Read I Hope You Dance for Free Online Page B

She’s promised to do nothing permanent until she turns eighteen. And, by the way, how I raise my daughter is none of your business. I am a young mum, not a stupid one.” I slammed a drawer shut. Tried another one, yanked out the food wrap and banged it closed with my hip. “When Arianna is fourteen I’m going to have so much fun watching you go nuts. She’ll be eating McDonald’s, watching videos of half-naked pop stars on YouTube and saying ‘innit’ and there’ll be nothing you can do. Grow up.”
    I took a deep breath and stepped outside. I could blame my emotional state for taking control of my mouth and letting these things come out, but I still hated myself for it. The truth was, Maggie’s hair had nothing to do with teenage rebellion, or even bad taste in hair fashion. It was a message to the world. A message that she was hurting, bruised and bereft. And it killed me that I couldn’t make the hurt go away.
    A few weeks after her father’s death, I signed Maggie up for bereavement counselling. The first signs of Fraser’s financial betrayal had surfaced. I was floundering. I managed to get up each day and function – smile at Maggie, check she’d done her homework. But trying to hide the extent of my own grief from my daughter left me no strength to deal with hers, so I found someone else to be the emotional rock I thought she needed right then.
    I thought it helped. When people asked me how Maggie was coping, the honest truth was I had no idea. What was coping for a fourteen-year-old? Wasn’t it enough simply to cope with puberty, getting through school and that boy you have been obsessing about for weeks asking out your best friend?
    With the sudden jolt into a single-parent family, a lost, broke, barely-holding-it-together-parent family, a new house, new town, new school – wouldn’t anyone scream at their mum, stop doing their homework and shoplift a few bottles of nail varnish?
    As far as I knew, Maggie didn’t smoke, drink or mess about with boys. I wanted to believe she coped okay. But part of this involved electric blue hair. Or, I should say, blood red, Shrek green, zebrastriped, flame orange, curly, choppy, extended, back-combed hair. Maggie’s counsellor had asked her to find a creative way to express her emotions. I suggested writing poems. Rapping. Learning the trumpet. Sculpting. Baking cakes. Gardening. Building furniture… Maggie wanted to express herself through creative hair. I advised she write a journal. Maggie: hair. I proposed synchronized swimming. Maggie: hair. Dressmaking? Jewellery? Nail art? No. Hair. So black dreadlocks announced her grief. Red extensions symbolized her growing, writhing anger. The yellow fluff ball demonstrated the thrill of her first concert.
    Electric blue? To her it meant: “I want to shock my snobby, stone-hearted grandmother, my sophisticated, stylish nanny and my snotty aunt with a stonking great ‘up yours’. And if I make my weird, wimpy cousins afraid of me, so much the better.”
    What did my uncut, rarely washed, frizzy brown ponytail say? I was too darn tired to care any more.
    Â 
    Esther took the kids home to bed soon after dinner, before they had time to move on from poker faces to actual poker. Mum got straight to work in the kitchen, kneading bread dough. I sat at the kitchen table with a piece of paper and a pen, sketching a family of swans. The female swan wore a flowery apron. She span in a frantic circle, balancing a three-tiered cake stand on one wing.
    â€œWhere was Dad this evening?”
    â€œOut.”
    I looked at Mum, my eyebrows raised in question. For forty-eight years, my parents’ marriage had been a Viennese waltz, a close-hold, eye to eye, in perfect synchrony. I suspected that selling the studio had ended the dance.
    Mum paused in her work to fling a leaflet at me.
    â€œWhat’s this?” The leaflet was for an organization