Bar C Publishing and Distribution.

I was at my local grocery store the other week, doing a quick shop for milk and cookies; you know the real necessities of life. As I was heading to check out. I walked towards the, no more items than this # isle. When a ten or eleven year old boy with dark hair and equally dark eyes suddenly stopped in front of me and sat on the floor at my feet.

“Mum, Mum.” He said. “Come to this line, there’s no one here.”

He said all this while looking at me. I could do nothing but smile down at him while thinking. What are you doing sitting on that filthy floor? Only to have the question in my mind answered when the boy re-tied his loose shoe lace.

I walked past the boy to the cashier who was now waiting for me. Her immediate remark was.

“I bet you hear that all day long.”

She had mistaken me for the boy’s mother. I turned and looked behind me as the boy got off the floor and went to stand beside a lady who could only be his Mum, who had apparently been standing right behind me, but in a different isle.

“No.” I said. “I don’t hear that all day long. But it would have been okay if I had.” The cashier was a little perplexed.

For me the memory is stamped upon my emotionally scarred heart.

For a second that boy could have been my son, for a second I could have been his mother. He wasn’t quite as old as Matthew would have been had he lived, but he was close enough for me to imagine.

To have that chance happening acknowledged by a person with no knowledge of me or my history somehow made the impossible again possible.

While having a biological child is no longer an option for me, it doesn’t mean I cannot be a mother again. I just have to find my way. I now know this is possible as I have already been recognized as a mother, even if it was a mistake. Mistakes are not always what at first they may seem; some mistakes are life lessons in disguise.

For me this is one lesson that left me with a feeling I will treasure, because for just one second I was…

© Deborah Collins aka Emily Richardson.

Remember hope. To have hope means finding something to believe in when there is no reason left to believe in anything. Never ever give up on hope.

If I help only one then it is enough.