Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

breathe.
    ‘Is this it then?’
    Susie and Ria are both smiling at me, as I take the paper over to the window. I read the names. Tears then.
    I don’t know why. Why do we cry? The names read like runes.
    Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights.
    Ria: ‘I have counselled so many mothers over the years who are giving up their babies for adoption, and I tell you, Jeanette, they never want to do it. You were wanted – do you understand that?’
    No. I have never felt wanted. I am the wrong crib.
    ‘Do you understand that, Jeanette?’
    No. And all my life I have repeated patterns of rejection. My success with my books felt like gatecrashing. When critics and the press turned on me, I roared back in rage, and no, I didn’t believe the things they said about me or my work, because my writing has always stayed clear and luminous to me, uncontaminated, but I did know that I wasn’t wanted.
    And I have loved most extravagantly where my love could not be returned in any sane and steady way – the triangles of marriages and complex affiliations. I have failed to love well where I might have done, and I have stayed in relationships too long because I did not want to be a quitter who did not know how to love.
    But I did not know how to love. If I could have faced that simple fact about myself, and the likelihood that someone with my story (my stories, both real and invented) would have big problems with love, then, then, what?
    Listen, we are human beings. Listen, we are inclined to love. Love is there, but we need to be taught how. We want to stand upright, we want to walk, but someone needs to hold our hand and balance us a bit, and guide us a bit, and scoop us up when we fall.
    Listen, we fall. Love is there but we have to learn it – and its shapes and its possibilities. I taught myself to stand on my own two feet, but I could not teach myself how to love.
    We have a capacity for language. We have a capacity for love. We need other people to release those capacities.
    In my work I found a way to talk about love – and that was real. I had not found a way to love. That was changing.
    I am sitting in the room with Susie. She loves me. I want to accept it. I want to love well. I am thinking about the last two years and how I am trying my best to dissolve the calcifications around my heart.
    Ria smiles and her voice comes from a long way off. All of this seems too present, because it is so uncomfortable, and too far away, because I can’t focus. Ria smiles.
    ‘ You were wanted, Jeanette .’
    *

    On the train home Susie and I open half a bottle of Jim Beam bourbon. ‘Affect regulation,’ she says, and, as always with Susie, ‘How are you feeling?’
    In the economy of the body, the limbic highway takes precedence over the neural pathways. We were designed and built to feel, and there is no thought, no state of mind, that is not also a feeling state.
    Nobody can feel too much, though many of us work very hard at feeling too little.
    Feeling is frightening.
    Well, I find it so.
    The train was quiet in the exhausted way of late-home commuters. Susie was sitting opposite me, reading, her feet wrapped round my feet under the table. I keep running a Thomas Hardy poem through my head.

Never to bid good-bye
    Or lip me the softest call,
    Or utter a wish for a word, while I
    Saw morning harden upon the wall,
    Unmoved, unknowing
    That your great going
    Had place that moment, and altered all.

    It was a poem I learned after Deborah left me, but the ‘great going’ had already happened at six weeks old.
    The poem finds the word that finds the feeling.
    *

    Ria had given me the name of the court that might still hold my adoption records. Life was local in 1960, and while I had thought that I might be looking at somewhere in Manchester, it turned out that my records were in Accrington. I had walked past them every day of my life until I had left home.
    I wrote a simple letter asking if the file had been kept.
    A couple of weeks later I received a reply; yes, the file had been located, and now my request to see it would be placed before the judge.
    I didn’t like this; Ria had told me that it was my right to see the records, although no one could know what might or might not be there. Sometimes there is a lot of material, sometimes very little. Whatever else, I might find the name of the adoption society who had placed me with the Wintersons – the name that had been so violently torn off the top