Disclaimer: These characters are mine; treat them with care.

A/N: This one hurts me. It's a slight revamping of a ficlet I wrote in October, involving Paul Fleming's mother and his siblings during the period immediately following Mr. Fleming's abrupt departure. It wasn't a happy time.

A Good Mother

At times like this, Tina wished there was a manual.

Every day, Paul came home from his after school job and refused supper. Every day he smiled, said “Oh no, thanks, I grabbed something on the way home. Just give my share to whoever’s hungriest, yeah?”

And because he insisted and because it was useless to fight, she did. It was always one of the youngest three who got the extra food, sometimes divvied up between them. If it was a particularly coveted meal, each of the other six got an extra bite or two.

Every day, Paul eyed the supper table with a taut smile and ravenous eyes and insisted he wasn’t hungry. Tina didn’t know what to do; she couldn’t force him to eat, couldn’t inject food intravenously while he was sleeping or threaten him with a timeout like she did Mitchell.

She knew he was only getting one meal a day; that it was freeleftovers from the cafeteria because the ladies suspected he wasn't eating otherwise. Really, Tina was surprised they hadn’t called child services on her.

Sometimes, Paul could barely keep his eyes open during the day, and his stomach made noises that he pretended she’d invented as an excuse to fatten him up.

She was such a bad mother. A good mother would figure out how to feed them. A good mother would be able to keep her children fed and clothed and be able to give them toys or other small comforts. A good mother wouldn’t have to rely on her son for groceries and her daughter to help her meet the electricity bill. And a good mother most definitely wouldn’t have taken the handful of quarters little Anthony brought home after walking up and down the playground looking for spare change (but those coins bought a loaf of bread that fed them all, and he told her he would only have bought candy and rotted his teeth).

A good mother would give up her own meal instead of letting her eldest make the sacrifice. Wouldn’t let him bully her into eating with the excuse that the little ones would worry if she didn’t; good mothers wouldn’t let their sons take care of them like that.

There was a line somewhere, a line between son and friend, child and confidante, but she and Paul had overstepped that years ago, almost a decade ago. Tina tried not to concentrate on the fact that Paul saw her cry every time, that she held it back until she knew she could talk to him because she couldn’t trust anyone else and he’d already seen so much.

Tina didn’t know why her children still protected her. Why Paul occasionally got into fights to defend her from teenage slander when he’d clench his jaw and look away if they called him ‘faggot’. Why Elizabeth slammed the phone in its cradle and shook with rage for hours after Tina’s brother called to ask how his slut of a sister was. Why Mitchell, who scowled all the time and never said thank you for dessert, even, got sent home from playschool for biting one of the other boys' faces becausethe kidsaid his momma said that Mitchell’s momma should put her kids up for adoption.

But the truth was, they did. The Fleming family — God knew why they still kept his name — was tight-knit and fiercely possessive of one another. Siblings who fought at the dinner table got black eyes and bloody noses defending one another on the playground. Children who screamed at their mother because she wouldn’t buy them the toy their friends had, stuck up their chins and told the school counsellor that Mama was doing a good job, thank you very much.

She’d heard the phrase that you can’t love others if you can’t love yourself, but Tina knew it was a lie. She loved her children with every breath she had, cared for them and protected them with everything she had until there was nothing left for herself and it still wasn’t enough. She didn’t have to like herself to love her children.

She still cried at night, sometimes. Except that in her world, when twenty dollars could feed them for a week if she was careful, when shoes were repaired until her children practically went to school in duct tape footwear, ‘sometimes’ meant ‘every day’ and the promise of a brighter future seemed very far away.