Baby

In her earliest memories, badness swarmed. It stung like the bees that continually plagued her.

“Bees and yellow jackets, bumbled and hornet, it makes no difference to me!” she cried.

Her mother cautioned her on what a lack of education can get one in life, but the girl had education of a sort that her mother either denied or was unable to fathom.

To her, they really were all the same! The flew, they buzzed, they stang; sometimes they crept up on her, over long distances of blankets or car seats, for the sheer pleasure of sinking their little insectile swords into her flesh. She would try to move out of the way, but then she would be told to stop fidgeting and a slap would be administered to make sure she was listening.

“Don’t be ridiculous!” various persons with legs taller than her entire being would bark, gruffly. “They won’t bother you, if you don’t bother them.”

That was their answer to her explanation of why she cried, how she kept being chased by insects and attacked. Oh but her flesh was in misery, for where it was not stung or slapped, be sure that it was full of welts from the dreaded mosquito!

That was not all the badness, though surely it would have been enough. For the girl remembered other things. She wished she didn’t, but she did.

Only, there was one thing remembered that gave her hope. It was her mother’s voice demanding of the man standing over her what he intended to tell her father. Sometimes she told herself it was a dream, only; or a memory, maybe, but one belonging to someone else. Doesn’t every unhappy child wish to find they had been adopted, one way or another?

If they don’t have parents, they wish their real ones would return to claim them and so adopt them from the confines of Orphanage or Foster Family. Or, they wish for someone to come and claim them that would act as a real parent ought, at least. So it is the same with unhappy children, more or less, whether they have a full family or none at all.

She was unhappy.

For hours, she would sit under the table, trying to hide from the stinging insects, the biting and scratching cats, the barking and slobbering dogs, the slapping adults, the punching brother, the thoughtless feet of visitors that sometimes kicked her too and fro and made her slip in their slushy wake.

“What is she doing under there?” someone tall would ask another someone tall.

“Probably feeling sorry for herself as usual.” would be the reply. Then to her, they would call out “Oh baby! Oh baby! Do you feel unloved? Do you want to be loved?”

She wouldn’t answer; she knew better, by now. She knew of the slaps that might occur if she said yes, if she came close enough to hug. She knew of the laughter, which hurt worse than the slaps, as the various tall persons would jeer as she broke down and cried, screaming to the world at large “I just want to be loved. Why don’t you love me?”

She no longer cared to here the responses to that question. None of them were kind, none of them gave her hope of a brighter future. None of them told her where she belonged; only where she did not.

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Tags:

girl, mother, children, baby, female, chaos, child, sadness, hope, grief, insects, childhood, angela, father, bees, sting, abandonment, ordem and ordine