‘Thank you for lunch,’ I yell at the door. I try to sound pleasant, at best I achieve neutral. I can’t let anger or fear leak into my voice. ‘Who am I talking to?’ My question sounds reedy, needy, pathetic but it does at least get a response. I hear the keys of the typewriter being struck.
It doesn’t matter which one of us, does it?
It has never mattered to you before.
This is not true. This is so far from the truth. If it didn’t matter to me which one I was with, I could have picked either one. That’s the whole point. I couldn’t choose. But how do I explain that?
I cram a second hot dog into my mouth. I swallow it without tasting, then I force myself to slow down, chew carefully. I might make myself sick, besides I don’t know when I’ll be fed next. Something about my hunger after the enforced fast reminds me of the first time I dealt with Oli being sick. It was about four months after Mark and I married. He picked up a tummy bug at school, the way kids do. I remember him vomiting all over the lasagne I had carefully prepared for their tea. It was like The Exorcist. I was grossed out – the smell, the mess – but then I saw the small boy’s big watery eyes, shocked, scared, and I stopped thinking about what I was feeling. I stopped being horrified. I just wanted to fix him. I leapt up from the table, caught a lot of the vomit in the salad bowl, in my hands, down my jeans – I didn’t care. I stroked his back, murmured, ‘I’ve got you, it’s OK. You’re OK, better out than in.’ He vomited for twenty-four hours. Who knew such a small boy could have so much stuff in him? Certainly not me at that point. New to parenting and dealing with sick kids, I was terrified. I thought the doctor’s advice not to let him eat anything other than dry toast, maybe a spoonful of rice, was barbaric. Naive, I thought he should be rushed straight to hospital and wondered why everyone else wasn’t as panicked as I was. I guess Mark had been through it so often by then that he took it more in his stride. I changed sheets, mopped Oli’s hot body with cool flannels and refused his requests for Coco Pops. ‘But they are like rice, Mummy,’ he pleaded. It was the first time he called me Mummy.
Suddenly, I don’t feel hungry. What have I done? I picture Oli and Seb, mops of dark hair, tanned skin and long lashes in common. Seb skinny and angular, all elbows and feet that in the last few months have grown too long for his body which has yet to catch up. Oli is filling out; he wears a hint of the stocky strength of the man he will become. I envisage them as I usually do, huddled over their phones or eyes glued to the TV, oblivious to everything else around them, including me. This is an image I have often been assaulted by in the past. When I am with Daan. On those many occasions I have immediately forced the thought of them out of my head, slammed the door on the room in my brain where the boys sat. I have to sectionalise and bracket, it is the only way. Shut down, blank out. I trained myself so it was as though once I was away from them, I viewed them through tracing paper. The memory of them a pale and poor copy of the original. So far away and indistinct, they did not quite exist. The thought of them did not have the force to rip through the tracing paper, insist on their reality, their notability. I feel awash with shame that I have ever shut a door on them, even mentally. Now I ache for my boys. My children.
And they are my boys.
If either Oli or Seb ever woke in the middle of the night with a terrible dream or a high temperature, it was always me who climbed into their beds to comfort them. Mark would have done it, in a heartbeat, he had done it before I came along, but he knew that if he went into their rooms, I wouldn’t sleep alone in our bed anyway. I wanted to be involved, I wanted to soothe and comfort. I wanted to feel needed. So he let me tend them. Joking that he wouldn’t ‘fight me for a night with a kid in a single bed’. I have made their beds, picked up Lego, built papier mâché volcanoes, shopped, cooked, cleaned bathrooms. Stove to loo. In one end, out the other. Relentless. I’ve performed these daily devotions, this worship, uncomplaining, with joy, mostly. I have watched them grow. These small beings, stretched out, reached me in a way no one else had until I mothered. And I’ve listened to them. Heard their funny observations turn from charming to challenging, but not always wrong or rude. Sometimes very thought-provoking. I’ve been with them as their vocabularies became more complex, their friendship groups more unknown, their desires more secretive. As they’ve grown, I have tried to store them up but because they constantly changed, my memories are unreliable, they spilt, seep away. I want them to be less liquid, more solid.
And I’ve wanted all of this, felt all of this, whilst leading a double life.
It’s a comfort to think that the boys won’t even know I’m missing yet. They won’t have cause to be scared.
