This Exciting Life - Chapter 1 When Life Gives You Lemons

My name is Rebecca, full name Rebecca Silver Rosebank. Yeah, it’s bit of a mouthful. People I’m close with call me Revy or Becca, but mostly it’s Revy. Some people also call me Silver.

When I was 15 years old, my father died of extremely aggressive lung cancer; he was 41 when his body gave up. His death devastated my mother and as for me, all colours in the world turned to grey.

He was the glue that kept the family together. He was our pillar, our steady mountain and my mother’s love of her life.

My mother, though I loved her just as much as my father, was quite frankly useless as a parent.

She was two years younger than my father and a fully grown adult, supposedly.

Despite being an accomplished art painter with her own gallery, she didn’t know how to cook, clean and wash clothes like any normal adult and parent would.

She was always late or forgot to show up for e.g. parents meeting at my school or my piano recitals. Sometimes it was because of her nature, being a scatterbrain and all, but most of the times it was because of being too engrossed in her painting or meeting with a potential buyer; there were many things in which she was inadequate as a parent.

She was however never late or forgot her weekly dinner date with her husband, my father.

I felt closer to my father who was my constant rock. He was incredibly busy with his own work as a paediatric surgeon in a big hospital, but he always had time for me whether it was school related or my recitals. He was also a great cook and basically the perfect parent.

I loved him so much. Too ease his hectic life, I started learning how to run a household from an early age and after I turned 10 years old, I took on the chore of cooking and so on, but he still helped whenever he had time.

I repeat, I loved my mother and I had respect for the business she’d build herself.

At home she was really sloppy and lovey-dovey with her husband. They fed me dog food all the time. She also hugged and kissed me all the time.

I know it was because she just loved me and wanted to show affection, but sometimes it was also because she’d been in her useless parent mode and wanted to escape from me scolding her.

That being said, I did think she was really cool and pretty in her suit or one-piece dress, and always in high heels, when she was going to the gallery. And as an art painter herself, she was incredibly talented and creative. She donned herself in blue denim dungarees covered in various colours of paint whenever she went to her atelier.

I looked up to my mother, but probably more like a woman to woman or a girl to woman. Not necessarily as daughter to mother. I repeat, she was useless as a parent after all.

I used to scold her, complaining why she couldn’t be like my friends’ mothers. Then my father would laugh and pat my head while saying “Our daughter is so grown up, an old soul in a young body.” and kiss my pouting mother to make her smile after her daughter had “verbally abused her”, as she called it.

Every time I would scream “Don’t do that daddy! Mommy needs to learn!” and stomped the floor in a huff. She was such a pampered wife, really.

But then my father died. Ironic isn’t it? He worked as a surgeon, healing children and giving them their lives back, but he lost his own. My mother couldn’t cope with his death and five years later she also passed away.

I heard people whisper at the funeral, that my father’s death stopped her will to keep living and that she died from grieving. If it weren’t for my paternal grandparents taking me in and shower me with unconditional love and patience, I’d probably have passed away from grieving too.

That was three years ago and now I’m 18 years old. Though I’ve grieved and cried more tears than most girls my age group, this is not a story about loss and sadness, but a story about a second chance in life in a world I never thought, in my wildest dreams, existed.

This is a story about me living an exciting life in another world.