sarah manning is an anomaly. (anomalia) wrote in the100, @ 2016-04-08 12:04:00 |
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Sarah Bennett’s small home was an old place, one she’d found for a very inexpensive price when she’d moved out on her own. It had been in need of a lot of work for some time, and she’d been taking it slowly with bits and pieces along the way. (Sarah, for her very sweet nature, was not one who liked to ask for help. It was less a sense of overwhelming independence and more not wanting to impose on anyone by stealing their time away.) Once she’d decided to try to adopt Kira, her plans for renovation had needed to come a lot more quickly.
Now, her home was a construct of plastic coating and tape. All of her furniture, save for the few pieces that were necessary to day-to-day life, was covered and there were splotches of paint across some of the still unpainted walls.
She’d taken Kira to school and returned home, setting her keys in the little container just inside the door and moving into the kitchen to make some coffee. Once the warm mug was in her hands, she went to sit at the kitchen table. And she paused, looking around at the chaos.
On the small kitchen table were little piles. In one sat all of her receipts for the cost of what she’d spent. Beside it was a stack of quotes for the rest of the work that needed doing. There was a third, large but organized stack of bills that needed paying and a second pile of those that she was going to put off for a little while longer — their due dates were later. Somewhere in one of the piles was an unopened envelope that contained an acceptance letter to a law school she couldn't begin to pay to attend.
Sarah rubbed her forehead, already exhausted even though the sun had barely risen. She didn’t make enough doing her job to pay for the process of the adoption and the renovations needed to make her home meet the standards that would make the adoption successful — and that was assuming she could actually work. She’d taken the week off, though. She’d needed the time to do the renovations she didn’t have enough money to pay to complete.
She’d not been lying when she’d told those who’d asked that she was stressed. Sarah felt like a rippling ball of it, in fact, all held together by bits of bone and muscle and skin. She was sure that she was entirely made of anxiety at the moment, and she’d always been one prone to paranoia.
This was more than that, though. Sarah genuinely wasn’t sure if she could do it.
Raising Kira — that was the easy part, comparatively. She loved the little girl more than anything in the world, and she was prepared to do whatever she could to make her life as happy and comfortable as possible. But all of this? She was so horrified at the idea that she would be judged unfit to mother before she even got the chance to try.
The fear brought tears to her eyes, and not for the first time. The hand at her forehead slid to cover her face, her shoulder shaking a little as she gave into the overwhelming sense of stress, alone in her plastic-coated kitchen in her tiny house that she just barely had enough money to keep.