It’s about 5pm now, and I decided to spend today hanging about the house and learn some new skills. Norah is basically the font of all knowledge and sagely wisdom, so I thought I’d hang out with her, tending the garden, help her cook, learn some new skills, and all that jazz. That woman is amazing, and it really felt like I was hanging out with my grandma. At least, I assume that’s what hanging out with a grandma feels like. I never had the joy of grandparents, or parents, or siblings. Life was just one big battle for survival and safety from the get-go but hanging out with Norah, with her gentle demeanour and surprisingly wicked sense of humour, was just what I needed.
We got to talking and I inevitably asked about kids. The fact she was living on her farm alone when the world died always stuck in my mind, and I wondered if she was ever visited by her kids or grandkids.
“No,” she answered, a little hint of regret evident in the way she said it. “Sadly, that was never in the stars for me and my Bill.” She tapped her midriff with the soiled trowel she was using to turn over some earth. “Something wasn’t wired up right inside me. We tried and tried, both got tested, and turned out it was me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it with every fibre of my being. She would have been a great mother, and an even better grandma.
“It is what is, flower,” she replied with a shrug. She calls everyone “flower.” It’s her thing. I kinda like it. “No sense being bound in the chains of things we can’t change.”
“Didn’t you try IVF or whatever? Or adoption?”
She shook her head. “IVF treatment was relatively new at the time and has only in the last few years been made available on the NHS. It was far too expensive for us, so we tried adoption, but we got so disheartened by the miles of red tape and hoops we had to jump through, Bill and I finally gave up. We were disappointed late in the process on three occasions, and those three times took up a total of five years of our life in agonised waiting and stress. After the third, we just couldn’t face starting the process all over again.”
I don’t know why, but this made me really fucking angry. Not at her, Freya, just to clear that up, but the system. It took all of two minutes for the police and social services to come and drag my six-year old self away, but shit, if I’d been adopted by someone like Norah and her husband, I’d have been in seventh heaven. How is it that obviously good people can’t give a single child a loving home, but the system can stack us all up in group homes where we’re left to go near feral, or bounce from foster home to foster home, where some of those people are doing it just for the money?
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of truly amazing people fostering kids who have hearts of gold, that genuinely care for the kids that pass through their lives, as they try to pick them up from the floor and teach them self-reliance, strength, self-respect, and good old honest values.
But there are those who use it as an income stream, and they were the ones I always found myself thrust into before inevitably bouncing back to group homes. Some of those people were fucking Victorian in their methods. Children should be seen and not heard, speak only when spoken to, and all that dated bullshit. Hell, I even got a slap or two on occasion as I’m not exactly famed for my patient restraint. My smart mouth was reddened by many an open-handed slap in my time. They were always clever with it though, and never did anything that would leave a real mark. If you complained, you were just the “problem child” with a history of lies, deceit and incivility.
That Norah and Bill couldn’t get a child of their own seemed criminal, and a complete failure of not just two amazing, loving people who just wanted a child to care for, but a failure of that kid who could have had a home, and a chance at a new, normal life.
“We just got on with our lives,” continued Norah. “We had a good life together, me and my Bill. Strong and stable, working for each other all the time, and we always talked. That’s the key to any real relationship, flower; communication.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I shrugged.
“That’s just because you haven’t met the right man yet.” She gave me a wink. “If it’s men you’re into.”
I laughed. “It is, though I think my problem is I keep finding boys, not men.”
“They exist, flower. You just to have to pan through the dirt to find the gold.”
“Unless it’s fool’s gold,” I snorted.
I hate that I sounded bitter, thinking back on it. I’ve said earlier on that I never really got the “love” thing, except when I was viewing it through a window, an observer on the outside looking in. Honestly, it’s never really bothered me, but with the world mostly dead or undead, I realise the pool I can choose from has vastly decreased. There aren’t that many fish left in the proverbial sea these days.
“Well,” said Norah, “let me give you these two pieces of advice when that opportunity does come along, in how to judge its worth. Firstly, your relationship should be a sanctuary, not a battlefield. Whenever you find yourselves faced with adversity, you should remember one simple
