For years she had used words like fate and serendipity to describe her situation but she’d never really believed it was fair, or right.

She’d been a pretty, stubborn and intelligent young woman, up for a good time, noisy, an outspoken feminist of the free-love type, a show off, she’d liked sex and music. She’d also been a student in that halcyon era, all Joan Armatrading and spliffs til 4, with trusted friends. And the future, well the future had been years away. Hopefully never.

Then, before her student days were over, Jake came. Limited, time-consuming, stupendously annoying Jake. And the old her had had to stop.

And yes she had resented it, wasn’t that her sole remaining right? her crutch? Didn’t she deserve some resentment? At the Mums in the school playground who were older than her but looked younger?

At Fucking Dominic who jumped ship with a yoga instructor in Florence, and when he came back part-time to take Jake every other weekend, used his Downs-syndrome child as a mark of his kindly humanity when women were about and got praised for it by all, including, gallingly, her own mother!

Yes maybe most of all and admittedly unfairly, at her mother, who told her that in her day people had just got on with it. “Aaaaagh” she wanted to say “but you had me, a clever girl! and I had Jake!”

She’d been a pretty, stubborn and intelligent young woman, yes, but then for more years than anyone cared to remember she’d been Jake’s mum, grey before her time struggling round in the rain on benefits in a chunky cardigan.

It was not fair, nor right that, the pernicious goody-goody girls of the school playground, bullied Jake with behavioural standards and patronisation, displaying righteous anger when he dropped a wild hedgehog on the playing field in his exuberance at having found it. It was not fair, or good, or right that the rough and tumble boys who he adored, never even played with him.

The Special school was even worse. She could not even think about the meat factory incident and poor Jake covered in mounds of offal.

And now Jake was about to die, from something to do with congenital heart anomalies, it was common for people with Trisomy 21.

And her mother had said “Well you’ll have your life back now dear like you’ve always wanted.”

On the way home from the hospital, she wept openly on the bus.

And it was then, for the first time, that she realised, consciously, that she had had a life! A brilliant life, with her son who she loved so much. And that in his wisdom, he had taught her something very precious. And suddenly, her tears turned to laughter at the mannered rebellions of her middle class youth, at people who trained themselves to act upon their worries about what others thought, and at the antics and joy and pain of the wonderful and truly uninhibited Jake.