The Art of Not Falling Apart

by Christina Patterson

  Space, as Emma and Tony have discovered, is good. Separate friends and interests are good. A GSOH, as the dating profiles put it, seems to be vital, and so does respect. And arguing is good. Yup, arguing is good. If you’re not arguing, according to Gottman, that’s probably a sign of withdrawal. If you argue, it shows that the relationship is alive.

  I wish someone had taught me this at school. I wish I hadn’t spent my youth with people who told me I shouldn’t even kiss a boy unless God wanted me to marry him. But regret, as Katherine Mansfield said, is ‘an appalling waste of energy’. So, I decided, when I said goodbye to the man who had been setting up dates with other women after our sessions of sex and Borgen and ice cream, are men who rely on their charm.

  I sometimes worry that I’ve left it too late. And then something happens that reminds me that it’s never too late. One of the reasons I was so happy for my friend Ros when she got married was that her new husband, Stuart, had found love for the first time at fifty-eight. ‘I’d envisaged remaining a bachelor for the rest of my life,’ he told me, ‘probably with the occasional affair, but living that final part alone. But,’ he said, and I suddenly felt a catch in my throat, ‘that won’t happen now.’

  Madonna of the Rocks

  I wanted to cook a friend a birthday meal. When I say I wanted to cook, I don’t mean that I actually wanted to cook, of course, but I did want to repay Lorna for her feats, and feast, for my fiftieth. I had rented out my flat again, so my friend Dawn offered to host the meal at hers. For some reason, I thought the only way to match Ottolenghi effort was – well, Ottolenghi effort. This time it was Dawn and I who spent the afternoon toasting pine nuts, grating lemon zest and trying to follow the twists and turns of recipes that made The Waste Land look like The Hungry Caterpillar. By the time Lorna and her partner turned up, we were both so exhausted that we had drunk nearly a whole bottle of prosecco before they had even sat down.

  Because I couldn’t possibly drive home, Dawn and her partner Duncan offered me their spare room. In the morning, after breakfast, their daughters put on a little show. Amy, the eldest, sang Pharrell Williams’s ‘Happy’. Lizzie, the youngest, sang ‘What a Wonderful World’. Lizzie is five. She looks like a Victorian angel. She looked like an even happier angel when I whipped out my iPad, swiped to video and tapped the red button. I think I probably have a recording of the most touching performance in history of ‘What a Wonderful World’. I don’t know. I’ve never been able to bring myself to watch it.

  I had just found out I had cancer when my friend Lisa told me she was pregnant. We had both recently turned thirty-nine. I tried to smile. I started to say that I was happy for her. I was happy for her. Lisa is one of my dearest friends and I knew that she would be happy that she was having a baby before it was too late. But when I opened my mouth to speak, what came out was a howl.

  It was two days before my forty-sixth birthday when I heard my cancer had come back. It was too late for babies. It might, I was beginning to realize, be too late for everything else. Dawn didn’t want me to spend my birthday on my own, so she came round with her daughters and some little cakes they had baked for me. I gazed at her four-year-old, who looked, I thought, remarkably like my sister, and at her baby, at her skin like a peach and her clear, clear blue eyes. I didn’t want to cry, because I knew Dawn would do anything to make things better, and because it wasn’t her fault that she went into hospital to have babies and I went into hospital to have tumours cut out, but still this was true, and I couldn’t bear it, so I cried anyway.

  It does get easier. As the clock ticks, and forty passes, it definitely gets easier, particularly when you could be dead, but aren’t. I love my friends’ children. I’m happy to see my friends’ children. But there are times when I have to protect myself from a pang.

  You know how I feel about Man’s Search for Meaning. It was bad enough when Viktor Frankl said that the only thing that kept him going at Auschwitz was the ‘thought of his beloved’. Later, it gets worse. At the end of the book, he talks about a woman with a disabled son. He tells her that if she had looked back on a life that was ‘full of financial success and social prestige’, but with no children, she would have to say that her life ‘was a failure’.

  ‘I saw a little girl in the park the other day,’ said the woman sitting opposite me, ‘and I smiled because she looked so adorable. But I choose,’ she said firmly, ‘not to go there.’ The woman sitting opposite me was Julia Stuart and we were having coffee in a London hotel. Julia is very attractive, very talented and very good company. We met when we were both working at The Independent. She was thirty-five and had just met the man who would become her husband. ‘It was the time,’ she told me, ‘there was all the stuff in the papers about fertility declining once you’re over thirty-five. I remember thinking “if we’re going to have children, we’re going to have to start now”. It was really early on in the relationship and I blurted it out. We both knew it wasn’t right.’

  I remember that time. I remember every newspaper I opened seemed to have a giant feature on how thirtysomething women were wrecking their chances of having a family by focusing on their careers. I remember wanting to ask the people who wrote those pieces what exactly they thought we were meant to do. Where were we meant to find the sperm? And who was going to look after the child if you had to work to feed it on your own? And how were you meant to pay for that person, since you probably didn’t earn all that much more than them? I even remember asking Auntie Lisbeth not to talk too much about her grandchildren in front of my mother. It was my father’s funeral. It was my beloved father’s funeral and I couldn’t bear to add to the weight of my mother’s grief.

  By the time the marriage broke down, and they parted, Julia thought the chances of finding a new partner in time to have a baby were slim. ‘Everyone used to say “you’d make a lovely mother”,’ she said, ‘and now they say “you would have made a lovely mother”.’ And how, I asked, but I didn’t really need to, did that make her feel? Julia’s smile was brave. ‘I could,’ she said, ‘burst into tears now.’

  When it comes to fertility, people usually just think about women, but one in six couples in the UK has trouble conceiving, and most of these couples involve a man. Through another former colleague, I met Simon Ricketts. Simon is the son of a cleaner and an insurance salesman who both became social workers. His brother is a youth worker. He was brought up to think that life was about caring for other people, and always assumed that he’d have children to care for, too.

  Like Julia, he took the traditional route into journalism, working his way up through local papers, without a degree. He has worked as a postman, a milkman and in a double-glazing warehouse. He was working ‘for next to nothing’ on a local paper when his girlfriend found out she was pregnant. ‘We were both twenty and living with her parents,’ he told me when we met for coffee in his work canteen, ‘and had almost no means of our own. We discussed it a lot, but in the end she had a termination. I remember the day, clear as a bell. We went to a clinic, and were taken in and sat down. It was fairly plain I wasn’t welcome during the process. I walked out of the door and I remember walking aimlessly up and down the street.’

  Simon took a sip of his coffee and then looked into the distance. His kind face looked sad. ‘That child,’ he said, ‘would now be well into its twenties. I’ve never thought about what gender it would be, and it’s probably best not to. I just know that it was a chance for me to be a father and for her to be a mother.’

  He was in his late twenties, and with a different partner, when the issue of children next came up. ‘It’s a decent age to be a father,’ he said. ‘I had a proper job by then. We tried naturally, doing all the different things you do, checking your cycles and so on. Some of it’s good fun! There’s a certain amount of “get home, it’s a good day”. But then it did become a bit like a process. The bottom line was that we weren’t getting anywhere. So we started to go for tests.’

  For a while, his girlfri
end tried Chinese herbs. ‘She had,’ he explained, ‘to drink all these leaves and barks and these amazing potions that smelled like the bottom of a drain.’ I tried to give a sympathetic nod, but felt my mouth twist into a cartoon face of disgust. Just the mention of Chinese herbs is still enough to flood my mouth with bile. After that, he said, they tried IVF. Three cycles at £2000 a go. ‘We’d done a cycle and the egg had been implanted, and they said, “We’re going to give you a prescription to inject into her stomach.” It was nine hundred pounds. I bought it from Boots. So I’m sitting in my bedroom with my girlfriend waiting to inject her, thinking “if I drop this, it’s nine hundred pounds down the drain”.’

  Hope, as I know with all my medical treatments, can be very expensive indeed. But on the third cycle, she became pregnant. ‘I remember clearly the day they told us the first IVF hadn’t taken,’ he told me. ‘I can remember hardly being able to see through the tears. So we were pleased when we got the news, but cautious.’ A couple of months into the pregnancy, his girlfriend came home from work in pain. ‘The next day was Christmas Eve,’ he said, ‘so we decided to drive to the local hospital. I remember her saying, and it’s a testament to her, “Let’s stop at the butchers,” because we’d ordered a turkey for us and our parents. We went to the hospital and yeah, she was losing it.’ His voice now dropped to a monotone. ‘That was very, very difficult.’ I could see that he was trying hard to be matter-of-fact. ‘I think it affected us both incredibly deeply.’

  If I’m really honest, I think I would have liked to have been a father. It sounds like an excellent way to get the pleasures of parenthood without quite as much of the hassle. The begetting of the child, as the Bible puts it, sets the tone. A quick burst of pleasure and Bob’s your uncle, or your son. After that, you can nip down to the Jolly Butchers and everyone will slap you on the back and buy you pints. You don’t have to waddle round in leggings for months, wondering if some kind of alien is about to burst out of your stomach. You don’t have to gaze at a bottle of Viognier, and worry that one tiny sip will turn that shrimp you saw on the scan into Saddam Hussein. You don’t have to wonder how on earth that wall of muscle that can barely fit in a speculum is going to squeeze out something the size of a cat. And you don’t have to go through the shock of discovering that something that looks quite easy in Renaissance paintings is actually quite painful and will leave your nipples sore and cracked.

  When you’re first handed a tiny scrap of wriggling flesh, you can gaze at the nose and eyes and mouth and yell ‘That’s my boy!’ You can hold this scrap of flesh, and kiss this scrap of flesh, and cuddle this scrap of flesh and watch this scrap of flesh grow. Best of all, you can leave this scrap of flesh during the day, and strut around an office, and talk to grown-ups and do the job you had, and be the person you were, before. For you, this scrap of flesh is what a business would call ‘added value’. You’re the same, but now you’re more. When you get home from work, you can marvel at the scrap of flesh. You might even stick photos of the scrap of flesh all over your desk, but life will carry on very much as it did before.

  This is not what it’s like for most mothers. It would be nice if things had changed since our mothers were young, but they don’t seem to have changed half as much as we might have hoped. Mothers, as far as I can tell, are suddenly hurled from a life of work and friends and a relationship, if they have one, to life on a new planet where every part of the landscape is different. That scrap of flesh is theoretically not part of you, but why, then, does it feel as if that creature wriggling, or crying, or peeing in that baby-gro is actually a part of your heart? You can’t just abandon your heart – of course you can’t just abandon your heart – but you used to have interesting things to say to adult humans and now your life is all about flesh, and milk, and food, and shit, and crying, and sleeping, and crying again.

  And when you leave that scrap of flesh, which you will probably have to do to keep a roof over your head, with another woman who seems nice enough, but not really good enough for your child, you will be torn in two. You will probably have to get used to that feeling. You might, for example, feel torn in two when your child goes on their first holiday without the family, and when they get their first boyfriend or girlfriend, and when they go off to university or leave home. You might well have to make some sacrifices in your career, because someone will have to dash home in time to get to the childminder, and, let’s be honest, it probably won’t be your bloke. And when you do get home from the office, it will be the start of a whole new working day. You will cook. You will clean. You will tidy. You will iron. You will lay things out for the morning when the whole damn caboodle starts all over again.

  On top of all of this, you are now a member of a cult. In that cult, you will not gaze soulfully down at your naked toddler, in a landscape of rocks dotted with flowers, and with an angel at your side. You do not need Leonardo to paint you to know that you are now part of a clan. In that clan, you know that what redeems you is the blessed gift of parenthood. Through your children are ye saved. They are the way, the truth, the life.

  In this cult, children rule. They rule the family. They rule the house. They are praised for every tiny thing they do. ‘What a lovely drawing, darling!’ ‘What a nice, big poo!’ In this cult, they get gold stars for smiling, or drawing, or just for turning up at school. I was once asked to be ‘journalist in residence’ at a primary school. I helped the pupils put together a little newspaper about what was going on in the school. One child wrote a report about a football match his classmates had played in. ‘Well done, Husthwaite!’ he wrote at the end of it, naming the school. ‘But,’ I said, ‘I thought you lost?’

  In this cult, children are ferried from one activity to the next. They are guarded. They are coached. They are groomed. I never thought I’d be saying ‘when I was a child, it was all different’, but when I was a child, it was all different. On the estate where I grew up, we spent most of the time wandering into each other’s houses or playing in the street. For a while, a big chunk of the estate was a building site. We treated it like a giant playground, climbing on piles of timber and running up half-built staircases that suddenly stopped. In the evenings, there was a vague system of ‘keeping an eye’ on each other’s children, which meant that a neighbour might pop round once just to check that the house had not burnt down.

  We were not chimney sweeps. We were not wolf children. We went on nice trips to National Trust houses and Royal Horticultural Society gardens, where we hoped our father would treat us to honey cake, and sometimes he did. But in the freedom we were given, we learnt how to play, to dream, to roam. We learnt how to imagine and how to tell stories. We learnt that it wasn’t up to anyone else to make sure we had a nice day.

  Cults are usually disappointing. I know, because I’ve been in something very like one, a group that talked about salvation and redemption and heaven – and also, of course, about hell. Some people find that parenthood doesn’t feel much like salvation. Some people find it feels a lot more like hell. ‘In my late twenties, it just came out of nowhere, this urge to have a child,’ said one mother in a recent article about motherhood in The Guardian. ‘When she was placed in my hands for the first time, it was “Oh, no. What have I done? This was a huge mistake.” I hoped the feeling would go away. It didn’t.’ The baby was healthy and beautiful and grew into an ‘awesome’ girl. ‘If anything were to happen to her,’ she wrote in a blog post, ‘I would be inconsolable. My mistake was not because I don’t love her or because I don’t want her or because there is something wrong with her. It is not her fault by any stretch of the imagination that I shouldn’t be a parent.’

  The woman in the interview was brave enough to give her real name. She is called Victoria Elder. She works for a mortgage company in Louisiana. When she answered a question on a blog, ‘What’s it like to regret having children?’, in a matter-offact way, she might as well have announced that she was off to marry Kim Jong-un. She was accused of being self-indulgent an
d narcissistic. She was even accused of child abuse. It may or may not have been a good idea to put her thoughts in a public arena, but her daughter, according to the journalist who did the interview, didn’t seem to mind. And Victoria Elder is clearly not alone.

  There’s a Mumsnet thread called ‘*deep breath* I regret having children’. ‘I regret having my son,’ says the mother who started it. ‘While I’d go to the ends of the Earth for him, there is not a day goes by that I don’t kick myself. It is not PND. I am not depressed or “down” . . . My son is perfectly lovely, and my darling husband is extremely helpful. I adore them both . . . But if there was a way to reverse time, and politely, painlessly engineer him out of existence, I would. Honestly.’

  That’s certainly honest. Shockingly honest. ‘I miss my old life intensely,’ she continues, ‘and the thought that I had every right and opportunity to keep it that way makes me sick. I miss my relationship with my partner. I miss what we did together. I miss being able to walk out of the front door of my own bloody house without a second thought. I miss having the money to spend on the odd nice thing. I miss having a house full of our nice, beautiful, adult things. I miss being able to ponder freely over my career options. Honestly, truthfully, does anyone feel the same? I don’t mean those who are unfortunate enough to have depression . . . does anyone actually endure cold, hard regret?’