Book 1 / Part 1

My father, then twenty-two years of age, tapped my mother’s shoulder as she sat among her sisters along the edge of the dancefloor at a local disco, and asked her if she would like to dance on what he would soon learn was the night of her eighteenth birthday. A daughter, a son, and a miscarriage later, I was born on the redacted in a hospital atop a small hill overlooking pastureland where cows bowed their heads to graze. For almost six years I would be the youngest member of a family upon whose love I could depend and in whose company I could express the giddy excitement of my early youth.

You might want to lengthen Part 1 a little bit.

holy shit lads he's actually doing it

BRING ON PART II BABY, HOLY MOLY.

WHEN DOES THE MALAISE SET IN???

Soon after my birth I was lifted from a struggling mass of newborn babies and presented to a ward of mothers who had recently given birth so that the nurses could explain to the less experienced among them how a child should be held, washed, fed and tended to. I had been chosen for this role by one of the nurses on my mother’s ward who was perhaps the first person in my life to acknowledge the distinct purity and innocence I represented and that I would continue stubbornly to represent in a world where such virtues would contend with the organized forces of corruption and degradation. Thus began a life of distinction, plucked from my peers in order to represent the finer aspects of their nature, burdened already with a duty to serve as an example of all that is healthy in a world inflicted with decay. This was a duty I did not yet comprehend and one I welcomed with the native joy of any child who is granted the care and tender attention of loving maternal figures. Both the nurses on my mother’s ward and the women who occupied the beds around the one in which she lay congratulated her on the health and beauty of her infant son, whose soft plump body, wide eyes and thick red lips were complimented by a calm disposition and a reluctance to cry and flail as the babies around him consistently would. My silent disposition was not yet any cause for worry or despair, and was at that early moment a welcome suggestion that my infancy would not be defined by tears and howls of discontentment. Already I was a stoic: reacting to the world in which I had been suddenly burdened to live with silent dispassion and a quiet yearning no doubt to return to the small warm space in which my existence had so far been confined.

To a woman who was then thirty-eight years of age, and who had already suffered a miscarriage in she and her husband’s ambition to bear a third child, the relief that her newborn son was not only healthy but also the most beautiful of the three children to which she had so far given birth must have overwhelmed my mother’s natural shyness, which would otherwise have likely encouraged her to pardon herself from the attention and praise she and her baby boy received. My sister turned twelve years old on the day I was born and soon came to visit the hospital along with my brother, two years her junior, excited to be presented with what she would later tell me was the best birthday present she could have hoped for on. My sister’s nascent maternal longing now had a living object on which to be expressed, in a way that dolls and teddy bears and other representatives of all that which requires the loving and tender care of a gentle and nurturing figure had not sufficiently provided. Younger than my siblings by a decade, I looked up from my tight bundle of warm white blankets to see four faces belonging to a family already long-established, my parents no longer young and my siblings already on the brink of entering their teenage years. It was as though I was a dog who had been invited to sit at the dinner table alongside the family whose house it occupied, and who can only look around in helpless confusion as its members stare towards it with smiling, incomprehensible expectation.

For any young couple whose perspectives have been shaped not only by the urgency of their biological drives but also by the traditions and expectations of their culture, it is understandable that, should these two internal forces combine to encourage a single aspiration, the young couple will treat this aspiration as a natural expression of their own independent wills and in turn seek to honour by allowing it to dictate in part the direction of their lives. The reproduction of the human species via the sexual union of its members is such an aspiration, one that to the great number of people is so overwhelming in its basic necessity that a refusal to involve oneself in the birth of a child and to grant them the inheritance of your own unique biological disposition is to commit a crime punished by a law whose capacity for punishment exceeds physical detention by the State or censure of one’s community, and is a punishment inflicted internally and incessantly, and often with growing intensity, for the rest of one’s existence. But for a man and a woman whose erotic potency has faded, and whose lives are dictated less by the temperament of their erogenous zones than by the stability of their financial state and the rational calculation of their thoughts, the decision to invest life in a non-existence being must be considered on the whole to be a decision based on considerations largely divorced from the demands made upon them by their native drives, and, should their union have already resulted in the birth of a child, be considered more of a personal ideal than as a consequence of the influences of their social climate. It is to such an ideal that I owe my own existence, an ideal which can be traced to no clear external source and which must therefore be accepted as something largely arbitrary, such as the colour of a new car or the texture of a bedroom curtain. Three children, of which I was to be the third and final: the conclusion of their familial aspirations, a symbol of the unity which had by that point existed between them for almost twenty years.

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come back memoir san we want to hear about all your problems

Shortly after my mother was permitted to leave the hospital our family returned home to number fourteen, REDACTED Avenue. This was my parents’ second home and the first large enough to accommodate their growing family and their own growing ambitions. Their previous address was four streets away, and had been bought at a time when my father’s job as an apprentice civil engineer could barely justify the mortgage required for its purchase. My mother’s family, which was among the largest in the area and whose members largely lived within a twenty minute drive, provided the young couple with items of furniture, strips of carpet, tins of paint and anything else they could spare that mother could use to decorate the home in which a daughter and first son would soon be born. Despite living in a small town where few people possessed any more money than was required to maintain a modest lifestyle dictated by routine, my parents, with the assistance of those same people, were thus able to construct for themselves an early imitation of their ideal family home. One of the few photographs from the time depict a square of grass surrounded by breeze blocks, my father a shirtless blur pursued by my infant sister in a sun hat holding the hose towards him. Another includes four people I do not recognize sitting on a two-person sofa, others standing nearby with their backs to the vertical blinds along a living room window, smiling at something taking place beyond the camera's ken.