Neglect is a Womb

1.

How loud is a sigh? As loud as the clatter of pans, the bang of a door slammed, a church organ rumbling through you? How about an eyeroll? The silent treatment? Were they half as loud as the voice in Nora’s head? Came in spirals, it did. Looping on repeat, kind of like the swirls she used to draw as a girl, filling double-sided A4 pages. Where’d that voice come from anyway?

And she’d almost put her finger on it.

She’d almost put her finger on it one afternoon at the post office.

Her mother sighed audibly, fidgeting with self-service machines. Nora joined the queue instead, just like everybody else, just like the woman in red, the elderly man and his grandson, his faded action figure and its big, black boots.

“I gave them a one-star review,” said her mother.

“Now I can’t come back,” said Nora, almost shaking her head. Caught herself just in time. Kneaded the envelope, instead. Traced its edges, its cardboard corners.

The queue slowly progressed, one package at a time, and from behind her came a familiar sigh.

“Why don’t you go grab a coffee, Mum? I’ll come find you when I’m done.”

“What, you don’t want me here? I’ll go home if you don’t want me here.”

“No, just go grab a coffee, and I’ll come find you when I’m done.”

“You don’t want me here?” she repeated. “I’ll go home if you don’t want me here.”

And she did, just like that, nose up, shoulders back as she waddled out, a smile on her lips, the image of innocence – as though the room didn’t reverberate with whatever it was she’d just done, as though she hadn’t left in her wake an elephant in the room. And Nora stood there a moment staring into the empty space that was, five seconds ago, her mother. Then she turned back to the queue, watched the grandson, blinking blue eyes, and his dangling action figure watching her.

She was too resigned to feel embarrassed, too resigned to feel angry. She felt only a lump in her throat, tears so long suppressed she could feel them somewhere in the back of her head, in her cheeks, before they even reached her eyes. Dread, she felt dread, somebody standing on her chest.

Hi Mum, I won’t be responsible for your frustration. I think your reaction was disproportionate. I’ll see you in a few days when things have calmed down. Could you please delete your review? This is my new city, my home.

No reply, just the cost of the envelope quietly deposited into her bank account.

How loud is a bank transfer?

2.

Chronic guilt and shame – we don’t realise it’s there, not if we’re used to it. It’s a small echo in a moderately furnished room. And maybe that’s why, consciously or not, we spend forever stuffing our lives with things to dampen the sound – or maybe that was just Nora. Nora taking a sip of beer. Nora rejoicing at the wind in her hair.

“How’s your father going to remember? Do you recall him ever reading you a book?”

“OK, let’s test you, then,” said Nora.

She’d sent her mother a message yesterday, inviting her to watch a concert at the Notre Dame Cathedral, and she’d accepted. And now they found themselves here—she, her mother and father—sharing a bowl of fries on a terrace, amongst barking dogs and soothing owners.

“Hairy Maclary from—”

“Donaldson’s Dairy.”

“Hercules Morse—”

“As big as a horse.”

Her mother had read to her growing up. She’d taught her multiplication with marbles, fractions with fruit, her times tables with interactive games in the park. She’d taken her to speech pathology, to swimming, to athletics and gymnastics. She’d researched how to correct her underbite when a dentist insisted headgear was the only way, that Nora would have to drag bags on wheels around like a hospital patient.

“Oh, guess what, Nora? A bunch of Africans—”

“Mum!”

“Oh, what? I’m not allowed to speak now?”

“What your mother wanted to say,” intervened her father.

“No, you can’t tell her! You’re not allowed to talk about it!”

Her mother then buried her head in her phone for the next twenty minutes. Walked ahead of them when they paid the bill. Merci, bonne soirée. Extended her cheek to Nora who said she was leaving, accepted her kiss goodbye as though she were dirty, as though her very own daughter might stain her cheek.

And that same daughter, against her better judgement, left feeling guilty as she often did. A twenty-eight-year-old habit is hard to break.

3.

How loud is the past? Nora walked down the street, paperwork in hand, and past the post office – she’d have to find another one. Bridges burned – bridges burned by her mother who’d never have to cross them herself. The one-star review was still live, and yet Nora was the one being punished. For existing, it felt. Her mother sometimes looked at her like a bad smell.

Metallic purr of a bike. Timely click of something caught in the wheel.

And that’s when Nora finally put her finger on it, on that elusive voice. It was the past, it was a pattern, and she could finally see it – like dust only once it settles. Nora believed, deep down, that she was bad, that she hurt people, that she had to fix the things she’d broken.

Her mother threw tantrums, cried when they didn’t work, and then, as a last resort, gave you the silent treatment. Her silent treatments, they lasted for days, weeks, and sometimes even months. Only late into her twenties did Nora realise that wasn’t normal, that it was never her responsibility to regulate her mother.

The ring of a bell. A dog’s collar.

And whenever Nora offered her an olive branch, she took it, but only to punish her – punish her with silence, uh-huhs, curt nods, monosyllabic responses.

And when her mother said she was pretty in a photo once, she got upset when Nora lit up – she called her vain like her father.

And when Nora was a teenager, she was given vitamin supplements for emotional stability. If we sent you to a psychologist, they’d say something’s wrong with you and put you on real meds.

And when,

and when,

and when.

Everything was always Nora’s fault, but she didn’t punch a hole in her own door – that was her brother. And yet, for most of her life, she’d believed what she’d been taught: she was difficult and crazy. A knot formed in her throat as big as an avocado pit. Gulped it down, she did – she had errands to run, documents to mail.

4.

We have the words, Nora wrote, to describe the absence of things—neglect, avoidance, and so on—and yet they’re still so hard to spot, so hard to pin down, so hard to justify to oneself, let alone to others. Plausible deniability. Not all absences manifest as undeniably as blindness, death or famine – and without that physicality, that tangible evidence, we have nothing. Nothing but words – words that are mocked, labels that don’t carry weight, trauma that is questioned. But neglect is loud once you acknowledge it. Neglect, it makes a sound – heard only by those with a trained ear, the reluctant musicians who can tell when a note is slightly off. Neglect, it’s a scream into a pillow. It’s as visceral, as somatic, as vomiting up a life’s worth of food poisoning.

Neglect is not barren but fertile.Neglect is a womb, and in it grows a voice as small as a cluster of cells, growing, growing, until it yells that you’re an awful person worthy of erasure. That was the voice – the voice in Nora’s head.

She stuffed her mouth with her T-shirt. Thin walls. Didn’t want to disturb the neighbour.

Neglect, it births trauma. And maybe there are two of me – the one my mother birthed, and the one she neglected.

Nora paused on the word ‘neglect’…

That was all she was prepared to call it for now.