February 24, 2016

The more concerned everyone is for me, the worse I feel, like I’m just about keeping my own sloshing supply of panic under control but every time someone offers me a top-up it threatens to spill out and flood us all away. This morning, J and I take the kids to school together, and I find myself humming the alternate version of the alphabet that I was taught at 9 years old by the teacher who did our school plays, that we were encouraged to sing when we felt anxious and mouth-dry in the moments before we stepped onstage. Stuff learnt early beds in deep.

At the hospital, there is a similar delay to my last visit, but this time I have someone with me, and we both are laughing, and when we’re finally called in, I feel almost like a normal person might feel in this situation.

The neurologist seems different this time, although maybe it’s just the bright blue sky behind him; the golden-blue light of the promise of better days, I think afterwards, in hyperbolic giddiness. I work through my list of questions, each answer surprising us: not that serious, low risk, long term danger minimal, until we’re just pummelling him But are sure and But what about and But how can you tell, on and on until we have to admit a beautiful defeat, and I want to cry even though I don’t seem to be able to do that anymore, goddammit.

Afterwards, I go for a run in the cold bright day and a flock of birds turns above my head, a whole lace curtain of tattered, feathered underbelly sweeping over me, welcoming in a New Era with such cartoonish positivity that as I run, along the river, along with the sun, my upbeat new playlist in my ears, I would cry again now, if I did cry, which I still don’t, for the sheer joy of good health and good family and good hope.

And my brain says: That’s all well and good, until we see the neurosurgeon and hear whether you’ve got to have your skull opened up.

And I say: Who do you think you’re kidding? You had me fooled for a minute, but the verdict’s in: you’re on my team now, buddy.

February 2, 2016

“A Hollywood tearjerker or a harrowing news report, you can’t claim that being a parent makes you any more emotional – and it’s insulting for people who don’t have kids”

—

Jonathan Dean, The Pool

We’re had a couple of conversations recently with various friends who are considering having kids, and the thing which comes up again and again is that there’s never a switch-flicked moment where you can say everything is different. Is it when you choose to try and have a kid, if you make that choice? When the pregnancy test comes back positive? The first scan? Birth? First words, first steps, first food, first night away, first favourite book, first joke; the experiences don’t stop, and that child never stops developing. But is there some kind of End of History assumption that because you’re the adult in charge, you do?

No one would discount my assertion that my experience with this film was different when watching it shortly before my father’s death, rather than if I’d watched it when it first came out, before he was even ill. But to admit that having a baby — the most mundane, bourgeois, boring and everyday event from some angles; the most missed, mourned-for, hoped-for, agonising event from another — might actually have some effect on the filter through which we view the world? Ha! No way, dude! I’m cool! Havin’ a kid ain’t never gonna change me! Art is a simple objective event with no personal experience brought to its consumption!

If your child is a healthy one/two-year-old, and you aren’t the primary caregiver (I have no idea about whether either of these is the case with the author of that piece), might I be so bold as to suggest maybe JUST MAYBE you haven’t got the final word on How Parenting Affects Everybody? That maybe your friend who’s experienced an event for longer and and in more depth than you might occasionally have something valid to say? That maybe after eighteen months you haven’t yet discovered all that caring and raising another human has to offer? That you, too, might have some developing to do, just like every other single person still kicking around the planet?

Ultimately, articles like this annoy me because a) they smack me so much of ‘I’m not like those awful parents, I’m a COOL parent’, b) son, you — just like me — don’t know shit about all the ways parenting can change you, and c) setting one set of people’s emotions against another set of people is just bad egging. We feel how we feel. It’s not tactless to say life changes us. There are no enemies here. You don’t have to win anyone round by being Just Like A Normal Person and throwing parents under the bus. No one’s saying parents experience things more, only differently. Just like it’s OK to say that a divorcée, a retiree, an orphan, a widow, might experience a piece of art differently after an event which is echoed in that art.

Either way, lazy generalisations are just the worst. As a parent, I’m uniquely qualified to judge.

A wonderful holiday. Not for the first time, I wonder if I’m in BTL, trapped in my own Bedford Falls, where our beautiful children share their presents and gently wrap each other in their blankets and say please and thank you and make me laugh until I’m choking and reassure me during Stick Man and voluntarily watch at least one hour of a silent reindeer-sleigh documentary before taking it in turns to dance on my head. To add salt to that chocolate ganache, however, I’ve got my book deadline, work worries, money worries, mortality worries, worries about my Aged P, worries about others’ worries, guilt, tiredness, and Pringles overdosing. Talking to someone with their own brain adventures makes me realise that I’ve never let myself be bothered by it for more than a moment, and perhaps that’s not a good thing. I’m so busy reassuring everyone that everything isn’t a big deal - a discovery in my MRI scan; my father’s death; my sister’s emigration; an ultimate inability to google the next few decades of mine and my loved ones’ lives; and always always always money worries - that maybe I don’t find time to work out if any of them are a big deal. Or what to do if they are. How do people hold themselves together in the street, when absolutely everyone is going through some version of this? I’ll occasionally find myself close to tears and thinking, ‘Wait, I don’t have time for this now, I’ll have a good weep later.’ Only later I’ve got a deadline to meet, or a kid to stuff into bed. We all have our row to hoe.

Any kind of introspection momentarily blots out the blistering fear to replace it with a literally paralysing rage: I find myself staring out of windows, teeth and muscles clenched, burning at the potential injustice of my early death, and the hundreds-and-thousands of wrongs sprinkled liberally over the rest of the world. I suspect it’s my seizure meds. But I doubt I’ll take the time to find out.

January 5, 2016

December 24, 2015

My oldest friends come over for a Christmas meal, and things tumble in that December way so that it becomes only the men who can make it. At one point, they sit around the table with my husband and cheers each other, while I’m standing at the other end of the kitchen, preparing our food. I say, Are you fucking kidding me? and we all laugh, but I feel for a moment like I’ve slipped into some kind of parallel dimension, or a time warp to twenty years ago where I wouldn’t have said anything because I love them all so much.

I go to bed so early the next night that every time I wake up and realise it’s still dark, I tumble back through the blissful blackness like I’m falling with no danger of impending impact. I feel human in the morning, so much so that I go to see Star Wars again, taking the eldest, and cry so hard at the final forest scene that I frighten the two teenage boys next to us. I realise at the climax that this film is exactly what I needed in a month of constant, expected, unnoticed emotional and physical labour, and I squeeze my daughter in the dark of the cinema, and feel such joy that she can see a world where the heroes look like black men and young women.