"There were times when we had to go without puddings to pay John's uniform bills, and always I did the facings myself with a cloth-ball to save getting new ones. I would have polished his sword, too, if I had been allowed; I adored his sword" (Duncan 55).
So beings one of my favourite stories by Sara Jeannette Duncan and one I've been up reading since the early morning. This story of a mother's strangled anguish in relation to the child she gave up at 5-weeks and betrayed at 21 haunts me. I can't help feel that it reflects my own situation and my own immediate grief in relation to the proposal that my lawyer forwarded to my daughter's father yesterday.
What have I done? Will I live with the kind of regrets that make Mrs. Farnham bridle with resentment and hide her mortification with pretty phrases? Will the distance she feels from her pretty and conventional daughter, who she suggests is purblind, be one that I've inadvertently introduced by allowing my spirited girl to be partially raised by a woman too cowed by my ex to resist his narcissism? Have I been negligent in allowing my (relative) poverty to prevent me from a whole-hearted fight on my daughter's behalf?
I know my good friend HD in Vancouver will disapprove of my actions.
"You have to be a pioneer and fight this," she said on the phone. But I haven't much fight left in me.
. . . my daughter calls . . . more later.
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