Not My Child

My daughter was born nearly eighteen years ago in a warm hospital in south Wales. She was a few days late, had inconvenienced a few people by moving into the breach position, only to somersault the day before a Caesarean was scheduled and, thanks to the gargantuan efforts of her mother, crashed into the world one November evening. She was wrapped in a blanket and placed in a little cot on the maternity ward next to her shattered mother.

It was a moment of pure joy, tinged with relief and exhaustion and all the emotion that accompanies a new life. She was someone we had longed for and tried for. In the midst of the delight, we were all moved to a ward of new mothers.

There were maybe a dozen beds in the room, a dozen conversations and a dozen doting dads and beaming mums. The efficient glide of midwives between them all. The bed opposite ours was empty. And then it wasn’t.

A child of maybe no more than twelve or thirteen years of age was being wheeled in by a midwife. Her own baby was placed in a cot. At that moment, I was trying to concentrate on being in the moment with my own precious family but couldn’t look away. The child had an expression of deep shock, of having gone through an unimaginable horror and not yet having the vocabulary or the energy or the context to articulate it. She was a child with a child. She did not look at the baby. She sat and stared into some fixed point ahead of her, some lost moment behind.

I have never seen such a broken person. 

I think I indicated to my wife, unintentionally I hope, the girl sat in the opposite bed. Either way it distracted us for a few moments from our own fresh arrival. As if sensing our presence in this moment, a midwife came and offered my wife a cup of tea. Another nurse hovered into view and then drew a curtain around the bed opposite. 

From within the thin curtain there came the unmistakable sound of someone having their heart broken. I felt a terrible sense of powerlessness. A man and a woman, both dressed like salesmen, came into the room. They had briefcases and mackintoshes. A nurse ushered them into the heartbreak. There was crying, lots of crying. I noticed a policewoman at the door.

When I talk to my daughter about the night she was born, I leave all this out. I talk about the first time I held her, the way I pointed outside roughly in the direction of our house. Outside the night was wet, was dark. There were distant lights. There were distant lights.

I tell her about the tiny row I had with her mother when I accidentally named our daughter whilst her mum was in the shower. I tell her about the long walk home I enjoyed in the rain and the large scotch my next door neighbour poured me when he saw me at my front door. 

I tell her how much she was loved from the very start and how she will always be loved, no matter what.

I leave out the bit about the little girl and the even smaller child this life had seen fit to give her. I leave it out not because it’s not part of her story, but because I hated myself for being glad when the midwife separated her from the joy in the room. I did not want to be reminded of the horrors of the world so soon after the birth of my precious daughter.

Most of all I did not want to be reminded that sometimes a man cannot do a thing, not a single thing to help, even if it was a small terrified child barely an arm’s length away. 

I do not want my daughter to know I could not help and did not try.

When I came to see my wife and child the next morning, the bed opposite them was empty. The child and the other child had been moved in the night to whatever future the girl had stared into the night before. 

I presume they were both taken into care and eventually from each other. I try not to think of her, but sometimes I get the bus home that way, over the hill and past the old hospital. 

Through tears I cannot show, I remember her pale wet face and beg for their forgiveness.