Stella
The second most surprising thing about your husband leaving you, at least if you have a baby, is that you just sort of.
. . carry on. It would be nice to crawl into bed and cry but most days there isn’t time, and on the occasions that I’ve had half an hour spare I’ve genuinely attempted a bit of scheduled crying and found that – probably unsurprisingly – feelings don’t work like that and the tears won’t come.
I didn’t have many break-ups before Gavin because I married the first proper boyfriend I ever had (possibly my first mistake).
But when a situationship did end, or a boy I was obsessed with stopped messaging me back, I went full wallow.
I loved a break-up in the same way that I loved a hangover.
It’s not technically a nice feeling but it is sort of satisfying to lean into the discomfort.
Comfortable clothes, comforting TV, comfort food, the whole nine yards.
Fun, because the heartbreak was a graze rather than a stab wound, and eventually sufficiently boring that I’d jack it in and go back to living again.
This, unfortunately, was different. This was a bit like a bereavement and a limb loss tied into one.
My routine, my home, my confidant, my financial security, my sense of who I was as a person, all gone up in smoke.
Poof. Every shared memory, in-joke, every story about holidays together, all the gossip and the lore lost because I’ll never be able to explain them to anyone else and probably wouldn’t want to even if I could.
Surprisingly, the most helpful tool I had to get me through the unrelenting misery of post-Gavin life was Rose.
Rose didn’t just want things, she needed them, and there was literally no option other than to get up, change her, feed her, get her dressed, take a lightning-fast shower if I’d got too grotty to tolerate, and then take her out in the pram, telling myself that the cold March air was good for both of us.
‘That’s a lot of stuff,’ he says faintly, looking at the bags by the front door.
I’ve packed her clothes, dummies, bottles, premixed formula, nappies, wipes, more nappies, more wipes, snot sucker, baby Calpol and various different books. There’s also the travel pram, the travel cot and the car seat.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Babies come with a lot of stuff.’
‘Maybe I can get some duplicates. For my place. Then you won’t have to pack all of this up next time.’
‘It wasn’t any trouble,’ I lie. It took me two hours because Rose screamed if I left the room to get something.
I buckle her into the car seat and then burst into tears as I watch his car, rented from one of those pay-per-hour services, pull away from the kerb.
It’s like a physical pain in my chest. I go back into the house, sit down on the sofa and stare at the wall for a while.
Then I clean. Once I’ve cleaned, I reorganise. Then it’s dinnertime.
I open the fridge and stare into it until it starts beeping.
This fridge was the most exciting, and most expensive, thing I’ve ever bought.
Double doors with an ice maker, like the cool girls at my school always used to have in the noughties.
Gav and I jokingly called it my first child when it was delivered because I took so many pictures of it.
It was briefly the background on my phone.
It’s enormous, designed to see us through at least two children.
It currently contains six pots of weaning-friendly baby food, a satay chicken ready meal that went off two days ago and half a bottle of wine from when Louella came over.
I pick it up and look at the label. It’s something complicated and biodynamic because Lou is too cool to drink an M&S sauvignon.
I pour a glass and drink it quickly, then pour another one, feeling massively pissed because I barely drink these days.
It’s a nice, fuzzy, numbing kind of insulation.
Then I feel worse about feeling slightly better, in case it means that I’m actually an alcoholic.
So I do three quizzes on my phone all titled ‘Are You an Alcoholic’ and conclude that no, I am not.
Then I cook the ready meal and eat it, worrying that it’s going to poison me but figuring that having food poisoning is one of those things that is much easier child-free, and at least I’d be thinner as a result.
Next, I put on the television and scroll through the options until I’m so bored and angry at not picking anything that I turn it off.
Do you want to finish watching White Lotus? the TV screen asks.
No, I don’t. I started it with Gavin. He’s probably finished it. Arsehole.
What about Game of Thrones?
Again, no. We rewatched it when Rose was born until I started worrying that the noises and violence were going to traumatise Rose (at that point, three days old).
At 10 p.m. I’ve officially run out of things to pretend to be distracted by and I allow myself to go to bed.
I wake up at 6.30 a.m. yet don’t move, needing to wee but so tired I can’t make my legs work, counting down the minutes until Rose will be home.
I open my phone again and go to my conversation with Gav, just in case he has magically messaged me, admitting that he can’t manage Rose on his own and saying that I can come and collect her.
He hasn’t. I swipe back on our conversation.
We speak so rarely now that within a couple of minutes I’m six months back and there are endless pictures of Rose, messages from me asking him to bring me things from other rooms because I’m nap-trapped under a sleeping baby.
I scan his replies, looking for signs that he was plotting his escape.
Then I scroll further back, back to when I was pregnant.
Pictures of me grinning into the mirror, showing off a swollen side profile.
His replies about how beautiful I am, about how proud he is of me, how he can’t wait to spend the rest of his life raising a mini Stella.
How did any of this happen? Where did any of that go?
A week later I recount the story of my first evening of freedom to Louella.
She’s in my headphones as I push Rose in her pram, on the way back from ‘Jump & Jiggle With Mummy, Six Months Plus’.
Louella, by contrast, is on her way home from reformer Pilates, which looks really easy but apparently actually isn’t.
‘Hang on, I’m switching to my AirPods,’ she says as I tell her the part about rereading my messages with Gav. ‘Sorry, did you say that you had your first night of freedom and you ate an expired ready meal, did a bit of emotional masturbation over your ex-husband and then went to bed?’
‘Yeah,’ I say.
‘Did you get food poisoning?’
‘No. Ironclad immune system, me,’ I say mournfully.
‘So you ate loads of microplastics and you didn’t even get skinny out of it.’
‘We’re not supposed to say stuff like that any more,’ I retort, pulling the pram shade down to block the sun from Rose’s eyes, as if I hadn’t had the exact same thought process when I ate the meal. ‘We’re supposed to pretend we don’t care about being thin.’
‘You actually did look skinny last time I saw you,’ Louella goes on. ‘Can I do a matcha with almond, please?’ she addresses what I assume is a trendy barista.
‘Yeah, divorce will do that to you,’ I say.
‘My boss got divorced and she got really fat,’ Louella counters.
‘So I actually would check your privilege on that one. Anyway, your night sounds fucking tragic and it’s not happening again, so we’re doing something today.
What time does Gav pick her up?’ Louella makes the name ‘Gav’ sound like ‘skin infection’.
‘Four-thirty,’ I say, feeling sick.
‘Okay, great,’ Louella says, sounding brighter. ‘I’ll find something fun for us to do and message you the address. Meet me there, okay? Wear the Sézane jeans I got you with a navy jumper and ballet pumps, not white trainers.’
She hangs up without saying goodbye. I roll my eyes and then, after I’ve once again packed up Rose’s entire life, I get ready.
Rose is napping, so I’ve got an hour, and instead of doing anything productive for the house I blow-dry my hair and curl my eyelashes.
By the end of the process, wearing the outfit Louella dictated, I look in the mirror and to my surprise, recognise the person looking back at me as the girl I used to be, rather than the mumsy-looking woman I’ve been catching glimpses of in shop windows.
‘You look great,’ Gav says with a tone of surprise.
‘Thanks. This is her stuff, and this is a cool bag of purées I’ve made for her – you can use a normal teaspoon to feed her, just obviously watch her at all times while she’s eating.’
‘I thought you said she just has whatever the adults are eating?’
This is technically true, because we are mostly doing baby-led weaning.
But last week her clothes came back with a stain that looked and smelled very much like an adult lasagna, which is full of salt, which babies aren’t allowed, and I really cannot bring myself to ask him to read an entire book about weaning.
‘We’re just doing purées for now,’ I say. It’s a lie, but only little one.
‘Oh. Right. Okay.’
Rose screams when I hand her over and I want to claw her back from Gavin and move to a country with no extradition treaties to the UK.
But before I know it I’m walking to the Tube.
On my own. With a tiny handbag. I’ve checked seven times if I’ve got everything I need, because carrying a handbag with no nappies, wipes, bottles or change of clothes genuinely feels like I’ve lost an extremity.
I listen to music on the Tube. I get off at Tottenham Court Road and don’t even look to see if they’ve got step-free access.
For a moment I forget to feel sad about Rose being gone and then I’m smacked with a wave of sadness tinged with extra guilt.