July 2nd 2007

July 2nd 2007

I hate shouting all the time. Correction, I hate shouting at her all the time. She’s still so small and cute, and tactile, and loving, whilst being impossible and moody. Her behaviour is volatile. That’s a word her teacher used. Volatile. Like a dodgy chemical substance, you never know when she’ll explode. You just know she will, eventually.

I want to do girly things with her, paint her nails, play with her hair, cook cakes and biscuits. I tell her we can do these things, together, bond a little. But every time, she ruins it. Screaming, shouting, I don’t want to treat her when she’s like that, and it seems she’s always like that these days.

Harriet’s never been easy. The older two weren’t. Husband, Dave, says they were feral when we got together. Aged three and five, Harri couldn’t stop hugging everything in sight, couldn’t stand to have me far away, Tim was tiny, undersized, but extremely violent. He did what he knew, what he’d seen during his short life.

I don’t think Dave would have hung around, if it weren’t for our past. We’d known each other for years; he knew what I used to be, before my ex shattered me, I was truly destroyed. Dave put us all back together. Tim is lovely now. I was scared about what he might turn into, at age five, three kids went to the hospital because of him.

But Harri, she’s different. From pulling hair until she was almost bald, and trying to kill herself at age seven, the incident that started her with the psychologist, she’s never tackled life like the rest of us.

Today, she came off the bus crying, a boy had hit her. Apparently the girls behind her were making fun of him, and as she passed by to get off, she asked if he was okay. He lashed out. She says she doesn’t know who he was, or the girls.

That is a part of school life. If it happened the way she said, then I’m proud of her. She didn’t hit back, and she’d asked if he was okay. But, as we walked home she said this:

“At school today, in Drama, I couldn’t stand the light, and I had to hide behind a curtain.”

“What?” I said.

“The light went all weird, hiding behind the curtain fixed it.”

We talked about the boy that hit her, me trying to get more info, then I steered the conversation back to her hiding.

“I felt sick,” she said, “and angry.” She crumpled up her face. “No, not angry… confused. They have these black curtains over doors and stuff, and I went and hid behind one. Then I felt okay again.

“And the teacher allowed this?”

“Yea…” she said, vaguely.