When Minnie was TWELVE, Hope bought her a kitten. Minnie named it CAT. She was a rescue cat from the Cats Protection League, and was very thin when she arrived. Minnie was devoted to Cat, who slept on her bed and adored her. One morning, Minnie woke up to find that Cat had brought a tiny baby mouse in from the garden. Far from trying to kill or eat it though, Cat was nursing it, protecting it. Minnie researched how to feed a pinkie mouse, and so she religiously fed it watered-down kitten formula from a pipette until it grew. She named it MOUSE and, ironically, Cat and Mouse became inseparable. Hope found the whole situation difficult. A mouse, an actual rodent, being welcome inside the flat …? She was pretty much appalled, but Minnie was insistent that these two strange bedfellows were her very best friends, and she pleaded with Hope to let them be. Again, Hope acquiesced. Of course she did.
When Minnie was THIRTEEN, she owned one cat and between one to thirty mice at any time. She was beginning to flex her independence muscles and would have wild mood swings. She spent too much time in her bedroom alone (except for creatures) and Hope would find endless notebooks full of dark stories about lost love, death and vampires. Sexy vampires, of course. She became morose and monosyllabic. Her skin had also broken out in spots and, because she’d had flawless skin since she was a baby, this came as a huge blow. In an effort to help, Hope tried to introduce more fruit and vegetables into Minnie’s diet, much to her dismay. Minnie only liked Coco Pops for breakfast; nothing else would do. One morning, before school, Hope prepared a fruit salad for her instead. She arranged it in the shape of a rainbow on the plate, using different fruit to form the coloured arches, raspberries, then mango cubes, then kiwi, then blueberries, then melon, then strawberries as the top arch. She was pretty pleased with herself. Minnie walked into the kitchen rubbing her eyes and yawning. She stopped still when she saw the fruity platter.
‘Um. Excuse me. What the actual …?’ she said.
‘I thought we could share it. Y’know, maybe start a health kick together?’ her mum replied hopefully. After all, this expensive fruit had put a big dent in Hope’s shopping budget.
Minnie blinked a lot, as if in total shock, then grabbed her school bag and coat and flounced out, shouting back over her shoulder, ‘Thanks for ruining my whole bloody life!’
When she returned that same evening, she was contrite to a degree, and told Hope, ‘Look, sorry, right? But the thing is, I love you and I would never kill you or anything, but please never cause me trauma like that again.’
It was a year before Minnie ate fruit. Not because she didn’t like it, but because her pride prevented her.
When Minnie was FOURTEEN, she wrote rap songs about sexism and being a girl, which she performed to her mirror. Very, very occasionally, she would run a couple of rhymes past her mum, or practise them with Princess; otherwise, it was a private activity. She also waged a war of loathing against her own body. She disliked so many things about herself: her forehead, her thighs, her feet, her growing breasts, her fingers and on and on. Hope noticed this slide into low self-esteem and decided to step in.
She knocked on the bathroom door one evening when Minnie was in the bath, and asked her to come and join her when she got out. Minnie trudged into Hope’s bedroom in her PJs with a towel around her wet hair. Hope invited her to stand in front of the full-length mirror alongside her. Hope was in her PJs too. Minnie was reluctant until Hope gently persuaded her with, ‘Please. For me …’
Minnie stood next to her mother and looked in the mirror.
Hope said, ‘What do you see?’
‘A lump. Look at me. God. Stupid fat lump.’
‘Well, OK, that’s NOT what I see, but OK, it’s your body, you see it as you see it, you are the only one that has a right to it, no one else does. BUT … can I just ask you: if someone on the bus called Princess a stupid fat lump, what would you think of them?’
There was silence for a moment …
‘Bully.’
‘Yeah, a bully. You seem to be prepared to bully yourself about your own body. So can I ask you, just for a couple of weeks, to try and stop that? And maybe, Minnie Moo, if you can’t exactly love yourself yet, maybe you could at least not hate yourself, eh? Maybe you could try to be a bit tolerant and at the very least be kind to Minnie? Be a bit more gentle? Maybe think about the fact that she might feel a bit raw sometimes and need some understanding? Be a good friend to her, to you, just as you would for Princess. You deserve that at least, surely?’
Hope held her breath. Had she pushed it too far?
Minnie squirmed a bit, but then
