Baby, Mine

           Life was not meant to be this way. The carriage I was travelling in was full of colour, exuberant noise, parties. 

           Then everything changed. I was not in the carefree young adult carriage anymore but stuck on a side line in a carriage of my own making. A carriage that I could not permit anyone else into. 

            It was an isolation of my own making. Social pariah, outcast. I had derailed my life all on my own. I consoled myself that it was temporary.  I believed it too.

    

       I was still a child. Sweet if not entirely innocent. Nobody in my position had the right to call themselves innocent. Naïve perhaps, but not innocent. I thought I was ready for adult life believing it would be kind of warm and kind of nice, a more independent version of my childhood. But it wasn’t like that.

          The child that was at first a delicious secret held in my dark internal spaces, a promise of love ever after, became a terrifying reality and as she grew so did the shame that was forced upon me. It was impossible to imagine anything but giving her up. The words seemed so easy, like chocolate at Lent, disconnected from the heart breaking reality. Walking away was like tearing myself in two. 
I will never be whole again.

         I live with the secret and conjur memories of a life I imagine Emily to be having, the life I could have shared with her. The protective mother in me was born simultaneously as she drew her first independent breath. I imagine the rosy glow of chubby cheeks as she blows out birthday candles, bumps and bruises that I kiss better, the hand I  hold as we walk across the road, the lullaby I sing to keep the demons at bay. What kind of love is this? The kind that haunts my every quiet moment.

         There is a persistent knowledge of something missing in the fabric of my life- a quilt with no stuffing. I am alone. Alone in my carriage, still in the siding, while everyone else has moved on.

        If I look closely enough, I think, maybe I will see her. I study the faces of children at the park, in the shoe shop, at the school gate. I wonder if I see her will there be a lightning bolt, a moment of undeniable recognition? Then I hope that our paths don’t cross: to rock her world like that, destroy the reality she believes in, would be cruel. I have no right. I gave up my right. But I send love into the world like a crown of steam on a cup of tea and hope it will blanket her with protective warmth.

         One day. Maybe one day I will hold her again.

         I know I should be grateful that she found a good home, that she filled the gap in someone else’s family jigsaw. The down I stroked on her head has long since become curls but they reside in someone else’s locket; the scuffed shoes will be polished by someone other than me; the frown I imagine on her sweet head will be smoothed by her not-quite-mother’s hand. We are united she and I, united by pretence, complicit in the same falsehood. We are both not-quite-mothers, by blood and by choice. Maybe I am not alone. Maybe she thinks of me too.