My mother stranger

My mother died today. Or was it yesterday? I can’t be sure. No one’s really told me that much, just the fact she’s dead.

It’s hard to think my mother us dead when the woman I have seen as my mum for the past eleven years is sitting beside me. The mother who died was a stranger, only my mother due to blood, not by love. And now she is dead. It’s a strange thought.

At first I only thought: so? But then guilt overtook me. The woman was my mother, my real one. I should be grieving her passing. But I’m not. I don’t remember her, I never knew her. She was worse than a stranger to me. I never met her, at least I don’t remember if I did. I was only three when she gave me up. Why should I grieve? How do you cry for a stranger?

“Who cares?” Jake scoffed from his Playstation. And despite our, no, his parents protests I have to agree. Who does care? I don’t, not really. My parents are right here with me, along with my non-blood related brother. I belong to this family, it doesn’t matter how I got here.

…But still I can’t help feeling for the woman I never knew, now dead. I wonder what she was like, if she looked like me…who my father was. I wonder if she thought of me at the end, or if she forgot about my existence altogether, like I did with her.

I wonder. Who was she, my mother? And who am I because of it? I wonder.

But now she’s dead, and I’ll never know.

Or so I thought…