Gidday, Subbers 
Here is a video reading of the chapter below, because you know I love to read! Thank you so much, you are there, motivating me along with seeing this novel done. If you haven’t yet guessed – it’s my near year’s resolution to see this telling told!! Can you BELIEVE it: I actually have a goal!!! (you can’t imagine how long it has been since I felt any sense of goal in life).
I decided to give Gaden a call – to give a man a chance. I could not allow the strike of men previous against my heart, to bleed forever. If Tom found me unreachable yet I was in my prime, a woman, I needed to change. If I was unreachable now and continued in my ways a little girl hiding, I would be a walking ghost by the time I was 40, through which people passed, unseeing; through which my years of life streamed but the experiences I did not grasp.
He was receptive. It had been a while since he slipped that note under my door after spying my address, but Gaden had not followed up or hassled me, and I respected that. That he could accept when a woman is not interested, boded well.
“I can’t come then,” I told Gaden over the phone. “I have Daniel.”
“Well, bring him. I’d love to meet your son.”
Gaden’s comment was both encouraging and unnerving. Dad had ingrained in me that men are not interested in children, much less the child of “a single mother”, he would slur. So did Gaden have an agenda? Was he a paedophile, or violence personified and looking for a mother and child to suffer him, or so desperate for sex he would tolerate a child’s company?
“I’ll have my daughter that day anyhow,” he went on. “So you two can meet her too.”
I had to stop thinking. I had to leap from my perceived safety in stagnancy to the next stepping stone, for progress.
“OK,” I replied, warily. “We’ll come.”
~/
The idea of amending my Response to Chris’ application a second time would not leave me. It seemed that life was giving me an opportunity (for why another court date when Orders had been made?) to break from Chris in Perth and brave my dysfunctional family over east, on the pretense we would be stepping into a loving family unit. To do that, I needed a sound case why this should be allowed. “Allowed”. How does that happen, in life?
I was estranged from my father. My eldest sister had ex-communicated herself and would change her surname by deed poll, she so loathed connection to our lineage – not seeing that name is but name while blood remains – and then spend years looking us up on the internet, for whatever it might tell her, and gleaning what she could from connections on the grapevine; my schizophrenic sister was so needy, I felt her drain 4,000 kilometres away; and my sister Wendy was chalk to my cheese. We had not a close relationship at all. Going to Melbourne was not an answer, I knew in my heart. Yet, if I made that sacrifice, left Perth’s beaches, my independence, and returned to where I was raised – if I had a positive attitude, just maybe it would serve Daniel’s life for the better.
It would be a charade. However, if I could make the charade believable to the Magistrate, we could be freed from Chris and I could endeavor a good life for Daniel – no more beating by stick, fearing Tracy in the dark for reasons I still did not know, no more sadness on return from Chris, or “knees hurt“. And maybe I could re-connect with my sisters and my father. Maybe life was inviting me, this choice.
To make the charade credible, I needed evidence. This would sadly be ideal, coming from the patriarch. Knowing my father took well to writing, I rang and asked could he please write a few words to the court, why moving to Melbourne would be good for Daniel, that a loving family unit (ha ha!) was awaiting our return, that from what he understood, the aggravations by Chris were detrimental to my already troubled mental health, and in turn detrimental to Daniel. The Magistrate and my father, patriarchs together, could come to accord about Daniel’s life with me, his direction and placement.
Really, I wanted to ask my father why he hated me so much – why he’d punished me in childhood more than my sisters, why he damaged me so, why he left me in states of mental disarray that saw me wagging school, squatting between parked cars for hours, begging the guts to jump out and kill myself, why he destroyed my self esteem, said I looked “Just like yer mother” with contempt, bludgeoned me until I could only manage to crawl from his domain late teens – but I said not one word of that. On breaking my silence with him, I only asked would he please write a letter. And to my surprise, he said he would.
Copyright
Noeleen&Daniel 50/50
