When I got into work, Lou looked really down. I asked her what was wrong and she told me that David had booked a week’s holiday for them at the end of the month for the May half term. She was stressed because she had no cover for the café during one of its busiest times. The tourists come for their holidays from May through until August, so I understood why Lou didn’t want to close for the week.
‘I’ll do it!’ I said. I had no fucking clue how. I had five kids and a dog to care for and I hadn’t even discussed with Jamie if he was taking any time off work. Lou asked how I would manage and I said Belle could help out making coffees and washing up. She and I would sort it between us. Lou deserves a nice week away and I needed some space for myself while things were difficult at home. I loved working in the café and it gave me precious moments to step away from being a mum and just be me.
When I got home, I asked Belle if she would help me at the café and she was so sweet. Just instantly agreed, didn’t even ask about getting paid or moan she wouldn’t be able to see her friends or do the stuff she’d planned. I feel so lucky at times for the way she is, paralleled with a panic about what if she changes and becomes one of the teenage girls I read about or see in BBC sitcoms – the ones who can’t stand their parents, are mean to other kids, steal cigarettes and hate the world …
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Finding Meaning in the Madness
Monday
It’s almost midnight.
Today has been rubbish.
We found out from Ruby’s teacher that Laura had left several voicemails on the school answerphone over the weekend, where she sounds either medicated or intoxicated. Or both. They’re not entirely sure. She has made several allegations about Jamie and me (although they won’t say what) and asked the school to contact her to inform her of what they are doing to protect her kids.
I wanted to vomit. I can just picture all the teachers in the staff room slagging us all off and pitying the kids like we’re all ‘as much to blame’. Jamie tells me it’s not like that and they deal with families who have far worse issues than ours, but I don’t want to be a family with issues in the first place! We shouldn’t be labelled as having ‘issues’. I don’t want my children or step-children on some kind of register where the teachers just see you as ‘that’ problem family whose kids need extra support because along the way you haven’t done your jobs right. And that’s shit, and unfair, because since I gave birth all I have done is dedicate my life to trying to make sure my kids aren’t fucked up or labelled, and since I’ve known the true extent about who Laura is, I’m now dedicating it to making sure her children are OK too, and I’m exhausted.
I’d like to revise my opening: it’s not been rubbish, it’s been a truly shit day – bouncing from solicitor emails, guilt from the school, ruminating on all the past wrongs, and feeling bitter about Laura’s behaviour.
Jamie and I have five kids between us and both our exes are idiots. I am trying to get enough money out of our house sale to set us up for the future while knowing we are likely to enter into an expensive family court battle to protect Jamie’s kids. We rent our home and I have no idea if and when we will be able to buy our own, and drama seems to constantly surround us despite the fact, and I truly believe this, that neither of us ask for it.
But even right now, with the shit we’ve got going on, I would still choose Jamie and this life over what I had with Mark. I would still choose the steps and halves, I’d pick the rented accommodation over the big owned house, the battles with exes and the fights to make things right for children we didn’t biologically produce. It is odd because all we ever want in life is to find ‘the one’ and the dream is to have your children together, to do all your ‘firsts’ with this one person that is your happy ever after – but the reality sometimes works out so differently.
I am happy, right here and now, with what I have – all this crazy chaos is just fine by me to love like I do and feel as loved as I am.
Wednesday
The house has sold.
Properly sold.
My solicitor called to inform me that Mark has agreed to pay me £237,000. Wow.
I felt a wave of sadness, that that was it. Not sadness for him, or us. I mean it’s been a long time now since my marriage was over, and after that ended, our home had just turned into an empty lonely house where I was often at my very worst and loneliest. It was a house I had come to feel trapped in, but before all of that, it had once been my home, where I’d birthed all my babies, and where I had once upon a time felt happy.
I wondered if I should mention the house being sold to the kids but since we had moved they hadn’t asked; the boys had no clue of the difference between renting and owning, and Belle had accepted that it was in the past and our lives were here now, with Jamie and the kids, next to the sea in this beautiful beach house.
I decided not to mention it, and when I looked at them all across the dinner table tonight, I knew that we are doing OK. We are luckier than most. Parental guilt has a way of storming into your life and making you question any decision or choice you’ve made, but we’re doing OK, we’re really doing OK here, despite everything, and I’m determined to only look ahead from now on.
Saturday
Belle started work at the café today. Lou has taken her on to do Saturdays with another two girls who are in their early twenties. It means she gets a bit of her own pocket money and also builds up her confidence. Jamie was working today too, so I took the other four kids down to the beach for some fresh air. It was so good to see Ruby looking carefree as she chased her brothers across the sand and splashed about in the shallow waves.
Not long after we arrived, Rex spotted his friend Roman and ran over to play with him. Roman’s mum is Megan, a lady who I’d seen in the café from time to time with her kids. A few weeks ago, we had all been devastated to learn that Megan had lost a baby at full term. It had made me feel sick, and I’d hugged each of the kids just a little bit harder when I’d got home that night.
I watched her now sitting with her children on her own and noticed she still had a very slight baby bump, her body trying to recover from the devastation of delivering a full-term baby, born sleeping, almost three weeks ago. I felt knots of anxiety in my tummy when I saw her. She was sat on a blanket on the sand with her elder daughter and I decided to follow Rex over and say hello. She had huge sunglasses covering her face, and perhaps her tears, and a huge shawl covering her shoulders. She was really sweet and welcomed us to sit with them as the boys dug out the sand with their spades. Will and Art were now kicking a ball at the other end of the beach and her daughter, Edith, was just four months older than Ruby, so they took their dolls for a paddle in the freezing cold sea.
We sipped steaming hot tea from a flask Megan had brought with her and we chatted to one another while avoiding the elephant in the room. I then gently told her that I knew about the baby she’d lost and, now that her sunglasses were perched on top of her head, there was no hiding the tears that filled her eyes. This poor woman was only a few weeks post birth, with a body full of crazy hormones, no baby and her boobs the size of melons. I just knew that if I’d been in her situation I would want as much support as I could get. And I’m so glad I told her I knew because she slowly began to open up to me.
As our children played close by, Megan told me how she’d had a normal birth with Edith seven years ago, but that Roman had been breach with only a little amniotic fluid surrounding him and the cord wrapped around his neck so she was advised to have a planned C-section. When she got pregnant with her last baby, another boy who they named Wilf, she was offered the choice of a C-section or vaginal birth. She chose a vaginal birth based on her two previous experiences as she knew the healing process was a lot quicker so things might be easier.
‘The irony,’ she told me in a small, unsteady voice, ‘is that if I’d had a C-section, I’d have been in five days earlier and he would probably have been born healthy. But I did the wrong thing.’
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I offered her a tissue from the crumpled packet in my pocket and thought, what a cruel world we live in. That decision is something she will live with and blame herself for, for a very long time.
It didn’t matter how many times I told her she ‘wasn’t to know’ and that there were no guarantees; she has heard those words from every person around her, from her consultant to her husband. The fact is she knows, she knows that she was feeling her baby move on the day she would have had that C-section, and the day after that, so in her mind it’s now her fault, and as she choked into her tea while she said those words, my entire throat and chest throbbed with pain as I held in my tears for her tears. I had spoken to this woman for only an hour of my life but the pain I could feel she was in was just unbearable. Here she was trying to get through life while in the absolute trenches, but with minimal people to support her because it still isn’t OK to tell people ‘I lost my baby’. How utterly devastating is that?
Later Megan and the kids came back to our house. The kids got on so well and we sat at the kitchen table and chatted over more tea and biscuits. She asked me all about Jamie and the kids and I just offloaded, at first I felt bad for doing so but I could see by her listening to my problems it was taking her mind off her own, and she was so supportive and sweet. Turns out her husband has a fifteen-year-old son, Jacob, from a previous relationship, who lives with them half the time and she had similar issues with his mum when they got together. It was good to hear they’d come through it.
She invited us all over for a BBQ in the half term. I liked that idea. I liked her, my kids liked hers and I was sure after speaking so much about her husband and Jamie they would get on too. Jamie and I had never had any ‘couple friends’ before, and it’s only since moving here and surrounding myself with others that I’ve learned the world is a lot better when you are around decent, kind people.
Later, when Jamie walked through the door, I hugged him so tight and hard, and I gave our babies extra kisses when I tucked them in bed. Sometimes, just one conversation with someone else makes you realise you never know what’s around the corner and you should feel grateful for what you have right now.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Supermum (in Law)
Monday
Jamie received a call at 5am from the police. They wanted to check whose care Will and Ruby were in. He told them they were in our care and asked what the call was regarding. The police informed him that they had Laura in custody but that they couldn’t disclose why. He immediately asked if she was OK and I was filled with love for him again, that he still cared about her well-being. She was the kids’ mum, after all, and I know if he could have one wish, it would be for her to get well so that she could be their mum again.
The police said they had made a referral to social services and Jamie would need to speak to them. He called all day but no one was available to speak to him, and no one called us back. When he went in to pick the kids up from school this afternoon, he asked the teachers if they knew anything. They said they didn’t, but when the local newspaper headline flashed up on my phone later that afternoon, we quickly discovered what had happened.
‘Thirty-four-year-old mother survives suicide attempt at local cliff spot’ screamed the headline; and the article went on to state that the lady was found by a dog walker, injured, who called for help. Her injuries weren’t mentioned but she was said to be in a stable condition at hospital.
In shock, Jamie went through all the ‘What ifs?’. I waited all day for more news, which I imagined there now wouldn’t be.
Jamie called Pete who told him that Laura was not in a good place and was in no fit state to see the children. She would write Jamie a letter via their family solicitor as soon as she was better, but he did say that as a family, alongside the authorities, they were all in agreement – Laura included – that the kids were to reside with us for the foreseeable future. I felt so sad for Laura that things in her head had gotten this bad, but also relieved that she would now get the help that it was clear she desperately needed, and ultimately that can only be a good thing – for her, for Will and for Ruby.
I called Jamie’s mum to tell her what was happening because she had been worried about Jamie and the kids too. I speak to Pat every day via WhatsApp, send pictures of the kids and the dog, and she loves to send me a selfie from the garden sipping her gin, or a picture of the tray of brownies she’s baked for the women at bridge.
When she answered the phone and I heard her voice, I realised how much I miss her.
Jamie’s mum doesn’t judge, or bad-mouth people. She seems to see the good in everyone, even when they do bad things; and, although she knows Laura has done some pretty awful stuff, things she tells me happened before I came along too, she refers to her as ‘damaged, wounded and broken’, never anything nasty.
I felt like I whinged for the entire phone call; I tried not to, but the reality is that, right now, things feel hard. The house is just a battle to keep on top of every day, with laundry and cleaning, and with me working part-time, trying to keep the house clean just feels like mega hard work. I then worry about how affected Will and Ruby actually are by what’s going on with their mum. And then I worry that I’m not giving my own children enough time and attention. So, I basically spend most of my days worrying about things I have no choice about or control over and it’s got to the point where Jamie and I have stopped talking about it because we’re both shit scared of what each other is thinking.
And I don’t want to be ‘that’ mum – the one who is super stressed because the house isn’t immaculate or there is a basket of dirty laundry. I can’t physically be ‘that mum’ anymore because I cannot keep on top of everything like I once did. I have gained two extra children, a bigger home, a job and an untrained puppy – I am going to have to learn to live with a little bit of mess and chaos.
After I had spent twenty minutes bitching, Pat said, ‘If it would be helpful, and I don’t want to impose or be in the way, I could come down for a few weeks and help out. Just until you’re all feeling a bit more on top of the situation with Laura.’ I grabbed hold of that life raft like I’d just fled the Titanic.
I didn’t hesitate or say no, and almost shouted, ‘Yes! Do come! Thank you, thank you, thank you! We would all love that!’
She said she’d book a train first thing in the morning for her and her border terrier, Digby, and come down to help for a few weeks. I wondered briefly how life would be with two dogs, one well-behaved terrier who could walk to heel without a lead, and one Labrador who is incapable of listening to any instruction that comes out of anyone’s mouth. But despite me wanting to rehome this silly shit-head dog multiple times a day, he is also the sweetest, cuddliest puppy and our kids are absolutely obsessed with him, as he is with them.
I really need her here. We all need her right now to come and look after us and help stitch us back together. I feel totally relieved that she will be here tomorrow and luckily Jamie cleared out most of the summer house last weekend. We moved the extra furniture into storage so we can make use of it rather than having it as a store room when it’s so beautiful. I’ll force myself to find time to give it a good clean in the morning so at least while Pat is here, she will have her own space to get a break from us all in when she needs it – and I imagine she’ll definitely need it.
Tuesday
Jamie’s mum and Digby arrived at 3pm today. I didn’t tell the kids they were coming and when we walked in from school, they went crazy. All five of them – and Stanley! They’ve been here a matter of hours and Digby has gladly been put in the summer house away from Stanley, who is constantly pawing him, barking at him and shagging his backside, which the kids find highly amusing … so everyone is happy, apart from Digby – who, I imagine, can’t wait to get back on the train home.
Pat made herself busy within the first hour of her arrival, loading the washing machine and emptying the dryer. As much as I kept telling her I would do it all, secretly I felt the rel
ief escape my entire body and as the kids ran to raid the fridge and cupboards, she hugged me to her so tightly I could smell the sweet scent of the Jo Malone perfume on her scarf. She is so glamorous and, although she is in her early seventies, she always has perfectly shaped nails painted scarlet red, a smear of pink lipstick and not a highlighted hair out of place.
I sobbed into her neck. Not big sobs, but sobs that she heard, and she held my face in her hands, wiped away my tears and said, ‘It’s OK, my darling girl, these times are sent to test us, that’s all. It’s just temporary’. With that Belle walked into the room and declared, ‘Thank God you’ve arrived to sort her out, Grandma; she’s been like this for weeks.’ The three of us really giggled and Pat invited Belle into what was now a group hug.
Jamie didn’t know his mum was coming either and when he walked in from work to see her, he was made up. I loved how he loved her and I hoped our three boys would be like that with me when they grew up. ‘Our three boys.’ I just wrote that without thinking. But I do see Will as mine. I know he didn’t come from me, and he has his own mummy, and I didn’t get to love him straight away, but I am head over heels in love with his daddy, and him and his sister are tiny extensions of Jamie, who both deserve and need a mother’s love, which right now they don’t have – so that’s what I will give, always, no matter how tough things get.
Tonight was a good night – over-excited kids, an over-excited Golden Lab humping a pissed-off border terrier and three adults sipping wine in the garden and chatting about everything and nothing until the sun went down. Perfect.
Wednesday
Jamie leaves for work just after 6am now. Usually I have always got up with him so I have the time to get the house organised before the kids wake, but recently, like today, I end up hitting snooze repeatedly then getting up at 7. This morning, when I woke up, I could smell cooked food and I came downstairs to see Pat showered and dressed, as glamorous as ever, frying pancakes for the kids who were also up and getting ready. There was a pot of tea brewing and she greeted me as I walked into the kitchen with ‘Good morning, my darling’, and passed me a bottle of maple syrup and bowl of fresh berries for the kids’ breakfast.
A Different Kind of Happy Page 10
