Hand-knitted

It is John’s birthday, his thirtieth, to be precise. He does not want to make a big fuss out of it, so when we meet him, he is walking his elderly neighbour’s dog like he always does on Wednesday afternoons. The dog is small, stubby, and shaggy and has bright brown eyes that look curiously into the world. So basically, he looks a lot like John, even if he is not the owner. John always wanted to have a dog, but his parents never let him when he was a child and since he has been an adult, his landlords would not let him. So, Spencer is what he got, but it is fine, really, no responsibility, just a walk with a dog once a week.

John would have enjoyed his afternoon walk more if it was not his birthday. He generally did not like holidays, the pressure to do something special and the forcedly good mood…His birthdays were the worst. He never really understood the point of them. It had neither been his effort nor his wish to be born. So why celebrate? Why pretend that this was a special day? Of course, his parents had a completely different opinion about this. For them his birth was a very significant event, an event that had changed their life profoundly and that had fulfilled everything they had at one point stopped to hope for any longer. So, he had to have a celebration of some kind. Typically, it included dinner with his parents and a lot of presents he did not want but got anyways.

Tonight they were going to his father’s favourite Italian place, one of those exquisite restaurants with long white candles in silver candle holders on white table cloth, just the place where you go with your doctor parents and have a glass of prosecco to celebrate your getting together. He had to get home and get himself ready for the evening, get a shower, maybe do a little meditation to relax, put on some comfortable clothes that would not prompt his father to make his usual remarks about the importance of exercising regularly. And he must under no circumstance open the letter he had been hiding in his desk drawer for the last couple of days. It would only upset him. It always did.

As long as John could remember he knew that he was adopted. He was everything his parents could ever have wished for: a son, a baby son of their own after years of failing to conceive. They had sworn that they would do everything in their power to make him the nucleus of their new atomic family. He would grow and prosper and become their son not only by name but also by his complete being. They had also sworn that they would not lie to him about the circumstances of his birth and their parenthood. He asked the inevitable question when he was three years old and their neighbour was seven months pregnant: “I was in your belly, too, mommy, right?”. He was clearly expecting a simple, reassuring “Yes”, but what he got was a fairly complicated “No”. That day he learned about the concept of adoption. He was mature enough to grasp the basic concept, but too little to deal with the emotional impact of the fact, that he had another mother, a mother who gave him away. Was he bad in some way, damaged goods? Too little to understand or to ask, his young brain compartmentalised the issue: he understood that he was special due to his adoption because and told everyone who would care to listen, to the horror of his parents. The more traumatic aspects of the whole affair sunk deep down onto the ground of his subconscious.

They lay down there like the carcass of a whale, slowly rotting and releasing tiny particles into its surroundings; bigger chunks were eaten by fish and other creatures of the deep sea and resurfaced in disguise. They emerged as profound self-doubt, a lack of basic trust and the uncanny ability to present himself as the person the other one had always wished for. Unsurprisingly. John became the perfect son his parents had wished for. They could hardly believe their luck since they knew that adopted children could cause a lot of trouble, their biggest fear was that his birth mother had been a prostitute and John would turn out to be a drug addict or criminal or just bad. Alas, John never did.

The mystery of his birth mother accompanied him his whole life and, on his birthdays, it became especially intriguing. He never wanted to tell his parents about it since he did not want to give them the feeling that they were not enough, or that he longed for his ‘real’ mother. He didn’t, not really. And still, as soon as he turned eighteen and could contact the youth welfare office to ask for more information on his adoption, he did so. Maybe the mystery had grown too big, maybe the resentment for her had become too big, maybe he just wanted to close the case, which would have been easily possible if his mother was indeed a troubled person. Or, on the opposite, how would his life change if his mother was amazing, maybe a famous actor or even noble and rich?

As is turned out, none of his hopes and fears became true. His mother was a friendly common woman, still young and very warm-hearted. She said all the right things, for example that she regretted giving him away every day of her life. She explained to him that she had been very young when she was pregnant with him – 15 – and that she was raised in a very difficult family and just did not see any way to keep him at the time and that she just wanted the best for him. She was so happy that he had gotten in touch with her and she could not wait to introduce him to her new family who all knew about him.

John was very disappointed with this. He had expected more drama, more feeling, more something. He could not really put his finger on it. He met her more often, he met her family, nice ordinary people all over. In some respects, they were quite like him. Like him, they always had tea for breakfast. His parents preferred coffee. They had the same favourite colour (blue). And they had a dog. They greeted him very warmly and he instantly became a member of the family. He hated it. You would expect that every adopted child longed for exactly this. But he just hated it.

All these years, he had managed, he had fantasized about his mystery mother and it was ok, not great, but ok. And now he felt this rage, a rage that had been buried very deeply inside him. He did not want to belong to them, he did not want another family. He wanted to hurt his birth mother for having abandoned him. So, when he turned twenty-one, he decided that he’d had enough and did the only thing he could think off: he abandoned her. He did not return her phone calls; he did not write to her and he forgot her birthday. The last time they had seen each other, he had told her to her face that he despised her. He kind of enjoyed her tears.

Unfortunately, she still had his address. A letter from her had arrived two days before his birthday. Just seeing it had made him feel uncomfortable: slightly ashamed of himself and slightly satisfied. He had buried the letter unopened in his desk drawer; he could not open it before he had had dinner with his parents because he was afraid that they would see it in his face. Mollified by a couple of glassed of vino rosso and some grappe he returns home. The evening has been a relative success, they have gotten along quite well, his father has not made any remarks about his physique and they have given him a city trip of his wish as a present, something he was actually looking forward to. When he enters his dark apartment, he is in a bright mood and filled with some tender nostalgia.

He is ready. He opens the letter. He does not read the card but slowly and pleasurably rips it apart and tosses the shreds into the bin. There is also a little present in the envelope: a pair of red-blue socks, hand-knitted. John looks at them and sighs. With a tiny uninterpretable smile on his face he takes them to his bedroom. There he opens the undermost sock drawer and puts the pair in there, next to their nine colourful hand-made siblings. Just where they belong.