Sugar-bag baby
"Sugar-bag babies were all the rage when you were born," your mother tells you.
“I smoked ten Park Drive cigarettes and drank a pint of Guinness every day while pregnant with you. Did no harm.”
She says it with her chest billowed, stiff lips that dare you.
She says it meant she didn’t have to push out a big fat baby.
She says you were a sugar bag baby — nice and easy, like.
She laughs when she tells this story.
She tells this story to everyone.
But as you reflect on your earliest memories, you're left with a jumbled image of baby powder and buttery sunlight on the nursery room walls, mixed with the acrid scent of smoke and sour morning breath.
The memory is hazy, and you're not sure if it's real or just your imagination, as you've been told you possess both.
Acid in your chest, stomach hard, a lump rises in your throat. You stare out of the kitchen window, beyond the yellowing net curtains. She scrubs with red knuckles at the tatty Formica worktop, smoke curling upwards, eyes squinted.
Being born at one pound and six ounces (less than a bag of Tate and Lyle sugar) was a struggle for you. You were one of the tiniest babies the nurses had ever seen.
“They don’t make diamonds as big as bricks, Lilli,” your dad told you when you worried about being so much smaller than your school friends.
He sometimes uses your full name, Lilliputian, to emphasise a point.
Nobody remembers that fragile baby, or the battles you fought in your earliest days. Now, you're just like everyone else, perhaps a bit less noticeable.
Now.
You continue to fight but, this time, to be heard in casual conversation. Maybe you’re not quick enough to gather your thoughts; there’s no quick wit or clever commentary.
Silence.
Defeated.
You worry that people think you have nothing to say or that you’re stupid.
But you know deep down that you're not stupid or uninteresting.
If you could only believe in yourself and your own worth, you could rule the world. The varnish of self-doubt thickens, but you know that with time and effort, you can scrape it away and reveal the shining, capable person underneath.
These mini-vignettes/sketches/tales are taken from my ‘people-watching series’, based mostly in fiction — or are they?
Extraordinary.