Why You Were Taken

Journal entry 15 April 1988

Westville

In the news: A bomb explodes prematurely outside Pretoria’s Sterland cinema killing the carrier and injuring a bystander. The passengers of plane-jacked Kuwait Airways Flight 422 are still being held as hostages – it’s been 11 days – the Lebanese guerrillas are demanding the release of 17 Shi’ite Muslim bombers being held by Kuwait.

What I’m listening to: Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm – Joni Mitchell

What I’m reading: Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ – I feel like this book is speaking directly to me, making me question my life.

What I’m watching: Beetlejuice

My shrink says that it’s good to write my feelings down so here I go: the ugly truth. I don’t think the pills are helping. I love the babies more than life itself. I do, honestly, it’s like they are physically connected to my heart. I can’t imagine life without them.

But I also feel trapped. Isolated. I’m so young and here I am washing and cleaning and changing nappies while I should be out in the world, making friends and money and just LIVING. I feel like I am stuck in a life – that sometimes feels like a living hell of pee and poo and vomit – that I didn’t choose.

I miss home and my family, even though we don’t get on that well. I’m sad that they haven’t come to visit the babies. I love P. Sometimes I think that he must regret marrying me, I can’t imagine how he finds me attractive when I am such a stretch-marked baggy-eyed zombie. Other times I think, I am so pretty and young (on the inside!), I should be out there dating a whole lot of different men, be taken to new restaurants and getting flowers and goodnight kisses.

I don’t want to eat because eating binds you to this earth in some way and I want to be free. I can see my clothes hanging off my body and it feels good to have an outward expression of the way I’m feeling inside.

I feel like I have wasted my life, that there is nothing to live for. Even though I know it’s not true, that is how I feel, and that’s why it’s so difficult to get up in the mornings. And then when I do get up the babies cry and cry and I just feel like jumping out of a window.

The sticky love for the twins is push-pull: sometimes I’ll be holding one of them and swaying and they’ll melt into me and I think that the moment couldn’t be more perfect. In the next minute something will happen: I’ll slip on spilled milk, the washing machine will pack up, Kate will vomit on my clean top, Sam will start screaming, then they’ll both be screaming and the kitchen will flood and I’ll realise we’re out of breakfast cereal and I can’t stand it so my mind just floats away.

On these days I have the urge to just run away. To leave P and the twins. Not to be a coward, but to be brave, to save my life. I get anxious in the car on these days because my body and mind want to push that accelerator as far as it will go and just go anywhere that isn’t here. Another province. Another country. Or even into the side of a bridge. But then I pull over and breathe and try to listen to my heart, which is connected to the babies, the sweet babies, my beautiful Sam and Kate, and it tells me to stay.