Esmee : This baby

This baby

I did not skip breakfast that morning and neither had I wanted to. I didn’t even think about the calorie content that much as I chewed my way through the meal. It was a welcome break from what it had been over the last few days of meal time torture. It would come back of course. It always came back after a while. No matter how much you tried to block them out from your head or told yourself that you were crazy for having the bad thoughts. The ones that told you, you were fat when you were thin or that eating meant losing some stupid control over yourself that you never really had in the first place. You could never really honestly and truly make them go away completely. Even steam could get through waterproof seals and that’s what the thoughts were. Evasive and clever, just shadows mist and steam that came to drive you down, however any time off from them, the little victories over them were good things to be noted down.

Later that morning I headed into town. Emmet had offered to go in with me but I wanted to be alone somehow. I had had a good breakfast but before that with the trigger of my jeans not fitting I had fallen to a place where I had not been to for a while, a place where I did not want to go again. It was the place where the steam and shadows that sometimes got through the gaps solidified and turned into ghosts and demons to take you away. It wasn’t really some necessary brooding that I wanted to take part in. It was just thinking and besides I wanted to shop, and Emmet wasn’t a fan of the whole shopping thing. He thought all his new shits and jeans magically appeared in his wardrobe by the cloths fairy.

The town centre was quiet to my delight and my first stop was mothercare for some much needed new maternity clothes.  I had eventually braved going into our storage type room to sieve though some of the spare cloths that we kept up there in vac bags. We probably had more cloths then most cloths shops kept back for the foster children. In fairness most came with a bag packed but the emergency’s sometimes didn’t, arriving beaten and broken on our door step in cloths that were either vastly inappropriate, including one thirteen year old that had turned up in a leather skirt  fish net tights and tank top that advertised that she was in fact the queen bitch. She had come straight from the streets after the police had picked her up prostituting herself, her father was her pimp and her mother didn’t care. Other times the cloths were just worn, dirty or the wrong size completely. After a few times of being caught out we had managed to get an appropriate set of cloths in nearly every size and that included an adult size 14 that thankfully still fitted me well for the time being so decided to wear them into town

After handing just over four hundred pounds to the cashier for some much needed new maternity gear that included Jeans tops and a pair of stretchy dungarees that would come in handy when I was a lot bigger and a cheeky packet of first size sleepers and vest that I fell in love with I started to wonder around the town centre aimlessly, dragging the bag of cloths around with me and wishing with every step that I took I had not bought the baby cloths. When in the heat of mothercares surrounded by the world that was made for babies it was very easy to believe that it was all rosy, that everything would be clear and that everything would be OK. It did not threaten miscarriage or still birth in moterhcare and  It certainly did not mattered that the hour before - though he regretted it - my husband had asked me to abort the baby I was now dressing in “mummy and daddy loves me” inscribed vests.  The truth is I would not abort the child and Emmet would not ask me to do so again but in the real world lost somewhere amongst the grey pavements and even greyer tall buildings that towered over everything and casted shadows inside my head once again babies could get harmed and could die while inside their mothers even after the golden 12 week mark. There was always a way for the pieces of something to fall through the cracks even if you had all the super glue and sticky tape in the world to keep them together.

Without knowing how I really got there or weather I had actually bumped into anyone or anything from under my obsessive thinking on the way I found myself in boots the pharmacy and smiling at a toddler about the age of Mia who was talking to a doll who to the toddlers utter surprise was talking back at her. The toddler stamped her  miss behaving feet and squeaked with glee which amused her once again heavily pregnant mother and farther no end not to mention me.

Joy was out there and so was happiness, sometimes it swelled inside you and made it almost as hard to breath as pain did and I was lucky enough to at times have felt it to have lived and breathed right inside the glorious magical feelings that came from joy. However with all happiness there was pain and so often it slid silently beside happiness like it had done today for as I pulled my eyes away from the toddler and scanned the rest of the shop I saw another child. This one was admittedly older, probably a good thirteen to fourteen years on the toddler who stamped her feet in uncontainable glee but to my 30 year old self still practically a baby, however she had not found a toy to play with. She was not looking at the make up or body sprays or even hovering over the hair dyes to indulge in that teenage right of passage that would inevitably end in disaster and a trip to the hair dresser. This baby stood in front of the display of bye one get one free painkillers with despite wide eyes and shaking hands. This baby had a poorly applied blood soiled bandage peeking out the ends of her long sleeves and a blood stain appearing on the sleeve of the opposite arm This baby did not have a doll in her hands that she was not willing to give up for no one; A bottle of the cheapest spirit money could buy and a bag from another pharmacy was her prize to keep. This baby though still had clearly given in.