It was hours after I arrived that she died.
Mum carried me home in a hospital blanket,
a cocooned caterpillar in her arms,
barely clinging to life.
She opened all the Babygros we’d been given
and lay me in a new cot to sleep.
She watched me,
and cooed, amazed by her achievement.
I slept.
Soundly.
But when my eyes opened,
Mum was gone.
And she never returned,
though I squealed like a
banshee.
She was in an ambulance,
or back on a hospital ward,
doctors doing their best to stop her
disappearing.
Dad sent in a neighbour to stem the crying.
But when he returned from St Bart’s the next day,
ashen and alone,
a wife down, a newborn heavier,
he chose to place every sorrow
in his heart on my head
and looked at me thinking:
You did this …
Dad never realised that hers was the skin I needed,
the smell and the taste.
Dad never realised that I loved my mother
from the
inside out,
before I’d ever known her face,
and that while he might find another wife,
I would never
ever
get another mother.