Christmas 1985

As Christmas 1985 drew near she was feeling more and more lonely, left behind in Switzerland by her friends who had jobs to go back to in the UK, she found a job working for cash in hand through a drinking buddy they had met on the Greek Islands and moved into to live with her in Lausanne for that winter.

That Christmas was the first anniversary of her father’s death, as it loomed how could she have been conscious of the forces driving her into the arms of a man one night when drunk who she didn’t know was in love with someone else.   It was with sadness and shock weeks later in that cold February that she found out she was once again pregnant and then the accusations came from her friends flatmate, saying she was lying about the truth of the father.

It was decided that the termination would be organised through the hospital, it was an procedure that would take place under general anaesthetic, unlike the two terminations she had had previously in the two years prior to her father’s death.  Her friend drove her to the hospital and all of these years later other memories have been erased but what she does remember is waiting outside in the snow with her bags waiting for her friend to turn up to collect her and waiting and waiting.  She found out her friend had decided she would prefer to get drunk at the pub with her mates.  “I’m not your fucking mother,” Heidi would scream at her while drunk later that evening.  It was snowing and bitterly cold as she made her way all alone to the bus stop for the journey home.

In the little room where she slept on the floor she crawled into her sleeping bag and wrapped herself into a cocoon on the floor.  The next day the father John Pierre arrived with a single rose, it was not long away from the first anniversary of her father’s death.  She never cried for herself until many years later.  Alcohol and dope were very much part of the way she dealt with everything in those days.  Years later when she was in therapy and grieving the loss of her unborn children (6 in all) she would call this baby Freya after the Norse Goddess.  She would write a letter to each unborn child explaining the reason why she could not bring them to term.

Was this part of the Catholic guilt she carried?   Did these unborn little ones have souls?  Was this a form of soul murder as a therapist told her many years later?  Or was she living an unconscious aspect of her own death wish being born to a mother who didn’t have much of a skill for empathy and mothering?   I guess she will never know the answer to these questions, but these are the words she wrote to Freya 17 years later, her feeble attempt at self therapy.

The blackest pain the darkest night.  I’d gone to the UK a short time following Dad’s death everything unresolved – a feral creature suffering wounds I didn’t know the depth of consciously,  on a mad binge of drinking and meaningless connection (all the unconscious hunger for my father’s absent holding and love).  During one drunken night you were conceived in shameful circumstances but a fit of pure lust….The pain of the termination physically would have been spared and my memory is blank, except for dim images of a white room of coming…..around from the anaesthesia….. waiting for Heidi to come, she didn’t show – there was thick snow on the ground – I waited in a bus stop… I was scared… when I got home Heidi cursed me and gave me a tirade…..   all her anger at her own mother who she hated  all of that intense vitriol spat out on me.  I was not a victim but I was so alone.  A few days later Jean Pierre arrived with a single red rose….. writing these memories now it seems impossible that I could have borne this kind of isolation … inconceivable that I would suffer all this and only tell one living soul outside of 23 Rue de Crete – I treated myself like a discarded thing.. writing this is hard but its flowing.   I have finally touched that pain.. every month my body repeats it as I shed my blood and at this time I remember that it was 17 years ago this January I made that painful decision.  I accept it now, the grief, and have grieved it much, but a portion always remains.  You are always with me.  The memory of you lives inside me I will not ever forget you nor the depths of where I had to go to birth myself and not giving birth to you was part of the sacrifice, as I knew enough to trust the truth I felt in deep inside my gut.   I didn’t want you to be without a father and a loving home.  You would have been 17 now if you had lived….Please forgive me Freya.   I had to learn first to love me before I could have any kind of decent love to give you my darling.  I hope your soul accepts and understands.