The day after I called the truce felt good, hopeful. So, it was possible to level a person, to bring them down from a mentality of power and possession, to humanize a situation.
I had trembled in Court, shed tears which Chris smirked over, was hollowed when he served upon me application for an injunction against Daniel and I leaving Western Australia, when his girlfriend had looked so titillated at the event of hurting me, my freedom, at having such power to affect my life. But I could let it all go, my punctured ego could just pick itself up, if we could just be two loving parents to Daniel, fully mindful of Daniel.
With the same brand of hope styled by my heart which believed my father might be loving to me one day, I believed I had actually changed another human being – that Chris would care about Daniel foremost now.
~ ~ >
I scanned the bobbing heads in the childcare centre, the giggling ones and grizzling ones, the quiet ones alone fixated on blocks, hand poised to place another layer on some world they’re building which adults could never grasp, the two toddlers a toy torn between them and the carer swooping in to make a ruling, and finally saw my son. My heart leapt, 
like it had for no human before.
I had finished my affidavit in the library, and printed it. I composed a version including Dad’s letter, if it would come, and one without Dad’s letter.
“…it remains that my father, sisters, aunties, cousins and well established friendships from school years are in Melbourne…have urged me since pregnancy to return but I consistently refused,” I had written. What a farce. I had named all of family as if they would all be there for me. I was building a case, an illusion, a reason for the Magistrate to “let” me relocate with Daniel to Melbourne. How many wheels of justice, my conscience pondered as I wrote of my illusory supportive family, had turned on farce and eloquent construction of a case. So many, I was sure, as to be unjust.
< ~ ~
Daniel’s chubby little fingers wrapped around my neck and tangled themselves in my hair as I airlifted him from the sea of children. I thanked Dorota for caring for him. I was thankful to her for so much more – forever, for translating my Polish Mother’s words on that scrap of paper I had found at my Grandmother’s. “Life is ugly to me,” Mum had written some day before her suicide, “I’ve got a very heavy pain.” 
I wanted dearly to leave my own child words by me, but of beauty of this life. If I could just stop running into dark corners, stop scampering through life driven by reaction to actions against me, fear and injury within – if I could one day possess my own self, my direction, my life…
“He’s so easy to care for,” Dorota smiled. “He’s a gem.” Why, why did Chris see need to smack Daniel, and Aunty Karen with that stick?
“Thank you so much, Dorota,” I said, grateful Daniel was of such beautiful nature. I had to secure his wellbeing. I had to find us safety. How to do, I did not know, when I remained unprotected from my own childhood. It still lunged forward in my mind at the most unpredictable times, to slash pain through the potential of happy days.
“The truth is that the applicant’s constant intrusion on the lives of The Individual and me…plus my genuine concern at his senses of parenting and responsibility… have finally broken me…The welfare of The Individual my whole reason, I seek the Court’s permission to relocate.”
Was this a sound argument? I did not know the Law.
~ ~ >
Whispered, the wind by my ears as the child care centre door closed behind me. The world felt so alive in such subtle ways.
Under the hot West Australian sun I buckled Daniel into his child seat, dumped the bag of unspent nappies and snacks on the back seat and took to the wheel of my good old Holden Torana. The car, so doted over by my mechanic ex husband, the cause of much 
wedded tension as it “needed” service after treatment after the best quality oil, had served Daniel and I well, but our need of money had become so desperate, I was considering selling it – especially if we would move to Melbourne. I felt so uncertain what to do next with our lives. I had blown hard, with all my breath, on the dice – my affidavit which I would throw before the court in just over a week.
My argument was that I could have gone to Melbourne when pregnant, as urged by “loving family” back then, but instead I gave Daniel’s father a chance to be a father. Knowing now what I did not then, and I did not fully know what harm came to Daniel in Chris’ care but knew “something” was not right – having given the father a chance, I now begged to be freed to raise my child in the embrace of people who, I proposed, care. A layperson’s plea before a Judge of the Law.
~ ~ >
Shards of sun pierced my eyes when I stepped out of the car at our block of flats. I raised my hand in weak defence at its brilliance. It was a searing hot day.
With Daniel at my side and bags burdening my broad but buckling shoulders, I knelt down at the letterbox to retrieve our mail. Sighting the electricity bill sealed my decision to sell the car.
Then I saw it: my father’s distinct cursive writing. Learned in some classroom somewhere in Melbourne in the 1900s, by repetition and with a School Master with punishing ruler overseeing, it showed attention and focus in its delivery. It was the first letter I had received from my father in approximately a decade, this communiqué, this response to my asking him to please write to the Court, please help me break free from what my instincts were screaming that I free us from, though I could not define what.
As Daniel settled into slurping pleasure of a lemonade icy pole, the sticky sweet melting down his fingers and forearm as he endeavoured to devour it before Perth’s heat would, it was with a mixture of hope, and a shiver, that I opened my father’s letter.
“TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN”, it read, “This letter is written in a response to a plea by my youngest daughter Noeleen…”
(c) 50/50
Noeleen&Daniel
