Shaba and Bella

I always wondered what it would be like. To have a little thing that i could walk around with, attached to my tummy with the fancy carrier things. A little thing that would come running to me because they thought the world of me and i would hug them and say the beautiful words that mothers find somewhere.

I do not wonder anymore. I have two of them now. Shaba and Bella. Shaba, because his daddy was young and hip then and Shabaranks was loud in our ears. Bella because i was the sensible one, it is short for Elizabeth. I was and still am a sucker for the romantic English books, Jane Austen's especially. I had planned to call the third child Catherine but she didn't make it past three moths in my womb. That was a long time ago...well two and a half years ago actually.

I watch Shaba and Bella together sometimes and i know i am a happier and better person because of them. I want to be everything i can for them. When they ask me now, at age 8 and 5, where their father is, i am torn. What do i say? The truth? or do i tell the good girl lie that people tell to "make it easier on the kids."

Shaba is an intelligent little thing, he reads me like those books with a predictable ending. He will smile at me when he knows i do not have the answer to the difficult life question Bella has asked and then he will distract her with a card game. They adore each other. That consoles me. They have one another when i need to hide and wail.

Do not get me wrong. My life is not terrible. I wail because it seems like the most natural thing to do when you are alone. Yes i am alone. I never knew my mother. She died hours after i was born. I was raised by my aunt, her sister, because my father did not know what to do with me and when he remarried, the new wife didn't want me. I never saw much of him. I saw him when i was 26 but we had no connection. He died shortly after and a year later, so did my aunt.

I do not have friends. Mostly because Gerald, thats my children's father, drove most of them away. He was a jealous man and never liked me having people i could talk to. People get tired of abuse eventually, however much they love you. I watched them apologise for leaving me and leave anyway. It didn't matter, i had Shaba and Bella. These two are my life.

Shaba is a lot like me. He is quiet and never fights. Bella however is her fathers child, she is loud and entitled. She demands attention and i know that we spoil her by constantly enabling her. She asked me the other day why she did not have a daddy. Shaba grabbed her hand and took her to the fridge to write her name with the new magnets. When she was done, she came back and asked again.

I argue with myself, even as i try to raise my voice and inquire whether her room is clean, to distract her.

I wonder if i should just tell her that her Daddy is in jail. I will have to explain that it is a place where people who have done a bad thing go for a period designed for them by the system. But i know she will ask what bad thing he did and i will have to tell her, that her father beat her mother until she miscarried her little sister, and then picked up a knife and stabbed her grand mother...my aunt who raised me. That is what killed my aunt, the stab wounds. The year after my father died.

It is a long story really. Shaba had seen it all but i think he blocked it all out of his memory. I remember screaming at him to run, but no, he wouldn't. He stayed screaming at Gerald and telling me there was blood everywhere. He is such a calm and happy child now. I envy him that. I wish i would forget but these memories are here. I wonder if it will all come back to him in future, i am torn. Part of me, would like to tell them but the selfish me wants them to have nothing to do with the man whose blood they carry.