We don’t want you to overdo things,” my mother explained, “you can’t afford to get overtired.” My brother continued learning until his Leaving Certificate. Towards the end of that year my father said it was my time to do something special. I was so delighted I even practised my scales without the pedal. On the ninth of December that year my father suddenly died. Mum had initially referred to it as a funny turn, but, as his life waned, we were told he had suffered a massive cerebral haemorrhage. My world crumbled. My mother lapsed into deep debt and depression. The following year, at sixteen, I unhappily left school. At twenty, I married a man who would gradually encourage me to become everything I wanted to be. Life flies by. By the time I was forty I desperately needed a hip replacement. After the birth of my fourth son I had gone back to the piano lessons. At forty, I had completed all my exams and accreditation, and was running a music-teaching studio from home. The artificial joint made a huge improvement in my quality of life. By the time I was fifty my eldest twin sons were students at the Conservatorium and had married and moved out so I was able to take their double bedroom and turned it into a Music Room. This is where I write, surrounded by pictures. There are two with a cat playing the piano. Above them is a medieval picture called “A Lady’s Favour” which reminds me of Guinevere and Lancelot. There is a print with the poem “Footsteps” which describes how God carries us through the worst times. There is a series of photographs from the Scout Gang Show where, as Musical Director, I teach other people’s children to express themselves through music. On the opposite wall, my mother’s piano is the focus of the room. In the opposite corner of the room, there are two photos. One is a sepia print of my brother and myself as teenagers. We are both wearing white shirts and he has a tie. My brother is ever charming and handsome. I am straight haired, round faced and smiling in a reserved sort of way. In the other picture frame there is a child in five poses. This child is about a year old. She is wearing a white voile dress with red and green and blue embroidered spots. The dress has little white cape sleeves and is smocked in red, blue and green to match the spots. On her feet are white socks with lace around them and little black patent leather court shoes with straps. She looks like it is a strain to sit still. She is laughing outrageously in one of the poses, her head of copper curls thrown backwards like she will tip over. In two other poses she is smiling like she wants to get up and run, another has her staring intently at a toy, and another staring enquiringly at the photographer. I am trying to recognise this girl-child. Endeavouring to reclaim her from the vortex of misery and separation. Attempting to incorporate her in the teenage picture I know is part of the woman I have become. When I moved the piano into the front room, I rescued the picture from our garage and placed it out in the light. I am trying to do the same for the picture-book child. If I could leap back into the continuum from her to me, the first thing I would do would be to contradict the doctors’ diagnosis. Just after my hip replacement when I was forty, the specialist told me I had never had Tuberculosis. “It was a congenital malformation. There were many misdiagnoses in the early days of X-ray,” he assured me with a smile and a pat on my good leg, “you’re not the first I’ve seen.” I argued with him, showed him the scar on my wrist, but he shook his head. “It was just a passing infection – you probably had some contact with the disease.” The nurses tried to stop my tears. They said I should be relieved not to have had tuberculosis. Forty years of living with the enemy. Forty years of walking through the shadow of death, and I should be relieved! The silence I had been taught as a child, and practised for forty years enveloped me again and I simply turned away. There were no words I could summon to explain. If I could go back, I would take little Jeanie by the hand and speak words about the misery of separation my parents had never been able to in those far-off days of absolute medical power. Even if she were hospitalised for treatment, I could make the authorities understand that the miserable child described in my medical records, is simply a three year old grieving for everybody she loves and who love her. I would change her upbringing. When she came home I could allow her to run and play and have a normal childhood away from the threat of TB. But, the question that hangs heavy above me now is who would I then be? Would I passionately strive to live, enjoy, partake of life – if life had never been denied? These questions reverberate around the Music Room, my own space. I am surrounded by that which feeds my spirit, all overseen by this copper-curled child. Here it feels right to tell the world what happened to her; to let others into the private terrors that live long after separation and abandonment; to recover her essence, unmarked by her childish notion that somehow she had been too naughty and had to be very good if she were ever to be better. Take my hand my own child, and come and see what we have become. Here in this special place with music and with joy we have found ourselves. They that taught us not to cry could not kill our spirit. We survived. One day we will again be one.
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