Care Is A Circle

And that means you don't need to be ashamed if you need it

On Tuesday mornings, they weigh the neighbourhood babies. We make sure to position my wheelchair where I can see them being carried or pushed through the community centre to the weighing room. I like being able to look up to see a kicking, smiling wonder in a harness on their father’s chest, tiny legs pumping, pumping, pumping up and down, as if moving the entire, fatigued procession along by sheer force of will — bag-eyed mums, dazed dads — which I suppose is what they’re doing, miracles that they are. The woman following behind the kicking sprite holds a tiny one against her chest. This baby is brand new, as red as a scalded thumb, and the mother makes a shape around it as solid and protective as a house.

On Tuesdays, too, in the middle of all this, Nicola arrives, pushing a second-hand plastic pushchair full of dolls — her babies — along the tiled floor with determined strides, her mouth moving the whole time as she talks and talks, to nothing and everything. Actually, no, she’s been persuaded not to do that anymore. The pushchair isn’t solid enough to stop her falling and so she pushes a nice, reliable rollator now — phew — one favoured doll chosen to balance on the seat, covered carefully with a crochet blanket.

Nicola is tall and stocky and strong and has eyes set far apart like a goldfish, peering out through thick-rimmed glasses. She always wears dresses, bright and tight, and often a faux-fur coat, deep wine red. Her mouth hangs a little open. I have only seen her smile properly twice in all the time I’ve known her and it surprised me, both times, the way her mouth twisted in an unexpected shyness, teeth white and small and bunched together like a child’s. People think of her as one — a child — but she isn’t. She may have the thick speech and energy of a confident six year old but she has the body, needs and mind of a woman in her 50s. She is my friend and I adore her.

As is the routine, the community centre serving staff all come out to peer and coo at Nicola’s ‘baby’ for the day, making jokes about how she has the perfect wee one, while the doll, frozen-eyed, is rocked and patted and tucked up a little warmer under its blanket. Then Nicola will make a bee-line for me. Sitting together, leaning forward, her hand periodically reaching to pat the doll asleep again, we will work through the scripts she likes best, her telling me a story I’ve often heard before, each sentence repeated three or four times, with me responding in turn, perhaps telling her a story of my own which she will seize on, perhaps calling one of her carers over so she can repeat the same words to them. She has an astonishing memory for details. This morning, I told her the story of when I found and adopted a stray black kitten and before long she had recounted it to everyone who passed by, pulling out each major plot point like a trophy and repeating it in her own words, insistent, knowing. “And if no one claims them, you have to keep them,” she repeated, again and again. “You can’t let them get cold. You can’t let them get cold.” “It chose her,” she said several times, nodding at me. “It chose her to love.”

At some point during our talk, she will do the thing that I cherish most. Her rollator will move a little, knocked perhaps, and she will turn away from the doll and me to croon at it reassuringly too: “It’s ok. There there. Settle down.” Her bag gets the same loving treatment, nestled in a cushion, talked to, too. Nicola talks to everything. Everything she sees and touches is offered words of care. This bold, different woman who cannot help but scream vulnerability with her every word and jerking movement, is one of the most loving people I know. Care flows from her like a river. I have seen her talk to pictures in frames, to her shopping, to her coat; an animist through and through.

Her care extends to all the people around her too, of course. When the serving manager’s husband died she was the first out the door to go to the card shop, muttering all the while, clutching a piece of paper with the words ‘sympathy card’ written on by someone so she could ask for the right thing. I have seen her jump up, much to our alarm, on her unsteady feet to try and lead a blind old man to his dinner, her every loud word one of patient understanding. In turn, I have seen her ask for help, endlessly, with not a moment of self-consciousness. Every shop assistant in the area knows her. When she needs something, she marches right up and asks for it and so our neighbourhood is one of delight, of smiling people who feel good, because they got to help.

There is so much that I wish I could talk to her about, but for all her brash confidence, she gets easily confused and distressed and so I often end up sitting quietly when we’re together, my bigger words unsaid.

I do not need as much care as you, but right now I do need more care and tolerance than anyone else I know, I want to say. More so recently. And I think out of everyone, maybe you’d understand, even if you don’t have the words for it, and that’s why you feel like my sister in all this.

What little work and activity I usually manage to do, I have not managed lately. The ghostly disapproval I feel is everywhere, in everything. I am not being very useful and I’m not sure how to be useful again without burning myself into collapse. How frightening that thought is to so many of us, how frightening it is to me, as if usefulness is the one true secret permission slip we must hold onto against all odds. I am finding more and more that I need to ask for extra support and time while I rest, recover, time when I’m not required to be anything at all. I don’t repeat my words but I feel like a stuck record all the same: always tired, always needing to stop, needing endless patience as I fail to make progress. Progress? Progress in what? I imagine trying to explain my failures and insecurities to this woman who is so unapologetically alive, who knows her worth. She wouldn’t understand, not because she’s stupid — she isn’t — but because she knows how meaningless the idea of ‘usefulness’ really is. She expresses that truth with every gesture and word of her miraculous body. There is not an ounce of shame in her because why should there be? She knows. She knows too, I think, how complex care is, how simultaneously rescuing and diminishing, how difficult it is to work out your place within it. She may not have my words, but she knows.

It’s that I wish I could talk to her about, more than anything: how to let go of this ego in me that forever tells me I should be ‘more’ or ‘less’ — anything but what I actually am. She knows how to be and I wish I did. Instead, I try to follow her example, to forget about self-consciousness and instead make my day about love: showing love, being loved. No need for more. No need for less. “You take care,” she’ll always say, as she tries to help me sit back in my wheelchair. “You go steady.”

Another woman arrives and stands near us as I sit with all these thoughts, on her way to the weighing room. She doesn’t look at us. She holds her baby over one shoulder, his babygrow the same colour as her navy coat. He sucks at a damp sleeve, staring at the world, wide-eyed, and his mother gently lifts his other small fist to her mouth, blowing softly, warming his fingers as he nestles against her happily, and she lets out a long sigh of relief, pulling him closer.

Where does care begin and where does it finish? I’m not sure anymore. I think it’s all one vast round-and-round thing, which is good, which is perfect. It means there’s no need for shame or guilt. It means we’re all allowed to need what we need. It means, in the end, that we all get to belong to each other.

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