Chapter 21
When my alarm went off an hour earlier than usual, it took everything I’d got to avoid the snooze button, instead pushing back the covers and slowly hauling myself up. I crept downstairs like a teenager sneaking off to a party, tiptoeing about the kitchen as I made a mug of tea before slipping outside into the crisp morning air.
Oh, it was a tiny slice of heaven. I spent half an hour alternating between thinking and not thinking, and another fifteen minutes reading my book. I was upstairs, out of the shower and half-dressed when Isla burst into my bedroom. Rather than bracing myself as usual, I was ready for her.
‘Hey, lovely. How did you sleep?’
‘Okay.’ She narrowed her eyes suspiciously. ‘I had a dream about a hedgehog pricking me with its prickles.’
‘Ouch! Did you feel the prickles in your dream?’
‘No.’ She folded her arms. ‘Why are you so woken up already?’
‘I got up a bit earlier than usual. Shall we see if Finn’s up or get some breakfast just the two of us, first?’
‘Breakfast just two of us!’ Suspicion evaporating, she thundered down the stairs loud enough to wake her brother up. Thankfully, by the time she had a plate of toast with a banana milkshake, she was happy enough to share her mummy with Finn.
The rest of the morning went, if not like clockwork, not like a clock that is dysfunctional and broken. We were ready on time. Isla had cried only once. She’d laughed her head off when Hazel had thrown up down Toby’s shirt.
‘This was good, wasn’t it?’ Finn asked as we walked to school, spotting a rabbit in one of the fields alongside the path. ‘Shall we do our lunch the night before every day? Maybe then Isla will stop crying all the time.’
I knew it would take more than an organised morning, or a mum who’d had an hour to gather herself before the onslaught of the day. But we would be doing our lunch the night before, that much I did know.
My buoyant mood carried on into the first half of the antenatal class with Brayden and Silva, up until the lunchbreak, when Brayden cornered me by the coffee mugs.
‘Liz, as you’ll have noticed, I’m struggling to interact with you today.’
‘Oh?’ No, actually, I hadn’t. It had been a practical session so far, looking at comfortable positions to support labour, which mostly involved the couples working together while I wandered about making the odd helpful suggestion and answering any questions.
‘To be honest, I nearly didn’t come. I wasn’t sure I could trust myself to keep my cool and put our private lives to one side. You know what I’m referring to.’
‘Sorry, I really don’t.’ My mind started flicking through possible reasons for Brayden to lose his cool with me. He’d seemed in a great mood when he’d dropped Finn and Isla off on Saturday. I couldn’t imagine what had happened since.
‘It’s only fair that I tell you Silva and I are discussing whether we need to apply for custody. The plan was to start some weekend sleepovers, a few days away in the school holidays. But we are gravely concerned.’
‘Um, what? What plan?’
‘I knew you were struggling. But at this point, the question needs to be asked whether you’re simply clueless and desperate, or have genuinely lost your mind.’
‘Excuse me? How dare you speak to me like that?’ I still had no idea what was going on, but my hands had started trembling with rage.
‘How dare you? This must breach all professional standards. If it was the other way around, and a male in a position of authority had acted like this with a teenage mother, people would be contacting the police. Maybe they already have. You’d be fired if you weren’t your own boss. What the hell does Nicky say about it?’
To my horror, the rest of the class had at some point tuned in to Brayden’s increasingly loud rant.
‘Are you accusing me of something, Brayden? Because I think you’d probably best say what the hell it is I’m meant to have done rather than throw cryptic statements around.’
He turned up his nose in a sneer. ‘Are you denying that you’ve shacked up with a teenager from one of your classes? Moved him into the house with my children, and got him playing daddy?’
There was a collective intake of breath from everyone in the room, including me. I waited a moment, forced myself to take a couple of slow, deep breaths and counted backwards from ten.
‘Yes, I’m denying it. Where on earth did you hear that?’
‘A concerned parent at Bigley Primary told me that this boy walked the children to school. Isla was very happy to tell everyone that he’d moved in, and was going to be her new daddy.’
‘And you believed it?’ I pulled back my shoulders, ignoring the very real urge to vomit in horror, and tipped up my chin, looking my ex-husband right in the eye. ‘Last week Isla told her teacher that she had a flying bed and I’d flown her to fairy land. You were married to me for years. Which one of those stories do you think is more likely?’
‘I have zero evidence for a flying bed. A lot of people saw this boy with my children.’
‘Do they also think I’m two-timing him with Theo, my brother-in-law? It wasn’t so long ago that Isla asked if he could be her daddy.’
‘Well, no.’ For the first time, Brayden started to look discomfited. Everyone else in the room was frozen still. It was the first time most of them had discovered that Brayden and I knew each other outside the course, let alone had children together.
‘Are you seeing the theme, here, Brayden? I wonder why Isla is so desperate for a new daddy. Maybe because, up until two weeks ago, the father who deserted us when she was five months old spent less time with her than he did making TikToks.’
‘That’s not fair,’ Silva interjected. ‘Cultivating our online presence is part of our business.’
‘Brayden has no business!’ I snapped. ‘He sold an app for a preposterous amount of money and now farts about while you take photos. You have less followers than Baby Bloomers!’
She opened her mouth to argue, but now we were here, talking about this, I wasn’t about to let Silva sidetrack the conversation.
‘The point is, you can’t suddenly decide you want to play daddy and expect me to hand over the children I’ve raised single-handedly for sleepovers and weeks away. You have no right to make snap judgements about me based on playground gossip and the testimony of a child you barely know. You are completely out of order—’ my whole body was fizzing with fury now ‘—bringing up my personal life, my children, any of this here. Now, is anyone still eating lunch, or shall we move on to talking about sleeping patterns?’
‘Wait,’ Claudia, the single mother, said. ‘Brayve is your baby-daddy? And he’s brought his new woman to your classes?’
‘He’s my ex-husband,’ I mumbled, having started to run out of steam.
‘Talk about rubbing it in your face!’
‘Who left who?’ Claudia’s birth partner asked.
‘That’s none of your business,’ Silva barked. ‘We’ve heard more than enough for one day.’
‘Actually, now that Brayden’s started sharing, I think it’s best to let people know the situation. They’ll only be wondering, otherwise, which will make it harder to concentrate and detrimental to their learning.’
‘See!’ Claudia said, crunching on the last of her pickled onion Monster Munch.
‘Brayden and I married when I was twenty. We had our son a year later, then a girl nearly three years after that. He…’
Oh, how I itched to complete the story. He left me for Silva, the woman he’d started sleeping with before I got pregnant with Isla, leaving me with two tiny children.
‘We…’
Brayden looked as though his internal organs were shrivelling up. Silva blinked defiantly, but the knuckles clasping her falafel wrap were white.
‘It didn’t work out, for all sorts of reasons. We were young, these things happen. But what matters now is that we’re committed to parenting our children as best we can. Just like for all of you. Whoever makes up your baby’s family, what counts is that you share the same goal, to provide them with the best childhood they can have. Full of love and security. So, that brings us on to an activity that might be relevant now, thinking about your support networks…’
‘She’s wrong.’
Brayden’s voice was a rough croak.
‘Excuse me?’ I asked, wondering how much more of an arse this man could be in one lunchbreak.
‘Now’s not the time, dude.’ Gordon winced.
‘It didn’t work out because I failed as a husband and a father. Liz was amazing. Even when I was cheating on her throughout a risky pregnancy, she was strong and brave and kept on being the best mother to Finn. When she was fighting for our marriage, at the same time I was actively destroying it, she always put our children first. Silva and I aren’t here to rub it in Liz’s face, to gloat or show off or any of that. We’re here because she’s the best parent I know. And goodness knows, I’ve got a lot to learn about parenting, so we wanted to learn from the best. For what it’s worth, Liz, I’m sorry.’
You could have heard one of those unborn babies burp, the room was so still.
‘I’m sorry for failing you. I’m sorry for all the extra sacrifices you’ve had to make because you married an immature waster. I’m sorry for everything Finn and Isla have missed out on. I can’t put that right. But I can start being there for them now. I’d like to try.’
Silva was staring at the floor, face stricken.
‘Oh, and I’m sorry for accusing you of living with your teenage childminder in front of your clients.’
‘Oh no, I am living with him,’ I said, when I’d managed to get my brain back working.
Another audible gasp.
‘He’s renting that back room off me. I could use the extra help, since you’ve been promising to pay me child support in the form of shares in your still-non-existent new business. But I appreciate the apology. Shall we get on with the session now?’
I might be a wreck in all sorts of ways. I was lonely, and more than a little lost. But, boy, Brayden was right about one thing. Building my brilliant business while raising two small children had made me tough and brave and, below the stress and the mess, understand what really mattered. I was so grateful that I was finally putting that into action.
‘He left you for Silva? When you had two littlies?’ Claudia’s birth partner suddenly asked. ‘That’s not cool.’
‘And whatever the excuse, it’s a bit much bringing her to the classes.’ Chris, the dad with four kids, turned to his partner. ‘See? You think I was bad!’
‘You were bad,’ Jemima replied. ‘You told your not-yet-ex-wife that I was your niece. On balance, that’s probably worse.’
I powered through a one-off private antenatal class on Tuesday evening, and the Bloomers postnatal session on Wednesday. Doing my best to keep on top of things while adding more items to the new to-do list, the one with an achievable number of things to do, rather than a billion. When I found myself wide awake at one o’clock on Thursday morning, I dug out an old notebook and tried journaling again for the first time since I was a teenager, the process reminding me of how cathartic putting my feelings onto paper could be. I scrawled pages about Brayden and his unexpected apology, the wonderful weirdness of adjusting to Toby and Hazel being around, and – of course – my hopes and fears about the upcoming dinner with Jonah and Ellis.
My fears? That Ellis still resented me for what happened. That it would be stilted and awkward and we’d have nothing to talk about. Jonah would hear how my life had turned out and conclude I was a loser. Then he’d throw into the conversation some anecdote about his incredible girlfriend, or wife, and, even though I couldn’t and didn’t want to be either of those things, I’d choke on a piece of chicken and the grumpy waiter with sweaty hands would perform the Heimlich manoeuvre in front of everyone.
My hopes? I tried to hope for an enjoyable evening with people I once cared deeply about. I wanted to hope that I’d connect with Ellis well enough to become a supportive friend, or at least enough to keep her coming along to Bloomers.
But the events of the past few days, seeing Jonah again, the very fact that we were meeting up, had stirred up that old na?ve optimist inside me. The things she hoped for, I wouldn’t even admit to my journal.
The evening was overcast, so in a last-minute panic I threw on a newish pair of jeans – two years old counted as new compared to the rest of my wardrobe, anyway – a thin-knit jumper with a flattering neckline that made me feel more curvy than dumpy, and a pair of sandals that were so old I had a feeling they were back in fashion again. I dug out my old hair tongs and played about with my new hairstyle, then dabbed on a smattering of make-up.
Jonah or Ellis wouldn’t care, but it had been far too long since I’d cultivated some personal pride, so it meant a lot to me.
‘Looking good, Libby!’ Toby winked when I nipped into the kitchen to check the kids were eating their fishfingers without causing any trouble.
‘I’ll be back for bedtime,’ I promised them. ‘You can skip a bath tonight, but if you’re good for Toby and get everything on the new chart ready for school tomorrow, I’ll read you an extra story.’
‘I love the new chart!’ Isla sighed, dreamily.
‘Especially if we get a special treat at the end of the week!’ Finn added.
‘Me, too.’ I gave them both a kiss on the forehead, taking care to avoid ketchupy fingers.
‘What’s your special treat, Mummy?’ Isla asked. ‘There’s nothing on the list for you.’
‘Seeing you two happy is enough for me,’ I said, checking, for the third time, I’d got everything I needed in my bag.
Toby folded his arms and blocked my exit from the kitchen. ‘What’s your treat, Libby?’ he asked. ‘How are you showing these guys that mums deserve to be happy, too?’
I paused, glancing at the clock on the microwave, which, thanks to Toby, was now correct for the first time in forever.
‘I don’t have time to think one up now. I’ll add something to the chart later.’
Toby slowly pulled the pencil from behind his ear and handed it to me. ‘I think we can all agree you’ve put it off long enough.’
‘Fine!’ I grabbed the pencil and scribbled ‘bar of chocolate’ on the treat list.
‘A bar of chocolate?’ Toby said, making no effort to hide his contempt.
‘That’s rubbish, Mum.’ Finn shook his head mournfully. ‘Ours are way better. You’ve worked almost as hard as us at the chart.’
Almost?
I was tempted to write down ‘a child-free weekend in a luxury spa hotel’ but was scared Toby would somehow force me to go through with it.
‘I’m really late!’ I handed the pencil back to Toby, not wanting to admit how stumped I was when it came to thinking up something nice for myself. ‘You pick one.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘Make sure it’s sensible,’ I called from the hallway as I slipped my shoes on. ‘And cheap!’
‘One sensible, cheap treat coming right up,’ he called back, laughing.
‘You do have to complete your list of things on the chart first,’ Isla shouted as I grabbed my keys and opened the front door.
I didn’t stop to reply, because I was about to complete an important item from another list – attempt to make a new friend.