Easy As Falling Off A Bike pt 2223

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The Daily Dormouse.
(aka Bike, est. 2007)
Part 2223
by Angharad

Copyright © 2013 Angharad
All Rights Reserved.
  
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I was sore again the next morning but Simon’s words with the troops the day before must have had some effect because none of them commented on my less than flowing movement.

Simon had gone to work early with Sammi, it was her last day as she was down to be admitted on the Friday for surgery the following day. Although we weren’t paying for the surgery, we did make a large donation to the local hospice at the agreement of the surgeon. So to anyone who suggested we could go privately for treatment, we pointed out we had made a payment to the hospice.

I showed the bracelet to the girls and they loved it–mind you, so did I. The blue of the sapphires matched those in my engagement ring and the necklace I had from my mother, originally from my grandmother. The link back to her was important to me. Sadly, it won’t go any further because my adopted children will link to their own grandparents genetically, if not emotionally. Emotionally, they’ll link to Tom, Henry and Monica. What effect that will have on them in the long term only time will tell.

Common sense seems to suggest that adopted children will have more problems than natural children which is probably borne out in some survey statistic somewhere. I suppose even obvious assumptions have to be tested before we can quote them ad nauseum. I’ve had the odd problem with the children from time to time but nothing compared to some adoptive parents. The fact that they wanted us to adopt them has to be a factor and while some have an anger or even disgust of their natural parents, I’m aware that could change later on.

I took the girls to school as per usual and when I got home found we’d had a mail delivery including some Christmas cards. I decided I’d have to try and write some that day and ended up spending most of the day doing it. With a second class stamp costing fifty pence, I was going to reduce the number to a bare necessity. I still did a hundred–cor, fifty pounds just to send the bloody cards.

I looked at those we’d had delivered and there was one for Mima with a foreign stamp on it. I wondered if it was from whom I thought it might be. I collected the girls from school and when we got home I managed to separate Mima off from the others and give her her card.

She spent ages looking at the stamp and the air mail sticker. The postmark was Jo’burg, which is South Africa. She stood there holding it and then looked at me.

“Don’t you want to open it?” I asked her gently.

She looked very sad and her eyes looked very moist. She said nothing but it wouldn’t take a genius to have a guess at what she was thinking.

“Would you like me to open it with you?”

She thought about it for a moment before nodding and handing the card to me. I slit it open with the paperknife. My hand growing sweaty with mild anxiety I extracted the card which had a picture of a Christmas tree with snow on it–about as likely in South Africa as Bradley Wiggins winning another TdF. I held it up for her to see. “Do you want to open it or would you like me to do it?”

She pointed at me so I flipped open the card and read her the verse. ‘Season’s Greetings from South Africa.’ Then I read her the inscription. ‘Dear Jemima, I hope you are happy with your new mummy and daddy. We miss you and think of you often. Love, your old Mummy.’ There was also a hundred dollar bill US variety.

I handed her the card. She carefully removed the money and handed it to me. Then she read the inscription herself, before she burst into tears and shouted in pain, “Bwoody wiar. I hate you,” after which she proceeded to rip the card up and fling the pieces up in the air.

“Excuse me, but it takes me a long time to keep this place clean.” She looked suitably chastened and began picking up the pieces which she handed to me. I was tempted to put them in the bin but I didn’t, I shoved them all back into the envelope and put them on my desk.

I gave her a cuddle and we chatted gently about her original mother and I suggested that she did love her.

“That’s why she abandoned me, is it?”

“I don’t know why she did it, she didn’t tell me, but I know she’s missed out on seeing you growing up and that’s quite important to all parents, but especially mums.”

“That’s ha own fawt. She wan off and weft me, I hate ha.”

“From what I could gather she ran off because she was being chased by all sorts of nasty people and she left you with me because she thought I could offer you a secure home. I hope I have, I’ve certainly tried.”

“I wuv you, Mummy, you my mummy now.”

“I love you too love you too, sweetheart.”

“Don’t wet ha take me away.”

“You have been adopted, Mima. That means she has no legal right to you at all. I’m your mummy now and I intend to keep it that way until or unless you tell me different.”

“I want you as my mummy fo-evva.”

“In which case, I shall be your Mummy as long as I live. Deal?”

“Deaw,” she said and we shook on it.

She went off to change and probably to wash her face with her red eyes from crying an obvious advert to the others to ask awkward questions. I left the card fragments and envelope on my desk and went off to ask David about the dinner. When I returned the envelope had gone and it wasn’t in my waste basket. I said nothing about it but the next day, while making her bed I found it under her mattress. She still had feelings for her birth mother, which I suppose I’d encouraged though I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.

I checked all the bits were still there and she’d stuck it all together with tape and not very neatly either. I suppose if she did it in secret it would be difficult. I thought back to when I first got her and how I somehow managed to achieve the same wavelength as she was on and somehow she trusted me enough to walk again. That was before the blue light became manifest, though perhaps it was in the background. I didn’t know.

We’d been through quite a bit since then, especially when the blue light did save her after she drowned and was practically dead. I’ll never forget that day as long as I live. Her friendship with Trish was what gave Sam Rose the idea to send Trish here and between us, Meems and I got her walking again too.

I went looking for her and found her sitting with Lizzie telling her she’d never abandon her and she’d see to it that her mummy wouldn’t abandon her either, like she had been until I saved her. “My new mummy, made me walk again and she saved me when I dwownded. She’w wook after you too, because she wuvs babies.”

I slipped away, eight years old and she has me analysed to a tee.

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Comments

Thank you for the refresher on Meems.

As I remember she had been abandoned to an orphanage? Her Mum's name being Jemima could indicate that Meems is black or half black, I suppose. Please don't think me prejudiced. My life as a Muslim removed any of that, except for Baptists. :)

Gwendolyn

Mima's Parents

Mima's mother abandoned Mima, dropping her with no warning on Cathy, then ran off to join her hubby, who was supposedly somewhere in the Middle East, recovering from "injuries". Not long after that, both her mother and father ran off again, wandering around for a while before eventually landing in South Africa. I'm not absolutely sure, but I think I remember them being held by the South African authorities.

To the best of my knowledge, Mima is completely Caucasian, I don't recall anything at all about her being anything other than that. As far as I know, this is the first time we've heard from Mima's mother since a few months after she abandoned Mima.

Oh, I almost forgot, it was Trish, Danny (now Danni) and Billie that came from the orphanage.

*smiles*

So cute... Mima's always been a loving child. She has so much room in her hear! (Good thing Cathy seems to as well!)

Thanks,
Annette

Yay!

erica jane's picture

Meems and Trish are still my favorites of the kids.

~And so it goes...

"Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown"

It's twelve minutes before four in the morning and I have just recovered from weeping tears for poor wee Meems after reading eposide 2223 of EAFOAB.

You are one very very special person, Angharad.

The wind woke me up, and I have the bedroom heated slightly after a couple of cold nights, so the air was dry and I woke up with mouth open and dried out, so popped downstairs for some juice and switched on to my favorite site and favorite Author.

May you be blessed.

xoxoxoxox

(Why the quote from the Bard's Henry the Fourth ? I sometimes fantasise that I am the Head of State of my own country, the Roving Republic of Briarland, and that wherever I go my tiny sovereign state goes with me. I make and modify my own laws and do not recognise any other state that does not recognise mine, so to Hell with all of the larger ones, to hell with their polits, dirty tricks, pretend elections, magic vanishing money tricks, oppressions and wars.)

Briar

Abandonment; it still hurts.

If I let it, it still hurts but now I have to consciously 'bring-it-up' into my mind. At least I've managed to build some sort of wall around it. Everybody seems to find their own strategies, some successful, some not.

Still lovin' it though Ang, even when it occasionally takes a brick temporarily out of the wall.

Bevs

XXX

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Re: Abandonment; it still hurts

I know all about abandonment from my own personal experience, damn right, it hurts!

I don't know the exact circumstances of my birth, but from what I do remember, my mother was twelve at that time, so I doubt that she would have had any sexual experience at all, let alone enough to be running around with multiple men at that age.

In my mind, it is far more likely that she was raped, whether by one man or several, I have no idea. What I do know is that her family was Roman Catholic, possibly devout in their beliefs, and I was given up for adoption within hours of my birth (two months premature).

Once I was well enough to leave the hospital, I was fostered out, and over the next 6.5 years or so, wandered from foster home to foster home, a few months in one, several months in another, no stability at all, a dozen or more foster homes in all over that time span.

I was male to male raped for the first time, at 4.5 years of age, in one of those foster homes. A few months later, maybe in the same home but likely in another, I was shoved down the stairs because I was having a grand mal epileptic seizure.

After going through abandonment after abandonment in those foster homes, being adopted about a month after my seventh birthday seemed like heaven on earth. That only lasted a few months, then the beatings started because I wasn't a perfect child, i.e., I was seeking attention because of never having had stability in my life before that time. What made it so much worse was that I was treated completely differently than the rest of the children; if we had both committed the same action at about the same time, most often they would get a serious talking to, whereas I would get twenty or thirty lashes from the belt. That was "normal" until I told my adoptive father where to go when I was fourteen.

That set the stage for the next abandonment, my being removed from the adoption and sent to a group home for troubled boys. Three more times going through male to male rape there within the first six months threw a wrench into the works, so to speak, and for about a year or so, I was quite unstable, likely to end up in scraps with bigger boys, many of which ended up with my sporting one or more injuries.

Eventually, thanks to the determined effort of a couple of workers there, I started to settle down, and was discharged in June of '84.

It seems the government here had decided that I should still be in care, so I was sent to another home for troubled boys; I lived there for about eight months, then spent a few months living in a house that was under the home's authority but not in the home itself. That went bad when there was a fire in the house (three of the five of us smoked, a cigarette that hadn't been properly stubbed out apparently was the cause), I was eventually deemed to be the guilty party, expelled from the house and the group home's authority. I can't recall if I actually was at fault or not, but that didn't seem to matter to them at all, as I was the only one tossed out on my butt, yet another abandonment.

The next year or two were a bit better, but it didn't last. In early '86, I noticed I was having trouble seeing blackboards in school, and went to an optometrist, who recommended contacts rather than glasses. I agreed with him, as I've always had an issue with glasses pinching my nose and sliding down, having to constantly push them back up in order to see properly is a nuisance.

Anyway, I managed to get through the last few months of school in the spring of '86, had a couple of months off through the summer, then went back in September, only to find that my vision issue was much worse; I was literally having blinding headaches after being in classes for about two hours, and was regularly being excused because I was so nauseous I was unable to return to my classes.

This continued through most of the next two months, and I eventually was told to meet with my worker at the Children's Aid Society offices. When informed about it, the arsehole couldn't even be bothered to authorize a prescription for glasses, which most likely would have helped. What he did do was threaten to have me expelled from the CAS if I didn't stay in classes all day, every day.

He didn't care what was going on, and since I couldn't manage to stay in classes, two weeks later, the CAS dropped me cold. I ended up on welfare, several months later got into trouble with the law, spent most of a year in jail, and moved to Toronto when I was released.

I've gone through other abandonments since then, but most of those were quite minor in comparison, except for one instance, when I was pretty much abandoned by just about everyone I had thought were my friends. Since then, I haven't trusted people as much.

So yeah, I know all too damn well about abandonment, as it has been a recurring theme throughout my life.

Thanks Dear Ang

so very sweet.

Goddess Bless you

Love Desiree

Awwww... Poor Meems

i felt so sorry for her, It seems though i am not the only one, If ever anyone has had the gods watching over them it is the delightful Meems, Long may they continue.

Kirri

Touching episode

The children could do much worse than binding to Tom, Henry and Monica as their grandparents. A little surprised that we didn't hear about tears in Cathy's eyes after Mima's unconditional and permanant declaration of devotion.... now ... how will she feel about Cathy when she's 15 and testing her limits?

A lovely Episode

Thanks Ang, for such a lovely chapter,

I had tears in my eyes after reading this one

'Snot fair'

Love to all

Anne G.