A/N: When I said that I wanted to take today and write, this is not what I had envisioned. I have been working (plodding, trudging, struggling mightily) on the next chapter of Sweet Seasons, but something has just felt ... off to me. I think I've determined it's an issue of continuity.

So this piece contains spoilers for something that will be revealed in the upcoming chapter of SS. And I should warn that there are mentions (not graphic) of miscarriage. Be encouraged, however, that this piece, when complete, will be a story of restoration and fluffy Richobel sweetness. I would never hurt my babies or cause harm to their marriage. But before we can get to the redemptive bit, we have the backstory. I'm sorry it's not happy yet (though I think you will see it does have its moments), but I've done my level best to keep the story relatable and plausible assuming it were canon.

Mother's Day is hard for me, folks. What can I say?

For my Nan, whom I watched lose her youngest, and for T, who has lost two, and J, who has effectively lost five. Only love today.

xx,
~ejb~

And I who went to sleep as two
Woke up as one
Now only you remain¹

She is twenty-one years old on her first Mothering Sunday, and to date no one knows the secret she carries within. They attend church together - she and Reginald, her brother Edward, his wife Alice and their three little boys, and her mum. It's the first year without her father, and she squeezes her mother's hand as they walk past the bench outside the vestry doors that was placed there in his honour. The morning passes with more laughter than sorrow as Eddie and she recount their favorite childhood memories.

In the restaurant at lunchtime Reg casts an astonished glance her way when she declines the wine.

"Are you?" he mouths.

She nods at him, her eyes glistening, and he enfolds her hand in his. He begins to chuckle and she squeezes his elbow as if to say, Stop or you'll give us away! He manages to keep silent but his shoulders are shaking and soon she cannot contain her own joy. They are married a year now, both of them deeply steeped their pursuit of medical degrees, and the timing is far from ideal. But they are so very much in love, and have been since she was sixteen and he nineteen, and love will find a way. She leans into him as he announces to her family that by the time they all gather a year from today, there will be a third little Crawley, and somehow her father's absence is redeemed in the knowledge that new life abounds.

A month passes, and on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in the women's loo of the university library her unrivalled bliss comes to a shattering end. She knows enough to know that this can't be right - the waves of nausea that don't stop coming and the blinding pain radiating through her lower back and her belly. And the blood. So much blood. She retches until she cannot see straight and hugs her knees to her chest, shaking with fear.

A half hour later she has pulled herself together, with the help of overnight sanitary pads, to meet Reg in the quadrangle as they do every day before his afternoon internship. As he approaches her from the direction of the mathematics building he knows something is amiss. Her eyes are swollen, her arms wrapped round her own midsection.

"Take me to A&E, love," she says weakly as he scoops her into his arms. "It's gone, I know it's gone."

oOo

The following year she gives the family gathering a miss as she lies in bed recovering from a D&C. Reggie was loath to leave her side but she'd insisted that he go and be with her mother, both because she could not and because the bond between her husband and her mum was like nothing she had ever seen, and they would each one need the other on such a day as this.

He misses her, and all he can think as he sits in the pew between Fiona and a heavily-pregnant Alice is that he's failing her. He has trained in this, obstetrics. Is training. It is his area of specialty and yet it has afforded him no greater insight into why his wife: beautiful, young, healthy and vibrant, has lost two babies in less than a year. Fiona picks up on his distress and links her arm through his. The colour of her eyes could not be more different to her daughter's, but their shape, and the fact that when he looks into them he gets the feeling she can see straight into his soul, are so reminiscent of Isobel that it nearly makes him gasp.

"Patience, my son," she tells him.

At home that night he lies with Isobel curled against his chest. They are young, she tells him with a confidence he guesses is borne of being her mother's child, and their entire lives are still in front of them. Perhaps they aren't meant to have children of their own. Perhaps this will free them up to travel, to use the training they are acquiring in the service of those in desperate need. He whispers to her as his fingertips trace the length of her spine that he heard a guest lecturer from Médecins Sans Frontières* speak in his immunology class last week.

Medical missions have been on her heart from a young age, and she tells him now in the darkness of their bedroom, brokenhearted but clinging determinedly to hope, that she thinks they should look into volunteering with the Red Cross when classes break up for the summer.

She spends the next two Mothering Sundays cradling Ethiopian children orphaned in Addis Ababa during the Red Terror. Food is in short supply; tuberculosis is taking its toll on the very young and the elderly. She and Reg spend school breaks administering inoculations and food rations, desperately trying to stem the rising tide of sociopolitical unrest. Their hearts are heavy, but their arms are full.

oOo

She is twenty-five the first time she holds a child of her own. Matthew Reginald Crawley is born into his father's arms in the early hours of a rainy March morning. Her heart soars with joy and relief as she nurses her son, the both of them cradled in Reg's embrace. Her labour was protracted and excruciating as the baby's skull pressed on her spine, and her progression stalled twice. Her mother had held her as she pushed hour after worrisome hour.

"Mumma, will you take him?" Isobel asks when the babe is finished feeding.

"Are you sure?" Fiona replies with a glance at her son-in-law, who nods. Kissing the swollen, exhausted face of her daughter, Fiona takes her grandson in her arms, walking him back and forth in front of the windows. In the bed Isobel clings to Reginald as the both of them weep for the children they have lost and the son who is finally here, safe and healthy and nearly full term. Isobel has carried him for thirty-six weeks, no small feat after her previous losses at eight and nine weeks respectively.

As her daughter and son-in-law reflect on the birth of their son, it is Fiona, with the infant in her arms - her baby's baby -, who treasures in her heart the experience of life having come full-circle. And it's then that she realises the date.

With a smile, she says, "It's Mothering Sunday."

The sun is here, my love, my love
My sun; our sun complete²

It is Matthew's thirteenth birthday when he and his grandmother take the train down to London. They are meeting his parents, who have been attending a medical conference in the city this week. He has been doing administrative work in their medical practice to earn some money of his own and while his mates are spending their savings on Mega-CD games and pagers, he has arranged with his father to take his mum and grandmother to dinner at the Ritz.

Matthew is a well-rounded lad, popular among his peers and a champion junior rugby player. He is also an excellent student; having recently been accepted to Eton, he will matriculate after the summer holidays. He has known from age ten that he wants to go to Oxford, that he wants to read law.

oOo

Initially he had worried that this would disappoint his parents, but his grandmother swiftly silenced his concern.

"Have you any idea how long your mum and da waited for you to come along, lad?" she had asked him.

"Well, I know they were married five years before I was born, but I thought that had to do with them being in school."

As she had baked a batch of shortbread biscuits in her kitchen, Fiona told Matthew of his parents' history, beginning with their meeting when Isobel was aged fourteen and Reginald seventeen. She'd shared her daughter's determination, at age twelve, that she would never marry, and how quickly her tune had changed when Reginald Crawley had started as a clerical assistant in the family's medical practice. She'd recounted the time Reginald had come to her and her husband John, Isobel's father, to ask for their daughter's hand in marriage when she was eighteen and how Reginald and Isobel, newly married, had worked their way through medical school.

"The point is that you show a great deal of determination, and you come by it honest. Your parents were very young when they started out. They knew what they wanted and they made it happen. Now tell me, has either one of them ever missed a match of yours, or a programme at school?"

Matthew had thought for a moment. "Never, not one time, even if they've both been at work all week."

"Precisely," she had told him. "They determined that you are their highest priority, and that means they'll forgo everything else to put you first. Now, how could they possibly be disappointed in you for wanting to read law when they know how diligent you are in your studies and your determination comes straight from them?"

"There's something else, Gran," he'd said.

"Well, go on then! Out with it!"

"I've won a scholarship for the upcoming year at Eton. I know that Mother and Dad said the money's no concern, but I'd rather they use it to fund the relief efforts they used to support before I was born. When we go to London I want to tell them. Will you help me arrange it?"

Matthew had never seen his grandmother speechless. There was never any question as to how his mother had come by her talkativeness. But on that day in her kitchen he had watched as Fiona Turnbull was caught completely wrong-footed by his news. What thirteen-year-old boy thinks like this? Fiona had marveled.

"Gran?" Matthew had said, "Are you alright?"

"Oh, lad," she'd exclaimed, throwing her arms around him, "Now that is what I'm talking about! You've got nothing to worry about with your mum and da." Holding him out at arm's length, she ruffled his hair they way she'd done from the time he was tiny. "My God, but you are Isobel's boy!"

oOo

Fiona arranges it so that when the bill arrives during dinner in London, the waiter hands Reginald the notification of Matthew's scholarship. The table erupts in applause and gasps of astonishment, and Matthew shares a conspiratorial smirk with his grandmother.

Just as the excitement dies down, he reaches for the bill and his father gives him a proud nod, shaking his hand. Across the table Isobel and Fiona gape at one another, wide-eyed.

"Mother, Gran, it's the least I can do after all you've done for me," Matthew tells them. "Happy Mother's Day."

"Lad, I've got to hand it to you," the elder Crawley says to his son. "It takes nothing short of an act of God to render a Turnbull woman speechless, and here you've managed to silence two of them!"

Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity.³

Goodbye, baby
I hope your heart's not broken
Don't forget me
Yes, I was outspoken
You were with me all the time
I'll be with you one day¹

She is forty-one this year. By the time Matthew comes home for the summer holidays she'll have turned forty-two. He's phoned her twice today. She missed the first one, indisposed as she was at the time, but by the time the second call comes she is settled into recovery.

"Hello, Mother," comes his voice over the line. She thinks it's grown even deeper than it was when he was home the month before last. "Happy Mother's Day! Did you get my message this morning?"

She swallows hard, willing herself not to cry, not to look down at the lifeless bundle in her arms. "Matthew! Thank you for calling, my dear boy. I'm sorry I didn't call you back this morning. I—" She falters only momentarily. He'll never catch it over the telephone line. "I had an emergency at the hospital." A few tears squeeze out of the corners of her eyes and she wipes them away hastily.

"Is everything alright now?" He knows it isn't, even if he doesn't know the half of it. In the last three years he and she have endured the losses of both his grandmother and his father, the latter having suffered a stroke three months ago, followed by a fatal heart attack two weeks later. He had obtained two weeks of bereavement leave from the headmaster, and he'd told his mother he wanted to withdraw from Eton and stay with her after that. She had dismissed the notion straightaway; he was in revision for his A-levels, on track to start at Oxford on early admission.

"Oh, son," she sighs. Oh, son, how I wish I could tell you. She shifts in the bed … the epidural is wearing off and she hurts. Oh! how she hurts. "At the hospital?" She looks at her surroundings, this room she has been in hundreds of times. Only then I was never the patient. She does not look down. "Yes, things have ... calmed down."

She can hear the cautious half-smile in his voice, can practically see him saying, "Glad to hear it." He pauses, his brow furrowing. She is so stoic, but she needn't be, not with him. "Mother, you know, it's alright to miss Dad. I'm not going to crumble into bits if you tell me that you do."

She smiles weakly, sadly, ironically. There is so very much I wish I could tell you, my boy. Swallowing once more, she fights through the tears. "I'm glad you won't, love, because I do miss him. So very much. And Matthew …" She thinks of what will happen when she is released. She cannot go home. She thinks she might never go home.

"Yes, Mother?"

"How would you feel about spending the summer at Newton this year? I think I'm going to take some time and go up there. Home just isn't the same without Dad there."

"It's fine with me, Mother. I might ask some of my mates up from time to time if that's alright."

"Of course it is, love. I've got a lot of thinking to do, and it's always been easiest to get it all sorted up there in the countryside."

Matthew frowns again. "Mother, are you sure you're alright? I can come home if you need me."

"Absolutely not!" The fire inside her returns for an instant and it makes him smile. "No. You are in revision. Now, go revise! It's the first time we've not been together on Mothering Sunday and I just had a moment, but I am fine! You'll ring me once you're through your last exam, won't you?"

"Of course I will, though I'll probably call sooner than that. I've got chemistry on Thursday week and I might need to talk it through."

"I'm happy to help," she tells him, and for a moment - for just a moment - she feels almost normal. Purposeful. Then her uterus cramps again, or rather, the scar does. The wound that now resides where it used to be. She grits her teeth hard. Still she does not look down. "Lad, I'm afraid I've got to go," she tells him, trying for a smile. "But so do you. Listen, I'll give you a ring next weekend when I'm settled in up at Newton, alright?"

"Yes, please do. And don't be afraid to ring up Uncle Ed, will you? I know you want to handle everything on your own but he and Aunt Alice would never begrudge you the help. I love you, Mother. I worry for you."

Closing her eyes, she can almost pretend that it's just a regular telephone conversation with her exceedingly mature old soul of a son, that Reg is in the other room and the baby they'd found out they were expecting just a month before he died is still safe inside her womb.

"Well don't, love. I always manage, don't I? Your only worry should be passing your exams. Now, here's a kiss and I'll talk to you at the weekend, alright?" She blows him a kiss through the telephone line, just as she's always done. "I love you, Matthew. Bye now."

He tells her he loves her more just before he rings off, and for just an instant in the midst of the day's bloody devastation, she smiles a genuine smile. How many sixteen-year-old boys would say something like that to their mothers?

oOo

Her life has effectively ended, and yet it goes on. One child is top of his class at Eton; the other lies dead in her arms. It is now that she looks down. This is not happening, she thinks. Women her age, with nearly-grown children and who are going on twenty years in their profession, do not get pregnant. Certainly not when their bodies failed to sustain several pregnancies two decades prior. And husbands - most especially perfectly healthy, physically fit forty-five-year-old physician husbands, do not suddenly die of conditions for which there is no familial history.

¹ - "Goodbye Baby," Fleetwood Mac, written by Stevie Nicks. As much of a Mac nut as I am, this song is hard for me. But it is also perfect in some instances, this being one of them.

* - Médecins Sans Frontières is the medical/humanitarian relief organisation, founded in 1971, which has since become Doctors Without Borders.

² - Excerpt from Thoughts on a Grey Day, a poem that appeared on the 1972 Fleetwood Mac album Bare Trees. While I may be partial, this album is top-notch and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

³ - I Timothy 4:12 , ESV.