SHADOWS

I’m running through the park, I can taste blood and I think I’m going to have a stroke.  I’ve been going for ninety seconds and I’ve got to make it to three minutes.  My spleen is lying in a hedge somewhere beside the bowling green where I coughed it up during the first thirty seconds and I’m starting to doubt the link between exercise and happiness.  I am miserable, aching and leaking!  

In the moment of pain and gasping for breath like a misguided goldfish that made a bid for freedom over the boundaries of its bowl only to find itself flapping helplessly on a carpet, I think, just for a moment, I had forgotten everything.  I forgot I was sad, I forgot I was in the middle of a legal battlefield, I forgot I had to be home by 3 pm to endure the incessant ramblings of a twenty-something social worker with no kids of her own and confused as to which is her arse and which is her elbow… I forgot it all!  The physical pain was maybe worth it after all.  Like the same eraser that has rubbed me out of the lives of my children, the agony of dragging my anything but athletic self out for a run is rubbing everything else out too… Other than the awareness that everything is starting to go black and I need to sit down.

Three minutes!  I slow down for a “recovery walk”.  When I say “slow down” I don’t have much speed to reduce, my arms were going faster than my legs in an attempt to pull me up the slope, so I just flop them down to my sides and nurse a stitch under my rib cage (or possibly a heart attack).   Just as I feel my heart rate return from its trip to the danger zone, it leaps straight back up into my throat.  There they are! My girls.  Playing on the roundabout, laughing, beautiful long hair catching glimpses of the sun and my feet have stopped moving, I am paralysed with a thousand thoughts and emotions.  

Can you imagine seeing your own children across a busy park on a spring day and the first feeling you experience is terror?  Where your children go, so does their prison officer, dangling the keys to their cell off his hip (figuratively speaking.  I do love a good metaphor).  The bully who took your children from your life, who will stop at nothing to destroy you, your reputation, your family, your relationships.  Lies that trip off his tongue effortlessly, without guilt or conscience.  Can you imagine being afraid to run over to your own children, throw your arms around them and tell them you love them?  Beg them to come home?

I stood and watched for what felt like an eternity, then after a while, the littlest girl turns around and looks in my direction.  I blink and release the tears that have been blurring my vision sending them rolling down my cheeks.  It’s not them.  Of course, it’s not them.  They’ll be grown a full year while hidden from my sight.  These little girls just resemble my girls at a time when I saw them last.  My girls will be grown a full year more now and I’m now caught in a tearful panic that if I were to see them across the park one of these days, I might not recognise them.  That’s the third time I’ve seen their shadows this week and like phantoms, they’ve disappeared; transformed back into who they were all along.  Strangers.  Another Mummies babies.

“Ok…” the voice calls through my headphones… “get ready for your last three-minute run… 3… 2… 1… GO!”  I take a detour from the park and run my last three minutes home.  I’m not in the mood anymore and these Tena ladies aren’t all they’re cracked up to be!