The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2537 by Angharad Copyright© 2014 Angharad

---

Despite saying I wouldn’t, I ran Cindy home after dinner. I suppose I should have been doing more work on the mammal survey or something, but I felt listless, unable to settle. Thinking about my mother had pressed some buttons, so after dropping Cindy off, I drove to a car park up on the downs. It was cold and dark but I could look down and see the city in all its glory, or at least with the less salubrious bits hidden by bright lights or shadow.

I locked the doors of the car and sat there letting my eyes view the lights, twinkling in the distance like some gigantic nebula, and my mind drifting—going whence it wanted, my conscious self, my ego, roughly comparable with something the size of Australia, I left busy guiding my eyes while my unconscious plumbed its own depths as I waited for anything it dredged up. My phone lay in my bag. It was switched off. I had excommunicated myself having sent Simon a quick text saying I’d be back in an hour.

For a few moments I wished I could go backwards to my youth, insisting to my parents I was a girl and that they do something about it. I wished my mum were still alive and had been able to be at my wedding. I wished that she had seen how happy I was, knee deep in children and young adults who needed me, like I had needed her. I needed her now, or her counsel but she wasn’t there, not any more.

The vista of twinkling lights became more bleary as I tried to hold back the tears and failed as drip after drip fell onto my bust or lap. Then I simply sobbed for my loss. I hadn’t really dealt with it. I’d been to the funeral but I was almost spaced out by the fact that I had to deal as a woman with my father. For the first time, he had to acknowledge me as his daughter or be excluded from my life. I had Stella there, acting like my big sister, protecting me; but grieving was something I hadn’t done.

I thought of Billie and the tears flowed more steadily. How come I couldn’t save her? How could it be a child’s time to die? Children aren’t meant to die, that happens to adults; children are meant to grow and be nurtured and educated, not die. Was I still angry about it? A little—part of me always hoped I would be, it showed I cared—that I missed her—that I loved her.

Was I angry about my mother’s death? No because she had had a decent life as far as it went. She’d been forty five when she died, young by today’s standards but nearly five times as old as Billie. Dad had made his fifties but again wasn’t old when his strokes finally finished him off. Was the shock of my changeover the cause? I suspect Mum’s death was much more likely to prove the reason. He loved her and his grief damaged him physically.

Was I mourning him as well? If I was, I was unaware of it. We’d said our goodbyes as he died, holding on for me to get there. I’d loved him despite his bullying and abuse of me and in his own way I think he probably loved me, the son he was going to raise in his own image—only it went wrong—I got the wrong set of instructions and became a girl. In the end we were reconciled, or as much as we could be. So no, I’m not grieving—rather feeling a certain comfort when he announced to me and the sister on the ward, that he was proud of his daughter. I was proud of him for saying it, it meant a great deal to me.

Back to my mother: what was I missing? Everything. I thought about what a woman of my age would be doing with her mother—showing off or sharing her children, like I do to a lesser extent with Henry and Monica. Having the odd day out, shopping or doing girl things like sewing or getting our hair done. I missed most of that, just the odd tutorial—how to iron mine or Dad’s shirts—make the odd dress—cook—keep house—colour coordinate soft furnishings and so on. Much of it surreptitiously.

Did she know I was a girl or did she think I was gay, or was it as she said, she wanted to share her knowledge and skills with me, her only child. Perhaps a form of immortality. After all, some of my sewing kit was hers as was the sewing machine and the tailor’s dummy. Didn’t its continued use mean part of her was still alive if only in my memory.

I dried my eyes and the city lights returned to focus. For now, I’d released the pressure on my grief valve, I could go back to functioning again, coping with the stresses of my busy life. I wondered if she’d have been able to multitask, running a busy job, the mammal survey, a large family and home while dealing with their emotional stuff as well as my own? At times it feels like a big ask, at others it feels huge. Today for a moment it felt impossible. I had to release some of the grief or go bang, myself—such was the pressure. Whether it was building for a long time or doing the sewing instigated it, I have no idea. I blessed all my family, alive and dead and steered the catmobile back to the twinkling lights. Twenty minutes later I was parking next to Simon’s F type.

“Where’ve you been?” began hubby’s inquisition.

“I had some thinking to do and needed some space.”

That always worried him. He was terrified I was going to leave him. Ironic, because that was how I felt about him. In the back of my mind was that one day he’d leave me for a real female who could give him his own children, mine were off the shelf variety, although he claimed he loved them every bit as much as he would his own. I hoped he was telling the truth, I really did—not that I felt he was lying, not consciously at any rate.

“Sort things out?” he asked.

“For the moment.”

“Oh good. Want to do anything tomorrow?”

“You mean like sleep all day?”

“I was thinking something a little more active than that.”

“Like what?”

“We could stay in bed if you like and...”

“Simon, is that all you can think of?

“Not all, he almost whined.

“What’s the weather say?”

“Um—cloudy but dry.”

“Let’s take the kids out on the bikes and have a picnic.”

“Cathy, it’s January.”

“So?”

“So picnics are usually a feature of the summer.”

“It’s not that cold.”

“For eating outdoors it is.”

“Won’t stop the girls eating ice cream if it’s offered.”

“Nuclear winter wouldn’t stop the girls eating ice cream.”

Or me eating chocolate—still, the less he knows, the better I like it, at least with chocolate. Am I a chocoholic?