On the raft of the Medusa
My first night was spent mostly in a bit of a panic attack.
I was on a blow up bed with a giant stuffed giraffe looming over me.
Do we ever really grow up?
Our bizarre emotions have the capacity to grip hold of us with all the ferocity that they do at the outset. We just develop a language, of clumsy sorts, for them.
The urge to run was huge.
The feeling of being trapped.
The feeling of no control.
Out of country, out of home, out of safety.
I wanted to just run out onto the street and head the many hundreds of miles home.
I didn’t care, I’d run, I’d walk, I’d swim.
How could you die and leave me to do all of this on my own?
I had no choice. If I hadn’t come I would never have been forgiven.
I had no good reason not to, at least, not one I could coherently explain.
No control.
We have NO control.
What makes it even more ridiculously hard is that I’d be fine on my own.
I am so used, from so early on, to being alone.
What makes this so much harder is that it is supposed to feel safe.
It is family, the epitome of safety.
You protected me from this feeling.
This feeling of being a complete Frankenstein in the world within which I was created where I am supposed to feel at home and safe.

I was reminded of essentially the same feeling before. It was mum and dad’s 50th wedding anniversary and we were having a family get together in Mallorca. It was about 2 years after G had died (but it still felt like the day before). My brother and his partner were there with their new firstborn. My sister and her moody-like-you’d-never-believe-possible-in-an-adult partner, were there with my 12 year old niece. The sleeping arrangements meant that I had to share a room with her. (Now your partner’s dead you can just pop back into the child’s room...I know it was not how it was meant and it was just logistics but I was still at the mostly crying through the night phase and it was certainly how it felt as I careered with skates on towards being too old to have children of my own and a partner who’d just pegged it).

And now, here we are, all these years on, and it is that niece with her firstborn.

Anyway, I digress. I knew after the few minutes in the lift of the apartment block with my sister, when we skirted perilously close to the subject of mum and dad’s, I was in deeply unsafe waters. After that glancing skirmish I kept to the safe harbour of baby stuff ... easily done as she’s gorgeous of course. I sang G’s old songs to her and she soaked up my internalised safe haven. And I anchored below the giraffe reading The Argonauts that my friend has lent me. She warned me, ‘there’s baby stuff’, but she’s right, the book is about so much more than that ... a remarkable odyssey through identity, what it is to be human and in this world.