Dear Diary,
Ive always felt a quiet shame about my mum. At school the other lads would snicker, calling her an old lady, because all our friends have parents who look half our age. Society seems to expect children to be born to young couplesnot just for biologys sake, but because its the norm we all tacitly enforce.
Im only seventeen, while Margaret is already sixtyfive. My peers never miss a chance to poke fun at the fact that my mother looks like a doyenne. Even when we were at secondary school, the chaperones arrived to collect the younger children, and following me came my granny, who shuffled along with a noticeable limp. I could feel my cheeks burning with embarrassment, and the whole scene left a sour taste in my mouth.
There were nights I bolted from home, disappearing for weeks at a stretch. My sister, Ethel, kept pleading with me to pull myself together, to stop acting out. I told myself shed hurt me beyond repair, that her words were a betrayal.
Then, one bleak afternoon, I came back to find the flat empty. The neighbour, Mrs. Patel from next door, told me that Ethel had suffered a heart attack and was now in St. Thomas Hospital. She blamed everything on me, insisting I must have caused it, even though I hadnt done anything to her.
A few weeks later, on a frosty morning, I spotted a tiny bundle wrapped in a discarded blanket in the bin outside the council estate. I took the child in, raised him as my own son. While Margaret had let the baby be left to die in that rubbish heap, Ethel devoted her entire life to that child, which is why she seemed so old when I was still a teenager.
When the truth finally hit me, shame flooded my heart. I ran to the hospital, tears ripping down my face, fell to my knees at Ethels bedside, pressed my lips to her trembling hands and begged for forgiveness. She looked at me, eyes softening, and forgave me instantlyafter all, I was her brother.
Now I sit here, trying to make sense of the tangled web of guilt, love, and the judgments of a world that still thinks a mothers age should match the youth of her children. Its a lot to carry, but perhaps understanding it will finally lift the weight from my shoulders.
