Touch

When I was young, my mother tried not to touch me as much as she could. I was very dirty but not really dirty enough to avoid being touched. When I came to expect it, the contact never came. There are discernible moments when you expect to be touched, especially when young, when you fully anticipate it, the warmth of the press, flesh upon flesh, when you intuit that someone is about to reach out, or when you mistakenly pre-empt it, when your sensory centre has already fired up, when the touch has occurred as far as you’re concerned, and these moments of anticipation are built in to you when you are much younger and you know exactly when they’re supposed to occur.

When I was young I was put in an incubator, I was put in my cot, and they laid me down in the other room after my mother had birthed me and I stayed in that room for three days and three nights and when they came back for me I hardly remembered my mother and they wanted to hand me to someone else. My mother says she knew it was me but she couldn’t touch me, and so I remember the time she walked in after those three days and I saw just a shadow barely distinguishable in weight and importance from the shadow of the nurse standing beside her and whether they took me back to the room right then or a few hours later is of no consequence because by that time my mother’s dislike of touching had very firmly set in.

My mother was good at explaining why she didn’t want to touch me. She never insisted that she couldn’t; she tried to make out that it was very very difficult for her to touch me when I was as dirty as I was, but she would never go as far as to say she was unable. I think she knew I’d be able to challenge her if she pushed it too far, so she left it in the realms of something she had an enormous amount of trouble doing.

My mother was good at explaining why she couldn’t touch me but the explanations never made a whole lot of sense. When I say that she was good at explaining, I mean she was good at rebuffing my demands and my wants for justification; she was never short of a word or two to push me back; she always had something in her armoury which allowed her to follow-through with her fuzzy old logic which I’m sure was inscrutable for her but never made a whole lot of sense to me. Since I could pick up on my mother’s enthusiasm I could certainly not deny that I got a sense of her very real belief in what she was saying and I had to give it due credit.

When I was a young boy, I was, like I said, quite dirty. First, I had bogeys on me, bogeys and snot on the inside and also just outside forming a crust just below my nostrils and on my upper lip and sometimes I would salivate too much such that the saliva would dribble out of my mouth and I also sometimes could not help pooing myself such that the poo would slope down the inside of my leg. When I was young, I would cough and sneeze perhaps a little too much and then I would enjoy picking my nose and clearing out any of the bogeys that had collected there by virtue of the involuntary body processes.

When I was young, I was a little dirty on inside too. I had a fair amount of cobwebs and rubbish inside my head, I had areas of dirt and grime and dark bits you couldn’t see but I’m sure that my mother could see them. The dirt inside was reflected and manifested in some of my very awkward features. My ears were remarkably big and protruding and my nose was disgustingly hooked but also flat and somehow bulging as if it was a growth thad had invaded my face. The outer seemed to be a natural continuation of what I knew to be inside. I knew that to remedy the outer I would have to start with the inner but I never knew exactly where the inner was nor was my mother much help in me finding it, I presume, because she recoiled from it even more than I did.

I am suggesting then that there could have been very good reason for my mother not to want to touch me when I was young. When you combine the outer and the inner, I get a picture of something that wasn’t particularly amenable to the touch.

 When I was young I became archly conscious of the line between touch and no-touch which usually starts at the skin but often comes much sooner, as in, further towards the initiator of the touch. Now, I tend to divide everything into touchable and not, into touchers and non-touchers, into things tangible and those that just make themselves known in my head. How I long to be touched.

Because my mother was so reluctant to touch me when I was young, I hardly remember her in any way, shape or form. I do not recall an entity that I can call a mother though I know she was there.  My mother is not dead though she  still doesn’t like to touch me. But the mother now bears little relation to what I often like to call my ‘real’ mother. My real mother, the one I’m talking about in this piece right here, is fairly spectral, non-existent, let’s say she has arms that stop at the elbows, or let’s say her fingers are stumps, let’s say her face is an unhewn piece of rock, her nose flat and unmanifest, her eyes mere craters, her mouth not divided yet by lips, my mother was so base and unformed that she hardly resembled a real mother though she was my real mother.

I long to be touched.