Awkward Situations: Having Children with Different Fathers

My neighbours are an elderly couple, and their daughter lives with them, along with her three daughters. Her name is Mabel its whispered that shes fatherless in a peculiar way, for each of her three girls has a different father. Everyone calls her Mabel, though her story flickers and changes, as if being recounted in a half-remembered dream.

About Daisy, its said she first married when she was only eighteen. The young man was hopelessly besotted with Mabel; her parents saw no reason to object why wouldnt you wish for your childs happiness, after all?

The wedded pair lived together for five years or so, yet, curiously, no children arrived. Soon whispers began at tea time and over garden fences, questioning what was amiss. As is often the way in such tales, everyone decided the poor girl must be at fault. It was claimed that, by her eighteenth birthday, shed led a life so wild that she could never have a child.

Mabel was unfortunate in her mother-in-law, who came from a Kentish village and was endlessly reminding her son that a proper wife ought to deliver grandchildren. Eventually, her son listened and left Mabel. When the time came for divorce, Mabel saw no point in changing her name. Why bother? Just more paperwork and bother.

Not long after, she met another man, and quite suddenly, Mabel fell pregnant. It turned out she was not the one unable to have children it had been her first husband all along, but nobody seemed to care about that detail. The baby was born, though the new father vanished at once, drifting away like mist on the moors. What else could Mabel do but list her child under her first husbands name?

Her own mother, Margaret, was not cross about the baby; she was just glad to have a grandchild at last. Some time later, Mabel told her parents again: she was expecting another. At least, this time, she had re-married. That was something to chalk up on the positive side. However, the new husband had never planned for children so soon. Inconvenient for him, no doubt. The little girl arrived with health issues, though, and her new father was so spooked that he upped and left without even bothering to arrange a divorce.

In due course, another man wandered into Mabels life, and soon enough, she chose to have a third baby, this time against her parents wishes they worried about how so many mouths might be fed, but Mabels mind was made up. She had the baby, and the father melted into the night, as if he had never existed at all. Mabel gave her third daughter yet another fathers name.

At least the silver lining glimmered Mabel managed to buy a small flat, with her parents chipping in some pounds for the deposit. After a fiery falling-out with her parents, Mabel realised shed need to find some way to support her three children. She decided to apply for child maintenance. But what a surreally English predicament: none of the putative fathers would admit to anything or sign a paper. Some bolted, others sent ominous letters.

And so, endlessly, it goes. Mabel has her children; what else remains but to keep muddling through? She seems always to be tumbling into one difficulty after another, as if the ground beneath her feet might slip away at any moment all within a dream that never truly ends.