just_a_girl Read Online Free

easier just to pour a glass of wine instead and lie on the couch waiting forever for my husband to turn up.
    And there was another morning I’ll never forget, when I was trying to get the house tidy before she went for her first nap, so I could at least have a shower because that was the highlight of my day, to have hot water running over me and be able to smell that lemon soap, and then I heard this terrible scream, the kind of cry she didn’t usually do, and I ran around the corner and I couldn’t believe it when I saw that the laundry door was open, it’s never open, I always check it, and there she was curled in an awkward bundle lying still on the hard tiled floor looking up at me from the bottom of the step, as if she was accusing me, and I could see this large egg, a blue bruise developing on her forehead, a stamp for the world to see what a bad mum I really was.
    I stood there and moaned for ages and she watched me with those big dark eyes and grunted every now and then as if to say, What’s up?, and I really needed the Lord in my life back then, because suddenly I wished she would dissolve in my arms and disappear completely because I knew then I could never do it, I couldn’t be the mum she wanted me to be, and it was like she knew this too because she never looked at me the same way again, she kept her distance, always trying to climb out of my arms when I wanted a cuddle and crying in her cot for hours before sleep, turning her face away from the mush mush mush that I spent hours making, and keeping all her joy and giggles stored up for her dad the moment he walked in the door.
    And even when I was breastfeeding she had these tiny nails like razor blades and her little fingers would pinch me really hard and I would say No and she would do it even harder, and when I had a shower I would look down at my breasts and they’d be torn apart from her tiny deep scratches, and I didn’t really enjoy breastfeeding, it was never peaceful for me, not like in those books put out by the Nursing Mothers’ Association where the women are always smiling, like the Madonna, and they say that it should come naturally but it’s not like that at all, and I remember trying to get her on the boob in the early days and there I was with my husband and the midwife looking on and trying to get her tiny mouth onto this huge nipple and she would scream and I’d have her under my arm in a footy hold with the midwife latching her on, or some strange woman in the hospital squeezing my nipple hard and milking me like a cow, while Geoff tried not to turn his head away, and this trial went on for the first three months, every three hours, morning and night, until we both collapsed with exhaustion and I got the bottles and formula out, feeling like a failure in the art of nurturing.
    And I still wonder whether Layla’s been punishing me ever since because she looks at me in the same way with those dark unblinking eyes, and I feel like I’m being judged, for letting her fall, for letting her father go, for giving her the bottle too early, and I want to undress her and put her in the bath like I used to and wash her tummy and hold a face washer to stop the soap from getting in her eyes and say I’m sorry.

LAYLA
    At school boys think they’re better at maths. But what they don’t realise. Is that geometry is the way to a girl’s heart. Guys work their fingers in circles up your thighs. Small triangles down your back. Every girl has her own angle. It takes a while to work this out. Me? Diagonals. From big toe tip to back of knee. Right ear to left hip. Belly button to shoulderblade. Unfortunately Davo always works in straight lines.
    In grade 5 us girls were introduced to the frigid test. You had to stand statue still. While the boy you liked ran his finger slowly. From the top of your forehead down your body. To the cuntie as Sarah calls it. If you flinched or stopped his finger you failed. A few naughty boys moved their fingers in