Chapter 30 #2
‘Such is my lot as your mother. Such is my lot. If I have to sit with it until you’re forty-four, that’s fine, I will take my parental penance.
And you’re right, you know.’ Olivia tries to cross her legs into some iteration of a yoga pose, finds her hips too stiff for such magic.
‘I have been as bad as my mother for some time now. I’ve been obsessed with making everything perfect and happy and I can see now that, actually, all that does is make everyone miserable and uncomfortable.
You’re quite right about me being obsessed with pretending that we’re a normal family.
It’s been my life goal. Have a normal family!
’ Olivia raises her arms at an imaginary sign.
‘But what I was trying to do was have a fantasy family that I’d maybe seen in a movie or read about in a book when I was younger.
And believe it or not, I was once young.
Anyway, I was trying to uphold this ideal of a family that doesn’t exist and never has, despite the best efforts of the Fryers to find and perfect it.
Well, here I am, a Fryer-Greenwood giving up the ghost and accepting that I already have a perfectly normal family, one that is sometimes happy, sometimes sad, and very often annoyed with each other.
One that makes mistakes and gets things wrong, just as I have been doing for the last few years.
I’ve been getting it wrong, and you know what, that’s OK.
That’s part of being human. This is me surrendering to the wrongness which is probably, ironically, the first right thing I’ve done in a long time. ’
‘No, the first right thing you did was buy that dress.’ Saskia points at the leopard-print mini, now fully ridden up around Olivia’s hips, revealing a bobbly pair of 80 denier tights.
‘You should wear more fun stuff like that, you look like you in it. Better than a boring botoxed Zara zombie.’ Saskia shudders. ‘Soooo middle-aged.’
‘Harsh but fair. Listen, we need to talk about …’ Olivia takes a deep breath, steadies herself for the task at hand.
‘I know that I’ve been in my own world lately, but believe it or not, I have been paying some attention to you.
I’ve noticed some things about you, Saskia, that remind me a lot of myself when I was your age. ’
Her daughter visibly recoils at the suggestion she might have something in common with Olivia.
‘I know it’s cringe when parents try and relate to their kids.
I know I seem about seven hundred years old and I know you think I can’t have possibly had a life outside of being your mum.
But I did and …’ Olivia rubs her eyes momentarily, knows that only wholehearted honesty is going to cut the mustard if she’s going to actually connect with her daughter.
‘You know at Auntie Lily’s party, I mentioned that I was ill when I was seventeen?
I had anorexia.’ She pauses, allows her daughter to take this in.
Allows herself to properly take it in, this reality that she has, until recently, tried to gloss over, as if it were an aberration, a bolt from the blue, a grenade she alone bore total responsibility for.
‘It was really hard. They wanted me to go to hospital but Mum insisted on keeping me at home which is why I can be so down on her. We didn’t really talk about mental health back then.
There was a real stiff-upper-lip thing going on, and even though I like to think that I’m really enlightened on the subject I’ve probably carried a bit of that through with me, which is what all that perfectionism bollocks is about. ’
‘I thought you said we couldn’t swear.’
‘Yeah, well, you reminded me that sometimes we need a good swear to get the message through. Anyway, I’m telling you all of this because I want you to know that if you ever felt like you were in trouble with something, if you ever felt like you needed help, you belong to a family who would sit with you through it. Am I making sense?’
‘Not really?’ Saskia scrunches up her nose, but has at least moved closer to her mother. ‘Or at least no more sense than you’ve ever really made.’
‘OK, so I’ve noticed how much you do about the house, how you help with the tidying and the cleaning and how little I acknowledge all you do.
I want to thank you for the way you’ve been trying to hold things together, but I also want you to know that you don’t have to do what you’re doing. You don’t have t—’
‘It’s fine, Mum, it’s nothing.’
‘It’s not nothing, Saskia. It’s not nothing.
You’re sixteen. I know what it’s like to be sixteen.
And I think it would be very understandable if you had some of the same struggles I had, when I was younger.
You know, with food, like with the bagels and not ever wanting to eat very much.
Maybe that relationship doesn’t feel so good for you, in the way it didn’t feel that good for me? ’
‘I’m not anorexic, Mum.’ Saskia has closed her eyes, turned her body away from her mother. ‘If that’s what you’re trying to say, then you can relax.’
‘But you don’t have to be anorexic for me to worry about you, darling. Nobody ever has to wait until it gets that bad to ask for help. You can always get our support with stuff before it gets to that stage.’
‘It’s just hard, isn’t it?’ Saskia shrugs. ‘TikTok, Snapchat, this expectation that you should be shopping in Sephora from, like, eight years old.’
‘Is that a thing?’
‘Mum, you know it’s a thing. Don’t act all shocked when you’re all botoxed anyway!’
‘OK, OK, that’s fair.’ Olivia wonders what it would feel like to live in a world where everyone just left their face well enough alone.
‘Listen, I need you to know that it doesn’t have to be that way.
I know I’m not always the best example to you.
I’ve been uptight and controlling and I really shouldn’t be injecting things into my face.
I’m not going to do that any more, I promise.
But I want you to know I love you, and I’m here for you, whatever is going on with you.
You don’t have to be Little Miss Perfect for me.
I mean, you are Little Miss Perfect to me, regardless of your school grades or the way you look or how tidy you are in the house.
I want you to be you, Saskia. Not a version of you that you think everyone will love. ’
‘But it’s easier said than done, isn’t it?
’ Saskia stares. ‘You’re sitting there, forty-four years old, and only just realizing you can wear leopard print.
Only just realizing that I might be unhappy.
You can’t just say these things suddenly, and hope that saying them will magically make them come true for me.
I mean, asking me to just be me is a huge pressure in itself, right? ’ She shakes her head, picks at a nail.
‘That’s true. I mean, maybe we could go and talk to someone professional about this. Like a therapist?’
‘Maybe.’ Saskia exhales. ‘Maybe I could do with talking to someone who’s, like, neutral. But I’m figuring it out, Mum. I think that trying on all these different versions of yourself is the only way to ever work out who you actually are.’
‘God, you’re smart, Saskia.’ Olivia goes to hug her daughter, is surprised when she lets her. And as she sits there silently in this glorious embrace, she knows there is one more version of Olivia Greenwood that she needs to try on. And thanks to her daughter, she’s finally brave enough to do it.