Don't Abandon Love

In the book Numbers by Rachel Ward, the main character, Jem, can see when people are going to die. When she makes eye contact with someone, a number appears in the back of her mind, for example, 10102001 would appear. That means that that person will die on October 10th, 2001. That also happens to be the number that Jem saw in her mother's eyes. Ever since her mom dies Jem has been living in foster homes, and going to a school for troubled kids. Jem is smart enough to know she can't share her gift with anyone else, much less tell them their number. But Jem starts to change when she becomes friends with a boy called Spider, and the London Eye blows up. Jem and Spider go on the run when police think that they blew up the London Eye. This story is about how Jem accepts her loss of her loved ones by learning how to trust and love other people again.

Jem has to learn how to trust other people, and she starts with Spider. Spider has been wanting to get to know her better, but she hasn't let him in. But because Spider is so persistent Jem finally decides to give him a chance. Jem ends up hanging out with Spider a lot, and they become closer and closer, especially when they to run away from the police. [SPOILER ALERT] Jem and Spider eventually fall in love, erasing Jem's prior belief that she would never trust anyone ever again. Jem also starts to trust her foster mom, Karen, more near the end of the book. Jem wasn't prepared to love her foster mom, probably because she didn't want to feel the pain of loosing her mom again. It isn't clear whether Jem loved her mom or not but after her mom left she felt alone.

I have not lost anyone near to me to death, but I was adopted when I was 9 months old. I never knew my parents or possible siblings, so the yearning I feel for them is different than the ache of someone you knew well, and loved. I also have no idea whether they are still alive or not, so I don't know how to feel. They are missing from my life, but at the same time, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because I never knew them. My parents told me that my 9 months (4 months with my birth parents, 5 months in the orphanage) was a really long time, but I know adopted kids who were abandoned at 13. My friend told a story about how her parents took her on a car trip when she was 13, then left her at a gas station. It's not the same idea as being adopted from birth, but it had the same abandoned feel. Sometimes I'm glad I don't know who abandoned me, but in the situation of letting myself love again, I have accepted that and moved on, similar to Jem.