Yesterday somebody asked me if my three children were “all different”.
I’ve spent the last 24 hours trying to work out if there was any possible way the answer to that question could ever have been No.
Children are magical cherubs who appreciate every birthday you’ve gifted them with
Back to a hospital, back to a cancer centre, but purely for professional reasons this time. I wander around the back of the hospital for a while, the bit I like the best - cages of laundry and boxes of shrink-wrapped equipment in the sun, all the functioning innards that show this place is working correctly - before I head into the beautiful Maggie’s centre. My meandering route brings back the dizzy, detached, hurrying, comfort-eating horrors of last summer, spent at a different hospital while Cancer Dad was sleepily swelling and shrinking and sealing up for good. I see the point of these places. Warm and bright, full of voices and comfort, soft lighting, soft cushions, space, and time. You could sit there all day, eating biscuits and talking to other people about lymphoedemas, or their childrens’ jobs, or a courgette cake recipe, or the knitting you’ve never quite mastered, or the cities you’ve lived in across the world. I think of the cups of coffee and slices of cake we’d eat in the John Lewis cafe, anything to get away from the hospital (everyone in a dressing gown or in tears or both) and how we’d talk only to each other, going around and around in circles, never really saying anything.
On the way home, a song on the radio reminds me with such Proustian heaviness of a single particular day from my teenage years that I’m amazed I can drive the car at the same time as remembering. It makes me think that maybe the reason I haven’t cried since his death is simply that his not being around any more is a great deal less sad that some of those days when he was.
A life filled with good things. My dear mother gives me one of her Reverse Pep Talks (“I alwayz know zat wheneffer everysing iss going well, zat’s when sings start going wrrrrong”) (she doesn’t even speak like that, but I know she loooooves my, frankly, inspired impression of her) and even putting aside the fact that the very nature of Things Going Right is that you then notice when something, anything comes up which isn’t great, I make a conscious choice to put that parcel of gifted fear aside.
The baby turns her head back and forth on the bed to Taylor Swift, giving me perfect deadpan side-eye in time to the beat. Youngest siblings, right? After a long nap, she hangs out in my office and takes all my carefully ordered drawers to pieces, scribbling over my handmade gift tags and slowly shredding invoices. Tonight, almost two hours after all the buns should be asleep, when I’m desperately trying to finish the urgent work I had to put aside this afternoon to rescue my wireless box from her redesign, I can still hear bright, jolly singing from her cot.
It’s a great pleasure.