When I was four and a half my brother was born in the flat above our secondhand book shop while I peered through the keyhole of my mother's bedroom, terrified by the screaming and wailing emanating from within.
Perhaps I was too young to connect the two events, but when hours later I was introduced to the new baby, lying resplendent in a dog basket kindly donated by one neighbour, atop a shiny yellow quilt donated by another, the old baby, me, promptly slapped him hard on the face which earned me a good hiding.
At seven years old I was already tasked with taking the baby to creche a bus ride away, before getting myself to school. My parents divided their time between work and the pub so we were latchkey kids who fed and looked after ourselves until they rolled home.
It was to me that my brother ran with his problems, me who visited him in the hospital every day when he had appendicitis, me who 'stood for' him when he made his confirmation and my parents refused to go to the church. By the time I was a teenager, I felt like I’d already raised a child. If you can exhaust maternal feelings, I think mine had well and truly run out.
Perhaps it was this, perhaps it was my dislike of doctors and being prodded and poked, or, considering my two siblings are also childless, perhaps it was that our childhood experience killed any belief in happy families.
I've been in a few lengthy relationships so the possibility to have children was there, but somehow the urge never was. Children mean forward planning and I've not done much of that in my life; rather I've tended to blow with the wind and see where fortune takes me. Considering the many twists and turns my life has taken, I think I’d’ve produced some seriously disturbed offspring.
.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Posted in response to 
The images are my own.
