Write Anything Picture This #10 Memories of Sandals

My daughter reaches out to me from the photograph on Mum's bedside table. She is extra-chubby, nut-brown, smiling, around ten months old. I ache because I don't remember how she felt, how she smelt, what we did. Two months later I was pregnant with her little brother and from that time on the photographs all seem blurry, or like someone else's life. Her three-year-old chatter is piping up over the verandah from the beach below, and I let it lead me to the window in a sort of trance, still holding the photograph. She plays with abandon beside discarded sandals, tossing white sand aloft with two hands. She is, of course, accompanied by my husband. If she is far from his side it is never by choice. Like a crushing embrace a memory takes hold and it's not a fond one. It is my daughter's desperate cries for me when, pregnant with the new baby, I could no longer meet her needs during the night. It is her crumpled form on the floor where she had thrown herself, making, repeatedly, pathetically, the small hand signal I had taught her for "more"... Adrift, she anchored herself more deeply in my husband, as pregnancy, birth and the new baby swallowed me up like progressively larger, fiercer creatures.


Sometimes the old bond between my daughter and I reappears like a chance encounter with a childhood sweetheart. But mostly the territory that is "Mum" is soundly, roundly claimed by the passions of the new baby. Either that, or I need to read with the older one. Or my daughter simply withdraws from my lap, muttering something like, "You're not soft. You haven't got a beard." Or, like now, as the baby sleeps and my older son reads on the beach with Grandma and I still... can't. I need to do dinner. I can't leave the baby. I grip the photograph harder as I want badly to run to the sand, kicking it up with bare, free feet, towards my daughter. They troop, wet and breathless, back to the house at sunset and I feel like a shadow serving dinner and reminders of sandals.

When we get home late at night, and, after sleeping sacks of children are delivered to their beds, I take Mum's advice and let images help me start to find my daughter again. I trawl through the myriad pictures of our first baby girl, just in my mind. I remember her straddling me in the bath at nine months old, taking outright advantage of bare breasts. I begin to branch out from that with my husband's help as we recall the day she emerged from the bedroom with a bloody nose, having fallen off the bed. We rushed out straight away and bought a cot. A month later, she learned to ease herself safely down from our bed and the cot remained in the corner of our bedroom, useless. If I had my hands full and sensed movement or a soft noise I would call out to my eldest son to check on her. "Is she OK?" I would sing out anxiously. My five-year-old boy would report, like the weather man, "She's awake and playing" or "She's awake and smiling".

I leave the baby at home with my husband in the morning and make a visit to my neighbour. My three-year-old daughter relishes my empty lap and I cradle her close for a glorious fifteen minutes before she jumps up to play outside with the others. My neighbour recieves a telephone call from overseas and has to leave the coffee preparations. I hesitate between rushing to the kitchen to help and joining the children in the backyard. My daughter is gesturing to me from the screen door, indicating urgently the soccer ball under her arm. "More". She has the words now. I take to the grass with my naked feet and my daughter. It is only after we have been back home again for some hours that I realise we have both forgotten our sandals.