My parents are dead and I have had no
relationship with my siblings for many years. I’m a midlife orphan. Can one be
an orphan and be grown up? In a sense, I was always orphaned. My mother
divorced my father when I was five and that was the end of that, supposedly. We
were taken on holiday and told that we were to live in Rhodesia and not Spain
now. Daddy, like the rain on the plain, was mainly to live in Spain. He was not
coming back. But like a spectre, I summoned him over and over again, through
questions, through the way I looked, and for being ‘difficult’ or ‘looking just
like my father’ or for ‘being mad’ as we were told he was.
As far as my mother was concerned it was
over but really it was just the beginning of a quest for me. I
craved my father like a person on rations craves butter. I recalled every last
sight and smell of him; I clung to the letters when they arrived from Portugal.
Apparently an uncle offered to adopt one of us. Which uncle? Which one – of us?
Bereft, I longed to be adopted back into my Portuguese father’s family, but my
mother cut all ties and tried to strangle me with the sinewy umbilical cord
that just would not die. It was and is, attached to me, though now, it is
silvery, diaphanous: it divides the living from the dead.
My mother remarried and had us adopted into
a family I had no truck with. The older, singing, dancing, performing for
applause sibling was delighted with the substitute. The younger sibling floated
above it all and bobbed along with it, though he ‘ran away’ in various ways,
teddy, then whisky and Mary-Jane in tow. My running away was more literal. When
they changed my name, I raged and chanted my Portuguese name under the covers
like a mantra. Submission never came; silently, deliberately I maintained my
difference. Even my blood was negative: literally, as well as it being partly
his (they are all O’s, as in okay, let’s just go along with this new story). They
tried everything. Berating me, beating me, ignoring me, excluding me and
finally banishing me to the wilderness – boarding school at fourteen from which
I never really returned. It severed any further kinship with them and brought
new attachments: friends that became family; wild boyfriends who had more than
a whiff of my father about them.
I found him when I was twenty-one, with the
help of a fellow gypsy traveller. I turned up in our family village clutching a
black and white photograph, our common language having been ruptured. We wept
for three days and then I left. Numb with the shock of it all, I did nothing
for eight years. Then I returned with another fellow gypsy and a son who
carried my father’s charisma and dark good looks. I returned a third time and
then a fourth with my own husband and son, on the fifth time I returned in
response to a call from his brother. It was the first time and the last time I
was to be summoned by my blood family. He was dead and I and two other children
were required to pay for his funeral. There was macabre laughter at the funeral
but tragedy resonated from the northern Portuguese mountains where he was
lowered into the family plot and it resonated all the way back to Zimbabwe, to South
Africa and then back to Europe via the UK.
Orphanhood means many things for me. Above all, it means freedom and a new life; a spiritual burying of the past. It
means keeping the narratives that are positive and trying to discard the painful
ones: a delicate process. There has been much pain and betrayal; abuse even.
But much has been learned. There are dark secrets on both sides of my former
families, but richness too. It is true that the ones that love you most have
the power to hurt you most. From my perspective, the choices my parents made
impacted in a vicious way, but also made me strong, even though I was the
sensitive one. It is my choice to cut any other blood supply that has browned
and to keep the rich dark blood that travels back further through the pathways
of my genes to the ones who came before and who enriched me and the ones who
gather round me in this house: the ones that I have fed with my blood: the ones
that I will cleave to, and the many who do not share a common blood.
