Read Online The Mother by Yvvette Edwards - Free Book Online Page A

don’t think I am. The second Sunday after Ryan was taken was Mother’s Day, and I don’t know how I got through it, can hardly bear to think about the next. If it was possible to die of grief it would have happened that day. The worst part was trying to work out whether in addition to losing my son, I had lost my “mother” status, didn’t know whether I still qualified, was unable to satisfy myself or be satisfied by the responses from Lorna and Leah and the masses of people who visited to help me make it through that wretched day. In the end I looked it up in the dictionary, found the definition. It said that “mother” is the relationship of a woman to her child. I have three dictionaries at home and I looked it up in each of them. None of them explained whether that status was rescinded if there was no longer a child for such a woman to have a relationship with. So am I a mother? I don’t think I am, but it is too complicated to explain to every person I meet, too loaded and depressing. When people ask if I’m okay, it is exactly what they do not want me to elaborate on, another issue I cannot discuss, one more thing to swallow and hold down.
    It is ironic there is so much I can no longer talk about when inside I am filled with speeches. I want to get up and talk to those impatient mums, want them to know how fragile is the gift of children that has been given them, how easily and irrevocably they can be taken, how precious every moment is, every second and hour and day, the infinite joy in their possession already, the exact value of which can only be precisely measured in its dearth. I want to teach them to rejoice that they have no difficulty answering when someone asks as simple a question as “You’re the mother, aren’t you?” But of course, I don’t. I just watch them and sip my coffee and eat my cookie. And I listen to the laughter and occasional cries.
    From where I am sitting I can see the blocks of social housing where Tyson Manley’s mother lives, where he lived before he was in prison, really just a half-hour stroll from my home; a group of quick-build low-cost boxes, a Lego town occupying the ground between the entrance to the railway station and an imposing block of luxury apartments with floor-to-ceiling windows and huge balconies from where the view is no doubt spectacular, overlooking the park. There are places in the world I would never travel to, war zones where people live in daily fear for their lives, where families are all too familiar with violent death, the random bloody loss of those they love. They are the parts of the world I have never visited because I didn’t want to face that kind of danger, the risks were too high. Instead I lived here in the UK, bought a cozy house in a quiet street and satisfied myself for years that I was lucky for it, and all the while looked sympathetically at charity adverts or snippets on the news of those victims of warring and genocide, and felt sympathy, as if I with my safe life in this safe land were exempted from it, truly believed we were.
    The sun has gone behind the clouds, my hot coffee is now cold and the air chilly. I get up and begin to walk toward the estate. I don’t know why. Perhaps to see whether I enter something like a scene from a Hollywood action film, gangsters on the corners and armed police with loudspeakers shouting, “Put your weapons down!” It is nothing like that. It must be about one now and the estate is quiet, peaceful even. The homes are a bit worn, slightly dilapidated; the railings and doors and windows could be improved with a fresh lick of paint. There is some graffiti, but it is not excessive, play equipment that looks like it’s been in place for two decades, green areas gone brown. It’s not perfect, but I’ve seen worse. I work out which house the Manleys occupy and I walk past it slowly, just looking. Their address was in a document