Storm in a Teacup

In The Beginning

I arrived in this world on the 21st of August 1970 perfectly on time. I have never seen the point in being late and my habit of punctuality has stayed with me ever since. I was pleased to be born on the 21st as I’ve always liked the number 21. Perhaps I favour it because it is my birth date or maybe I deliberately chose the 21st for my birth because even in the womb I had a preference for the number. Which of these is the case is not clear. I guess it’s like one of those long puzzled over chicken and egg dilemmas. Anyway, I’m digressing so we’ll come back to the number 21 later on if that’s alright with you.

The summer of 1970 in Manchester had been long and hot and my Mother had patiently awaited her due date, growing rounder and heavier each day as the august heat became unrelenting and unforgiving of her increasing discomfort. In the days preceding my birth the weather had become humid and oppressive. On the day my mother‘s waters broke so did the storm filled clouds. The heavens opened and her journey to the hospital was accompanied by torrential rain and rumbling thunder, a fitting overture for my delivery I thought. I admit I’ve always liked to make a bit of an entrance.

However, within an hour or so of being at the hospital things had slowed down almost to a halt, the doctors and midwives told my father that he really should go home and get some rest as the baby wouldn’t be coming until at least the next day. So off he went into the waterlogged streets, apparently the whole of Manchester saw floods that day and it was the most inches of rain the city had seen in years and years. This deluge sounded kind of biblical to me and I imagined my dad having to row back to the hospital the next day in a makeshift boat through this new Water World version of Manchester where all the cars had been washed away and people waved and called for help from little skylights and rooftops. I fancied he might have to construct an Ark for his new family. This was not the case, but yes, I have always had an overactive imagination or shall we say a slight tendency to exaggerate or embellish the truth.

Now, I feel I must say that this part of the story is a little ambiguous due to the variation in renditions given by my mother. On a good day the story goes like this: “The stupid doctors sent your poor father home telling him that you wouldn’t be born till the next day, they were obviously lying and just wanted him out of the way”. On a bad day, of which there have been too many of late, the story goes: “Your stupid, selfish father went home and left me all on my own at the hospital”. So you see I shall have to be content with either imagining the truth to be some midway between these two versions or maybe both are genuine all at once or perhaps neither is.

Soon after my dad left the hospital things started to speed up again and as was common practise in those days, once my mother’s labour was in full swing, the midwives decided to drug her into a stupor so as to make her completely ineffective at giving birth and causing her to lose consciousness quite some time before the moment of my arrival. Why they deemed this to be an excellent plan I really have no idea and it seems somewhat twisted to me that midwives often prefer to have mothers virtually comatose and out of the way whilst they deliver the baby as if their presence were an inconvenient nuisance.

At 04:25 British Summer Time I slipped into existence unaided by my mother, as she was out for the count. I was probably as unaware of my delivery as she was, given that the painkilling drugs in my mother’s system had entered my blood stream and pretty much knocked me out cold too. And so it came about that ten long hours passed before my mother and I met. She slept sedated, oblivious to the fact that she had given birth to her first child, a little girl.

As for me I was wheeled away in one of those strange transparent plastic boxes that serve as cots for babies in hospitals. Like goldfish tanks with name tags on so as the babies don’t get mixed up. Well not so much that the babies would get confused, more really that the adults would mix up the babies and take the wrong one home potentially causing havoc plus years of unexplained feelings and psychoanalysis. Babies on the other hand are not that easily befuddled!

My dad was also ignorant to the fact of my birth as no-one from the hospital had contacted him since his earlier departure and the last thing he’d been assured of was that his child certainly wouldn’t be on its way till later the next day. There I lay in my little fish tank cot in amongst all the other fish tanks all set out in neat little rows in the hospital nursery. Not a soul in my family knowing that I’d arrived. I don’t even know if I knew I was here, whether I was awake or not. Did I just sleep? Did I cry? Or did I just lie in my tank wondering where the welcoming committee was. What a strange and lonely beginning. You make all that effort to find the right parents and to grow your little body for nine months and then you struggle your way out into the light only to find that no one is really paying attention when you get there. Just me....in a fishy tank........waiting..... Just a little bit longer.

Waiting to be loved, or is it, as some people say, and I’m inclined to believe them, that an infant’s greatest emotional and spiritual need is not the need to be loved but to have their love received. Because by nature they are love and all they want is for the world to receive them as that. So there I was, waiting to be received.

When my mother finally woke up groggy and disorientated she realised all was not as it ought to be. She was distraught when she realised I was not beside her. She got up, crying out for me, desperate, hysterical and confused. One of the ward nurses tried to comfort her, explaining that I’d been taken down to the nursery. My mother ran all the way to that little room with the rows of babies and started searching urgently for the cot with the right name tag on ‘Baby Harris’. She later said she’d never seen so many ugly babies before, ones with funny scrunched up little faces and some with unnaturally big mops of hair on their heads. Each one she saw she thought “No, No this can’t be my baby, it’s so strange looking and ugly” Then at last she found me and she tells me I was beautiful and perfectly pink like a proper baby should be.

My mother held me close and took me back to her bed and lay me beside her. We stared and stared at each other for a whole eternity and she didn’t once let any of the nurses pick me up or touch me again for fear that they might take me away. Of course my father was subsequently called and arrived swiftly, I’m told the first words my mother said to him were “Get me out of here!” which he did and I was taken home that very day to meet my grandma, the rest of my family and the rest of my life. Many days, weeks and months followed filled and overflowing with pink froufrou dresses and matching frilly knickers, bonnets and ribbons, sugar and spice and all things girly and nice!

Such is the tale of my birth, although there is perhaps one more thing to add. When I was about seven or eight years old I received as a gift from my grandma one of those Birthday books, you know the type that you can put in the names of your family and friends’ birthdays so that you don’t forget them. Well it had a little picture on every page with a corresponding phrase or motto for that day. Naturally I was curious to see what it said on my own birthday and whilst I can’t remember now what the picture was I have remembered that short phrase ever since. It said, quite simply ‘A storm in a teacup’.

What stuck with me was the fact that when my mother saw this she exclaimed flippantly “Ah, well, that’s very fitting for you”. Now I had no idea what the saying meant and I was innocently delighted at the coincidence that there had indeed been a big storm on the day I was born and the notion of there being one inside a small teacup seemed fabulous and fantastical, a miniature tempest in a quaint little bone china cup, how wonderful and how unlikely. However the tone of voice with which my mother delivered her judgment led me to believe that it was not particularly meant as a compliment and I went away feeling surly and wondering what it was about me that was wrong.

Until that moment I had fancied my findings meant that people born on the 21st Aug were like a storm in a teacup, wild and powerful yet contained and graceful. To my dismay my mother later told me that the expression was used to describe someone who makes a fuss about nothing. I myself have now looked into this further on the World Wide Web and I have found some more information, for instance:

A storm in a teacup (British & Australian)
A situation where people get very angry or worried about something that is not important. “I think it's all a storm in a teacup - there's probably no danger to public health at all”.

Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms © Cambridge University Press 1998

Not sure if I’m more insulted by knowing this or not really. I also like this further meticulous clarification:

This slang term references the idea that within the microcosm of a teacup, a small ripple can seem like a big wave, and any sort of jostling or change will result in a ripple or two. However, once one looks outside the teacup, the disturbance is revealed as a minor issue which one might not even notice unless it is pointed out. When someone causes a storm in a teacup, they belabour an issue more than they need to.

S.E. Smith © 2003 - 2009

I actually like this one because it sounds both scientific and philosophical. By the time you’ve finished reading it you couldn’t be offended anymore. Firstly because it seems like the kind of thing that Dr Stephen Hawking or Descartes would explain to you and I’m sure neither of them would ever be insulting. Secondly because as I read it I start to imagine the little diagrams of ripples in the microcosm one might draw to accompany the explanation and I get so completely absorbed in how interesting it is that I forget that my mother was trying to say I make mountains out of molehills.

Well, I really have digressed this time. I suppose what I wanted to say was that somehow I related this saying “A storm in a teacup” to myself and specifically to my birth and even though the real meaning and connotations may not be positive, somehow I created my own interpretation of it and claimed it for myself.