While My Eyes Were Closed

by Linda Green

have failed in that duty of care, therefore you are a failed mother. How can you be anything else when it happened on your watch? While your eyes were closed, for goodness’ sake. That is when you start to shut down inside. One by one, your vital organs cease to function. It is hard to know how you carry on breathing, how the blood pumps around your body, because you are certainly not doing it willingly. You wish that somebody would be kind enough to put you out of your misery. Until you realise that this is the price you must pay – to suffer in the way that your child has. You deserve nothing less for letting them down so badly. And so you live your non-existent life. And every

like it. But sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind when you are a mother. And the sooner this is done, the sooner the child can start her new life. Can learn to put the past behind her. I go to the bathroom cabinet and take the hairdressing scissors from the top shelf. I haven’t used them for a long time. Matthew got to the age, as all boys do, when he no longer wanted his mother to cut his hair. He went to a barber in the town centre one Saturday without me knowing. I cried when I saw what they’d done. It was too severe, it didn’t suit him. I think even he realised that, although of course he didn’t acknowledge it at the time. But he did let it grow back longer, and when he went to have it cut again he went somewhere different and they were kinder there, gentler. They seemed to understand

Uijj