Evening, fellow readers. Hope you’re all well and tucked up nice and cosy by the fire. It is Sunday night, the night before the day my people call Monday, and I … I am not happy about that.

Tomorrow morning, you see, I have to get up and go to work. Not so bad in of itself, but what is horrible is that I have to leave my son without me. I am going to leave my son without me for the day, and go about my business like some Dickensian witch who doesn’t care and who ignores a breaking heart of a tiny mite. And I will do it again the day after, and the day after that, over and over again.

Tried the lotto, didn’t work. Tried wishing, didn’t work. Tried denial, discovered it is not just a river in Egypt, didn’t work. So I have to do this. I just do not know how. I’ve had two weeks of being woken by his hands on my face, delighted to find me still under the same roof as him, and his company is a luxury always.

See, I’ll be fine. I’m the adult. He is the little person here, the one that doesn’t understand where I am or why I am not there, and when I will be back. The moment of that realisation is a knife within me, over and over. How on earth can I be doing this to him? Can you, reading this, explain it to me? How can I be doing this to him?

Somewhere inside of me is a gallery of paintings, made up of the important moments of my heart. And this moment is in there, for all to see, with all the condemnation I can muster. I am a wretch, and nothing I can do seems able to change it.

‘The Family’  by Paul Kerr.