Deaf for a While

November 1965. By the time I was collected, I had already experienced three mothers. Birth, foster and adopted. I came to the last, a ten weeks old parcel. 

It seems, for a while, I turned away from, not towards them. For whatever reasons, I was not yet the enthusiastically noisy communicator. So these new parents were tentative and noncommittal. I found letters from the time. They assumed I was deaf. They wrote back and forth to the private adoption agency asking them to provide medical evidence that I was not damaged goods. I can hear the surging fury in the clipped military tones of my father, like an officer on parade hissing commands. And my mother’s compassionless insistence that she had not expected to be so disappointed. It took almost a year.

I was kept on ice. 

They had already adopted a baby two years before I came along who had embraced them wholeheartedly. A few weeks after I came along, things were different. Judith confided in my aunt that she felt no bond. But she kept me. In that good old British upper class wartime spirit of never being seen to give up. I suppose she could not bear to have failed. 

My aunt recounted to me years later that she would frequently find me abandoned somewhere in the house. “Darling, you were always on the alert for passing attention.” When anyone approached my pram, “Your face lit up and you would shriek with laughter, beaming with a look of amazement,” she said. “As if this was the first human you had ever seen. You were always flirting with the world.” 

Poor Judith took no delight in that. It was a personal slight that I had not clung to her from the outset.

But I kept flirting.