5. For Luck - a prose poem by Donna Byer-Smith 14/10/1999
For Luck 14th Oct 1999
I've been looking for two pieces in my scattered history. Feeling that I wanted them to be my next blog post. After rooting around in my storage shed and screeds of folders and files, I finally found the writing and its protagonist. Sadly I had to glue her head back on, but she scrubbed up okay.
In my self reflection on mothering, in relationship to becoming estranged, and writing about the experience, it seems all things relevant to mothering are to become part of my Memoir, Donna Do - Meeting Myself Coming Back.
This piece is a snapshot in time. My past self reflecting on her past self.
I struggled to have children - it is about that time and this alabaster statue gifted to me for luck.
It shows that my first experience of estrangement was with my sister, the gift giver, thirty two years ago. Our family carries a sensitive gene. I too have it.
This prose poem is twenty six years old. Maybe you will resonate with it in some way.
D xx
Prose Poem by Donna Byer-Smith Words 717
I remember when my sister gave her to me. A beautiful thought and gesture. It, or should I say she, kneels about as high as one of my hands is long, and is leaning slightly forward cradling a newborn to her breast. She is of pale skin coloured alabaster and has knelt on a shelf in every house I have resided in for the best part of eight or nine years. As she squats presently, the light hits the crown of her head and her lean narrow shoulders, throwing the baby into shadow along with her lap and face. She is a slim figure with long limbs; delicate and nurturing in her pose. Whenever I look at her I am reminded of things past - my inability to have children, and the once close relationship I had with the sister who gave her to me for luck. There are flecks of olive brown speckled over her like freckles. Her face is not sure whether it is looking down at the baby in arms or forward to the beyond. She could almost be in the midst of an upward movement, about to take the baby to its crib now that it dozes after a belly full of milk.
The piece reminds me of my mother. Mum is a career mother. We used to count when we were kids how long she had been pregnant for, all up. A rough calculation would make it 5 years and three months. She isn't long and lean like my little statue is, but her nurturing and mothering were and continue to be as apparent. I remember when I used to want a baby so badly, and things in my life just weren't allowing me that choice. I remember getting really mad with mum because she didn't seem to understand my need all of a sudden. She seemed to think I could just turn that need off like a switch. I guess she was still being a mother herself, trying to protect me from myself and the influences upon me over which I seemed to be powerless. When I see my mother with a baby now, her experience shows in the way she holds and cherishes it. She would never have needed a good luck charm like mine for her own fertility. Mothering isn't just the ability to fall nor the production of a baby after nine months; it's an all encompassing thing that one can never imagine until one becomes a mother. Mum always said to me that having a baby meant you joined a club. I understood what she meant when I had my first son, but I think the club has become selective about its membership. I feel very alone in my mothering these days.
The statue reminds me of not being able to conceive, and the agony of that lack. It's like being a stepparent - unless you've been one you can't begin to imagine what it's like. I went through step parenting at the same time as trying in vain to fall pregnant. When you can't have something and you can't control the fact that you can't have it – you start to try really hard and go a little crazy. I did anyway. And I was lonely. It was a wedge between my husband and me. A wedge between me and the community. Walking down in the village was the loneliest thing of all. There were only ever mothers with prams and women with pregnant bellies, and none of them knew that the tears in my eyes were because I wanted to be them. It was a time in my life when I would have traded places with somebody else if I’d had the opportunity. The statue is a symbol of my sister too, her avoidance of me and the rest of the family. There isn't a day goes by, when I enter the bathroom and the light picks up the skin coloured tones of the alabaster kneeling on the windowsill, that I don't think of her, and of then. If I was generous of spirit I would pass it on to others who know the loneliness of not being able to fall pregnant, and hope that it would work its magic for them. But I'd miss her.