Read Ordinary Miracles for Free Online

that unlike learning about love. As a novice one presses all sorts of buttons that veterans know to leave alone.
    And then of course there’s Katie.
    Charlie says Katie can stay here any time – that there’s plenty of room. I keep telling her this on the phone. I also went to visit her in Galway last week. I said I felt like a break, but actually I wanted to check out her new flat.
    When Katie first went to Galway, Bruce and I found digs f or her with a nice family in Salthill. The lady of the house was very bonny and beaming and the place seemed like a home from home. So, naturally, I was rather worried to discover that, after just one month, Katie had decided that a home from home was not what she needed.
    ‘Mum, I’m not a child any more,’ she kept saying as I snooped round the small flat she’s sharing with a girl called Sarah.
    ‘Are you eating properly?’ The cliches leapt off my lips. ‘And what about that nice warm coat I bought you? It really is quite cold these mornings.’
    ‘Mum, I’m not a child any more.’
    ‘Here, I brought you a few things,’ I said, handing her a huge bag of sensible food. ‘That muesli’s home-mixed and it’s full of fibre. Fibre is very important.’
    ‘Oh, Mum, please don’t bring up bowels again. It’s so obvious.’ She grimaced long-sufferingly, as only an eighteen- year-old can.
    ‘I don’t think bowels are that obvious, Katie. Young people frequently forget all about them.’
    ‘No. No. Don’t be so dense, Mum. It’s so obvious you’re avoiding the subject.’
    ‘What subject?’
    ‘You and Dad.’
    She was, of course, right. We talked about my ‘displace ment activity’, as she called it, over some of my currant cake and tea. As far as I could gather, though Katie is obviously upset about her parents’ separation, the budding psychology student part of her also regards it as a rather interesting case study – though of course this could be just a defence.
    She informed me that if I had been getting more ‘positive reinforcement’ in my marriage – that is if Bruce had ‘rewarded me’ more often for my wifely attentions – then his affair would not have had the same impact.
    Pigeons, it seems, can be trained to detect flaws in produ cts on assembly lines through the judicious application of positive reinforcement, which in their case is usually grain.
    She related all this with such scholarly enthusiasm that I hadn’t the heart to point out that I found the pigeon analogy in our conversation far from flattering. First year psychology is bound to change her world-view somewhat. I’m grateful I was spared Freud. He pops up next term so I’m probably due a lecture on penises sometime soon.
    Yes – all in all – Katie has been very understanding. But th at may be because she herself has dropped more than one bombshell in the recent past. The latest was delivered last week. I was going on and on about hoping she wasn’t too upset and that I’d always be there for her and that sort of thing when she told me she thought she might be a lesbian. Frankly it’s something I wished she could have kept to herself until she was sure, but then I have been telling her for years th at she can ‘tell me anything’. She’s really taken me at my word and so far ‘anything’ has included a herpes scare, a crush on a priest, a short-lived wish to become a social worker nun, and now this.
    I’m beginning to wonder whether there isn’t something to be said for good old repression and secrecy after all.
    As to the latest announcement – I don’t have anything against lesbians per se. In some ways it makes a lot of sense and in an ideal world nobody would give a fig who was loving whom. But the world is not ideal and Katie is quite sensitive.
    She’s also beautiful. I know I’m her mother and therefore biased, but it’s true. Katie’s hair is wispy and golden white, like an angel’s, and she has these big clear kind blue eyes. For y ears all she