The Other Side of Eighty

Slivers of the Past. Blue Horizon Prints.

I stalk my estranged daughter on line. I can no longer call her missing. I found her about a year ago on Instagram and I have learned from a past idiocy of mine about 7 years ago when I followed her on Twitter. Big mistake. She blocked me and went underground again. And I had this underlying sick feeling of anxiety about her for 5 years.

I am overjoyed. Knowing she's alive as she was a suicide risk.

I know these life slivers about her:

She still lives in the same city in the UK.

She has a cat, and, I think, a partner.

She owns at least 2 pairs of shoes as she likes to take pictures of her shoes in odd areas.

Her beloved dog died.

She loves graffiti.

She eats Indian food.

Some of her more careful studies of scenes are quite wonderful. I see the world through her eyes and marvel at our similarities.

She highlights signs like "Bollox to Brexit. Bollox to Trump." That's my girl.

She's still a strong feminist and catches misogyny in plain sight for her camera.

Life can be about slivers whether joy or sadness.

Today I celebrate those slivers. They can pierce. But they are precious.

A lovely comment on Facebook today from a friend who has an estranged member in her family also.

"I remain friends with her younger self."

Extraordinarily comforting.

My estranged child remains estranged. No change there. This is my annual post on her birthday.

But now, today, her younger self surrounds me, the witty, vibrant, artistic woman she was. She lived with me for close on 28 years. We read the same books, visited art galleries together, jointly wrote reviews of the best greasy spoons in Toronto: de rigeur: Formica, elderly crotchety waitresses in grubby uniforms, maroon lipstick, smokers' coughs, a belligerent unsmiling chef rolling out the bacon, eggs and homefries, and thirty year old hits on the table top juke boxes.

I would never have anticipated her cutting off her entire family and her oodles of friends. She was popular. She was brainy. She was loving. I joke that I wore her for the first 9 years of her life. She was always hanging off a part of me. The complete opposite of her older sister. She is somewhere in England.

And she is missed and loved every day.

The Back Door.

If you're reading this for any kind of a while you know I have a missing daughter.

The years keep climbing on. Years that can never, ever be replaced or lived in harmony with the vanished one.

I've talked to others in the same boat and their stories of reuniting are not encouraging, for the eggshells in dialogue and memory recollection or photographs displayed refresh the pain of loss.

However, for the last few years Missing Daughter has contacted a neighbour of her estranged aunt (she has estranged her entire family), ostensibly to inquire about a son she was close to when she lived with her aunt, but updating her also on her life.

So she is okay. Neighbour fills aunt in, aunt fills MD's father in, father informs Daughter, Daughter tells me.

These are wizened little crumbs scattered on our never-ending love for her.

And part of me thinks:

She knows.

Building to a crescendo in December
Each morning pierces a remember
The golden child, the laughing face
The quick wit, the stunning grace.

Happy birthday darling girl, wherever you are, whatever you are, whoever you are.

You are cherished and loved and missed so much.

In her sister's arms.

Today, on her birthday, every year, I write about her - my estranged child.

What more is there to add? Nothing has changed. The pain can bite me out of nowhere some days. Catching sight of someone who looks like her, hearing one of her songs on the radio, remembering her acerbic wit, astonishing intelligence and outrageous humour.

How can you give up hope? asked a friend the other night. It's easier not to hope, I respond, if I have no hope of a reconciliation then I can't be disappointed, right?

Sometimes love is just not enough.
Or the right kind.
Or unwanted.

Can love remain unshakeable and constant?

Or does it occasionally wander off and meander around looking for a new home?

Do we put expectations on the love of another?

Can the love of self be pure and selfish in the best way?

Are we capable of love of others without love of self?

What validates love?

Can love be truly unconditional?

I ponder on this today, the very worst day of my year. When getting out of bed and showering and dressing and eating is truly an accomplishment. Under the covers in bed is where my mind is free to think of her. And think of her. And think of her.

Most of my beloveds I take for granted but never without overwhelming gratitude. They know who they are.

But there are other beloveds who are so very distant -  distant in their disregard and unavailability. But close to my heart. And they know who they are too.  For shared memory doesn't allow the cutting of those intertwining ribbons of love.

And there is never enough of it to go around today.

I put all my energy into reflecting on what I have and not on what I don't have.

It ain't easy.

Fog rolling in to my front yard.

Each year it creeps up on me and takes me by surprise.

I'm chugging along, minding my own business when wham, out of nowhere, comes black December. A month I despise.

It wasn't always like this.  Or maybe it was. Every year, it just seems to get a little more bleak, a little more sad as it hoves around the corner and up the driveway and into my house. It's clever. Like a fog. It pours into the corners and stays there. Making faces. Reminding me. I used to drink my way through it. For many, many years now I've "done" it stark raving sober.

This time of the year I see an abused dog in a news story and I bawl my eyes out. That dog in Chicago shot by a policeman? Did my head in.

And babies, hurt babies. Have to jerk past the headline to avoid a catastrophic collapse of my emotions.

Even poor old pregnant Queen Kate in the hospital? Good for a five minute weep. I couldn't care two whigs for the monarchy, But a stranger's pain? Let the floodgates roll away.

My father died in a December. My closest friend of the time did also. In our family car. And worst of all, really, it's my estranged daughter's birthday. She was named for my dead friend. I don't know how many years she's been gone, I deliberately don't count them as the length of the chasm would probably astonish me. And make it worse.

Let me say it loud and clear. I don't like Christmas. I'm not in humbug status, just apathetic about everyone's jolly homes all posted on Facebook with the lights strung everywhere and this year it looks like pink and gold trees - whoa, nelly! - and last minute runs to Walmart for Chinese gifty tat. I like Solstice and would celebrate that in Toronto, but here there is nothing of secularism and paganism. That I can find anyway.

I've nowhere to run away to. One of my clan goes to Egypt every year to escape it. (I know, Egypt?!)
But he manages the annual Great Escape quite well. We discuss the ghosts of Christmas Past together. And there were many. And try to extract a modicum, a soupcon, of happiness out of it all. And can't.

A couple of bahs you might call us. And you're entitled. And chin up and chest out advisories? It just seems to make it worse.

So yeah, I'll let it flatten me like a steamroller.

And the one great cheering thought I have is that I know I am not alone..

The voices in my head are particularly loud today. Invited voices, I hasten to add. Voices of the past, a child's voice, her 9 year old body hanging upside down from a tree in the back yard at a heart stopping height. A fearless child. A child never without bandaged knees or split skin somewhere on her face. A child who would insist on wearing different coloured socks. "One matches the sweater, the other matches the pants", she would say to me, rolling her eyes, as if to ask what was wrong with me anyway. A child who wore baseball caps and a leather cowboy jacket until they just about decomposed on her body. A creative child who painted black snow and blue trees and red grass.

I write of her every year on this day, her birthday, my estranged daughter. There is a balm in the writing of it. I know I am not alone. Each time I write someone comes forward and says, yeah, me too. It helps.

I was lucky enough to find her on Twitter. So I follow her quietly, not every day as I did in the beginning but every week. Modern technology: I am so grateful for bringing me my precious child but also a couple of very old friends who were lost to me. Estranged Daughter is a film-maker in England: Avant Garde films. Indie films. And also a social activist much like her sister and me. She is also a creative knitter (!) and writer. This much I glean.

And leave her be.

Happy birthday, dearest daughter!

December 9th is her birthday. I’ve written of her before and here. She is somewhere in Bristol now, we think, but her plants are still in the window of a flat she had in Ireland. An aunt checks on them, does a drive by and gives us an update on the plants. Silly, you would think. But it’s all we have of her, her father, her sister and me.

Her father and I email each other today. My last email to her bounced. He has snail-mailed a card and gift to her address in Ireland. Our baby’s birthday, we say. And there is nothing more to say, she has dropped out of our lives.

She came quickly on that long ago day. She’d been so quiet inside me I’d worried about her. Distrusted the obstetrician and his soothing assurances. This was pre-ultrasound days. Her father and I’d been Santa shopping for our toddler when I felt the first signs of her wanting to leave me. Early by ten days.

I watched her being born, quite painlessly, in a mirror above me. She was placed beside me almost immediately in a little incubator. A perfect little girl with a nasty eczema spreading over her little body. She couldn’t tolerate clothing for a week so she lay, like some Hollywood star on a sunbed, in her opened incubator in the nursery window soaking in the rays of the healing sun. Stark naked. She always hated that story. The vulnerability of it perhaps, she never explained why.

She has abandoned us all, some of us more hurtfully than others. Her father got his FOAD on Father’s Day one year. I got mine in Manchester in January 2003 when I flew over on an emergency trip while she was threatening to kill herself. Her sister got hers a couple of summers ago.

We are talking of flying to Bristol next year, making it a trip to visit Cornwall and Devon and the Lake District and as a sidebar searching for her. We don’t want to make the trip about her as we know we would be setting ourselves up to be disappointed.

But if I were floating freely, untethered from kith and kin, I think I’d like to be found.

Happy birthday, baby girl.