Chapter Four
The night before
So, the moment has almost arrived. I have spent the past few days wandering about in a haze of anticipatory grief, a sob painfully and permanently trapped in my throat.
Every time I catch sight of a family photograph, every glimpse of her coat, her shoes, her jewellery, the general detritus of Layla, I well up.
It’s not sustainable, this situation of knowing the end is near and being entirely unable to appreciate the last remaining moments because I am so sad.
It’s ghastly. Almost as though I’d have preferred to go through life childless if it meant not having my daughter ripped away from me.
Joe tells me I’m being melodramatic. And I guess that last paragraph does sound like something a borderline hysteric might write.
But it’s hard to convey how physically painful this sensation of impending loss is.
The nausea. The gnawing, churning, roiling feeling in my stomach.
I wonder if it’ll give me a gastric ulcer.
They’re sometimes caused by stress aren’t they?
And isn’t this an extreme example of emotional stress?
Is having an ulcer like having a tapeworm? Might it stop me putting on weight?
Perhaps I’ll just fade away like a side character in a Victorian novel.
Draw all the drapes and take to my bed, eschewing all sustenance until I am so painfully thin that Joe has to consult an apothecary.
Please, feed my wife, she’s skin and bone.
All of my friends will say, God she looks so thin.
And so chic. Have you seen her cheekbones?
I get lost in this daydream for a few moments and it provides a little distraction from the pain.
Because surely there must be an upside somewhere?
Or maybe I didn’t read the contract carefully enough when, after years of trying, that little blue line finally appeared on the stick.
When you start on this great and noble journey of motherhood you are vaguely aware that, at some point, this tiny baby will become a fully grown adult human being, and that a marker of your success as a mother will be how successfully this new person navigates the world as a grown-up.
But in those posseting days of milky madness, when the fug of constant feeds and endless nappies leads to a sensation that time has been suspended and normal rules of day and night no longer apply, in those bleary moments the very idea that this squalling, red-faced little angel will become an actual functional person, seems laughable.
Add to that the notion that this person might eventually leave home, and to your hormone addled brain it sounds frankly deranged.
How is it even possible they will one day no longer need you?
Look! See how much they need you now! Even the process of staying alive is beyond their capabilities.
Without you to feed them, clothe them, keep them warm and safe from harm they’d die!
And yes, you know from the widening relationship with your own parents that eventually there will be a separation, an assertion of independence, but this is different.
You were a child of the Seventies; your mother barely knew where you were most of the time.
Off with the boys on their Raleigh Choppers, playing on building sites, smoking behind bike-sheds by the age of eleven.
You practically raised yourself! Whereas this baby…
your baby, well, she’s going to need you forever.
She’s a part of you, she’s your life’s work.
It’s conflicting to say the least. And I try, I really have been trying, to keep this conflict inside my own head and not let it squeak out of my mouth or seep out of my eyes when I’ve been with Layla these past few days.
She knows I’m sad, but she also thinks I’m excited and happy for her.
And I am! I have to keep reminding myself – I am happy.
So terribly, terribly, awfully happy and excited.
The best plan seems to be a vow of silence.
I’ve taken to not actually speaking to preserve the illusion of functioning as normal.
It’s easier for everyone this way. Earlier today when I asked if she had packed enough warm clothes, my voice broke on the words ‘woolly jumper’ and never really regained its full strength.
So, silence it is. I just pointed to various garments and numbly added items to boxes and carrier bags until Joe got back from work and we could start loading up the car.
He was also uncharacteristically sombre as we undertook the Jenga challenge of packing one eighteen-year-old girl’s belongings, old and new, into a hatchback while still leaving enough room for three people to squeeze in.
We’d all agreed that the best plan was to pack the car tonight to save time in the morning ahead of the long drive (Layla didn’t really have anything worth stealing so the security hazard seemed minimal).
Then we were going to have Layla’s favourite dinner, watch a favourite film on the television (really ramping up the nostalgia just in case anyone was in danger of missing the significance of the moment) and aim for an early night.
‘At least she’ll have something squashy to lean against if she wants a sleep on the way up,’ Joe said, forcing the last bin liner of clothes onto the rear seats and taking a step back to check that the precarious structure would hold.
‘I think the yucca plant poking her in the eye might put paid to that notion,’ I said, offering up the offending item.
Joe considered it, chin in his hand. ‘Does she really need a pot-plant that size?’ he said eventually. ‘I mean, I know she loves Sideshow Bob but he’s not terribly portable – what’s going to happen over the holidays with nobody watering him?’
‘I’ll let you have that conversation with her,’ I said.
‘But I think she’d probably argue that any plant will be better off being neglected for a few weeks in a hall of residence than it would being neglected full-time if she leaves it with me.
And I don’t want to be responsible for the death of Sideshow Bob.
I’ve already had to agree to contacting her immediately if one of the cats so much as sneezes in a worrying way.
She’d be after daily photographs of Bob if he was left behind. ’
He gave me a fond look. ‘I can’t imagine you complaining about having to contact her every day,’ he said. ‘Even if it is just for a horticultural update. Have you two had a chat about how regularly we expect her to be in touch?’
‘Not directly,’ I said. ‘It all felt a bit final.’
‘Are you just avoiding thinking about anything beyond tomorrow night?’ he said, putting an arm around my shoulders as we went back towards the house.
I nodded sadly.
‘Well, I’ll speak to her while you’re getting the popcorn and snacks,’ he said. ‘I think we should suggest that she calls us at least once a week to begin with.’
‘Once a week?’ I stopped in my tracks. ‘But…’
‘As a minimum,’ he said gently. ‘I know you’re going to want to speak to her all the time, Hattie.
But we don’t want her feeling like she has to commit to a certain number of phone calls or messages – she should be out enjoying herself, not feeling guilty because she thinks we’re waiting at the end of the phone. ’
‘But once a week.’ I tried to keep the panic out of my voice. ‘That feels very – infrequent?’
Joe shrugged. ‘It’s all our parents got,’ he said. ‘Do you remember queuing up at the payphone with a handful of coins on a Sunday afternoon?’
‘God, it was always in some draughty stairwell, wasn’t it? No privacy and you’d have like five people waiting, standing about a foot away from you. And none of them would give a shit whether you were bawling your eyes out due to homesickness or being informed about a death in the family.’
‘My parents never got much information out of me,’ said Joe. ‘I was only really ringing to tell them I was alive. And if there was sport on, or I was really hungover, I just wouldn’t call them. They’d have to wait a fortnight.’
I inhaled sharply as we walked into the kitchen. ‘We were monsters,’ I said. ‘They must have been worried sick most of the time.’
‘I don’t think so. It was normal, wasn’t it? They didn’t expect to hear from us every day. It just wouldn’t have been realistic.’ He lifted Margaret off the worksurface giving her his best stern expression.
‘What was normal?’ Layla asked as she walked through from the sitting room where she’d been cueing up this evening’s film on the television.
‘Oh, just me and your mother, reminiscing about the olden days,’ said Joe, Margaret still tucked under his arm, looking faintly aggrieved. ‘Come on. Let’s go check your room for anything you might suddenly decide you can’t live without. Which reminds me. We need to discuss Sideshow Bob…’
Later, once the film was over, the dishwasher on, and the cats shut in the utility room, Joe and I lay in bed, him fast asleep, me wide awake, blinking at the ceiling.
I realised that this was the final night that our family unit would spend in this format of ‘parents with a child at home’.
As of tomorrow, Joe and I would be ‘parents of a child at university’, and although the distinction sounded arbitrary it really did feel quite momentous.
This wouldn’t be the same as having a child leave to go travelling for a gap year (although that would bring its own perils and stresses).
And it wasn’t the same as a child returning to live under your roof once they’d hit their twenties and realised there was no such thing as affordable housing, because this was always seen as a temporary solution, even if they’d been back home for years.
There aren’t many hard markers in parenting.
There’s becoming a parent, obviously, when your child first arrives in the delivery room, although my mind was more occupied with concerns about my perineum than the magic of childbirth or the beauty of creation at that point.
And there are the developmental milestones as your child learns to crawl and then walk unaided, learns to speak, to read, to feed themselves.
There are educational markers – starting nursery and then school, the exams, the results days.
And the life skills – learning to drive, catching a train unaccompanied, first kiss, first date, first girls’ holiday abroad.
But these were less about parenting and more about the progression of an individual life.
The markers of parenthood were few and they were distinct; your child is born, they grow up, they leave home, find a partner, and maybe have children of their own.
The timing may be flexible, but the significance of each moment is huge, with a clear before and after.
And we were at one of those junctures. A fork in the road.
Once we dropped Layla off at university tomorrow, we would have crossed over from the before to the after.
And so, no, I didn’t get a bloody wink of sleep.