I don't know why we are here either, but whatever the answers, I'm back with Engels in 1844. We're not here to be regarded ‘only as useful objects’.
They are easy to talk to. Five hours pass very quickly indeed. But I have to go. I have to get to London. Susie will meet me. I stand up to say goodbye. My legs are weak. I am exhausted.
Ann hugs me. ‘I wondered if you would ever try and find me. I hoped you would. I wanted to find you but it didn't seem right to try’
I am not able to say what I want to say. I can't think straight. I hardly notice the taxi ride back to the station. I grab some food for me and Susie, because she's been working all day, and I get myself half a bottle of red wine. I try and phone Susie but I can't speak. ‘Read the paper. Chill. You are in shock.’
There's a text from Ann. I hope you weren't disappointed.
15
The Wound
M
Y MOTHER HAD TO SEVER some part of herself to let me go. I have felt the wound ever since.
Mrs Winterson was such a mix of truth and fraud. She invented many bad mothers for me; fallen women, drug addicts, drinkers, men—chasers. The other mother had a lot to carry but I carried it for her, wanting to defend her and feeling ashamed of her all at the same time.
The hardest part was not knowing.
I have always been interested in stories of disguise and mistaken identity, of naming and knowing. How are you recognised? How do you recognise yourself?
In the Odyssey, Odysseus, for all his adventures and far—flung wandering, is always urged to ‘remember the return’. The journey is about coming home.
When he reaches Ithaca the place is in uproar with unruly suitors for his hard—pressed wife. Two things happen: his dog scents him, and his wife recognises him by the scar on his thigh.
She feels the wound.
There are so many wound stories:
Chiron, the centaur, half—man, half—horse, is shot by a poisoned arrow tipped in the Hydra's blood, and because he is immortal and cannot die, he must live forever in agony. But he uses the pain of the wound to heal others. The wound becomes its own salve.
Prometheus, fire—stealer from the gods, is punished with a daily wound: each morning an eagle perches on his hip and rips out his liver; each night the wound heals, only to be scored open the next day. I think of him, burned dark in the sun where he is chained to the Caucausian mountains, the skin on his stomach as soft and pale as a little child's.
The doubting disciple Thomas must put his hand into the spear—wound in Jesus’ side, before he can accept that Jesus is who he says he is.
Gulliver, finishing his travels, is wounded by an arrow in the back of the knee as he leaves the country of the Houyhnhnms — the gentle and intelligent horses, far superior to humankind.
On his return home Gulliver prefers to live in his own stables, and the wound behind his knee never heals. It is the reminder of another life.
One of the most mysterious wounds is in the story of the Fisher King. The King is keeper of the Grail, and is sustained by it, but he has a wound that will not heal, and until it does heal, the kingdom cannot be united. Eventually Galahad comes and lays hands on the King. In other versions it is Perceval.
The wound is symbolic and cannot be reduced to any single interpretation. But wounding seems to be a clue or a key to being human. There is value here as well as agony.
What we notice in the stories is the nearness of the wound to the gift: the one who is wounded is marked out — literally and symbolically — by the wound. The wound is a sign of difference. Even Harry Potter has a scar.
Freud colonised the Oedipus myth and renamed it as the son who kills the father and desires the mother. But Oedipus is an adoption story and a wound story too. Oedipus has his ankles pierced together by his mother Jocasta before she abandons him, so that he cannot crawl away. He is rescued, and returns to kill his father and marry his mother, unrecognised by anyone except the blind prophet Tiresias — a case of one wound recognising another.
You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation.
There is always the return. And the wound will take you there. It is a blood—trail.
As the cab pulls up outside the house it starts to snow. When I was going mad I had a dream that I was lying face down on a sheet of ice and underneath me, hand to hand, mouth to mouth, was another me, ice—trapped.
I want to break the ice, but will I stab myself?
Standing in the snow, I could be standing at any point on the line of my past. I was bound to get here.
Birthing is a wound all of its own. The monthly bleeding used to have a magical significanc he baby's rupture into the world tears the mother's body and leaves the child's tiny skull still soft and open. The child is a healing and a cut. The place of lost and found.
It's snowing. Here I am. Lost and Found.
*
What stands before me now like a stranger I think I recognise, is love. The return, or rather the returning, named the ‘lost loss’. I could not smash the ice that separated me from myself, I could only let it melt, and that meant losing all firm foothold, all sense of ground. It meant a chaotic merging with what felt like utter craziness.
All my life I have worked from the wound. To heal it would mean an end to one identity — the defining identity. But the healed wound is not the disappeared wound; there will always be a scar. I will always be recognisable by my scar.
And so will my mother, whose wound it is too, and who has had to shape a life around a choice she did not want to make. Now, from now on, how do we know each other? Are we mother and daughter? What are we?
Mrs Winterson was gloriously wounded, like a medieval martyr, gouged and dripping for Jesus, and she dragged her cross for all to see. Suffering was the meaning of life. If you had said, ‘Why are we here?’ She would have replied, ‘To suffer.’
After all, in End Time, this vestibule existence of life on earth can only be a succession of losses.
But my other mother had lost me and I had lost her, and our other life was like a shell on the beach that holds an echo of the sea.
Who was it then, the figure who came into the garden all those years ago and threw Mrs Winterson into rage and pain and sent me flying down the hall, knocked back into the other life?
I suppose it might have been Paul's mother, the saintly invisible Paul. I suppose I might have imagined it. But that is not my feeling. Whatever happened that violent afternoon was tied to the birth certificate that I found, but it turned out not to be mine, and tied to the years and years later opening of the box — its own kind of fate — where I found the pieces of paper that told me I had another name — crossed out.
I have learned to read between the lines. I have learned to see behind the image.
Back in the days of Winterson—world we had a set of Victorian watercolours hung on the walls. Mrs W had inherited them from her mother and she wanted to display them in a family way. But she was dead against ‘graven images’ (See Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, etc.), so she squared this circle by hanging them back to front. All we could see was brown paper, tape, steel tacks, water—staining and string. That was a Mrs Winterson version of life.
‘I ordered your book from the library’ said Ann, ‘before you sent me anything, and I said to the librarian, “This is my daughter.” “What?” she said. “It's for your daughter?” “No! Jeanette Winterson is my daughter.” I felt so proud.’
Phone box 1985. Mrs Winterson in her headscarf in a rage.
The pips . . . more money in the slot . . . and I'm thinking, ‘Why aren't you proud of me?‘
The pips . . . more money in the slot . . . ‘It's the first time I've had to order a book in a false name.‘
Happy endings are only a pause. There are three kinds of big endings: Reveng ragedy. Forgiveness. Revenge and Tragedy often happen together. Forgiveness redeems the past. Forgiveness unblocks t
he future.
My mother tried to throw me clear of her own wreckage and I landed in a place as unlikely as any she could have imagined for me.
There I am, leaving her body, leaving the only thing I know, and repeating the leaving again and again until it is my own body I am trying to leave, the last escape I can make. But there was forgiveness.
Here I am.
Not leaving any more.
Home.
Coda
W
HEN I BEGAN THIS BOOK I had no idea how it would turn out. I was writing in real time. I was writing the past and discovering the future.
I did not know how I would feel about finding my mother. I still don't. I do know that the TV—style reunions and pink mists of happiness are wrong. We need better stories for the stories around adoption.
Many people who find their birth families are disappointed. Many regret it. Many others do not search because they feel afraid of what they might find. They are afraid of what they might feel — or worse, what they might not feel.
I met Ann again, in Manchester, just the two of us for lunch. I was glad to see her. She has my quick walk and she looks about her the way a dog does, bright, alert, and also watchful. That's me too.
She told me a bit more about my father. He wanted to keep me. She said, ‘I wouldn't let him keep you. We were poor but we had floorboards.’
I love that and it makes me laugh.
Then she tells me that she used to work in a factory nearby. It was called Raffles, run by Jews, and it made the overcoats and gaberdines for Marks and Spencer. ‘In those days it was all British—made, and the quality was something.’
She tells me everyone, poor or not, floorboards or not, had made—to—measure clothes, because there were so many sewing shops, and cloth was cheap. Manchester was still King of Cloth.
Her boss, Old Man Raffles, found her the mother and baby home and promised her a job when she came out.
I find that story very curious because I have always felt at home among the Jews and have a lot of Jewish friends.
‘I brought you into Manchester to show you round and have your photo taken when you were three weeks old. That's the photo I sent you.’
Yes, the baby with the ‘oh no don't do it’ face.
I don't remember but in truth we remember everything.
There is a lot Ann can't remember. Memory loss is one way of coping with damage. Me, I go to sleep. If I am upset I can be asleep in seconds. I must have learned that myself as a Mrs Winterson survival strategy. I know I slept on the doorstep and in the coal—hole. Ann says she has never been a good sleeper.
At the end of lunch I am ready to leave or I will fall asleep right there and then at the table. Not from boredom. On the train I fall asleep at once. So there is a lot going on that I don't understand yet.
I think Ann finds me hard to read.
I think she would like me to let her be my mother. I think she would like me to be in touch regularly. But whatever adoption is, it isn't an instant family — not with the adoptive parents, and not with the rediscovered parents.
And I grew up like in all those Dickens novels, where the real families are the pretend ones; the people who become your family through deep bonds of affection and the continuity of time.
She looks at me so closely when we part.
I am warm but I am wary.
What is making me wary? What am I wary of? I don't know.
There is a big gap between our lives. She is upset about Winterson—world. She blames herself and she blames Mrs Winterso et I would rather be this me — the me that I have become — than the me I might have become without books, without education, and without all the things that have happened to me along the way, including Mrs W I think I am lucky.
How do you say that without dismissing or undervaluing things for her?
And I don't know what I feel about her. I panic when my feelings are not clear. It is like staring into a muddy pond, and rather than wait until an ecosystem develops to clear the water, I prefer to drain the pond.
This isn't a head/heart split or a thinking/feeling split. It is emotional matrix. I can juggle different and opposing ideas and realities easily. But I hate feeling more than one thing at once.
Adoption is so many things at once. And it is everything and nothing. Ann is my mother. She is also someone I don't know at all.
I am trying to avoid the miserable binary of ‘this means so much to me/this means nothing to me’. I am trying to respect my own complexity. I had to know the story of my beginnings but I have to accept that this is a version too. It is a true story but it is still a version.
I know that Ann and Linda want to include me in their family; that is their generosity. I don't want to be included; that is not my hard—heartedness. I am so glad to know that Ann survived and I like thinking of her surrounded by the others. But I don't want to be there. That's not what's important to me. And I don't feel a biological connection. I don't feel, ‘Wow, here's my mother.’
I have read a lot of overwhelmingly emotional accounts of reunion. None of that is my experience. All I can say is that I am pleased — that is the right word — that my mother is safe.
I can't be the daughter she wants.
I couldn't be the daughter Mrs Winterson wanted.
My friends who are not adopted tell me not to worry. They don't feel they were ‘right’ either.
I am interested in nature/nurture. I notice that I hate Ann criticising Mrs Winterson. She was a monster but she was my monster.
Ann came to London. That was a mistake. It is our third meeting and we have a serious row. I am shouting at her,’At least Mrs Winterson was there. Where were you?’
I don't blame her and I am glad she made the choice she made. Clearly I am furious about it too.
I have to hold these things together and feel them both/all.
As a young woman Ann wasn't given much love. ‘Mam didn't have time to be soft. She loved us by feeding us and clothing us.’
When her own mother was exceedingly old Ann found the courage to ask the question, ‘Mam, did you love me?’ Her mother was very clear. ‘Yes. I love you. Now don't ask me again.’
Love. The difficult word. Where everything starts, where we always return. Love. Love's lack. The possibility of love.
I have no idea what happens next.
Table of Contents
1The Wrong Crib
2My Advice to Anybody Is: Get Born
3In The Beginning Was The Word
4The Trouble With A Book . . .
5At Home
6Church
7Accrington
8The Apocalypse
9English Literature A—Z
10This Is The Road
11Art and Lies
Intermission
12The Night Sea Voyage
13This Appointment Takes Place In The Past
14Strange Meeting
15The Wound
Coda
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Page 18
