is sprawled diagonally across the bed, duvet twisted about her like a chrysalis. She has always been a very active sleeper, moving around her mattress like the hands of a clock. When she’s asleep, as she is now, she looks exactly like the toddler I remember in her cot – that determined jut to her chin, the flaxen hair which forms damp curls on the pillow when she’s hot. She was born with these enormous eyes whose colour didn’t settle for a long while, as if they were still making up their mind. When I lifted her out of the cot each morning, I used to chant, ‘What colour are your eyes today? Browny bluey greeny grey?’
They ended up hazel like mine and I was secretly disappointed she didn’t get Richard’s perfect shade of Paul Newman blue, though she carries the gene for those so they may yet come out in her own kids. Unbelievably, my mind has already started straying to grandchildren. (I knew you could be broody for a baby, but broody for your baby’s baby? Is that a thing?)
I can tell Emily is dreaming. There’s a movie running behind those busy, fluttering eyelids; hope it’s not a horror film. Lying on the pillow next to her head are Baa-Sheep, her first toy, and the damn phone, its screen lit up with overnight activity. ‘37 unread messages,’ it says. I shudder to think what they contain. Candy told me I should confiscate Emily’s mobile, but when I reach out to take it her legs twitch in protest like a laboratory frog’s. Sleeping Beauty ain’t going to give up her online life without a struggle.
‘Emily, sweetheart, you need to wake up. Time to get ready for school.’
As she groans and turns over, burrowing deeper into her chrysalis, the phone dings once, then again and again. It’s like a lift door opening every few seconds.
‘Em, love, please wake up. I’ve brought you some tea.’
Ding. Ding. Ding. Hateful sound. Emily’s innocent mistake started this and who knows where it will end. I snatch the phone and put it in my pocket before she can see. Ding. Ding.
On the way downstairs, I pause on the landing. Ding. Looking through the ancient mullioned window onto a still-misty garden a line of poetry comes, absurdly, alarmingly, into my head. ‘Send not to know for whom the belfie tolls. It tolls for thee.’
8.19 am: In the kitchen, or what passes for one while Piotr is building an actual kitchen, I quickly post the breakfast stuff into the dishwasher and open a tin for Lenny before checking my emails. The first one I see is from a name that has never previously bothered my Inbox. Oh, hell.
From: Jean Reddy
To: Kate Reddy
Subject: Surprise!
Dear Kath,
It’s Mum here. My first email ever! Thank you so much for clubbing together with Julie to buy me a laptop computer. You girls do spoil me. I’ve started a computing class at the library.
The Internet seems very interesting so far. Lots of funny cat pictures. Am really looking forward to keeping up with all the grandchildren. Emily told me she is on a thing called Facebook. Please can you give me her address?
Love Mum xxxx
So yesterday, I Googled ‘Perimenopause’. If you’re thinking of doing it, one word of advice. Don’t.
Symptoms of Perimenopause:
Hot flushes, night sweats and/or clammy feeling
Palpitations
Dry and itchy skin
Irritability!!!
Headaches, possibly worsening migraines
Mood swings, sudden tears
Loss of confidence, feelings of low self-worth
Trouble sleeping through the night
Irregular periods; shorter, heavier periods, flooding
Loss of libido
Vaginal dryness
Crashing fatigue
Feelings of dread, apprehension, doom
Difficulty concentrating, disorientation, mental confusion
Disturbing memory lapses
Incontinence, especially upon sneezing or laughing
Aching, sore joints, muscles and tendons
Gastrointestinal distress, indigestion, flatulence, nausea
Weight gain
Hair loss or thinning (head, pubic, or whole body); increase in facial hair
Depression
What does that leave? Oh, right. Death. I think they forgot death.
I made Emily go to school the day after the night her bottom went viral. Maybe you think I was wrong. Maybe I agree with you. She didn’t want to, she pleaded, she came up with every reason under the sun why it would be better if she stayed home with Lenny and caught up on some ‘homework’ (binge-watching Girls, I’m not that stupid). She even offered to tidy her room – a clear sign of desperation – but it felt like one of those times when you have to stick to your guns and insist that the child does what feels hardest. Get back in the saddle, isn’t that the phrase our parents’ generation used before making your child do something they don’t want to became socially unacceptable.
I told myself it would be better for Em to run the gauntlet of crude jokes and smirking whispers in the corridors than throw a sickie and hide her dread under the duvet at home. Just as when the seven-year-old Emily came off her bike in the park, the gravel cruelly embedded in her scraped and bloody knee, and I knelt before her and sucked the tiny stones out of the wound before insisting that she got back on again in case the instinctive aversion to trying what has just hurt you were to bloom into an unconquerable fear.
‘NO, Daddy, NO!’ she screamed, appealing over my head to Richard who, by then, had already bagged the softer, more empathetic parent role, leaving me to be the enforcer of manners, bedtimes and green vegetables – tedious stuff lovely, tickly daddies don’t care to get involved with. I hated Rich for obliging me to become the kind of person I had never wanted to be and would, in other circumstances, have paid good money to avoid. But the moulds of our parental roles, cast when our kids are really quite small, set and harden without our noticing until one day you wake up
