Sitting through those two hours on a child’s chair, which was clearly too small for my big arse – so much so that a bit of it was on the chair of the bloke next to me – has made me realise I’ve no excuse now not to learn. I’ve got six months off coming up – the ideal time to have a go. The first time I tried, work commitments stopped me, and the second time I was pregnant and didn’t have any brain cells left. I can understand lots of Welsh, however, and speak a little, and I’ve got Elis to practise with (Rhodri’s Welsh is odd and too fast), plus I can teach Osh as I go along.
I will find out about Welsh classes, and this time I WILL LEARN and I will return to my employer, the BBC, a greater asset than I surely already am.
July 14, Friday
Osh is in the crèche today. Normally he is at home on Fridays but I’m having some ‘me’ time. I always feel a little bit at sea these days when I have ‘me’ time. My ‘me’ time usually involves me manically tidying the house, watching a bit of Paramount comedy, cooking something wholesome for the family – in this case a shepherd’s pie – and then wondering what the bloody hell I did with my life before I had children and a husband. Well, I had lots of friends who I would meet for coffee, then we would go out to eat or to the cinema or the theatre. We would usually get drunk so the next day was a bit of a write-off, but that didn’t matter too much as we didn’t have any children jumping on our heads at 7.30 in the morning demanding to be fed and watered. Ah, those days . . . Actually, I don’t miss them. Give me what I’ve got – really, I mean it. In fact, that whole single thing would scare the shit out of me so I hope to God Rhodri doesn’t leave mel.
Actually I wouldn’t bother again, PLUS let’s look on the bright side: I might die of cancer so the singles market may never be an issue for me, unless there’s something going on in heaven or down there in the other place, or limbo or wherever Buddhists go. I suppose if you believe in reincarnation you might come back as an animal, and they don’t even have to observe the social niceties. They just jump on each other’s back when they are in heat and shag the living daylights out of each other.
Men never have any problem with their ‘me’ time, do they? As most of their bloody lives are spent having ‘me’ time, they are never at a loss as to what to do with it.
The sound of silence around me, the stillness, the calm in this empty house, can almost be felt. When I was here alone at first, I always had something on – the radio or the telly, or I was phoning people. Now I want the silence, although I still crave the noise and the smells of cooking and the episode of Scooby Doo I could repeat verbatim. I want them and yet I don’t.
July 15, Saturday
This evening, I went to the Spar shop to get some wine. I have always liked a drink, and drinking is linked to breast cancer. I think that is why I was not surprised when they said I had it. I am ticking lots of ‘how to get cancer’ boxes: I’ve had children late in life, I never breastfed and I drink wine several times a week, so I’m up there on the ‘Things Not To Do’ list. My cousin died of breast cancer at the age of forty-six and she left an eight-year-old son; my aunt by marriage also died of breast cancer and she left four children: that’s five children in my extended family who have grown up without their mummies because of breast cancer.
The Spar is near Llandaff Cathedral – a beautiful place. I am not religious per se, but I do believe in something. You can’t watch Colin Fry and NOT think there is a spiritual dimension in life, a place where people pass to. I have also seen a ghost. When I was a student I was woken up one night by a blue flashing light outside my window. An elderly man, Len, and his lodger, Andrew, who was about twenty-five, lived next door. Kate, who I shared a flat with at the time, liked Andrew and used to chat with him. She had once reported a break-in in his van to the police; they caught the people who did it and he came round with some flowers for her.
Anyway, they brought a body out on a stretcher in a body bag. I thought that it was Andrew because Len stood outside the door and, as they took the body past him he extended his arm as if to say, ‘This way.’ The next morning I found out that it wasn’t Andrew who had died, but Len. Len was in the body bag, but I had clearly seen him in the doorway, so I know that there is something. I know what I saw and I had seen Len with my own two eyes when he was dead.
When I was waiting to go for the mammogram, Rhodri was away. I was in the hallway about to climb the stairs with a pile of washing in my hands, late one night, when I started thinking about my babies and life without them, and I got down on my knees there and then and prayed to God to save me, not for myself but for my babies.
You never find an atheist on a sinking ship. I did not make any pacts with God but selfishly asked for myself. I thought that maybe God would not like it – me being selfish and asking him to save me – that it was cowardly, but it was so spontaneous and, I suppose, so desperate that I did it.
I have never mentioned this to anyone, until now. Perhaps this is God’s way of testing me, or maybe I should just be grateful that my breast cancer is at an early stage and that if I get through this, I may be a better person – maybe that’s what I should aim for.
The cathedral door was shut so I sat in the graveyard and contemplated life and thought what an amazing evening it was. A group of American tourists passed by and a woman smiled at me the way someone smiles at you when they think you are in a graveyard because you have lost someone. I suppose I have lost someone; someone has died that I knew and that’s me. I am no longer that person – that person is gone. I am a different person now and I must try to be a better one. I need to learn to speak my mind when I feel things are not right and to hold my breath and count to ten when I want to shout at my children, or belittle Rhodri just because I can.
Rhodri is really only a baby: he’s four years younger than me, quite immature at the best of times, and I wonder if he will ever be able to give me what I want, as I go through this. I love him with all my heart, I truly do, and I couldn’t wish for a better father for my children, but in truth we have little in common apart from the children and a bloody great big mortgage. Where have those two people gone, who couldn’t keep their hands and eyes off each other? I want them back, I want them together again. There are occasions when I see glimpses of those people, but they are few and far between.
Kate’s husband left her and now has another woman, and that knocked me for six (never mind what it did to Kate). I thought they were rock solid; that they were the together-for-ever type and then he ups and leaves after ten years of their relationship: the same amount of time Rhodri and I have been together. You think, What the hell was that about, those ten years together just gone like that? What if that happened to us?
Rhodri has plenty of opportunities to have affairs. He’s never bloody well here for one thing, he travels all the time with work, and when you’re in another country, how does anyone else know what you’re up to? He could have been unfaithful to me for the last ten years and I would have known nothing about it. I keep asking him if he’ll ever leave me and he says, ‘Why would I want to leave you? You’re a goddess, you’re amazing.’ Then I think, I expect that’s what other men say to their wives and then bugger off with another woman leaving their relationships and their children.
Elis often asks me when Rhodri and I are going to have two houses because he knows quite a few friends who have divorced parents and I think he views it as a progression in life, something that happens. I explained to him that some people don’t get on with each other and they shout a lot and it’s sometimes better if they live in different houses. His reply was, ‘You and Rhodri are always shouting at each other.’ Hmm, I can’t argue with that one. He also says, every time I explain why people divorce, ‘But they still love each other, Mum, don’t they?’ Well, sometimes they don’t but at his age he thinks love is a thing that you have for ever and why would he think any differently? I hope he never has his beautiful heart broken – otherwise she’ll have me to answer to.
I went
home and drank the wine with Rhodri and went to bed and sobbed my sad little heart out to him, repeating over and over again, ‘I don’t want it, I just want it to go away, please make it go away.’
July 17, Monday
Work is still manic. Andrea, who took over for six months when I was on maternity leave with Osh, will be taking over again. I can’t quite make out if she was seconded under duress, or whether she actually wants to do it. We’re also having Jean, who was doing little bits of work for us, to answer the phones and generally help around the office, so things should be OK.
July 19, Wednesday
I rang the hospital today to ask for my appointment date so that I could ‘plan my entire life around it’ as I said to Mr Monypenny’s secretary. My date is 9 August, two days before I was due to go back to work after my holidays. Clare came in to see me and has agreed that I don’t need to come back, so I can ‘prepare’ myself for the op. ‘Preparing’ myself in reality means running round like a blue-arsed fly making sure everything is done in the house and arranging for my mother to look after the children. It’s good that it will still be the school holidays so Elis won’t have to be in school.
Rhodri is due to work on the ninth and my mother has suggested – well, said – as she doesn’t really do suggesting – that Rhodri sticks to his routine in work. Originally, he agreed, but now he says he thinks he should not do one of the Proms that he was due to direct. He asked me if I wanted him to be there with me and I said, yes, I did. The problem with Rhodri’s job as a TV director is that it is a big deal for him to have to get someone else to do his work. There’s so much preparation and it is difficult to find people at short notice, but I suppose your wife having an operation for breast cancer is also a big deal, and for once I want to be put first – before football and work, or work and football, which are interchangeable but always at the number one and two spots.
July 20, Thursday
Babs has come to see me with Dr Susan Love’s Breast Book. Yes, she is a real doctor and yes, that is a real book. Suddenly a whole new world of research has opened up for me. Babs has recently had a double mastectomy so I feel well versed in aspects of breast cancer and surgery, having talked it through with her over the last six months. I met Babs when I did my masters degree seven years ago; we did our masters degrees together, we got pregnant at the same time, and then I rang her up four months after her mastectomy to tell her that I too have cancer.
We just seem to have these life-changing moments at around the same time. I have told her I am waiting for her to win the lottery as I know that I will be guaranteed to win too. Apparently, she doesn’t do the lottery – unlike me with my standing order with Camelot. I’ve told her she has to start buying tickets.
Babs is the reason I went to the doctor in the first place. Even though Mr Monypenny and Helen said I wouldn’t have been able to know I had a tumour, I am convinced that I did know. I knew there was something and that is why I went to my GP three times. We have learned to rely on medical technology so much that sometimes we don’t listen and respond to our own thoughts and feelings about our bodies. Finally, I went to see a locum doctor and she referred me. I told her that my friend had had a double mastectomy and, even though she thought it was nothing to worry about (her husband was a breast surgeon), she said she would refer me to put my mind at rest. That woman probably saved my life just by wanting to put my mind at rest. Thank you.
I have become obsessed with Susan Love’s book. There are those in life who are information gatherers and those who are information avoiders: I am the former. In fact, I would go as far as to say ‘I love Susan Love.’ Her practical, ‘OK, you’ve got cancer, so let’s look at the options here,’ is really what I need at this moment in time.
July 21, Friday
Holiday, it will be so nice (sung to Madonna tune). We’re all going on a summer holiday (sung with Cliff Richard lilt). Oh my God, I so love being on holiday and what’s more I don’t have to go back to work. I know I shouldn’t be happy about that, but work has seemed so trivial. I just feel that I need to get out there and live a bit of life and be with my children on beaches looking in rock pools and eating ice creams.
We arrived in Roscoff, and are staying one night at a hotel in the town. Roscoff is a beautiful little port town and the weather is fab here. We went to a restaurant and all sat down, including Osh, which is unheard of – he can’t sit on his arse for more than five minutes usually. We had pizzas and wine and lemonade, and to all the world were like a ‘normal’ family. I often wonder if other families, when they manage to sit in a restaurant without the parents having a row, the children having a row with one of the parents or the children having a row with each other, when somehow it all comes together and no one rows or runs about. Do they sit there thinking, Hurrah! We are to all the world like a normal family?
I texted my sister Sarah in Ireland and said we were sitting down having a pizza and we were like a normal family. She then texted my other sister Julia in Wales saying that I was sad, obviously thinking that I meant we looked like a normal family but in fact we were a family blighted by tragedy and had a cancerous mother who was trying to keep it all together – while sitting overlooking the harbour with two exceptionally well-behaved children and a setting sun. So Julia texted me to ask if I was OK saying that Sarah had said I was sad. I said Sarah had got the wrong end of the stick, with my text, so then Julia texted her and I texted her, by which time our pizzas had been devoured and we were on to the ice-cream part of the evening.
The hotel room had two double beds in it and we’d set up the cot for Osh. As we walked back from the restaurant I said to Elis, ‘Ooh, lucky you, you’ll have a bed all to yourself.’
‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘I’ll have to sleep with you or Rhodri.’ He has always called his father Rhodri since he could speak, for some reason.
‘Who is it going to be then,’ I said. ‘You choose.’ Thinking of course it would be me.
‘OK, Mum,’ he said, ‘the next time we are in France and we are in a hotel room with two beds, I’ll sleep with you.’
Ooh, he really should be in the Diplomatic Service, that one. I didn’t mind a bit that he was going to sleep with Rhodri as he wriggles and hogs all the bed, so I was in a hotel room in a double bed all by myself.
July 22, Saturday
The camp site is very nice, with three swimming pools, a bouncy castle – Rhodri and I will be on that later after a few drinks – a club house and a park nearby. There’s a little harbour and some amazing rock formations and, better still, we are the only English-speaking family on the site, which is mainly Dutch and French. Rhodri and I love going to places where you don’t hear anyone speak English as then we feel that we are ‘real’ tourists. God knows how we ended up in this place though, we found it on the internet.
We once stayed in a place in Spain and only heard one other English couple all the time we were there. Rhodri whispered, ‘There’s Brummies on the beach,’ so we moved along the beach – not that I have anything against Brummies per se, we just wanted to think we were special. And if they were near us we talked in Welsh, which proved a bit difficult as I am at my most fluent when I talk about the weather; anything slightly more complicated than that is a problem.
July 23, Sunday
I am in semi-paranoid mode as there is a decking sun terrace outside the caravan and Osh cannot be trusted to stay outside on his own. He wanders off and there are cars going past occasionally. It only takes one knock and that is it: he is dead. Rhodri is in his relaxed holiday mode which does not involve thinking about the dangers that a six year old and a two year old could encounter in a strange place. He keeps saying very annoyingly, ‘They’re fine, Shell.’ This being relaxed extends to Osh being left on the sun terrace – which I have said categorically can not happen, and to reading a book while Elis is in the pool.
I don’t mind Elis going in the pool by himself – that is, after all, why we have spent the last twenty weeks driving hi
m to swimming lessons every Monday night, so that he could actually make a decent attempt at saving himself should he fall in the water. But there are lots of children there jumping into the water which comes over Elis’s head and, while he could save himself in an empty swimming pool, if one of those testosterone-fuelled teenagers jumped on his head – which is a possibility because they are all jumping in like maniacs – then he would be in trouble. I know the chances of this are remote and I know it’s a pain to have to monitor Osh every minute of the day, but we are their parents and it’s our job to keep them out of danger while still trying to give them a good time, and Rhodri saying, ‘They’re fine, Shell,’ is not going to wash with me.
This means that I am constantly on Rhodri’s case as I can’t be in two places at the same time and he just has to accept that coming on holiday is about them, not about us sitting down to read our books. How many stories have I read in newspapers about children getting killed on holiday because the truth is, that’s when our guard is down. But it should be doubled because the possibility of something going wrong IS REAL, RHODRI. At least the wine is cheap and nice so I’m looking on the bright side.
July 24, Monday
Have period from hell. Am feeling a bit frazzled. Rhodri said he’d take the boys to the beach and I could meet him later so I could sit down and read a book and have five minutes to myself. I agree and then think, Oh my God, I’ve let him go to the beach with the two of them. Will I ever see any of them alive again? This is only day four of the holiday; please tell me that other mothers are like this. I start reading my book, The Kite Runner, which is really captivating so for a while I do forget that I am a paranoid ball of stress and that my children may not make it to the end of the holiday in one piece, or my marriage for that matter.
My Mummy Wears a Wig - Does Yours? A true and heart warming account of a journey through breast cancer Page 2
