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Nikki's Intro - May 1996 
Most women get nine months of pregnancy to prepare to become a mother. I only got five days. I was at my desk in the office on Monday the 13th of May 1996 when my boyfriend Roger called. He said that his ex-wife Sam had checked out of rehab and disappeared and his six-year-old son Ben was coming to live with us. On Saturday the 18th, we collected Ben and my life changed irrevocably and forever. I am quite fond of saying that I only got five days notice instead of nine months. It is what I say to try to get people to understand what it is like to be twenty-two and become up an instant mother to another woman's child. Nobody ever gets it. I don't think they ever will.
I didn't particularly want children. I have only one childhood memory of acting out weddings and I played the groom. Elaborate fantasies of fairy-tale nuptials and babies were not for me; I was a career girl. By my thirtieth birthday, I wanted a flat in London and access to a helipad, not a husband and 2.4 children in a house in the suburbs. Children were not part of my life plan; they were a vague concept at best. I knew theoretically that I may want to have them in the future - the biological clock ticks for most of us - but I was twenty-two and strictly not the maternal type. Of course, I knew that Roger had a son. Shortly after meeting Roger eighteen months earlier I had met Ben and had spent regular time with him. I had also known for six months that his Mum Sam had serious problems and we had found out a week before Roger rang me that she was using drugs, but I never imagined for one moment that Ben would end up living with his Dad and me. Six months before Ben moved in, I discussed my concerns about him with my mother - my only barometer of what was normal behaviour for children. I mused, "Children aren't supposed to lose weight, are they? They are supposed to grow bigger and get heavier. I'm worried that Ben has lost a few pounds. Sam has anorexia; he's probably learning how to not eat from her." My Mum replied, "I don't know why you worry so much, it's not like he's ever going to live with you." I agreed. Dads rarely have a chance at custody; a solicitor had recently told Roger as much. Ben moving in was Roger's dream come true and I was swept along with him and did not honestly think about what becoming Ben's replacement mother would mean for me. If I had known of the drama that lay ahead, would I have stayed? Probably; anyone with any common sense would have immediately got out of there but I have always had a predilection for taking on responsibility that wasn't my own. I was the child who was 'grown-up for her age', an over-achiever that appeared confident but secretly wanted everyone to like her; a regular glutton for punishment. Picking Ben up that weekend was like any normal visit other than we loaded the car with bin bags full of his smoky-smelling clothes. Sam's mother Pam had been taking care of Ben and she hugged him for longer than usual before we got in the car and drove to Roger's Mum Rae's house where we often spent the weekends. The following day Roger and I left Ben with his Granny Rae and drove to Sam's cottage to get the rest of Ben's belongings. The cottage was cold and quiet; Sam's Prozac left untouched on her dressing table, an abandoned skirt in the spare room and Ben's meagre collection of toys the only reminders of the lives recently lived there. Prior to Sam's disappearance we had not been allowed to see or know the location of the cottage. We had to track it down based on a few clues that Sam had inadvertently given and we had eventually it found by spotting Ben's clothes hanging on the line in the garden. Two weeks prior to that fateful phone call, we hadn't known where Ben was living nor had we seen him for two months. Suddenly Sam has vanished so completely even her own mother doesn't know where she is and we've got the key to the secret cottage to go and collect Ben's possessions for his new life with us. The cottage had roses growing up the white walls outside, airy rooms, an open fireplace, wooden beams and a cottage garden. I did not understand how Sam had become so unhappy there. Exactly what was she playing at disappearing without a thought for her own child? Later that day Roger and I headed down the M40 as we so often did on a Sunday afternoon, only this time Ben was coming home with us. None of us had taken in the reality of what was happening; we behaved as if on a family day out. We told Ben that his mother was in hospital and trying to get better, which he readily accepted. The first night was easy; no sign of the difficulties ahead. Ben had been to our rented house in Bourne End for a week the previous summer so he was familiar with our home. He calmly went to bed and Roger and I sat together on the sofa while he cried and I soon joined in. I knew how much it meant to Roger to have Ben finally with him and now that I knew that Sam had chosen getting high over having her son, it seemed better that he was with us. We knew that Ben's life with his Mum had been increasingly traumatic and we were relieved that he was under our roof; we thought that everything would get easier now. For two months, we had not even known where Ben was, yet all of a sudden, he was safe upstairs in bed. Although I should have thought it through, there was never a moment where I thought to myself, do I want this; to become a mother overnight and to raise someone else's son? I was naïve; I didn't realise the work involved in looking after a child and I thought that Roger would be Ben's primary carer and I could observe more than actively participate. I didn't wonder what might happen if Sam turned up again or consider how she may make life difficult for us. I thought only that as long as we loved, fed and watered Ben, everything would be fine. It simply didn't occur to me that I could leave and let Roger get on with it. I didn't consider my choices and so my resentful feelings at being forced into a role that I didn't want and wasn't ready for seemed to be all Sam's fault. I expressed my denied feelings by being angry at Sam for having abandoned Ben. She was his mother; she was supposed to have held it together for his sake, not dumped him on me. I hadn't had my own baby but I knew instinctively that if I did, I would never be able leave it. I thought that Sam lost her right to the title of 'mother' the day that she walked out on Ben. His life advertised a vacancy, which I had the skills to fill, and so outwardly I got on with being the good girl with the everyday toil of playing 'Mum' while inside, stoked by my determination to think of Sam only negatively, the embers of resentment I held towards her smouldered and began to ignite. |