She’s Always Swallowing Things

 We thought she’d have grown out of it by this stage. It’s the sort of thing little children do. Babies, I mean, and toddlers. They’re inquisitive when they’re young, and always hungry. Babies are forever putting things in their mouths. Marbles. Cigarettes. Leaves. Great, filthy handfuls of soil and sand. Our niece, Catherine once ate an entire bar of soap. God bless her poor mother. Imagine coming into the bathroom to find your three year old, beetroot red and howling, foaming at the mouth. Poor Janice wouldn’t let the child out her sight after that.

You expect a toddler to require a certain level of vigilance. We’ve kept an eye on all our children and seen them through the swallowing phase. By three or four, they’re usually past it and aside from the odd warning – ‘stop licking the icing off that cake,’ ‘don’t put your fingers in your mouth’ -  we can leave them to police themselves. Not Julia, though. Julia was different. Julia couldn’t stop swallowing things. As soon as she worked out how to haul herself up on her feet, she was dragging the chairs into the kitchen and climbing up onto the kitchen bench, where she’d work her way through anything that wasn’t locked up: condiments, sugar cubes, biscuits, tea bags. It didn’t matter how things tasted or whether they were edible. If Julia could fit it inside her mouth, she’d chew it into tiny pieces, then force herself to swallow the mess.

In the early days, she wasn’t subtle. We’d hear her, dragging the chair across the floor and intervene before she could do that much harm. The edibles we understood. Julia was a child, experimenting with tastes, discovering the subtleties of her palate. Perhaps she found something delicious and appealing in the strange combinations of foods which went into her mouth. We only really started to worry, when we realised she was making a bee line for the cutlery drawer. Teaspoons were Julia’s flavour of choice. She swallowed them whole. Though we couldn’t see the appeal ourselves, we were glad she hadn’t gone for the knives.

We took her to see a specialist. It cost an arm and a leg. But she was five by this stage and too old to be swallowing inappropriate things. The specialist said it was common enough, especially common in the middle children of large families. “Attention seeking,” he mouthed silently over Julia’s head, then raised his voice to assure us she would grow out of it soon. “Encourage her to enjoy her actual food,” he suggested. “She needs reminding what a mouth is for.”

We took Julia home and for six months, fed her like a proper princess. Every meal was a kind of banquet. Every mouthful, exquisite. We could tell Julia was enjoying her food. She’d often ask for seconds and thirds and while we were off in the kitchen topping up her plate or bowl, sneak the teaspoons off the table, pocket the napkin rings or the salt cellar, to swallow later, by herself. She’d always inform us afterwards. “I’ve done it again,” she’d say and list the things she’d lately eaten: two soup spoons, a set of chopsticks, several buttons and three pounds sixty four in loose change. She only told us because she needed help when it came to extricating the things she’d swallow. We won’t go into details here. Less said, the better. It’s part and parcel of being a parent. You’ll do whatever your children need you to do.

Julia’s seventeen now. She’s off to university next year. She knows we won’t be around to help her. She’ll have to manage by herself. “Or,” we say, fingers crossed on all our hands, “maybe, you could just give up swallowing things.” She looks at us, like we’ve suggested she quit food altogether, or stop drinking or breathing or something equally necessary. “Please, Julia,” we say. “We’re worried about you.” She holds her silence for a minute or so and we wonder if she might be considering our suggestion. Eventually, she looks up at us with her big honest eyes. “I could promise to stop swallowing things,” she tells us, “but that would be a lie. You both know I’m never going to stop now. I think it’s time you accepted me for who I am. I might be your daughter but I’m not like you. I never will be. The bottom line is, we have very, very different tastes.”

Inspired by a line from Agatha Christie’s 1968 novel, By the Pricking of my Thumbs