The pictures of me, post-birth, are some of the most disturbing I have seen. Scrunched and writhing with my severely herniated belly-button, ten nail-less finger and toes, and tiny tube-bisected face I seem to be crying “For the love of God, why am I here? Put me back in! I’m not done yet!”
Three months short of done, or if you prefer 2/3rds finished, I was immediately whisked away to complete my development into something more closely resembling a human child in the glassy womb of an incubator. There I lay, happily focusing on developing working lungs, while the doctors wandered in and out to my mother and said such reassuring things as
“There seems to be some considerable bleeding in the brain,”
and
“We aren’t sure if her eyes will work yet.”
I don’t know whether it dawned on my mother at this point that what she had bought into the world was a bone fide Dud Child or whether it took longer, but Dud Child I was at my first ausipicous coming and Dud Child I was to remain throughout my infancy.
Recently when I was searching through my “child file” (less sinister than it sounds) attempting to find my driving license, I rediscovered the many and myriad letters and certificates pertaining to my dudities and sat laughing at them for about an hour. Most of them are medical reports and some of them are almost fantastically vague. One, full of dense figures and unfathomable text, has written in pen at the bottom “If Anna is worried at all as she matures she can return for correction”
Concerned by the ominous sounding “correction” but incredibly excited that I may have found some sort of medical root for my chronic and generalised worrying, I presented the letter to my mother. She explained that she had been given it on my behalf when clumsyness on her part had resulted in some minor facial surgery on my part. The “worried” referred specifically to any insecurities I might grow to have about the resultant scarring.
This was disappointing. Unlike nuclear war, my encroaching death or the prospect of a loveless suburban life, my scar has never worried me. Feeling as if I’d had the prospect of a “corrected”, worry-free existence snatched away from me I returned to the “child file.”
Those papers that weren't misleadingly vague had written at the top a sort of topic sentence for what followed. They were all bundled together in a section of the file that my mother had titled “Medical” but that I would have titled “Will she lead a normal life? NO she’ll be a Dud-child!” Each topic sentence, hilariously and slightly unprofessionally, read like a verbatim recording of what my mother said to person behind the desk, upon checking in with me. They were, more or less, as follows...
“Anna can’t hear anything”
“Anna can’t speak recognisable english”
“Anna can speak now but she makes up words and expects us to get it”
- beside which someone of a more professional bent has written “neologisms”
“Anna is weezy and rattley.”
“The ventalin you gave Anna to reduce her weezy rattlings gave her terrible hallucinatory visions.” - These “visions” are increasingly becoming my formal reason for not taking anything at university “Bah! Only just exploring the corners of your consciousness now? Think you’re Ken Kesey do you? Think you are Allen Ginsburg? Do you? Tit-master? I was expanding my mind aged five! Suck on that.” - I’m a dreadful arse at university, you can tell.
“Anna day dreams so much that I can give her a soft thwack to the ear and she doesn’t notice”
“Anna has contracted the sort of antiquated diseases that you thought went out with opium”
“Anna is bafflingly clumsy,” - This irks me. For starters the whole concept of clumsiness under the age of five is redundant, show me a graceful toddler and I will show you a swan you have mistaken for a human infant. The idea that I could have been clumsier than your average child without being some sort of one-women-three-stooges-act is offensive. Secondly the hospital would have had, next to the notes on my clumsiness, the notes (however vague) from when my mother, during one of her abortive attempts at tackling the twin goliaths of “walking” and “carrying her child” tripped up her own familiar front steps and accidently broke my face, but at no point did anyone think to chalk my clumsiness up to overwhelming genetics.
and finally...
“Anna has a really big head, is there anything you can do about that?” - I wish this one was a joke but it’s genuine, in the summarial section below the nurse has written “we have measured Anna’s head and can report that she is in the top 90th percentile of head size” you can see her fighting the urge to jot “commiserations” at the end.
The brilliant thing about all of these forms is that at no point are any of the issues solved, there is never a perscription pad attached (apart from with my LSD laced ventalin) but there are always some kind words explaining to my mother “sorry, there is little we can do, you daughter is just a bit...faulty,”
My mother, I think, was consistantly worried that my clumsiness, lack of attention span, and difficulties with hearing, speaking...being, might lump together to form a genuine disorder or be the lasting and dehabilitating effects of that bleeding brain thing. Years of testing proved that this wasn’t the case at all. In a way it would have been nicer if they were. Instead I was just an deeply ineffective child.
To further compound this the “child file” also contains five developmental reports (the results of said testing), these are lengthy and while they have a few saving graces re. academic performance they can essentially be parred down to “Oh dear, Mrs S we are the professionals and...dud-child I’m afraid.”
The first four, at least, the last report in my considerable record is from Dr Prendergast.
Dr Prendergast’s name in and of itself endears me to him greatly.
My mother took me to him in one final brave rush at reclassifying my dudities into one big treatable block. He took me for an interview and testing session aged 8 and half and his summary of the occasion constitutes a dramatic break from all that comes before it. Rather than being a catalgoue of my many and myriad failings it is basically an advert for me. I am “attentive” “intellegent” “bright eyed and cooperative” I “even show signs of humour” (I glowed when I first read that but I am now beginning to get sore about that “even.”) He concludes with the sentence “I can effectively describe her as a normal little girl.”
Ah, sweet Dr Prendergast, I wonder if he knew that he was formally elevating me from the dud child I was, stumbling around with my giant head balanced on my weak and ventalin-ravaged body, to the normal and even, possibly, even though she’s female, even, humour-based individual I now am.
The doctors records end there, not just the vauge behaviourial ones but also the proper illness based ones, I think I have been to the doctors twice in the last 13 years, which implies that Prendergasts judgements had a concrete effect upon my constitution or, much more likely, upon my mother. As far as she was concerned the final word had been said, I was normal. I had outgrown the Dud-child phase. She had a piece of paper to prove it. I like to think of her taking it out and looking at it during my intensely weird adolescence, and in fact, now, and thinking “No, I shouldn’t be worried, she is a perfectly normal little girl.”
I realise it would be more poetic if the completely farcical failure of my first few years on this earth had had some sort of lasting effect on me. If when I walked out of my ballsed-up Cambridge interview the walls had whispered “Duuuuuud chiiiiild.” If everytime I failed to impress my bright eyed and cooperative charms upon a pretty man he just lent over and said “I shalln’t be sleeping with you, you are a dud-child.” But it hasn’t. I didn’t even have call to think about it. Till I looked through the child-file to find my driving license, for my third driving test, which I failed, because I am clumsy and can’t focus on more than one thing at a time let alone everything that is going on, on a road, all the time, and because I’m basically deaf and I don’t know left from right, and every so often I get these dreadful ventalin flashbacks.
Seriously though I’m fine now.
