120. My Point of View: Write in the first person point of view.

I regret it.

There is no denying that the feeling in my dying breast is regret. It was a mistake, and it haunts me in every half-formulated fear. Will he ever come? By his very presense the life I have made is compromised. He could destroy my happiness in his simple seeking for my love, and that is how I know my happiness is not as firmly entrenched as I once thought. Yet with him knowing of me and me knowing of him, I cannot be fully content. I live in dread.

I only ever had one child in my life, and I should not have. I gave that child away, and that is the last I wanted to be involvement with him.

Perhaps I am being cruel. Yet he was not mine, from the moment he was conceived. I did not want children then and for many years afterward. Maybe that is why I married so late in life, and then to a man who already had children who were grown.

I think of his letter, sent to me so long ago. Sent to me when I had forgotten him. I thought of how he asked to meet me, this persistent child who was not mine. Or he was not a child -- thirty years was no longer infantile. He was a grown mother, but there was yet that same inner urge to know who gave birth to him.

I felt sorry for him, but I could not satisfy the request. I could not admit to anyone that he existed, or what I was now would cave in.

I had never told my husband I had had a child, long ago, and given that baby away. I had never said a word to him. Nowadays, I adored his kids. Yet I had spent so many years living in fear of mine that I did not feel anything but dread at the thought of him.

I was dying now and then it would all be over, I thought. Would he know? She sometimes wondered if he ever tracked her movements or if he ever looked her up on the internet to see what she was doing. How long would it be before he found out she had died? Would he ever?

*

A/N: My uncle found out today that his birth mother, who rejected him in a letter and said that her "sin had found her out" when he contacted her, died last November. This comes on the heel of my mother's decision to find out who her birth parents are. As an adopted child myself, these things affect me heavily. For this prompt I tried to get into the head of someone I would despise. I cannot fathom giving away a child, but this is my attempt to try.