The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2508 by Angharad Copyright© 2014 Angharad

---

On the drive home I mused on my teaching session and worried about how I keep Trish occupied. As a very gifted child, she’d soon be bored by run of the mill games, having said that, Livvie is better at some hand eye coordinated things, like tennis on her Wii. Once it’s down to pure brain power, as soon as she gets the hang of anything, Trish won’t just beat you, she destroys you. I no longer play chess against her, I’m not clever enough.

I did speak to my opposite number in the maths and physics department. He gave me a website to contact for super-bright kids, I’d try and look at it as soon as I got a few minutes. He also offered to have a chat with her with a view to offering her some challenges, intellectually, of maths problems. He’s used to teaching eighteen to twenty year olds, she’s half that age. I wondered if she’d have the experience to attempt such problems, as his students would have done A-level maths and therefore done a course in learning tools for increasingly complex calculations.

I wondered if there was an online course which taught similar courses, because I suspect once she got started, she’d consume it like wildfire. However, I didn’t want to just develop her mind, it needed to be balanced with activities to round out her body and emotions. In short I wanted her to be fulfilled as a young woman and experienced in dealing with people, playing sports, able to form friendships and have relationships as well as be able to calculate pi to ten thousand decimal places. If it didn’t sound too contrary, I wanted her to be a well rounded and grounded smart arse. She was going to be a challenge as she got older and realised she was much cleverer than either Simon or I were, when I hoped it wouldn’t go to her head. I needed to keep her aware of other people’s feelings and also of her own. Otherwise she could become dismissive of them and dissociated, treating them like insects or items for her amusement.

So far, I’d succeeded in all these things but as she became an adolescent it was going to become increasingly difficult. I thought about the four little monkeys in my car, each posed their own challenge.

Danni had been almost tricked into becoming female having dabbled with some enjoyment of cross-dressing and was also possibly bi-sexual. She struggled with being irreversibly female and only her enjoyment of football and the possibility of pursuing that as a woman to its highest level, gave her encouragement to enjoy being female. That she seemed to be improving academically by attending a girls’ school was a bonus. He had been abused as a boy and also fairly recently sexually assaulted on a school trip which had confused him because part of him appeared to enjoy it, or so he thought. Once I learned this I tried to explain the mechanics of what had happened as being almost a reflexive emission. Stephanie had dealt with it and I hoped it was no longer an issue. She would need further surgery on her genitalia as she grew, the scar tissue doesn’t. Trish would require the same, possibly more than once.

Livvie, had been emotionally abused by both her parents neither were that interested in her seeing her as a hindrance rather than their pride and joy. When her parents died so tragically, she wasn’t terribly upset, having been dumped on other people for so long, she had dissociated from the two adults who treated her so badly. I sensed that she needed to bond with someone and although I was concerned it should be Simon and I, was glad that she managed to do so. I hope we’ve helped to allay her insecurities and stopped her becoming too detached. Like Trish, she’s very clever, and like her sister, needs to be kept grounded and emotionally involved with the family.
Meems—my first lodger. Like Livvie, she’d almost been programmed to not form relationships with her parents because of their lifestyle needs. She’d been encouraged to see me as a new mother from the beginning by her birth mother, which I found outrageous. She’s a natural nurturer and quite girly in her manner. She loves to play with dolls and help in the care of any babies in the house. She’s quite bright too, but suffers from a speech impediment—an inability to sound the letters R and L properly. Despite several attempts by speech and language therapists and assorted doctors, she still has her impediment which worries me because it makes her vulnerable to teasing by other children. Trish can be quite cruel at times.

Somehow these poor kids had found themselves in my custody and while in some ways a godsend, as I can’t have my own children, I did and continue to wonder if I’m up to the job of caring for them as an adopted mother, let alone the two babies Cate and Lizzie or my older charges, Phoebe, Julie, Jacquie and Sammi. With the exception of the two babies, all of the others have had experiences of abuse or abandonment sometimes associated with being transgender.

My challenge with the infants is to help them understand that their mothers asked me to look after them, but as well I have to explain that they died tragically by their own hands. In Lizzie’s case, so did her dad, a copy of Livvie’s history.

In Phoebe’s case, she needed a mother substitute when her mother died from cancer. It wasn’t my idea that I fulfil the role but she’d stayed with me several times before her mum died, and I suppose I was more suitable to cater for her than her older brother Neal, who was Lizzie’s father. In taking on Lizzie, I tried to take the responsibility from a teenager, who having not long lost her mother, would not have been able to take responsibility for her niece.

Somehow we got home without incident, though I’d driven on autopilot. Just how was I supposed to cope with all these children or young adults, Simon, Stella and her two little ones, and Tom—who normally wasn’t too much of a drag on my time or resources, but who was ageing and while he was in reasonable health now, had caused a few scares. Add in that I was a career woman with needs of my own in terms of personal achievement, and an apparent agent for some Old Testament goddess and I did wonder why my hair wasn’t white or missing.

Some days I did wonder how I coped, but analysing didn’t seem to help whereas getting on with things and support from Simon, Stella and Tom, together with the older girls, when they realised the need, seemed to so far, do the trick. At times it felt like I was walking a tightrope and all I needed to remember was not to look down.