The girl came home every day upset, her eyes swollen with tears. Her mother was bedridden after a stroke, receiving government assistance, which was enough to support the girl, but in fact the thirteen-year-old girl was supporting herself. She had no one to teach her how to cook, so she had to make do with the meager school lunches she was given for free under the social program, and the children laughed at her because of it.
– Daddy left you because your mother is a cripple! – The younger kids laughed. – Do you at least have food? Or do you have to chip in a crust of bread?
– When her mother dies, she will be sent to an orphanage.
It was orphanages that the girl feared more than anything else. The children frightened her that the teachers there were evil, that other children would take away everything she loved, and she could see from her classmates and the other children at school how evil children could be.
– Mom, when are you going to get better? – sometimes she would ask, and her mother could not even comfort her, because she could hardly explain what she wanted or what she needed help with.
One night her mother got sick. The girl had to call an ambulance and go with her parent to the hospital, and there, when asked about her guardians, she could say nothing. She had no one to call, and the doctors looked frowning and sad. The girl was mentally prepared for the fact that she was about to be told she was going to an orphanage. Fortunately, her mother’s file contained the number of her cousin. He lived in another city, but when he heard about this kind of trouble for the first time in a year since her sister stopped getting out of bed, he immediately went to his family.
Mother could not fully recover, the doctors said it was impossible, but she got much better when her uncle began to help financially and took over some of the care of her thirteen-year-old niece. He had family in another town, and as soon as her sister was discharged from the hospital, he offered to move them in. For the duration of the move, he found tenants who could pay rent on a bank card, and he put the girl and her mother in his house.
A new school, new kids and conditions, and the girl blossomed. No one made fun of her anymore, no one threatened her with an orphanage, and she was very supportive of her cousin, both at home and at school. Sometimes she wondered why no one had called her mother’s brother before, why everyone had turned their backs on them at just the right moment, but perhaps they needed to go through some trials to be surrounded by caring people later?
Life can be as fickle as the sea: serene or with perpetual storms. You never know what awaits you beyond the next wave, but you can hope that sooner or later a shore or at least another ship will appear, and then you won’t be sailing all alone in the unknown.
