Seeing Lorraine was supposed to be easy: close to home, I could walk, someone else did the admin. But Lorraine doesn’t see me.
“…so, why don’t we review the supports you have in place and talk about some ways that you can find other…”
Fuck this. “That sounds like fun, Lorraine, but I’ve got to go.”
“Our session isn’t finished.”
“That’s OK, I’m letting you know now, well in advance, that I won’t be here next week.”
I struggle with the door, my scar prickling every time I move the stroller. Lorraine doesn’t help me. She just turns in her chair and says, “I’m sorry to hear that,” not sorry at all.
The therapy was hard to get but not the diazepam. I told the GP that I was having a hard time and within my ten minute time slot, barely a question asked, she gave me the prescription and the number for the borough counseling service.
I said, “Can I drink on these? I can’t be spaced out, I’ve got a baby and a kid.”
She said, “It’ll take the edge off. Bye now.” And she smiled as she held the door open.
I’ve pushed Rocky to the high street. I can turn left, go home and take the pill, have a drink and let it all go. Or I can turn right, pick up food for dinner, get Johnny from school and be their mother.
“You alright, pet?” I’m startled by the voice. It’s the white-haired checkout lady from Sainsbury’s on her cigarette break. The nice one who loves babies. Pet. Such a sweet name to be called. She touches my elbow. “You been standing ’ere for a bit. You OK?”
I’m so tired. My bones are tired. Exhaustion is pulling them apart, stretching my veins in every direction like a spider’s web, and I am just as impermanent. Transparent. I can hear the creaking hinge blink of my eyelids. I can’t move from this spot, overwhelmed by the possibility of crossing the street. I want to lie down on this sidewalk, absorb the heat from the concrete. This morning I saw a black plastic bag stuck to the street. It was a shopping bag like you get from the corner shop, except I thought it was a dead bird and I started to cry. That’s not the first time that’s happened. Does this woman know how that feels?
“Lovey?” She touches my arm.
“Yes, sorry, I’m just so sleep deprived. You know how it is with these little terrors.”
Somehow there’s still the ability to speak, to be paralyzed on the inside but still moving on the outside.
“Oh, I know, dear, but it goes by fast, too fast. Isn’t he gorgeous? You give your mummy some peace, you ’ear?” she says to Rocky, who turns to look at her with a dimply smile. Charm that he didn’t inherit from me.
“You’ll be OK, love, it don’t last for ever.”
“That’s what they say. See you tomorrow. Always need milk and nappies, you know?” She pats my arm. I watch her put out her cigarette on top of a trash can before she goes back into the store. “Thank you,” I whisper, and turn right.
10
wine, formula
A Wednesday in August 2016, 6:25 p.m. London, Grand Euro Star Lodge Hotel, Room 506
I’ve been crying for nine minutes. I know that because I’ve been holding the phone, watching the numbers change. The ladies are still bickering on TV but I’ve lost track of the plot. I check the phone again. Another new email. But this one’s a sudden burst of hope—maybe we could talk and…
Gigi, babes, how are you??? Sorry I didn’t get back to you last week. It’s been mental. Have you seen my Guardian article? It’s so huge for the firm. Anyway I just wanted to say don’t worry about what happened in the office. It’s OK, everyone understands. Remember when I came back I was a wreck too. So should we get the babies together? It’s sooo crazy busy for me the next few weeks, but I’ve got the nanny now and I sent her your details so she’ll coordinate a playdate at mine. I’ll try to pop in if I can if it’s my work from home day. And let’s do drinks next Thursday night? Might have a Law Society thing but let me check and get back to you. We all miss you here.
Got to run—
Lots of love, Charlie xx
I’m still processing the fact that she’s outsourced me to the nanny when another email comes through.
Sorry hun, can’t do Thursday and I’m in Manchester on Friday. How about the third week of September? xx
She doesn’t mean to make me feel bad. She doesn’t know I’m in this room. She’s offering the little time she has to spend with me. But I feel bad anyway. It’s not about me, I know that. I know, I remember, that there’s a kind of ruthless self-centeredness that’s crucial to survival when you’re a working mother, especially if you want to do well.
She doesn’t hear what a playdate with her nanny sounds like to me. It just seems practical, efficient, because she’s thinking only about the list, how many things she can get done on the list, who’s watching her and how they’re keeping score. She doesn’t know I’m barely surviving. She’s barely surviving herself but trying not to make it look like she’s trying, because this is a new stage; the part where she becomes Superwoman.
She starts to succeed in her career and so she’s expected to hire someone to do the mothering. She has to tell this story, where things are just “crazy busy,” with a cheerful eye roll because she’s got to sell the myth or it crumbles. If she doesn’t make it look easy she doesn’t get the important cases that put her in the Guardian. She also doesn’t see her kids awake for five days out of seven but she’s not allowed to tell anyone how much that hurts. Pain is not part of her story. She can’t show us she misses them, but also she has to tell us that this career is for them. Everyone has to know that she’s built all this herself but it’s not for her, it’s for them—their future, their education, their inheritance, their image of women—because she’s a mother. Her achievements are never for herself.
Her success amplifies my failure. Highlights my mediocrity. I don’t begrudge her except that I do. I’m proud of her. I’m jealous of her. I’m in awe of her. I think she can’t really be happy like this, and I think she must be so happy, she’s really making it. I say to myself I guess she’s alright with another woman raising her children and I say to myself why don’t I have her drive? I want her to succeed but I also want her success for myself, and if I can’t have it, I want her to fail—fail at the mothering part at least, so she can feel as bad as I do. So that I can justify why I’m in the house and she’s out in the world. We all make choices, I say. We all make choices, she says. Each of us defending our choice, knowing that there are no real choices for either of us. There’s just what you do because you have to do something, because they all need you and they always come before you.
Another email flashes up:
Hello Gorgeous Mummies!
Reminder that tea and cake next week is at mine, the usual time. It’s Fiona’s last meeting with us before she goes back to work! So come ready to have some afternoon prosecco (pump and dump ladies LOL) and help us wish Fiona good luck!
You got this Fi!
Sukie and Humphrey xx
I hit reply:
Just because we happen to be at home with babies doesn’t mean that it’s OK to act like we’re day-drinking moro—
I delete it before I say something that I’ll regret—something valid, like I’m not an idiot, so please don’t send me infantile-cheerleader-prosecco-party-bullshit emails—but that I’ll regret nonetheless. And anyway, where’s my proof? My proof that I’m so smart, so accomplished and above this stay-at-home shit?
I pour more wine into my plastic cup, shut my eyes real tight; they’re dry now from crying so much. And that’s when I remember. I scroll through the phone till I find the picture. There’s me and Charlie in the office, arms around each other’s waists, wearing matching red patent-leather trench coats. I have to laugh.
Last year, Charlie had this terrible case of this
mom who had got separated from her kids for years because of a series of visa rejections and mistakes. I helped Charlie with the appeal and when we won and her kids finally got here, she brought them all with her to the office and presented us with these two matching coats. She had tears in her eyes and she said, “Thank you. I’ll never forget you. God bless you.” And even though the coats looked like they came from a sex shop, we had tears in our eyes too because we knew that she had gone and found the most fantastic, beautiful thing she could afford to say thank you. And these wildly inappropriate coats were it. We all hugged, and I said, “Well, no chance I’ll ever forget you either, not with this coat in my house,” and we all laughed and hugged again. And then me and Charlie wore them out to lunch, pretty sure that people thought we were hookers.
I keep that coat on the inside of the closet door. It peeks out from behind some robes and belts left on the hook there. Some days I don’t even see it. But on days when it felt too hard to be a mom, and live in England, and have a job, and be pregnant, and wonder what the fuck I was doing all this for, I’d look at the coat, and I’d remember that I was good at something. I worked for me and I worked for Johnny but I also worked because my work meant something to people, maybe just to a few people, but it mattered. To them and to me.
We all make choices. But I feel like mine’s being made for me. Like I’m going down a road I don’t want to be on but if I choose the other one, I’ll drive right off the edge. I write back to Sukie, because I know her email is bullshit:
Thanks. See you next week.
G x
I write back to Charlie, because I know her email is bullshit:
Wow, you’re busy. OK, September. Proud to see you in the papers. You’re on fire.
G x
I wonder if they know that my emails are bullshit too.
London, June 2016; Baby, 6 months old
“Really, Sukie, really? I’m surprised you’ve had this—change of heart, I suppose you call it. I guess it’s just not my personality. I would never be able to cope with staying at home.”
The speaker’s voice carries across the cafe, demanding the attention of strangers with its deep rasp, defying them not to hear her. She’s used to being heard and taking up space. The voice of a woman who will stop in a crowded stairwell at school to have a private conversation about her holiday, blocking everyone’s way upstairs and making them wait. The voice of a woman who throws open the doors of her Range Rover and claims the whole pavement with her children and dog and bags so that the general public is forced to move around her, as she expects them to, never saying sorry. A voluminous voice that doesn’t know how to apologize but does know how to give orders.
I can hear the conversation only in between blasts of the espresso machine but I’m pretty sure she’s talking to the Sukie I know. If I’d known she was in here I wouldn’t have come in. Especially because I haven’t gone to any of the group teas for a month. Now I’m stuck. I can’t leave because I’d have to pass her table to get to the door. I can’t go to the bathroom because I’d be right in her line of vision. So I have to keep my back to her table to avoid the awkwardness of her recognizing me. Because if she sees me I’ll have to say hello, and she’ll do that English thing where she won’t introduce me to her friends. I’ll have to introduce myself and then I’ll feel fat and terrible because at her table they’ll all be drinking skinny lattes and not eating and wearing identical size XS leather motorcycle jackets in shades of gray and navy blue.
After the espresso machine cuts off I hear Sukie’s voice, hesitant and defensive. She says, “Well, it’s the right thing to do for us, I suppose. It’s just that at the moment—” Yeah, that’s definitely her, but the big voice quickly cuts her off.
“I don’t know how you won’t just die of boredom, Sukie, but good on you, you’re a much more devoted mother than me!” Ouch. Bitchy. Sarcastic. I’m intrigued so I take a sip of my coffee and lean back a little farther to listen.
Another voice, softer than Bitchy, but still not on Sukie’s side, comes through: “You should do whatever makes you happy, Sukie, of course, but have you thought about how you’ll feel in six months’ time? In a year? It might be best to keep a foot in, somehow, in case you change your mind.”
Then Sukie, misunderstood, frustrated: “I didn’t say it was forever, Imogen, just for now. I’m not ready yet. I’m not worried about me, I’m worried about Humphrey, leaving him, he’s just a baby and I—”
Imogen again, concerned but unrelenting: “I just don’t want you to regret it. Just think about Mum. Once you’re on that road it can be hard to come back.”
That hits a chord because I hear the tremble in Sukie’s voice when she says, “But I’m happy. I’m very happy. We went through so much to have him, you both know that, I just can’t leave him now.”
“Oh, Sukie.” Bitchy’s exasperated. Sukie’s tears are threatening but Bitchy won’t let it go. “Going back to work doesn’t mean you’re leaving your child. It just means it’s the twenty-first century and he’ll be fine. More than fine. All of our children are fine.”
Then Sukie, desperate to be heard: “That’s not what I meant, I don’t mean you, that you’ve left your children, I mean for me.”
Sukie’s losing this one, she can’t convince them, and then Imogen says, “Well, it’s not a choice for all of us, is it.” Shit.
“Yes, I know. I know that we’re lucky that Gareth…that’s not what I…”
Sukie tries to backtrack, to start again, but then Bitchy comes in: “I don’t think it even is a choice, really, not any more. I have Tillie and Sophie to think of, after all, and how they see me and how they’ll see themselves.”
“Yes, but the girls are in school, Tamsin,” Sukie pleads. Oh, that’s Bitchy’s real name. Sukie goes on, “That’s different to a baby. And I understand all of that, I do. I just…I just thought I would feel differently, but now he’s here, and I don’t know. It might be my last chance. I just want to be there, that’s all, it doesn’t mean that I think—”
Bitchy/Tamsin interjects, “But coffee mornings and cake baking and nappies? Really? What’s happened to you?”
What’s happened to any of us, though? I don’t know why she never told us about her job. The house, the outfits, the shopping list on the chalkboard. I thought Sukie was a professional wife.
Sukie says, “So I’ll never become partner in a firm and I’m fully aware of that and I’m doing it anyway. I want to be with my baby. Why is that so hard to understand?”
Imogen says, “Because we love you and we don’t want to see you throw everything away. They do grow up, you know, and then what will you have? You’re not just a mother, Sukie, there’s more to you than that.”
Just a mother.
Sukie says, “Well, maybe I don’t want more. And what about you? Feeling guilty? Is that what this is about? Tillie still in floods of tears every morning, Tamsin? And does Sophie still call out for the nanny when she has a nightmare instead of you? If you’re worried about your own children then work that out for yourselves, because what I do for my family is none of your concern.”
Silence. Imogen and Bitchy/Tamsin have overstepped, but so has Sukie. That’s always how this conversation goes. Each mother tears the other mother down, maximizing the other woman’s guilt and minimizing her sacrifice. Bitchy/Tamsin brings an end to it. “You’re right. It’s not. I’m sure it will be wonderful for you, Sukie. Shall we get the bill? I have to get back to the office.”
Imogen and Bitchy leave the table, but I look over my shoulder and see that Sukie didn’t go with them. My choices are: a) keep my back turned until I know she’s gone so that she never has to know that I just heard all of that; b) wait for her to go to the bathroom, then make my escape; or c) get my stuff and get ready to leave in such a way that she sees my profile and then she has to be the on
e to say hello first. Then I pretend I didn’t realize she was here even though Bitchy might as well have been screaming “Sukie!” through a bullhorn.
I decide on option b), until I hear her say to the waiter, “May I have a large glass of rosé, please?” Then I hear the muffled crying. She’s crying. Shit.
I bite the bullet and turn around. “Hey, hey, Sukie?” She looks up, red eyes, tears she’s trying to hide but can’t.
“Oh, yes, hello. I didn’t see you there. How are you?”
“I’m fine. You OK?” I ask, pulling Rocky out of the high chair and onto my lap, shifting over to sit at her table before she can object.
“Oh, yes, I’m fine.”
Her wine arrives and I say, “Could I get the same, please? You don’t mind if I join you, do you? Actually, even if you do mind, I have a policy about not leaving crying women to drink alone.” She gives me a faint smile. She needs a friend, whether she wants one or not.
She says, “I’m sorry, it’s my sisters. I’ve just had an upsetting conversation.”
“Yeah, I know, uh, I was sitting right there, and, well, if you don’t mind me saying, I think they were really hard on you.”
There’s a momentary silence and then she says, “They were really hard on me, weren’t they?” She feels validated now. “They’re my older sisters, Imogen and Tamsin. They’re both very successful. They think I’m making a mistake leaving work.”
“You’re leaving your job for good?”
“Well, sort of. My plan was to go back at six months, which is now, and I’ve asked for a further three for the moment but I’m almost certain that I’m not going back at all. I know we have twelve months legally but I don’t want to get caught up in having to repay any maternity pay or anything like that so Gareth and I have been talking. I’m pretty sure that’s what I want. And they don’t want me back anyway. I thought it would be straightforward. Have the baby. Go back to work. But, then…it’s not how you think it will be…”
When I Ran Away Page 22