I had a request for stories of children born out of Addergoole after their parents graduate. This is one of at least 2 that I will write.

Bianca is the daughter of Rand and Acacia from Year 4. Harvey and Miliana are Xaviera’s children by Ardell.

There were things Bianca remembered, years later, even when nobody said she should be able to. She’d been too little. Toddlers didn’t know these things. But they did.

Some kids, their moms or dads visited every weeks. Some didn’t even live in the crèche, just spent the days there while Mom and Dad were in school, or at work. Some came for preschool, and lived with an aunt or uncle or gramma in the Village. And then there were kids like Bianca, who might as well not have a Mom or a Dad (she was pretty sure she didn’t, actually. She remembered, very clearly, being two years old and telling another child “I don’t have parents. I came from the cabbage patch.”)

Other kids left after a year, or a couple years, or maybe, like Dora, stayed around but lived with their Moms. Other kids, kids who had parents, went away when their parent graduated. Sometimes their dad and their mom argued about who got to take them.

Bianca, and Harvey, and Miliana, and others like them, they stayed. They moved out of the 3-year-old room with the others, but the others got to leave, and they just moved into big-kid rooms. When Bianca was five, Lady Maureen took her aside, and talked to her about parents. She could have parents, she explained. She was old enough to understand that t was a choice. To stay here, in the Village, with the babies who got to go home with their moms and dads and the other kids who never did, or to go to a foster-family, to parents who would love her as their own.

Other kids took the fake-parents option. She knew that. But for her, it was a no-brainer.

She looked Lady Maureen in the eye, and said, as politely as she could (you were never rude to Lady Maureen), “the Cabbage Patch is my only mom and dad.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabbage_Patch_Kids

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