The Happiness Glass Page 10

  The next afternoon, while reporting her unexplained absence, I wept in a police station. In the years that followed I would grow accustomed to weeping in public places, and to sudden collapses, triggered by this or that unbearable memory.

  It happens that I am going through a period of great unhappiness and loss just now.

  It must be fifteen years since I first read that opening to Carol Shields’s novel Unless, but at any moment during that time I could have quoted its first sentence. It lodged in my mind, yet I had no reason to believe it held personal meaning. I appreciated it, and the rest of the novel, for what it was, and remains – the accomplished, elegant, understated prose of a writer at the top of her form. Unfortunately, as it turned out, it was also speaking to me of a time in my own life that was yet to come.

  In the novel, Shields’s writer character Reta Winter is suddenly stricken when her eldest daughter abandons her university studies and the family home to sit mutely begging on a Toronto street corner with a sign around her neck that reads Goodness. On that October day four years ago, which in memory is bleak, though it was mild and sunny, I found myself plunged into a period of great unhappiness and loss that in some of its aspects was weirdly similar to poor Reta’s. With this shattering of the lucky pane of glass and the move into a different sort of life, I began to wonder whether when we read something and are particularly struck by it, it is because of a subliminal awareness that we are reading forward into our own future. Can novels foreshadow human lives? Perhaps, if the signs are already in place, we will be drawn to literary expressions of the probable outcome.

  All cultures idealise the family. Whatever its shape and size, the family we belong to is a huge part of our identity, sometimes the largest part, and for most of us it is a crucial navigational point on our personal compass. Even families like ours that did not start out bound by blood but were formed by adoption mostly manage to hold together through rough weather and family crises. To have failed brings a special kind of shame. It is death by a thousand cuts without the pain relief of death, or death’s finality. But like death, a family estrangement is hedged by silence.

  Photographs that have stood for decades on a mantelpiece are quietly put away; people avoid the lost one’s name as they shun the name of the deceased. But unlike the silence that settles after a funeral there is a beady-eyed quality to the silence around estrangement: within it there are murmurings about good parenting, and especially about good mothering, never mind the swarms of crueller judgements and darker suspicions. For losing a child in this ill-defined way can make other parents in the wider family feel uneasy. There is a sense of stigma, no less real because it is never articulated.

  Yet figures suggest that family estrangements are more common than might be imagined. Research is scant, but in 2003 Relationships Australia surveyed 1,215 Australians and found that seventeen per cent of respondents were estranged from at least one member of their family. More recently, University of Newcastle academic, Dr Kylie Agllias, has claimed that around one in twenty-five Australian adults experience family estrangement at some time in their lives, and a 2014 study in the United Kingdom concluded that estrangement crosses all socio-economic boundaries.

  The word ‘estrange’ has its roots in the Latin extraneus, meaning ‘not belonging to the family’, or extraneare, ‘to treat as a stranger’. From Middle French comes estrangier, meaning ‘to alienate’, and this is the defining condition of estrangement, for one cannot be alienated unless one has first been held close, just as one cannot be estranged unless one has first been loved. Another necessary condition of estrangement is that the withdrawal of affection discomforts or grieves one of the parties. When the withdrawal is instigated by a parent, and ‘to alienate’ has the connotation of ‘to drive off’, they are often said to have ‘disowned’ their child, a word that vaunts a delusion of ownership.

  I began this essay in that small wilderness of days between Christmas and New Year, a patch of time as removed from ordinary life as some semi-lawless outpost where almost anything may be said, or thought, or written. The last days of the year are also the run-up to my birthday on New Year’s Day, which this year was remarkable for the appearance of a super moon. Having been alerted to this phenomenon via social media, I looked it up and found that not only is the first full moon of the year known as the ‘wolf moon’, but in 2018 it will be the first of two full moons to fall in January. The second will be the ‘snow moon’ or ‘hunger moon’ that would usually fall in February. However, every nineteen years the full moon skips February, thus the 2018 ‘snow moon’ will become January’s second full moon as well as a rare ‘blue moon’, which occurs every two-and-a-half years. A complete lunar eclipse will be thrown in for good measure.

  The waxing and waning of the moon marks the passage of the seasons, and in the Northern Hemisphere full moons were named for the behaviour of plants and animals, or the weather. Medieval Europeans and Native Americans bestowed these names, of which I had only previously heard of ‘harvest moon’ and ‘hunter’s moon’, which fall in September and October respectively. Now I learned that March, with its final full moon of the northern winter, brings the ‘worm moon’, for in that month the ground thaws and softens and earthworms rise, inviting the return of birds. Sometimes the March full moon was called the ‘crow moon’ because the sound of crows signals the end of winter.

  The ‘wolf moon’ alludes to the hungry wolves that howled on the outskirts of small communities in the depths of winter. This image of wolves prowling the frozen perimeters of one’s life feels like an apt metaphor for the encircling grief of family estrangement, and on diving deeper into moon-lore I turned up an astrological interpretation of the full moon on New Year’s Day that stressed its opposition to the planet Venus. This aspect, it said, emphasised imbalances in feelings of love and affection, though the full moon was said to offer great potential for peace and forgiveness.

  Learning these lovely old names for the full moon in the lead up to my birthday distracted me from the lack of a birthday message; the making and shaping of sentences then took over and, despite the difficult subject matter, I found a kind of peace in the cease-fire zone of creativity. Like many things refined by time and passed down to us, the meaning of the full moon’s names has been compressed, but opens in the mind like a flower: the ‘pink moon’, ‘flower moon’, and ‘strawberry moon’ or ‘rose moon’ promise warmth and delight after the hardships of winter. Other common names anticipate thunder storms, fish, the trapping of beavers, and the withering of grasses, until the year closes with December’s austerely beautiful ‘cold moon’, or the ‘moon before yule’, names that honour the conditions and rituals of the winter solstice.

  Humans have always looked to the natural world for signs and omens, and the astrological interpretation set me wondering whether this super moon with its aspect to Venus had influenced my sudden compulsion to write about this painful subject. It was irresistible to wonder too, whether, if I could only muster the right words in the right order, I could – I don’t know – change things, fix what had been broken, embrace forgiveness, or even effect reconciliation. One of the buzz words of the past twenty years has been ‘closure’, but closure in family estrangement is rarer than the elusive ‘blue moon’, and while most of us who are caught in its coils yearn to be reconciled, the chances of that happening are negligible.

  In Unless, Reta goes into a cubicle in a women’s washroom in a Toronto bar and writes on the back of the door: my heart is broken. It’s an impulse she recognises as “dramatic, childish, indulgent, grandiose and powerful”, but at once she feels a release of pressure, which she ascribes to having set down words of “revealing truth”. I am guessing it is a similar impulse that lies behind the writing of this essay – in the absence of closure, it is an instinctive move to let some steam out of the boiler before it blows, and at the same time write something true, though not, I hope, self-indulgent.

  Children find it difficult to believe
in the lives of their parents before they were born. I find it hard myself now to recall the tenor of those days, but they were less structured than the parenting years, and more light-hearted than the present as it bumps along with its load of unresolvable grief. One difference between a birth and an adoption is, of course, that the child also has ‘before’ and ‘after’ lives. The ‘before’ period might be short, as in the adoption of a newborn, or long, as when older children are adopted from orphanages or foster care.

  The period of our daughter’s life without us was eleven months. I sometimes think that if I could have rewritten what happened in those months I could have altered her future, could almost have ensured her happiness, and perhaps our own. It is wishful thinking, and impossible, I know, but at least those first months of life would have been drained of the horrors that by her first birthday had made of her a silent and unsmiling child. ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride’, as my grandmother would have said, but I will never relinquish that particular wish.

  For me, our ‘before’ life always anticipated her presence. There was a space waiting for her, and for a time she filled it. Now there is a space again. I try not to swim against the tide of memory. Returning to moments of lost happiness is debilitating, yet there are days when it is impossible to resist the backward glance.

  There was a photograph; I think my husband took it one afternoon when he met our daughter from the school bus. It was late September or early October, autumn in the Northern Hemisphere; in a few weeks she would turn sixteen. In the photograph she walks towards the camera, and her long dark hair – casually twisted into a knot – is tawny with late afternoon sunlight; a school bag is slung over a shoulder, and she wears the dull green army cadet uniform that flatters her. She is smiling into warm light, relaxed and beautiful, held in a wash of gold like something precious sealed in amber.

  We call it ‘the last photograph’, because it would come to feel like the final glimpse of a beloved face in the moments before embarkation for some perilous migration from which there would be no return. A day or two after it was taken she would step off the same school bus and fall into her bed, weeping. It was the first stage of a journey that more than a decade later would culminate in estrangement. Despite all our efforts, and the efforts of the people we called upon for help, something fundamental had shifted, though for a few years more there would be flashes of the child we believed we knew, the much-loved young woman who was to become a stranger.

  The cultural assumption is that parent-child relationships will survive almost any conflict, that the parent-child bond, of all close ties, cannot be undone. The factors that secure its endurance are said by social work scholars to be biological connection, along with a familial web of obligations and interactions, and shared histories. The involuntary nature of family ties is often referenced in their research papers as the element that makes most of us feel that ‘the family’, even if severely dysfunctional, is a personal force of nature, and inescapable.

  My heart takes a dive whenever I encounter this cold lineup, for as a family we have struggled to meet the criteria. Lacking a biological connection, we might have benefitted from a firmer network of family ties, but we were a small family whose adult members were from small families, far-flung in some cases, so that it was always difficult to define and maintain that web of familial connection. Then, our shared history had an eleven-month dent in it, and as parents we were volunteers – though this gave us a sense of being in it for the long haul; at no stage did our volunteer status suggest to us that we could resign our parental posts. But on examining the factors that forge endurance from the child’s point of view, the first thing I see is that severance of the presumed-unbreakable parent-child bond: it occurred, as far as we know, when she was four days old.

  In The Primal Wound, Nancy Newton Verrier asserts that children never really recover from the primary rejection. While adopted children everywhere will at some time in their lives hear the ‘you are special because you were chosen’ narrative, nearly all of them, even when quite young, will work out that relinquishment came first.

  I am still haunted by the story of the 2014 death of a homeless man in Dublin. Jonathan Corrie died in a doorway on Molesworth Street, just yards from the buildings that house the Irish parliament. He was forty-three. A photograph of Corrie in the Irish Times, taken when he was interviewed some months earlier showed a fine-boned face honed to bleakness, its most arresting feature a pair of deadened and immensely sad grey eyes.

  In the podcast of the interview, Corrie was well-spoken, polite, with patches of eloquence. But I could not get his eyes out of my mind – their frightening blankness, like a oneway mirror in which you would see nothing but your own reflection. I could only imagine that, while sleeping rough, with never a private moment, Corrie had turned his terrible sadness inwards for the sake of dignity.

  It transpired that he had been adopted when he was around ten months old. He said in the interview that his relationship with his adoptive mother had been ‘small’, that they were never close. “Sad,” he said. “Sad.”

  His adoptive father had been good to him, but he had died of Parkinson’s disease.

  Jonathan Corrie’s family home was in Kilkenny, where he had been educated at a prestigious private school; he had been a choirboy in St Canice’s Cathedral in Kilkenny. Yet from around the age of eighteen he had been troubled and homeless, only inhabiting a small flat once for a couple of days.

  He spoke about the toughness of the streets, of never feeling safe. His most telling remark was that there was always a story behind an individual’s homelessness, whether it was of a difficult upbringing, drink, drugs, or mental illness. Corrie himself had succumbed to a drug habit.

  With the report of his death, the revelation of his adoptive background and family estrangement came as no surprise: the figures for estrangement are said to be even higher among the homeless than in the general population. I did not know these people, his family, yet I felt that I did understand something about how they must have been feeling, and if it had been possible to sit down with them we might have talked for hours of our common experience, crossing and criss-crossing the contested territory of parental love, and the delicate grafting process that adoption attempts, and often fails. I felt his adoptive mother’s wretchedness, and the devastated landscape implied by that ‘small relationship’ Corrie described.

  His story raises so many questions for which there are no answers. For example: can the family home have been so terrible that a slow death on the streets was preferable? Could death on a cold doorstep be less difficult than facing up to what went wrong in a childhood or within a family? If adoption fails to bind, how else should we raise abandoned children? Corrie’s parents were described as good and decent people. They had bought two houses for him so that he might have somewhere safe to live with the young woman with whom he’d had two children, but Corrie sold both properties.

  His girlfriend sometimes searched for him in the streets of Dublin; he was always in their minds, she said. Once, she and the children bumped into him by accident and gave him their phone number. They were there if he needed them, they told him. But Corrie never called.

  Towards the end of Unless, Reta Winter solves the puzzle of her daughter’s withdrawal and her bizarre behaviour; the moment of trauma is identified, there is a homecoming, and the daughter, Norah, is gathered back into the family. But in life, estrangement rarely hinges on a single event or turning point. Novels must work with structure, and reader expectations; novels end, while life goes on, untidy and shapeless, and indifferent to expectations.

  In the long shadow cast by the walking-away of an adult child I had believed would be close to me forever, other relationships seem frail and tenuous. A few precious connections forged in childhood, my long marriage, are as deeply carved as a river flowing between high scarred banks, but the rest feel uncertain, contingent, best described by the sort of small connecting words Carol Shields used in
Unless as chapter headings: nearly; once; despite; instead.

  I began this essay under the full wolf moon’s beam, perhaps even prompted by it. Have I written something of ‘revealing truth’? Is truth even possible when memories are not fixed, and when even the happiest of them is not the solid slab of glass one imagines but is made molten and slightly altered with each recollection? Was the ‘last photograph’ really as I have described it – a moment captured on the cusp of change – or was change already in place behind the mirror-glass? Will the sight of schoolgirls with long, lovingly plaited hair always trigger regret, and longing, and tears? When will I cease to be haunted by Jonathan Corrie’s eyes? And you have to ask, I do ask, what could we have done differently? Was I never, despite the fiercest love, equipped to be her mother? Did the woman who confided her family’s grief recognise some subtle version of her life within the little she knew of mine? Will the rare ‘blue moon’ at the end of January, with its lunar eclipse, bring a noticeable shift, or the longed-for ‘closure’, to either of us, or must we await a ‘pink moon’, or a ‘rose moon’, in some distant year? Or perhaps never?