It happened while we were searching for treats.
Standing at the end of an aisle, I was looking at those helpful signs the supermarkets put up as a guide to locate products and there was the one I was looking for (‘confectionery’), when a girl skipped up to us, accompanied by her older sister. Keira is friendly from ‘around these parts’ (to use the phrase) with the younger sister. They exchanged their hellos, and almost immediately the older sister pounced.
“You don’t pronounce my sister’s name like that,” she said harshly, before saying it correctly, as an example. Keira has always had trouble pronouncing this particular name, and she usually gets it right, however on this occasion, she’d got it wrong. And was it me, but were her cheeks reddening?
I thought to myself, “Why, what a rude little…”
And then I thought, “Well, maybe I’m overreacting.”
Or maybe I wasn’t, for I then turned a few degrees to my left and I saw a woman attendant, stacking easter eggs onto the shelves, had stopped and was watching the girls and me, listening. I didn’t say anything, let the girls chatter for a moment more, and then we parted. I bought chocolate for us all. I needed a little bolstering after that.
***
I have no idea if Keira thinks of what happened. It happened several days ago. I also have no idea why it’s stuck in my head, why in quiet moments, when I’m in the car or lying in bed, it’s snuck up on me and made me want to cry.
***
Yesterday, we went down to the pool for a swim; which is to say they went swimming and I took a book to read. The glass doors had been opened to let the cool breeze inside, and I went outside to escape the chlorine. I sat cross-legged on a towel and with the combination of the clear blue sky and the breeze, it was almost as if it were April 28th 2004 again, and I could’ve been sitting on the strip of meridian grass next to the tram lines on Victoria Street, Fitzroy, with my head bent low, terrified because my labour was about to be induced. I wasn’t in labour then (nay, as it turns out, I was never to spend a single second of my labours outside a hospital), but yesterday, as I sometimes do, I felt a phantom stretching of the cervix; that heat and sting both at the same time, that stretches around until it becomes a band of agony. I am too easily whisked, I’ve decided, back into memory. And this memory bank serves itself, not me. So when I think about an event, an event I may or may not be exaggerating (though not for effect, please note), as you’ve just seen, I can easily get pulled into a segue of trams and labour stories.
I daresay it is a convenience, a cloak I pull around myself, these tales of birthing and babies, the questionable exchange, are all my way of saying, roundaboutly, that school is starting next week. I suppose I’m wondering if this is her last week of being solely bound to, and protected by, me and Adam as parents. As of next week, there will be hours upon hours where she will be fighting her own battles at school, and although all the education experts are telling me to let kids develop resilience (embrace it! They need no coddling!) part of me still can’t believe we’ve made it this far and how on earth I’ll be able to let her go.
