Chapter 96: Simple Woman
Jane Molson liked to think of herself as a simple woman, with simple wants, and even simpler needs. In fact, if she was asked to leave everything on earth, and pick just one, she would not pick a thing, she would pick a someone. Her precious daughter, her Emily.
That child was literally her world, sometimes, out of nowhere, Jane would look over at her daughter and think ’What have I ever done to deserve a child as wonderful as you,’ Being that it was an internal question, she never got an answer, but that did not matter. Emily was hers no matter what.
Whatever she had, or had not done, Emily was her daughter, and Jane loved her more than anything in the whole wide world. Without Emily, Jane was not sure if she would have survived losing her husband.
The days after Peter’s death had been some of the worst of Jane’s life. She had buried her parents, and had thought that she could deal with any kind of loss from them on. But losing Peter had cut at something deep within her.
In the natural order things, children buried their parents, so Jane even though she had been hurt over the loss of her parents, had at least been able to understand. But with Peter, there had been no logic to try and diminish the pain. They had said ever after, and promised to stay together ’till death do us part’ they had promised each other that. But at the time Jane had thought that death was decades away, that she and her soulmate would grow old together. And then one day he was gone and she was a widow, and Jane’s heart had broken in two.
It had felt as though a piece of her soul had died with her husband, and as she had watched his coffin go down, she had wanted to throw herself on top of it. Whether she would have begged him to get up, to come back to life, or she would have asked them to bury her with him, she could never be quite sure. Had it not been for a little hand slipping into hers, a small voice saying "We are going to be fine, okay, mom," She was not sure if she would have ever recovered.
But for Emily she had forced herself out of bed everyday. Doing it over and over again until she began living again, not just existing.
And for that, Jane had her daughter to thank, she loved that child more than anything. But that did not mean that her daughter was not responsible for quite a few of the grey hairs on Jane’s head.
Emily was not and had never been, someone troublesome. In most cases, that would have been a good thing, but for Jane, it brought in a whole other level of worrying.
Growing up, Emily had been the type of child who did not like to trouble anyone. And it had gotten worse after her father’s death. She seemed to have gotten it into her head that Jane needed protecting even if it meant that Emily was suffering. That meant she patched up her own scrapes and bruises(often badly enough that they had to be redone to avoid infections setting in). One time she had been stung by a bee in the park. But upon seeing that Jane was asleep on their little picnic blanket, Emily had not even screamed. She had sat silently, wiping away tears, her hand throbbing. She had stayed quiet for over thirty minutes, finally making enough noise to wake Jane up when the pain had become unbearable.