I can’t really say

I’ve given up writing about the stuff that is actually going on, because obviously the children have grown old and they know I write this and now I have to be a bit more like those other mothers who blank their kid’s faces from pictures. But in a writerly sense. Which I think I have mostly done anyway, slowly, over time – what I write here has only the scantiest whiff of the internal fury/drama/tension/maelstrom of what whirls around my 48 year old body and brain. I am quite sanitised, and probably not a moment too soon.

I mentioned this frustration to my friend Jess, a writer who also used to share stuff about herself and her family too (though was always much better at the anonymising part) – a frustration because the act of writing things down has long been a way to order things and sound them out and make sense of them for me and now all of those tangled unexpressed threads live in my head, shouting a bit too loud. Jess said I could still do find a way to write about it all – but I just have to fictionalise it first.

This works for her (she sells a whole lot of very funny books, very well). My only foray into novel writing was attempted over lockdown and which ended up as a 90,000 word strange-ling so I know I have the discipline to bash shit out but ah! The structure! The arc! The fact that things should probably make sense! Too hard. I just like spilling my guts really. Imagine what I am like in real life *sweaty awkward face emoji*.

So here it is: I want to tell my secrets and explain the hard things and want to find that these unpalatable bits resonate, partly so I don’t feel so alone. But I can’t. So you have to have the sanitised version.

Bits that I might get away with

We started family therapy this year. Once a week we speak to Joe, via the medium of various screens, beamed in from children’s bedrooms/the gym, mid pull-up/living room couch/Estonia/Armenia. The youngest has no interest – he cannot even fake it – although he is welcome to sit in, the second youngest sits in and listens, the others all variously chip in depending on where we are going with the sessions and whether they have any skin in the particular game we are diving into.

It is quite tough, this family therapy gig, because we all have to hear stuff that we might rather not. For me, these are conversations about how hard it was to live in such a small compromised space in our old flat of 17 years as the kids grew into adolescence, how I didn’t address issues between the kids seriously enough as they occurred, the way I just let my own tenaciously-fixed narrative – about how ‘fun FUN FUN!’ it was to have this busy big family in this tiny space and that sure, it was messy and noisy and sure things were a bit mental and ha, what a delightful chaos it all was – override anything else. The kids are like ‘no, it was hard, actually’. I was, and am, not great at the detail. I kind of gloss over everyone’s individual needs as a bit of a nuisance and guess what – in therapy you don’t get to gloss over anything.

It has helped though, really helped. What I want to avoid is this thing where the sibling and family resentments aren’t explored or poked at, and then they just crystalise into a big ugly scabby thing which scars and then that’s it – you find yourselves reluctantly attending a family reunion when you are 60 and you haven’t seen your brothers since someone’s wedding and your kids don’t know each other and you still have all of these brilliant ties and shared memories but you just don’t care because they have been so neglected or you know it matters but you don’t know how to connect again. I don’t want that waste. I want to be brave and lead the kids into these discussions and have them speak up and to listen and to learn and to fix stuff before it is too late. So far, so good?

2. I am struggling with becoming old. Yes this is so vain vain vain and so zzz. But I have all this stock in being young and energetic and fun and always wearing some sort of ballgown regardless of the occasion and trading on my cheekbones and my blue eyes and feeling like I know how this all works and then it’s all going away. I remember having that Nora Ephron book ‘I Feel Bad About My Neck’ and giving it away because it was a dumb conceit that I didn’t get and now I really know what she meant because I too feel bad about my neck, particularly the weird skin pigmentation and this strange uneven band of horizontal puff. I also feel bad about my lines between the brows and new troughs from the nose to the mouth and my hooded eyelids and weird stuff that I didn’t even know was a thing, like the way your lip skin melds into your normal skin and you need lipliner to draw you lips back on? And obviously furry face skin. And wrinkly hands.

That’s one thing, and I am doing all the gua sha-ing and the tweakments I can get away with, with retinol and peptides and micro-needling and derma planing and moisturing like a demon, with weights every evening and so much HRT but it’s a fait accompli, right? And I wish I could rise above it but I can’t. I have been checking my worthiness against perceived youth and attractiveness forever (thank you patriarchy/capitalism/probably something else too) and I am powerless to fight and I don’t know quite what is supposed to replace all that when the ageing wins.

3. Which brings me to how much of a cow I have become since that oestrogen rapidly declined. I have no tolerance for placating anyone, particularly my husband, and so when he asks me something vaguely domestic-related like ‘do we have tomatoes?’ or ‘where is the iron?’ I can barely stop myself from punching him squarely in the face. I don’t know, I don’t care, and asking me these questions just burdens me with your stupid burden and I don’t want it so take it back and THINK THROUGH ANY QUESTIONS WITH GRAVE ATTENTION BEFORE THEY LEAVE YOUR MOUTH.

He’s like ‘whoa you are a bit difficult to live with these days’ and I think he expects me to go back to not only answering the questions but actually owning the whole scene around them. Like, once upon a time I would have made sure we did have tomatoes before he asked, knowing that he loves them and believing that a good mother and wife would always have a full larder/pantry/kitchen with overflowing produce (though I never touched the iron) but now I DONT CARE. Sort your own tomatoes out and don’t you dare tell me about it. Don’t ask me about bills, or TV remotes or where anything of yours might be. Never quiz me about casserole dishes or duvets or sheets and never assume I have a handle on anything because I probably don’t. My brain is really busy just trying to go to work.

4. Between 23 January and 4 February three kids have birthdays. This year we have one kid turning 21, one 7, and one 16. This is taxing from an organisational POV, as well as expensive, and deeply weird because I don’t want them to grow up and leave me. They already do independent things and I am lonely because we don’t know who is coming for dinner and where they are and no one really watches movies with us anymore and having a stupid big house just means that kids stay in their rooms and for someone like me, this is a kind of torture. On Friday night after work I simply had nothing to do and no one to talk to and I thought ON NO THIS IS MY FUTURE.

5. Wembley continues to give me the ick.

Photo essay time

That time when we got a camera crew into our house to film a Thames Water ad ended up a flyer that was posted through the letter box and looked just like this: