Chapter 7. Babushka’s Eggs
- Personal
Object: Russian Dolls
12 associations
- Angela’s Ashes
- The pictures
- You looked like a little girl
- Manipulation
- Bringing me home
- In her trauma
- The Magdelane Home
- The Rape
- His walking stick
- Leaving them again
- Having my own life
- Doormat
Babushka's Eggs
Fucking hell. This isn’t going anywhere where I was thinking it was going. And it’s been fermenting beautifully in my head all week. I’ve had the most amazing discoveries to tell you. And now it is taking me to the other end of my story. But the nature of this method is you go where it is taking you. You trust. I’m not trusting at this minute. I’ve not been trusting all morning. There is writing that is a good sentence. What I practise for a long time. What I think I must practise. Then, then, there is real writing. About things that happen. Things that matter.
1973, I am in Scarsdale Rd. In a Victoria house. A big house. With lesbians in dungarees doing right by girls like me who are in danger. I don’t know how I get here. I remember going to the phone box when I have the suitcase. I don’t remember who I ring. The chain. The links. I do remember someone telling me to go in a taxi to Scarsdale House. I’m not one of these girls. But obviously I am if I’m here. They give me lunch boxes. I’m not sad. I am sad about the pink worn candlewick spread. I hate them to this day. I am sad about the other girls that don’t come from homes like mine with fluffy biscuits from the Irish shop on the end of Crofton Street and cabbage and ribs and Monday soup, Jamaican soup, with pinto beans that doesn’t taste too bad if you put a drop of brown sauce in it. I am not really from a bad home. I must be if they have put me in here. I stay here. I go to school. I’m, as usual, teacher’s pet. Well, they are not teachers really. I go to school. I don’t tell anyone in school. I have no plans. I can’t go home I know that. I can’t go home to those people. I can’t go home to that place. Then one night she turns up. Her coat is done up to the throat. She has her posh telephone voice. They tell me in the kitchen. I leave and go to my room. The room I am sharing with the other girls with the candlewick spreads. I don’t know how to talk to her. She follows me in. ‘He misses you.’
‘Does he?’
“He misses you. He’s not sleeping properly. He’s sad all the time.’
Maybe, I like that he misses me. I go back. I go to his room. He’s in bed. He looks small. He looks shrunk. He looks bald. He has no teeth. He must be 54. He has his blanket up by his throat. We don’t know how to talk to each other. We don’t know how to look at each other. He simply says, ‘Don’t do that to me again. You hear me? Don’t do that to me again.’ I go to my bedroom. To our candlewick spreads that have not had a line of girls from bad homes living in them.
2000, me and Rach’ are in the pictures. Angela’s Ashes. We’ve both read the book. We’re proud. The first thing ever about Limerick. I realise how poor my mum must have been. To have one toilet at the end of the street. And how she has been lying. Fuck this, cut to the chase, what I realise the other day is I am there. I am there in every drop of shit that woman has been though. And she is there, my daughter, Rachel, in every drop of shit I have been through. We are Russian dolls. When my mum's mum is repeatedly ‘loitering’ on the end of the street, she is there. I am there. Rach is there. We are already eggs in wombs. Mad, hey. And everything that she has been through, I have been through, Rach has been through, we have been though. No one wanting to talk to her. No one inviting her to their birthday parties. The man by the river dragging her into the bushes and raping her aged 13. Him getting time. Her being pregnant. Her getting time in the Magdalene Home washing sheets for the nuns. Her son dying there. While her sainted nana washes the dead and births the young.
Angela’s Ashes tells us she has, we have, a toilet on the end of the street. One toilet for how many? So, candlewick spreads make sense. Like my boyfriend being stabbed on my doorstep. And Rachel’s husband dying on her doorstep. The trauma is already affecting us in the womb. It is already making us a doormat. A fucking doormat. A fucking doormat. Fucking hell.
Ovarian intergenerational continuity
• Prenatal Development: A female fetus develops all the eggs (technically called oocytes) she will ever have while still in her mother's womb.
• The Timeline: This process peaks at around 20 weeks (5 months) of gestation. At this point, the fetus has approximately 6 to 7 million immature eggs.
• The Grandparent Connection: Because these eggs form while your mother is still a fetus inside your grandmother, the specific biological cell that eventually becomes you are physically present inside your grandmother's body during her pregnancy.
This chapter is such a mess.
2000, it is my dad’s birthday. I am brave for a year. I haven’t spoken to them for a year. I am trying to have my own life. I am sick of her trauma. I am pickled in her trauma. I have been there every moment in her trauma. I want to be a writer. Stop bringing me home. I can’t be a writer if you keep bringing me home. Will you fucking leave me alone. I’ve been brave enough not to go when he turns up and she is in hospital. I don’t say no. I just don’t go. When he turns up with the walking stick as a prop on my birthday with £10 in a card. He has never bought a card in his life. Leave me the fuck alone.
‘It wasn’t that good was it really.’
‘They never are books are always better. Will you take me to his?’
‘Are you sure?’
I am just not brave enough to ignore his birthday.
I bow my head as I go through the living room door. He is smoking his pipe. Wafting his fan, a hanky on a stick, to stop it staining the ceiling.
‘Hi, dad.'
He doesn’t acknowledge me. She goes into the kitchen. I follow her into the kitchen. It is never awkward with her. But we always, I always, me and her always have to give the pope his due, await the pope inviting us to kiss his ring.
'Do you want a biscuit? She offers me the biscuit tin of cheap ones. The good ones pile up in the cupboard for no one to eat.
He doesn’t speak. My daughter asks him what he’s watching.
‘Cricket.’ He says it kind. In his mind this generation is not part of our generation they are nothing to do with him. They owe him and her nothing. The same is true the other way round.
‘Do you want a cup of tea?’
‘Yeah, I’ll have a cup of tea.’
It goes on for about 20 minutes.
‘Are you ready, mum?’
‘Yeah.'
‘Happy birthday, dad.’
He eeks out his manipulation, to just before Rachel is about to drag us out the door. “Don’t ever do that to me again.’
Outside Rachel is furious. ‘You looked like a little girl. You looked 5 years old.’
Leaving them again, I just feel broken again.
- Muscle Memory
· Your title: Babushka's Eggs
· What object do you see?
· List the 12 things you associate with your object.
· 20 minutes to write. Include object, and 12 associations. Under your title.
- My Discovery
I don't feel good before I write. I feel really anxious. Sometimes it is momentary. Sometimes, like today, it is through a huge bowl of porridge and ½ a packet of no sugar biscuits. Oddly, each week, I keep getting entangled with my daughter's life before I write. I have the right to make Sunday morning — my writing hour — sacred. Which includes Saturday night, the lead up. I am available to indulge your trauma the rest of the week. Well, it's gonna take some extraordinary bravery on my part to tell her this. Not cos she'll say anything. Just cos I'll get demoted from best mum of the century. First prize syndrome yet again. Plus, fear of not being a good doormat, while teaching her how you love people is to be a doormat. Though, having written this, I've discovered she's fucking been pickled in it. But maybe there is still enough room to demonstrate dignity now. While letting her learn how to self-soothe.
- Your Discovery
· In your daily — barring Saturday — comfy place in your allocated hour, journal about what you have discovered in your penultimate 12-word chapter. I'm going to.