Sick bed

With a gentleness of tone she explained to me:

'It's just that I hate every single thing about you'.

There was no aggression just a sincerity and almost compassion as she tried to get me to understand something that I clearly could quite grasp. I'd asked her, out of curiosity, why she'd spent the previous twenty four hours calling me names that she new would hurt. This had been her reply.

Writing here now I can't even remember what started it, a thing happened, the usual sort of thing, and I said something then it all unraveled. The silence, interspersed with looks of distain and words of harm had trickled on. In the car, at the meal table, bed time, breakfast lunch all simmering. All focused on me, just me.

So, I asked and she helpfully explained that she hated me.

A day later, it was still simmering and I asked if she could remember why she was still cross with me, just me. She couldn't remember was more than happy to confirm that she was still cross with me in no uncertain terms.

I held fast, I knew that she'd come back with the sincere and heartfelt sorry. I daydreamed about playing it cool or throwing it back in her face or some such grand gesture so profound that it would change her, make her think and alter her behaviour for ever.

A day later the good MrsC texted me from home saying the school had called and she was ill and back at home now. She was proper poorly with the flue that been working its way through the massive.

When I got home she was poorly, still cross. I have to admire her tenacity, if this could be harnessed for good she'd be unstoppable.

She was ill. Sleeping not eating or moving. Wanderings through the night, medicine, the usual business.

So, the last day. I sat next to her on her sick bed, she did not recoil. I took a chance and stroked her face.

She let me and her hate had passed.

Over My Shoulder

Back in the early days when we were young and the Big Three were the only three we looked differently on the world. There were parts of the city we wouldn't go as a family, even when we were in the city centre there were times when for no reason I would start to feel uneasy, watched, conspicuous.

Surely among the thousands of people that we would pass someone must recognise the children, someone from their old life. We've all had the experience of being on holiday and bumping into someone we know, a mutual friend or an old neighbour. So surely someone would recognise us it seemed inevitable.

Once we were in our home town and all of us hand in hand going swimming and as we walked into the centre Birth Mam walked out of the door. She wasn't, it was someone who looked like her but for a split second we thought it was. Our world froze for a second,  the children oblivious, but Paula and I shocked.

The edges of our family have blurred and the line between adoptive and birth family is ragged and in part dissolving. I found out today that we had been seen. Sat in a city centre restaurant two years after the Big Three joined us my children's aunt and grandmother had watched as we sat and played out the usual family scene. They watched not malevolently but frozen transfixed by the sight of their children. Observers of this scene unable or unwilling to act or intervene so close.
But then leaving and letting the scene play on.

Speaking to the aunt last night she was sure I knew and I saw, I can't recall.
I don't look over my shoulder anymore.