No, Mo! You are not to do this! It’s none of your fucking business and I don’t want you helping her. It’s a whim, she’s just being emotional. She'll get over it.”

Jack’s particular choice of words was a red rag to me. First, I never liked being told what I could and could not do. Second, how dare he tell me that the identity of his birth mother and Lily’s grandmother was not my business. And third, though I agreed that Julia was a creature of caprice and crazes, I felt instant sisterly solidarity in the face of this male onslaught on emotions.

So we had a row.

Not a loud airing of disparate views arcing into a bit of personal abuse and subsiding into grudging acceptance of each other’s point of view, but a shouting, vituperative exchange where our faces grew flushed and ugly, we slashed at each other’s Achilles’ heels with any weapon to hand, then left each other alone, bleeding and bruised, me in the bedroom, Jack in his study, with an impenetrable atmosphere of freezing fog between the two.

“Bugger! I should have gone to yoga and ignored Julia’s tears,” I thought. “He’s right, she’ll probably give up on it if she doesn’t get a result straight away,” I reasoned, “And then there’ll be this rift between us for no reason.”

But I couldn’t surrender, go and say sorry and that I’d refuse to get involved. It was more than Julia’s request for help or her need to know; my fundamental allegiance to Jack couldn’t be shaken by his sister’s wheedling. It was more than idle curiosity, the nosy parker in me refusing to stand away from the net curtains; and beyond professional pride in my ability to get a result from such a challenge. It had touched my own deep-rooted concerns with the Chi of parent/child relationships. The absence of their own father had worried me as I brought up my first two children alone and, even when Jack became a loving and dependable stepfather, I wondered what they had missed and whether it was retrievable at any later time. Now I had the chance to see at close quarters the restoration of a biological parent to an adult (or two, if Jack participated) who had grown up without knowing them.

I had to find this woman; the quest had already become my own. And I had to make it right with Jack.

Tearful and shaken by our clash, I sat on the floor in the Sukhasana position and did my Pranayama Complete Breath: inhale down to the belly, fill the ribcage, top up to the throat, hold; exhale from the diaphragm, empty the thorax, clear the trachea. Peace and calm, peace and calm, peace, calm…. Jack’s words kept floating into my head, but I pushed them back out into the void. I cleared my mind, asked the Ultimate Source for advice, and waited. There was no explicit message for me - there hardly ever was - but I could tell when she was there. A kind of floating feeling, detached but intense awareness and a slight fizzing in my veins. That was how the connection worked for me. And then not so much specific knowledge, but a sense of clarity, reassurance. I had to do this, it was the right choice.

All would be well and all manner of things would be well.

It got me to sleep and I didn’t hear Jack come to bed, but I woke up early with the old anxiety pulsing behind my eyes. The fact that it hadn't bothered me for months, perhaps over a year now, made it particularly noticeable. The only cure was to get up and get going, and when Jack came downstairs to find his breakfast on a properly laid table, he seemed calm and friendly. He accepted scrambled eggs with a surprised smile, poured us both coffee from the cafetiere and teased Lily into finishing her cereal. Though neither of us apologised, he showed no signs of nursing a grudge.

As he opened the front door to start his five-minute walk up to the surgery on Sylvan Hill, Jack turned back to me and said, “I know you’ll do what you have to do and I can’t stop you, Mo. Just two things: make the right choice and, whatever it is, you’ll have to live with it yourself. I want to know nothing, nothing, about it at all. OK?”

“OK,” I said, “but – "

“No, that’s it. End of discussion. Bye, Li’l Girl.” He swung Lily up, kissed her and she hugged him with relish.

“Bye bye, Daddy. See you tonight.”

“Bye, baby. Bye honey,” he kissed me affectionately and left me to puzzle over his decision. Was it a gesture of generosity, of reluctant acceptance, or a poisoned chalice?
 

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