preconceptions

once when i was a child i asked my dad why my mum didn't want me. "she never did," he replied, "i had to pretty much rape her to get her pregnant. she tried to get an abortion but she couldn't." i was quite young when my dad told me this but i was old enough to know what rape and abortion meant.

at the time i thought it was my dad being poisonous about my mum. in spite of him being the one who had left her for another woman on more than one occasion he somehow had re-written history to make himself the wronged party. i therefore put this piece of information in the back of my mind and tried not to dwell on it.

years later, on a visit to my mum, when we were walking in a park in swansea, on a sunny day with birds singing and all apparently being well with the world, i felt it was time to ask mum about what dad had said. i wish i hadn't. instead of denying it she said "well, i thought i had something wrong inside me that would make it all go wrong. i went to the doctor and he examined me and said everything was fine." my mum went on to tell me she had indeed tried to have a termination but that the doctor refused as she was married and settled. in the late 1950s things were different to today.

with the amazing self-protection that our minds are capable of, i turned this into a welcome piece of news. i reasoned that it was not me personally, the 8 year old me with the gap in her teeth and pretty eyes, that my mum did not want. it was any baby that she would have had. it was the whole idea of it all. somehow i managed to make myself feel better about being the product of non-consensual intercourse and an unsuccessful attempt to remove me from the world. the human mind is a truly amazing thing.

what happened later in my mum's pregnancy has an almost biblical feel to it. we had a balcony in our flat and my mum grew bright flowers in window boxes. she was planting flowers for the coming summer when she was about 7 months pregnant. she had been to the dentist to have a tooth removed a few days earlier. somehow bugs from the soil had got into her mouth. this rapidly turned into an infection that became osteomylitis - an infection in her jawbone.

she was taken into hospital and had to have major surgery to remove quite a large part of her jawbone. this left a huge scar across her jaw. she was given large doses of penicillin (i am allergic to penicillin although i am told it doesn't cross the placenta so this may just be co-incidence). by the time i remember her she had had plastic surgery on the scar so it was invisible under the jawbone (it re-appeared when she was old as her skin sagged). for someone as beautiful as my mum this must have been horrific. the fact it was her jaw seems to have significance over and above the illness and the disfigurement. it is almost as though she was being silenced.