I am not his mother. I am the only mother he has. ******* His mother was beautiful. She was also young, kind, and alive with the sort of joy you rarely see and yet is infectious. I loved her and so I love him. She died bringing him into the world. It was nearly enough to make me stop believing in God. Maybe it did for a while. But she would not have wanted that. She saw God everywhere. Even in me. I started working for her when I was fifteen and had just left school. I couldn’t see much point in education. In a small town, dreams of university were just that – dreams – and my family didn’t dream. She had married her husband three years before, and she was still only 24. That seemed old to me then. Ha! You learn that age is relative. She was wise though. Her husband had charmed her away from the city and her plans to be a teacher. I don’t blame him; who could resist her? She was alive to adventure and revelled in the idea of the outback. She saw something good in that man she married, and while she lived, she made that true. He glowed in her presence, living into her vision of him. We are odd beings, we humans. So sure of our individuality and yet so susceptible to the influence of others, for good or evil. If she had lived, who knows what he might have become. Not what he did become, that is certain. When I met her, I was sitting outside the one coffee shop in town. I knew who she was, but we swam in different streams. Small towns are like that. You might know who everyone is, but equally, everyone knows where they fit. People like to pretend we’re egalitarian (she taught me that word) but that’s a steaming heap. Know your place or someone will happily show you where it is. I was from the other side of the tracks and receding into the distance. But she was a rule breaker. She walked up to me and just stated, “I’m pregnant.” No introduction or anything. 41
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