Sunday Best

I was running late for a coffee date with Sister Juliette and was just about the leave the apartment when there was a knock on the door. A woman I didn’t recognise was standing in the hallway. Hello how can I help, not speaking she handed me a note from Sister Juliette saying this woman is your Mother. 

The nuns running the orphanage said I was left on the steps in a cardboard box with clean clothes, a teddy bear, and a note. The note said that my mother wasn’t able to keep me and she wanted me to have a life she knew she wouldn’t be able to give me. 

I don’t remember much about life in the orphanage ‘till I was about five and then all days followed the same pattern. Prayers, breakfast, school, prayers, lunch, school, prayers, play and bed. One of the memories I’ll never forget was on Sundays after service we would all put on our best clothes and wait in the large hall for them to arrive. By them I mean the couples looking to adopt they would come and inspect us. Apparently, this had been the way every Sunday had gone since I’d arrived. When we were older the couples would be allowed to take us out to get to know us if they were thinking we were the one. I was never taken out. Many would say cute child, lovely little girl but that was the most I ever got. This went on every Sunday ‘till I was twelve when the nuns said my chances of being adopted were slim and because rejection was harder to take when you got older, I no longer had to take part. 

Not being paraded on a Sunday was liberating. After service I was free to roam and roam I did as long as I stayed within two blocks. Do you know how exciting it is to roam as a twelve-year-old child? 

Schooling at the orphanage had followed the states curriculum and I had achieved the grades to attend colleague.  

Time passed quickly and before I knew it Sister Juliette started to ask me what I wanted to do when my time came to leave the orphanage. I had always known that when I got to eighteen, I would have to leave the orphanage and move into my own place. I love the orphanage and the nuns are my family and I had contemplated staying and taking my vows, but my love of freedom had grown, and I knew that I would never be a nun. 

My own place would be funded for six months by charitable donations and I would also receive a small amount of personal spending money. After then I would be on my own. It was a one-bed apartment in a refurbished townhouse that had been split into four apartments. I was shocked how hard I found it at first to be alone. I missed the structure of the orphanage day in fact the first month I would still pray and eat at the same times. Also, during the first month I went on six interviews set up by the orphanage. I was offered two of them which I’m told was good but of the ones offered neither of them struck me as something I wanted to make a career out of. I phoned Sister Juliette and thanked her but said I would look for something myself. 

The search wasn’t going well. I had about three weeks left before I had to start to find my rent and money to support myself. I still hadn’t really gotten any idea what I wanted to do. 

I said come in.

I wasn’t sure how this was going to go but she said let me explain as best I can, and I said sure why not. 

She had a one-night stand which resulted in me. Things weren’t good at home with her alcoholic parents in a trailer park, and she knew that the baby wouldn’t have the life she wanted for it. Strange how she said the baby and it when I was her child. Should she not be saying you. I let it pass and let her carry on. She hid the fact she was pregnant from her parents which she said wasn’t hard and gave birth at a local shelter where they didn’t ask questions. She left me at the orphanage as she had heard the nuns were kind. 

She didn’t go back home, she got on a bus and got off in a small town in Texas. She had taken what little money she had and with it found herself a place to stay. She found herself a job as a baker’s assistant. When the baker died, he left the business to her. She married and had two children. She had just sold the bakery to a chain for a large sum of money, and she wanted to find me to say she was sorry she couldn’t keep me and wanted to make up for it now. 

You know when you have a rush of information, and your brain just shuts down, it just can’t cope. No words, no thoughts, no matter how hard you try, so I asked her to leave. When she didn’t move, I said again please leave. She said she’d come back tomorrow. 

So, she wants to make it up to me. I’m assuming she wants to give me some money which to be honest would be a good thing but I’m not for sale. She just left me at the orphanage just on the hearsay that the nuns were kind. They could have been cruel and used me as slave labour, no joke you only have to read the papers about institutions using children. No, she just couldn’t come walking in and think all the years of not being picked hadn’t had an effect on me. No, just no. 

When my she came back the next day, I told her to go away. She came every day for a week and must have gotten the message and never came again. I got a job and managed to negotiate a reduction in rent for a few months to get myself together. Do I think of her, yes daily and maybe one day I’ll seek her out but for now I’ll get on with my life.