Killing Karoline. Sara-Jayne King
as a shock of bright yellow. Summer is now, and was for me then, my favourite season. Winter feeds my melancholy and coaxes my black dog out of hibernation.
I soon learn that the thing about birthdays is that you are supposed to be happy. Those are just the rules. You must be happy and you must smile and be happy for being happy and, more than anything, be happy for being born. From a young age I understand this notion and do my best to play along. But, despite all the happy and the smiling and the trick candles that relight (even when you think you’ve blown them out for good), I am always plagued by feelings of sadness and despair when my birthday comes around. It becomes 24 hours of unmet expectations and angst and a historical certainty that at some point during the day I will cry. I find a place, somewhere my aching and I can be alone, and I weep. I then feel ashamed by my tears, and my inside voice gives me a brusque talking to and I turn the smile back up to ten again, inhale and blow out the damn candles once and for all. Because actually, for me, having been given up for adoption at just a few weeks old, my birthday doesn’t represent happiness or joy or celebration; it represents loss, rejection and abandonment at the most crucial moment of my life. Of course, at only a couple of months old, I would have had no words to express those feelings, and even later, when the words are there, the deep and profound sadness I feel will be compounded by a sense of shame. Shame, that to the rest of the world I am showing myself to be ‘ungrateful’ for the good fortune that has been bestowed upon me by being so selflessly ‘taken in’ by my adoptive parents. Because, how can one who has been rejected by their mother, their own mother, as a babe in arms, be anything other than the most unlovable, unworthy, unwanted wretch to ever take breath?
As a teen and later an adult, that primal sense of loss I could not put a name to would manifest in my being moody and distant. I would often check out emotionally or take myself away when my birthday came around so as not to create another opportunity to be abandoned. It took me years to understand why I felt so detached. If I did celebrate I would go overboard, arranging week-long birthday celebrations, as though to validate my existence somehow. ‘She may not have wanted me then, but look how many people love me now,’ I would try to tell myself. I fluctuated between wanting to disappear completely and feeling compelled to scream, ‘It’s my day! I’m here! I’m here! SEE ME!’ My emotions leapt from excitement to dread to apathy to misery, and each year would be consumed by a desperate expectation that this year would be different. This year there would be no tears, this year I would be spared the feeling, the one I could not name or explain, and maybe even this year someone might ask me, ‘How are you feeling?’ and give me permission to speak my unspeakable truth.
To this day, every year, I think about Kris and the questions rise again. Is she thinking about me? Does she remember? Is she too battling an unspoken grief, or does the day pass like any other? The wondering almost chokes me.
Despite having existed for a mere twenty-four months, I feel as if I have always been here. I know I’m not the oldest but I’m definitely not the youngest either. Babies are brand new. I’ve been here for much, much longer than babies. I’ve even held a baby so I must be a much bigger person than a baby. Two is definitely significant. When I think now of how short a time two years actually is, it makes me think. Could she, Kris, really have gotten over such a momentous episode in her life, our lives, in just two quick-as-a-flash years? Some cellphone contracts are longer than that and when the time comes to upgrade, bow out or look for another provider, I’m always, without fail, stunned at how quickly the time has gone. Surely the maternal pull must be stauncher than the small print of a cellphone contract?
And now, at my party, the mummy at the front door hands me a secret wrapped in shiny paper and a card I’m less interested in. She walks past me and into the house with a mini-version of herself.
Both mother and daughter have wide, dark eyes, gingerbread freckles dusted over the nose and a small, tight, uneven mouth that looks like a mistake. The bottom lip is disproportionately full compared to the top one, as if it has been given the lion’s share of plumpness. There is no denying the little girl and the woman are related. It’s like simultaneously looking back in time and also forward by way of a crystal ball; they are in essence the same, forever unchangeably linked, in life, in death, in distance.
It’s something I will always be fascinated by. Familial likeness.
I don’t look like Mummy or Daddy, or Granny or Grandpa, or Yorkshire Granny. I do look like Adam because we are both brown. Adam has long eyelashes, though – that’s what everyone says. When I’m older and at first school, Adam will sometimes come to fetch me from my class and we will have to go to the dining hall and sit on the gym bench and have our pictures taken. All brothers and sisters have to do it. There’ll be a big white umbrella and a bright light and Adam will sit behind me and the lady will say, ‘Say cheese,’ and I will wonder why, but say it anyway and then we’ll go back to class and I’ll be disappointed that it’s all over, so I’ll walk back really slowly, take my seat and begin fluently reciting my five-times table. When the pictures come back, there will be much excitement in class. When they are handed out, I see my and my brother’s faces looking out from behind the protective cellophane. Adam’s symmetrical, even toned and pretty, mine gap-toothed, mono-browed, eyes far too large for the face. I will shuffle through each of the various pictures, large, small, smaller, hoping – despite knowing they are all the same – that I will find one where I look … non-ugly. The year Adam leaves for middle school comes as something of a relief for me. I am still ugly, but not by comparison.
Downstairs Mummy is in the kitchen handing out birthday cake wrapped in pink napkins with stick-figure little girls with blonde straw-like hair on them. The little girls are holding hands. Mummy is dragging on a Peter Stuyvesant and wearing her apron with the Manneken Pis on the front. Daddy bought it for her on one of his business trips to Brussels where they speak differently.
I do and will always find the smell of Mummy’s cigarettes hugely comforting. The apron, less so. It is made of a plasticky material that doesn’t feel good when I cuddle her. She says it’s great because it’s wipe-clean, but I don’t like it. I like Granny’s apron, because if you mess, you can scrub and scrub and the stain never quite goes away. Plus, it’s soft and doesn’t stick to my face.
At two I am a precocious, amusing and consistently chubby child. Doughy rather than cherubic. My hair is a short, untameable sticky-outy mass of undefined curls. It is cut regularly by a white hairdresser who has not a clue how to deal with it. Thanks largely to her, I am often, too often, mistaken for a boy. It’s one of my earliest experiences of my identity being called into question or assumed to be something it is not. It never ceases to make me angry; often it proves utterly mortifying. I internalise every incident and feel the need to apologise for myself. What’s more, I have an overwhelming desire to make things okay for whoever hasn’t had the good grace not to ask the question in the first place. In twenty-four short months, I have learnt to feel shame about who I am and become a people pleaser.
I suck my thumb constantly. I will continue to do this until I’m in my late teens, which, as a teenager under the spell of Oprah, I convince myself is related to having been taken away from the breast too early. I also have a blanket, called ‘Blanket’ bought by mummy the night they collected me from the adoption agency. Blanket and I were both new. Even though I’d been handed over by Kris in a yellow one, Blanket was the only one I ever wanted and felt comforted by. Just as Kris had been replaced, so too had the old yellow blanket. In fact, I became so attached to Blanket that when it perished, the only thing for my parents to do was buy an immediate replacement. Sometimes, I would love Blanket so hard his edges would fray and the silky part, the best part, would come away all together and I would have a small, secret piece to carry around with me, because Blanket wasn’t really okay when I was five, six, ten, thirteen, twenty-two. One day the unthinkable happened. I returned home from school to find Blanket on my pillow, recognisable but changed. Too blue, too bright, too arranged. Immediate distress and panic rose up in me as I counted off on my fingers, ‘Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. WEDNESDAY!’ Maureen, our cleaning lady, came on a Wednesday. Blanket had been sacrificed to that which makes the unclean clean. Every scent, stripped from his fibres, his comforting properties sluiced away. The essence of Blanket was gone and I was enraged. That night I wet the bed.
We