I don't like porridge

My mother carries the sheets into the kitchen. Her face is stiff, her mouth a thin line. She walks right by me, her invisible child. My father is eating his porridge. He ignores me too.

I have committed a crime.

My brother joins my father at the breakfast table. My mother fusses around him and brings him a big dish of porridge which he eats making disgusting slurping noises. My brother loves porridge.

Still nobody speaks to me. My punishment, apart from the silence, is that I have no breakfast to eat. I mind the silence but not the porridge, which makes me heave.

All this because I have wet the bed. I am five years old, and for the rest of my life I will hate porridge.

Funny how my parents never knew that.