CHAPTER 15
By any objective measure, it had not been a good start to the day. The spontaneous text to Patrick had proven to have properties similar to all-you-can-drink espresso martinis, in that she’d woken every hour after midnight, anxious and sweaty, drawn to her phone like an addict, desperate for notifications. Maeve had then woken at 4.45 am with a series of screams which loosely translated as: I WILL NOT BE CALMED . Thus, Poppy’s day also began at 4.45 am—though everyone knew that this only counted as morning if you were an Olympic rower and with their abnormally powerful quadriceps they were hardly human anyway. Poppy was so tired she suspected she was dribbling but lacking the brain capacity to realise.
As she perched on the couch to try to feed her daughter, Maeve writhed in her arms, knocking Poppy’s toast—which had (foolishly, in hindsight) been balanced on the arm of the sofa—onto the carpet, Vegemite-side down.
While she was cleaning the mess, she heard the garbage truck rumble past her driveway. Classic . She’d forgotten to put the bins out. Again. The carpet cleaner was starting to foam, which was a good sign apparently. According to the bottle, she needed to leave it for five minutes then wipe it off. Poppy checked her watch. She was not rushing. Why would she be rushing? She had all the time in the world. She had no deadlines, nowhere to be. She lived her life to Maeve’s schedule, no-one else’s.
But a thought nagged at her. Oak tree at nine thirty . May as well try to be on time, she reasoned with herself, otherwise James would be a hundred metres ahead and it would be weird to follow him around the golf course, especially if Maeve was still in this grizzly mood. It might also give off stalker vibes, and that was an impression she did not want to convey—especially to him. But she was aware of the irritating irony: somehow, James had weaselled his way into her routine to the point that walking around the golf course without him would be more awkward than walking with him .
Poppy scraped the foam off the carpet, sponged it down, then lay a towel over the top. By the time they arrived at the oak tree it was 9.42 am. Poppy looked up and down the path but it was empty save for her and Maeve. On cue, her daughter wailed louder.
The crying didn’t stop until Maeve fell asleep in Poppy’s armpit as she carried her daughter to the car. It was an impressively brief catnap. Maeve woke up the moment Poppy clipped her into the capsule. Now, as she headed from the car to the supermarket, Poppy was navigating a new-found commitment to attachment parenting. Maeve had fallen into a restless sleep in the baby carrier on her chest.
‘Do not think about the text,’ commanded Dani through the AirPods as Poppy entered the store. ‘Get a coffee with someone to distract yourself. Is Henry around?’
‘No, he has an off-site meeting,’ said Poppy. ‘And he only ever gets coffee around eleven-ish because he schedules client meetings beforehand.’ Hmmm . She probably shouldn’t know his schedule by heart. ‘Besides,’ Poppy added, ‘you told me I had to call you urgently. What’s up?’
A pause.
‘Dan?’
‘Well …’
‘Wah!’ Maeve yelped.
‘Shit! She’s awake again. Oh, wait … okay, she’s gone back to sleep. Start again, Dan.’
‘Okay, so …’
Poppy’s phone beeped. Eek! ‘Hold on, Dan! Oh, sorry, it’s not Patrick. Just the mothers’ group WhatsApp thread going off. Oh, actually …’
One of the perky girls in a P.E Nation top had collected everyone’s numbers at the last meeting and connected them in a WhatsApp group optimistically titled Mumz Gone Wild. They were meeting at The Bustle in fifteen minutes, which was just across the car park—about a two-minute walk away. The conversation would no doubt be inane, but there was a chance it would distract her from her emotional turmoil about Patrick’s non-responsiveness. ‘Maybe I could go and meet them for coffee …’
Dani was quiet on the end of the line.
‘Sorry, Dan, what were you saying?’
Dani sighed. ‘Nothing, it’s all good.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yep, you’re having a busy day. We’ll chat later. You go to mothers’ group, and if Darth Vader texts, make sure you call me.’ She paused before adding solemnly, ‘May the force be with you.’
Poppy adopted a Jedi voice too: ‘And also with you.’
They both convulsed into cackles.
‘Love you, Dan.’
‘Love you too, Pops.’
Still smiling, Poppy hung up and placed her AirPods back in her pocket then beelined for the checkout. As they waited in the self-service queue, Maeve opened her eyes and blinked miserably. No wonder. By this time of the day, she’d normally had a two-hour nap already. Today, by Poppy’s calculations, Maeve had only had fifteen minutes of unbroken sleep since quarter to five. Poppy began some surreptitious squats to lull her back to sleep. In front of her, baby boomers made terrible decisions: not weighing grapes correctly, not putting their reusable bags in the bagging area, choosing cash when the signs clearly said CARD ONLY .
‘Wah!’ Maeve admonished.
Poppy checked her watch nervously and began squatting deeper, aiming for a full glute burn. Her daughter would be unhinged if she didn’t get some quality sleep. ‘Time for bed, Maevey,’ she whispered. These ignorant sexagenarians had no idea that the bomb on her chest was about to explode.
‘Waaaaaaaah!’ repeated Maeve more vociferously.
A couple of baby boomers glanced in their direction.
Hurry up! Poppy willed them. Why were they moving so slowly?!
Maeve’s body was becoming rigid on her chest. ‘WAAAAAAH!’
More grey heads swivelled towards them. Poppy flinched and checked her watch again. This was the scream of a hungry baby dragon, but Maeve wasn’t due for a feed for ages—she’d been cluster feeding all morning. Though, come to think of it, precisely nothing had gone to schedule today. Why would it start now? She was still a two-minute walk away from The Bustle, and judging from the pace of these boomers, a Jurassic period away from getting through the checkout.
‘WAAAAAH!’
Poppy cursed herself inwardly. She should have predicted this! It was the rule of three—and four and five and six and one hundred fucking million; if one bad thing happened, at least a hundred million other bad things had to happen before you had a clean slate to start again.
An empty checkout appeared behind a man in a tartan vest who was shuffling away at the speed of a comatose snail. Poppy raced over and shoved the nappies under the barcode reader and— oh no .
UNWANTED ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA .
No! How had she stuffed that up?!
‘WAAAAAH!’
This had escalated so quickly! Her daughter was screaming under her chin like a car alarm. She shouldn’t have called Dani! She should have been more efficient in the nappy aisle! She shouldn’t have wasted so much time thinking about bloody Patrick! And why did she continually let her grocery supplies get so low?! She needed to get better at weekly shops—that was how real adults did it!—but if she didn’t need to go to the shops every day, would she ever have a reason to leave the house?! She’d trapped herself in this vicious cycle of consumerism. Poppy did some more squats and added some useless patting. Random passers-by were staring openly.
‘WAAAAAH!’ Maeve reminded her, for lack of any other vocabulary.
A checkout assistant had still not materialised. Were they on strike? Wildly, Poppy weighed up her options: steal a (small) pack of nappies or risk being thrown out of the shop for noise pollution (was that a similarly indictable offence?!). Poppy suddenly wished James and his distractingly thumpy-tailed dog were here.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket and she seized it as if it were some kind of lifeline.
K .
‘WAAAAAH!’
K? K?! Poppy’s eyes bulged in disbelief as she stared at the screen. Patrick finally deigned to respond to her FaceTime invitation, and this was what he said? K?! He couldn’t even spare the time for a fucking vowel?!
‘WAAAAAAAH!’ Two lines of snot were now streaming down Maeve’s face and onto Poppy’s chest. It was very possible she was going to commit her first non-alcohol-induced felony.
‘Voila,’ announced a portly gentleman, appearing at her side and tapping the screen with a magic swipe card. ‘Someone’s grumpy,’ he said with a chuckle.
You bet I’m grumpy! Poppy fumed, before realising he was referring to her screaming child.
‘Thanks.’ She smiled weakly, paid with superhuman efficiency, and hightailed it out of there, quickly hammering out a text to confirm she’d call Patrick later. She didn’t make eye contact with a single soul until she emerged into The Bustle and spotted the phalanx of prams.
Hearing Maeve, two mums sprang into action, clearing a path for Poppy to cannonball onto a chair, where she whipped off the BabyBjorn and shoved Maeve onto her boob.
Oh, the relief . She was still panting from the adrenaline. Her lungs were at post-cardio levels of deoxygenation, like she’d just won the Tour de France and celebrated with a jumping-jack floor solo. On her left, a ginger-haired mum beckoned to a waitress. ‘Caffeine needed here asap, please.’ Poppy glanced up in thanks. The ginger-haired mum smiled back.
As Poppy wiped the beads of sweat from her hairline, the conversation washed over her. Away from the confines of the white-walled community health centre and without the hard-backed plastic chairs forcing them into frigid schoolgirl postures, the group seemed livelier than she remembered. Projectile vomits, night feeds, backing the car into a telegraph pole while the baby was screaming. To Poppy’s surprise, the chat wasn’t completely terrible.
When the coffees arrived, there was a flurry of movement as everyone cleared rattles and bottles off the table to make space. It was refreshing being around people who had the same amount of stuff .
‘Seriously, call me a Sherpa and send me up Everest,’ groaned one mum. ‘I’d be a real asset to any trek, I’m so highly proficient in lugging around crap.’
‘You try formula feeding,’ quipped another. ‘If anyone needs a few tins, I’m your girl. My nappy bag weighs, like, twenty kilos.’
Poppy snuck in a few glorious sips of her hot soy cappuccino before Maeve, now sated with milk but apparently existentially unsated with life, began to cry again.
‘She looks so much like you,’ said the ginger-haired mum, who—subversively—was not wearing activewear.
‘Like the kid from The Exorcist ?’
The mum laughed. ‘I meant she has your eyes.’
Poppy set down her coffee and repositioned Maeve on her lap so she could balance her in the crook of her arm. She could not get past Maeve’s little nose, which was unequivocally perfect on her but also an exact replica of her father’s. At least it didn’t overwhelm anyone else.
‘I’m April,’ the mum said. ‘You’re Poppy, right?’
‘Good memory,’ Poppy replied. ‘I can’t remember anyone’s name. My brain isn’t fully functional yet.’
‘You’re telling me. I left my sunnies on the top of the car today and drove straight off without them. Sayonara, Ray-Bans. I was so sad I cried.’
‘Ha!’ piped up another mum. ‘Today I filled out my Medicare forms and used my maiden name. I’ve been married six years! Poor hubby, it’s like all his help getting up in the middle of the night counts for nothing!’
‘That’s nothing,’ said another. ‘I clean forgot my husband’s birthday last week. No presents at all!’
‘Better than Hello Kitty lingerie, which is what my husband bought for my birthday,’ said a brunette mum.
‘Ooh’. The group winced in sympathy.
‘Sell it on Marketplace?’ suggested one mum.
‘Sell him ,’ suggested another.
The table laughed and at that moment, Maeve let out the scream that Poppy felt. She had to find a way to be more chill about husband jokes but she hadn’t worked out how. She shook her keys in front of her daughter, trying to shake off her suffocating awkwardness. Could they tell she was a single mum? For some reason, she felt she should keep that detail quiet.
As the conversation continued, Poppy cycled through a combination of breastfeeding, knee-jiggling, back-patting and key-shaking. Nothing worked. Maeve continued to oscillate between disgruntled whingeing and outright shrieking. Shoppers and coffee-drinkers jerked their eyes towards her, probably thinking, Shut that kid up .
I’m trying , Poppy wanted to cry.
Maeve was normally a straightforward baby but nothing was making sense today. People often said marketing was an imprecise science but Poppy knew that world like a chemist knows a periodic table. She could drill down into those market segments and find the missing links, the answers to the CEO’s questions, the untapped opportunities. There was no problem that didn’t have a definitive solution.
As Maeve continued to wail inconsolably on her lap, Poppy made ineffectual shushing noises. She couldn’t hear herself think, let alone follow a conversation. Her eyes lost focus, the colourful art on the walls merging into a hazy kaleidoscope. If she blinked for too long, she might fall asleep. She suddenly wished that for a moment—just one moment—someone else could hold Maeve; that someone would see her confusion and fatigue and know how to help. That was all she wanted. Just a moment to herself. She didn’t even need to go to the toilet. She just wanted to stand up and stretch her legs, arch her back and flex her fingers without the weight of another human barnacled to her body.
Poppy stared at her now-cold coffee. The women sitting around her wouldn’t think to offer. They had their own babies to hold. With husbands and partners at home, a cafe jaunt with bub was probably a treat: more one-on-one time! The guilt lanced Poppy’s heart like a poison dart. She loved the one-on-one time. Really, she did. But god, she was tired. She was so, so tired.
The pressure of the last few weeks had been building. Every day she’d been doing it by herself—feeding Maeve, swaddling and re-swaddling, changing nappies, making sure they both got fresh air, searching for jobs, making dinners, vacuuming, hanging out the washing, sweeping the verandah—and this was what no-one seemed to fully grasp: she was doing it by herself . Her mum and Dani and Mary would say things like, You’re doing so well , Maeve is so lucky , You should be so proud , but what she needed was someone who really got it, who really understood the mind-warping hamster wheel, who could feel in their bones how terrifying and exhausting it was, and she wanted them to say, What you are doing is so hard and you deserve a fucking medal .
That’s why, when the fellow mums collectively decided to dismantle the pram blockade and head home, Poppy felt the hormones threatening to engulf her yet again. She was going home—alone, like always—to clean her house for a FaceTime date with a man who still didn’t know he shared a nose with his daughter.
When April gave her a firm hug goodbye and quietly whispered, ‘You’ve got this,’ it took all Poppy’s remaining courage to lie and blame unseasonal hay fever for her watery eyes. She thought her laughter had masked her helplessness, but of course they could spot it: she stuck out like a sore thumb. She wasn’t like these mums at all.