My mother went to the shops to buy the weekly shop. She forgot to buy any food but inside her shopping trolley was a little puppy.
My mother hadn't felt well for some time, and had continually gone to the doctor wondering if she was pregnant. At the time the technology wasn't as good as it is now and either they didn't test her or the results were incorrect. So when my mother gave birth in our home unexpectedly, the shock of delivering a child in those circumstances and being told she was imagining it for months, did something to my mother's state of mind that was fragile to start with.
She couldn't look after me but after she lost the baby, my mother seemed to feel the need to mother something. At least that is what I thought, as I saw her hold the puppy in her arms like a child. Carrying it around everywhere she went.
Then after a week, my mother could no longer cope with the responsibility and I am not sure how, but I assumed the role of chief puppy carer.
The dog, walked around my mother desperate for attention but my mother's eyes were glazed over with the new medication she had and was lost in a world only she occupied.
No matter how hard the puppy cried and pawed at her, the dark grey skies that filled my mother's vision, clouded the joy she could have experienced.
Lost and in pain, she wandered the streets like a lost soul, searching for the child that had died, finding it hard to comprehend what had happened.
Other days she remained in her bed and never left it. The room was a dark cell. No light was allowed to filter in. The blackness of the room so dark, it looked almost as though nothing was in it, like the emptiness in her heart.
I wanted love, I wanted to receive it, I wanted to give it. But my mother and I slow danced around each other, never touching, never connecting. In a sadness that perpetrated the walls of number 5.
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Many thanks, Kimberley S B Lieb
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Just an Ordinary Girl
General FictionWattNaNo Drama Pick Winner 2018. This book has slices of my life, a memoir, covering my difficult childhood coping with my mother's severe mental heath issues and my journey today. This is a collection of short stories that can be independently re...
