The Don't Touch Garden E-Book

Kate Foley

• Herausgeber: Arachne Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 32

Beschreibung

The Don't Touch Garden explores what it is to be adopted, both for the child and the adoptive parents, through a wide range of poetic styles and complex emotions. An absorbing account of the legacy of being an adopted child. Forthright and tender, this moving sequence reflects Foley's unflinching gaze into the mirror in a sometimes excoriating attempt to discern traces of her belonging, and to make peace with the past. Joy Howard, Poet, publisher and former Fostering Services Manager

Leseprobe

For all my families

and especially my memory bank,

Cousin Nancy

CONTENTS

Introduction

Blue Glass Empty Pram

Lost Property

Well, Daughter...

The French for Midwife

Adoption

The Don’t Touch Garden

Milk

Elephant Aunts

The Man on a Bike

Mothers and Fathers

The Cot of my Bones our Bed

Corchipoo

Thyrotoxicosis

My Father, Counting Sheep

Sometimes I Feel Another Face

Making the Days

The End of a Long Conversation has Come

Oral History

On Growing a Face

The Right Bones

Oma

Bison

Paradox

Introduction

‘Mirror, mirror on the wall’

the old joke says

‘I am my mother after all’

but which?

1938: 4th May: Thank you for your kind donation of two and sixpence...

19th August: I have pleasure in sending you particulars of a dear little girl...

24th August: I am so glad to know you are interested in this little Catholic baby and can come on September 5th.

It will be quite in order for you to take baby if you like her and there is no need to bring any clothing, as baby will be dressed ready for the journey and a small parcel of clothes will be given you at the interview.

So the adoption society wrote in that part of the story, which was of course not only mine, but was where I first appeared.

This was all the introduction my parents had to the complex task of adopting. Their qualification for the job had been a letter from the parish priest saying they were of good character. Since of the only two possible religious options my father recognised – Catholic or lapsed – his was the second, I’ve wondered, if he’d had to bribe the Father with a bottle of whiskey.

So began the long intertwining of roots which is just as formative as the tangle of parental DNA we are born with.

‘What are you going to do when you grow up?’ asked my Aunty Margaret. ‘Starve in a garret,’ I said.

I knew from somewhere that this was an essential hallmark of the writer. My mother’s speaking eyebrows nearly climbed off her forehead but it was she who, with the unceasing

leaf litter of her stories about her thirteen siblings, taught me the arc of narrative.

Much later, I realised that it was time to move the great ice-age-erratic boulder of secrecy. Still not able to speak face-to-face, I wrote to my parents telling them that I knew. My father replied tenderly, blaming himself – ‘I thought not telling was for the best... when we got your letter your mother threw her apron over her head and cried all day.’ Old as the walls of Troy, that gesture says it all.

Near the end of her life I was waiting for an ambulance to take my mother, who had finally become too ill for me to nurse in her own home, to the hospice and I began to cry. ‘Don’t cry,’ she whispered. ‘O my lovely daughter.’

Sixty years on from that note from the society I found myself standing with my newly discovered brother by the bronze plaque commemorating our biological mother in a San Francisco graveyard, another twist in a narrative which revealed an absent mother but a living family.

This is not the whole of my story any more than anyone’s experience of adoption is the whole of theirs. The poet Mary Oliver says in a poem about her parents which is both tender and sad:

‘...I will not give them the kiss of complicity.

I will not give them the responsibility for my life.’

I hope these poems resonate for those who adopt and those who are adopted, but whatever our origins and wherever our lives take us, we all need to see, accept and parent the face we find in that mirror.