POV: Lonely at 8 years old

It was just me and my mum. And I liked that just fine. Until I didn’t.

My mum hated it when I let our dog, Scruffy, sleep in my bed. It would always stir up my asthma and make me sick. So here she was delivering her well-rehearsed ‘dog in bed’ lecture while I rolled my eyes. She yelled some more, and I yelled back. When she had nothing further to yell at me about, she took our dog with her and slammed my bedroom door on her way out. It was her way of having the last say.

The next morning we were both still angry, so we got ready for the day in silence. I didn’t give her our customary kiss when she dropped me off at school and instead I sulked out of the car, slamming the door behind me. I knew how this worked. We would be angry in the morning but when she picked me up after school we would pretend like nothing had happened and sing along to the radio on the way home. We didn’t apologise in my family; it was almost criminal to say the words ‘I’m sorry’. We were too prideful for that. As far as we were concerned, we were never wrong anyway, so there was no need.

But today was different.

When Aunt Poppy picked me up at school I knew something was wrong. She said we had to go to the hospital and that everything was going to be ok. Adults always say that when things are anything but ok. So I sat quietly in the car, preparing for the worst. She was lying to me, but then again adults always lied to kids, thinking we were too stupid to understand what was really going on. We were going to the hospital, so I knew that someone was dying. Death was the only reason our family had ever been to the hospital, so I knew what to expect.

Dying was a weird concept to me. None of the adults liked to talk about it much. But from what I’d gathered it meant that the person was gone, that you would never see them again and for some reason this made people sad. Strange considering everyone would say that they were in ‘a better place,’ so then why were they crying? Death was always followed by something called a funeral, where people dressed in black and cried over a sleeping person who was supposedly dead. It’s pretty crazy to me but there was always food after, so I didn’t mind. I wonder who had died this time.

When we arrived at the hospital, I was led into a crowded room. All of my mum’s friends were there. They all had their serious adult face on. One by one they gave me a hug, like I was being passed down an assembly line. Normally I liked hugs, but these hugs felt weird, like something had been taken from me and they were trying to give it back.

“It’s your mum,” I heard someone say.

After that, it felt like I was on an aeroplane and my ears had popped, because everything was muffled. I focused in on the unconscious person lying on the hospital bed.

But that wasn’t mum. That was a stranger, she didn’t look anything like my mum at all.

These people were lying to me and that made me mad.

There were burns all over this person, like a marshmallow that you had shoved in a fireplace for too long. I heard the words “car crash” and “coma” and a whole lot of other things, but I was too focused on the charcoal looking person that everyone was telling me was my mum to pay attention to anything else.

That couldn’t be my mum. She was always strong and happy. This person looked like a sad, blown-out balloon, someone who would fly away in the wind.

But deep down, I knew it was her, I just knew. And as much as I wanted to pretend it was all a lie, I couldn’t.

In that moment I wished I had just said sorry this morning and kissed my mum goodbye. I didn’t want my last conversation with her to be an argument. Yeah we fought a lot, and she could be annoying, but she was my mum. I loved her.

There was talk of adoption and child services and a will. I didn’t know what any of those things meant, just that they were bad. But the most overwhelming feeling I felt in that moment was loneliness. If mum died that meant I would never see her again. That meant I would be alone. I had no other family, none that wanted me at least, just her. It was meant to be me and her against the world. If she was gone then I had no one. Our small family had never bothered me before, but now it was all I could think about. Without mum in the picture, I was all by myself.

It was too overwhelming for me to stay in the hospital room any longer, so I walked outside to the waiting room and sat down on a cold, plastic hospital chair. The type of chair you sit on when you’re waiting for a doctor to come and tell you that whoever you were waiting for had passed away. A chair of death.

It was like the room was in black and white, like someone had forgotten to colour in the picture in front of me. If I had a choice, I would bring my favourite watercolours and paint everything rainbow, maybe then I would feel ok again. Maybe then everything would stop looking black and white.

Maybe I was going colourblind, that’s a thing right?

The hospital air was cold on my skin, and I felt sick. I found myself focusing on a drawing hanging on the opposite wall. It was a family of three, it looked like it had been drawn by someone small, like me. It reminded me of all my drawings hanging around back home. Mum called me her Picasso. Apparently, he’s a famous artist. I wanted to be just like him when I grew up.

The three stick figures in the sketch had big happy smiles on them. ‘Thank you for saving my mummy’ was written underneath the picture. It was meant to make you feel happy and safe, like you could trust the doctors here. But it made me want to scream. I didn’t want to see a drawing of a happy family when my family was falling apart. I wanted to tear the drawing into pieces, and I love art.

Normally I wouldn’t even think things like this, but I didn’t feel normal today.

I felt an emptiness that scared me, it felt dark and all-consuming. I felt small and everything around me looked suffocatingly big, like even the chair I was sitting on was going to swallow me alive. I felt unsafe and scared. All I wanted was my mum to give me a hug and tell me that everything was going to be ok, even if it was a lie. But I didn’t want to go in and see her. She looked like a stranger and that scared me even more.

There was too much uncertainty floating around in my head. I liked knowing what was going to happen next, that’s why I liked drawing, the picture would be whatever I wanted it to be, there would be no surprises. But right now I didn’t know what was going to happen next and that was frightening.

And yet, I was also angry. At church, we learnt that God looks after good girls and boys. So why was he taking away my mum? I may have been naughty last night but I’m normally a good girl. I’m always on Santa’s nice list, I know that I’m a good person! So why was God taking away my mum, why was he leaving me alone? How could he do this to me?

There were so many feelings swirling around inside me that I felt like a packet of M & M’s, all muddled up inside. I didn’t know what to feel first.

Suddenly, I started to understand why adults cried when people died. It’s because they were scared and uncertain and angry. I didn’t want my mum to die. Who’s going to get rid of the spiders in my room when she’s gone? How was I supposed to go to high school without her? What about graduation? Or when I got married? Mum and I had acted out my fake wedding to Scruffy many times before but what happens when I have to do it for real? AND WHY DO I FEEL LIKE I CAN’T BREATHE?

I don’t know how to cook yet or drive or how to use the washing machine. I mean I was still afraid of the vacuum cleaner! She couldn’t die, I needed her.

It’s strange the things that were going through my head. My mum was dying, and I was worried about being afraid of the vacuum cleaner. I was concentrating on the littlest things because if I really thought about how I truly felt in this moment, I was worried that I might just die too.

The doctors told us that mum would have to be in hospital for a while. She hadn’t woken up yet and that was frightening. She had to stay in hospital till she was awake, and they didn’t know how long that would take. They said I was too small to stay overnight, that I’d have to go home. But I didn’t want to. I’d never been away from mum; I don’t know if I could spend a night without her. I didn’t want to leave her in the hospital. If I was near her then I could make sure she was still ok. If I left I was worried that she might just disappear.

I lay in bed that night, waiting patiently till the house quietened down. All of my mum’s friends decided to stay with me that night, our house was filled with grown men and women sleeping on couches, in guest bedrooms and on the floor. As if them being here would make me feel any better. I just wanted my mum to wake up and come home. I didn’t want our house to turn into a camping ground. They were acting like she was already dead and that annoyed me.

Aunt Poppy had asked me if I wanted to stay in the guest room with her, but I had said no. I wanted to sleep in my own bed. If I slept with Aunt Poppy it would mean that something was wrong, and I didn’t want something to be wrong. So I lay in bed all by myself, in denial.

At 11 pm I snuck out of my room and smuggled Scruffy inside. A stupid part of me hoped that if I let him sleep in my bed that my mum would come barging through my door like she always did. And even though I knew this wasn’t going to happen, I lay in bed with my eye on the door, waiting.