Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

As far as the court is concerned, adoption records are nothing more than an archive with legal implications, and are attended to in the dead and distant language of the law, obeying protocol that is difficult to follow.

I looked up to heaven. Mrs Winterson had obviously heard that I was hunting and arranged a flood.

She looks at my pieces of paper – the court order and the Baby MOT – and she notices that my mother had breastfed me. ‘That was the one thing she could give you. She gave you what she could. She didn’t have to do that and it would have been a lot easier for her if she hadn’t. It is such a bond – breastfeeding. When she gave you up at six weeks old you were still part of her body.’ I do not want to cry. I am crying.

Ria: ‘I have counselled so many mothers over the years who are giving up their babies for adoption, and I tell you, Jeanette, they never want to do it. You were wanted – do you understand that?’ No. I have never felt wanted. I am the wrong crib. ‘Do you understand that, Jeanette?’ No. And all my life I have repeated patterns of rejection. My success with my books felt like gatecrashing. When critics and the press turned on me, I roared back in rage, and no, I didn’t believe the things they said about me or my work, because my writing has always stayed clear and luminous to me, uncontaminated, but I did know that I wasn’t wanted.

Listen, we are human beings. Listen, we are inclined to love. Love is there, but we need to be taught how. We want to stand upright, we want to walk, but someone needs to hold our hand and balance us a bit, and guide us a bit, and scoop us up when we fall.

Listen, we fall. Love is there but we have to learn it – and its shapes and its possibilities. I taught myself to stand on my own two feet, but I could not teach myself how to love. We have a capacity for language. We have a capacity for love. We need other people to release those capacities.

Nobody can feel too much,

This I do not agree with , Jeanette.

This family court judge who was so experienced, did he have no idea of what it is like to stand on the rim of your life and look down into the crater? How hard was it to send me the ‘usual’ form or to tell me where to download it, or have a court official talk me through the legalese? I started shaking again.

law is grandiose and designed to intimidate, even when there is no reason for it to do so. It is designed to make ordinary people feel inadequate. I do not feel inadequate – but I did not expect to be six weeks old again either.

When he arrived I asked him very gently if he wanted to die, and he smiled at me and said, ‘After Christmas.’ It was and it wasn’t a joke.

Mrs Winterson lies further off. Alone.

What made them give me away? It had to be his fault because I couldn’t let it be hers. I had to believe that my mother loved me. That was risky. That could be a fantasy. If I had been wanted why had I become unwanted six weeks later?

And I wondered if a lot of my negativity towards men in general was tied up with these lost beginnings.

Susie says, ‘I think you do know how to love.’ ‘Do I?’ ‘I don’t think you know how to be loved.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Most women can give – we’re trained to it – but most women find it hard to receive. You are generous and you are kind – I wouldn’t want to be with you otherwise, no matter how brainy and impressive you are – but our conflicts and our difficulties revolve round love. You don’t trust me to love you, do you?’

No … I am the wrong crib … this will go wrong like all the rest. In my heart of hearts I believe that.

‘And if we have to part,’ says Susie, ‘you will know that you were in a good relationship.’ You are wanted, do you understand that, Jeanette?

The form says Reason for Adoption. My mother has handwriten, Better for Janet to have a mother and a father.

No. I am not ready for any of this. Let’s have another drink. At that moment in comes a theatre director I know slightly – she is staying at the hotel – and soon we are all three having drinks and chatting away, and I wish I was one of those cartoon characters with a saw coming up through the floor in a big circle round my chair. Time passes.

I am just about beginning to take in that Mrs Winterson was expecting a boy, and that as she couldn’t afford to waste the clothes, I would have been dressed as a boy … So I started life not as Janet, not as Jeanette, but as Paul.

Oh no oh no oh no, and I thought my life was all about sexual choice and feminism and and … it turns out I began as a boy.

I always believed I would see her again.

I am the kind of person who would rather walk than wait for a bus. The kind of person who will drive out of my way rather than sit in traffic. The kind of person who assumes that any problem is there for me to solve. I am not capable of queuing – I’d rather give up on whatever I have to queue for – and I won’t take no for an answer. What is ‘no’? Either you have asked the wrong question or you have asked the wrong person. Find a way to get the ‘yes’.

I suppose it is because of the forking paths. I keep seeing my life darting off in the different directions it could have taken, as chance and circumstance, temperament and desire, open and close, open and close gates, routes, roadways. And yet there feels like an inevitability to who I am – just as of all the planets in all the universes, planet blue, this planet Earth, is the one that is home.

‘I am scared.’ ‘There’d be something wrong with you if you weren’t scared!’

‘No owner, no heartbreak.’

I had styled myself as the Lone Ranger not Lassie. What I had to understand is that you can be a loner and want to be claimed. We’re back to the complexity of life that isn’t this thing or that thing – the boring old binary oppositions – it’s both, held in balance. So simple to write. So hard to do/be.

‘I thought I’d get the washing done before you got here,’ is her very first line.

It is just what I would say myself.

‘I have had four husbands,’ said Ann. ‘Four?’ She smiles. She doesn’t judge herself and she doesn’t judge others. Life is as it is.

Yes, we are alike. The optimism, the self-reliance. The ease we both have in our bodies. I used to wonder why I have always felt at ease in my body and liked my body. I look at her and it seems to be an inheritance.

There’s a text from Ann. I hope you weren’t disappointed.

MY MOTHER HAD to sever some part of herself to let me go. I have felt the wound ever since.

As the cab pulls up outside the house it starts to snow. When I was going mad I had a dream that I was lying face down on a sheet of ice and underneath me, hand to hand, mouth to mouth, was another me, ice-trapped. I want to break the ice, but will I stab myself?

could not smash the ice that separated me from myself, I could only let it melt, and that meant losing all firm foothold, all sense of ground. It meant a chaotic merging with what felt like utter craziness.

All my life I have worked from the wound. To heal it would mean an end to one identity – the defining identity. But the healed wound is not the disappeared wound; there will always be a scar. I will always be recognisable by my scar. And so will my mother, whose wound it is too, and who has had to shape a life around a choice she did not want to make. Now, from now on, how do we know each other? Are we mother and daughter? What are we?

My mother tried to throw me clear of her own wreckage and I landed in a place as unlikely as any she could have imagined for me. There I am, leaving her body, leaving the only thing I know, and repeating the leaving again and again until it is my own body I am trying to leave, the last escape I can make. But there was forgiveness. Here I am. Not leaving any more. Home.

We need better stories for the stories around adoption. Many people who find their birth families are disappointed. Many regret it. Many others do not search because they feel afraid of what they might find. They are afraid of what they might feel – or worse, what they might not feel.

There is a lot Ann can’t remember. Memory loss is one way of coping with damage. Me, I go to sleep. If I am upset I can be asleep in seconds. I must have learned that myself as a Mrs Winterson survival strategy. I know I slept on the doorstep and in the coal-hole. Ann says she has never been a good sleeper.

There is a big gap between our lives. She is upset about Winterson-world. She blames herself and she blames Mrs Winterson. Yet I would rather be this me – the me that I have become – than the me I might have become without books, without education, and without all the things that have happened to me along the way, including Mrs W. I think I am lucky. How do you say that without dismissing or undervaluing things for her?

And I don’t know what I feel about her. I panic when my feelings are not clear. It is like staring into a muddy pond, and rather than wait until an ecosystem develops to clear the water, I prefer to drain the pond.

I don’t blame her and I am glad she made the choice she made. Clearly I am furious about it too. I have to hold these things together and feel them both/all.

Love. The difficult word. Where everything starts, where we always return. Love. Love’s lack. The possibility of love. I have no idea what happens next.