A New Start Series Boxed Set by Charlene Carr

Author:Charlene Carr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: suicide, adoption, endometriosis, infertility, women, friendships, strong female lead, self-realization in women, life-change events
Publisher: Coastal Lines
Published: 2016-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

“Oh.” My mother, sitting across from me in this little pub in a part of the world I didn’t know existed just weeks ago, bites her lip and it’s like looking in a mirror. “Why did I give you up? I was young.” She looks young as she says the words. I can almost see the twenty-year-old she would have been, deciding to let me go. “I was alone. I didn’t want to give you up.”

Words. Just words. “Did someone force you?”

“No, no. It wasn’t like that.” Her back is rigid, her body posture expressing someone who is self-assured, in control, and yet it seems like inwardly she has collapsed. I wait for her to go on. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Keep your child? Not throw her away?”

“I didn’t.” She stops.

It doesn’t matter the scenario, whether she had something arranged. She still got rid of me. I stare at her, waiting.

“Did you have a bad life? The family … were they?”

“I didn’t go with the family you picked.”

Now her body follows that inner collapse I had sensed. She slumps in her chair, her arms slack at her sides. “What?”

I explain to her the information I recently learned myself, tell her about my years in and out of doctor’s offices and hospitals, the group home, the foster homes, the fear, the confusion, the wondering where my mommy was and why didn’t she want me. She doesn’t interrupt. She sits, seeming to absorb the information. I start angry, my words clipped and fast, but as I continue they slow, the bite to my voice lessens. “So no,” I finish, “I didn’t have a bad life or a bad family. They were good people. But they weren’t my family. They weren’t you.”

“Were good—?”

“Are. They are good people.”

She rubs her hands along her upper arms. “I’ve wondered every day. I’ve hoped you were okay. I’ve hoped you were happy.”

I consider going into the years of teenage angst; the years of always trying to please, scared if I wasn’t perfect people wouldn’t want me; the years of lying to my closest friends. But what’s the point? “I’ve had good times and bad times.” The fight drains out of me. “I’m not unhappy.”

She nods and averts her gaze. Her eyes look distant, empty.

“Are you happy?”

She draws her gaze back to me. “Same.”

“Okay.” The waiter returns with our food. I stare at it, amazed I’m expected to eat at a time like this.

She picks up her fork then sets it back down. “I’ll try to explain. Do you want to know? Stop me if …” I keep silent. “I was seventeen when I got pregnant. It was terrifying. The father, he wasn’t, he … it was inappropriate.” She looks away. “That’s an understatement. He was one of my father’s work associates. A man with a wife and three children of his own. The oldest was in my class. My mother had died and I was going through a hard time … it just happened.” She looks to her plate, pushes her scrambled eggs back and forth.

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