“What?”
“Downplaying this. Downplaying yourself.” She sighed. “I wish you’d give yourself more credit.”
I sniffed. “Can’t help it. It’s my terribly British nature to beat myself up.”
“Yes well, bloody stop it. You’re good at this. I read your blog thingy, and it was good. You’re good. This could be something, Ky. What’s holding you back from doing it? It’s not like you’ve got much else going on at the moment,” she said pointedly.
“Ouch.”
Mum shrugged. “Am I wrong?”
She wasn’t. Most days I had to motivate myself to change out of my pyjamas. In the silence that followed, I considered her question. What was holding me back? After all, if I turned in a blo- no, an article, the worst that could happen was that it would be rejected and I wouldn’t be paid. The terms the editor – James – had laid out in our brief video call had had made it clear that I would not be employed by The Loop. I would be strictly freelance, getting paid per article, providing it met their standards and the brief they set.
I thought for a moment. “I think it’s the pressure of the audience. All the people who might read it and hate it. Think I’m a total idiot.”
“What about all the people who might enjoy it?” Mum said, tipping her head to the side. “It seems to me that folk often avoid doing something because they think of all the potential, negative outcomes. They don’t always consider the good that could come out of it.”
I grunted, not an answer, and we lapsed into silence for a while.
“When did you get to be so wise?” I asked, watching as Dad carefully tied up a particularly floppy rose stalk.
“Born that way, love.” Her lips quirked at the side. She went silent for so long, I thought she was done talking. But then she said something I couldn’t have expected.
“When I fell pregnant with you, the first thing anyone said about it – the very first thing, not “congratulations” or “how are you?” – was some gumph about how this would be the worst decision for me. How getting pregnant was a bad thing.”
I was silent, stunned into speechlessness so solid it was like I’d forgotten how to form words. So, I just listened. I could count onone hand the amount of times Mum had talked about that period in her life.
“No one ever stopped to tell me about the joy I’d have raising you. How watching you grow would be the best thing in the world. They only ever talked about my life changing, like it was a bad thing. I was young – your age – and…” She swallowed hard. “Alone. My whole life did change. But, then there was you, and it was just… better. Life was better because I chose you over the life I’d had before. I could have chosen to carry on as I was, but my life still would have been changed because taking something away doesn’t erase the fact that it happened. It wouldn’t have reset me to where I was before. I just would have been a different person in the same place.”
Mum reached over to grab my hand, squeezing it tightly.
“You can’t stay static, love. The world moves on, you have to move with it.”
She gave my hand one last squeeze before letting go, and we both turned back to watch my dad pottering around, looking for errant bits to prune, or floppy stems to tie up.
I bit my lip, debating for a second, before asking something I’ve only asked aloud in my head.
“What was his name?” It sounded like such a simple question, the nonchalant way it came out, like I was asking for the time.
Mum simply does not talk about that time in her life. I understood now that it must have been traumatic for her, and honestly my dad – the one currently swearing because he had tripped over the rake hiding in the tall grass – has been my ‘Dad’ for so much of my life that I rarely felt the need to think about the man who helped create me.
So, when Mum did answer, I wasn’t prepared. I certainly wasn’t prepared for the way I felt the urge to burst into tears.
“Ryo.”
I inhaled sharply, letting it settle around me.
Hearing the name of my biological father… I almost expected it to have some sort of profound meaning, but it was just a name.
It took me a moment to realise that the reason for my sudden burst of emotion was not because of the name, or the person it was attached to. It was for the woman sitting next to me who’d carried it with her for all these years.
She took a sip of her drink and said, “I reckon we’ll have more tomatoes this year than we’ll know what to do with.”
Together, we looked over to where Dad had now moved on to the tomato pots, and I saw she was right, and done with the conversation.
By mid afternoon I’d made my decision, because Mum was right. Moving forward didn’t change who you were, it made room for the person you could be, and… and I think I wanted to meet that person.
I sent an acceptance email to the editor. He responded promptly with documents of the terms of the freelance arrangement. It was brief, and the most important parts pertained to the pay, and exclusivity they would have to the articles I submitted. I was otherwise free to publish whatever I wanted on either my blog or other media groups – if I were ever in such a position to do so.
