sorry you were there. I’m sorry I opened my big mouth. But I can’t talk about this. I just can’t do it.” And this time, when I turn and run away, my whole body wracked with sobs, he doesn’t come after me.
Thirty-five
The only place I can ever kick my shoes off and feel completely at home is at my mum’s. It may not be the place I grew up in, almost all of the furniture may be completely new, but when I need to feel comforted by something other than a couple of tubs of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and binge-watching Celebrity Big Brother for hours on end, it is to my mother’s flat I go.
I tell her everything.
It is not like me to tell my mother everything, and it is not like me to burst into tears on her sofa as she tucks me up under a fluffy throw and brings me cups of hot, sweet tea, and listens. Really listens, murmuring in all the right places.
Her own depression and my father’s controlling nature pulled her away from me as a child. When I was in pain, or upset, or hurt, I learned to figure it out for myself. I never doubted she loved me, I just knew I couldn’t turn to her for help.
Now, I can turn to her for help.
Where else would I go?
The story comes out in between sobbing like a child, tears spouting from my eyes and my nose running as I pluck tissue after tissue from the box she conveniently keeps on the coffee table.
“How am I ever going to face him again?” I cry, when I have finished the story. “He knows I still love him. It’s the most horrific, humiliating thing that’s ever happened to me. Mum, I want to die. I swear to God, I actually want to die.”
She doesn’t say anything for a while, just smiles gently and rubs my back, waiting for my hiccups to go, passing me more tissues.
I think about when Annie is upset, lying on her bed, crying, and how I sit on the bed, just as my mother is sitting on the sofa, and rub her back, and pass her tissue after tissue.
I have a story about my mother, that she was always in bed, that she was depressed, unhappy, wasn’t able to love me. I have a story that I was raised by wolves, by a father who didn’t want me and a mother who couldn’t stand up to him, who in having to retreat from him, retreated from me too.
I have a story that that is why I turned to alcohol. Because I had no one; because alcohol was my only friend. As I lie here, sodden with grief, I remember. I remember my mother doing this when I was a child. I remember her loving me, and looking after me.
I was jealous of Julia and Ellie, jealous that they had a father, but I had a mother. She might not have been there all the time, but it doesn’t matter.
I was loved.
I know, suddenly and without any shadow of a doubt, I was always loved.
Which only serves to bring on a fresh set of tears.
* * *
“You still love Jason?” my mother asks, when everything seems to have dried up and I am finally able to breathe.
“Yes. Of course. I never stopped loving him.”
“So why be humiliated? Lucky him, having someone as wonderful as you love him. You wouldn’t have told him under different circumstances. Maybe what happened today is a good thing. You couldn’t have gone on avoiding him forever, and isn’t it better for everything to be out in the open?”
“But he doesn’t love me. He doesn’t want me,” I moan, suddenly hit by the full fact of my divorce in a way I wasn’t in the beginning, too busy getting sober, getting my daughter back, assuming that Jason would come back, assuming he would forgive me because we had been through this so many times, and he always had.
This grief I am feeling is completely disproportionate with what was a pretty bad exercise in humiliation, but was just that: an exercise in humiliation. I, however, feel like my world is ending, and I realize, as I lie here, that I am finally accepting this is over.
Jason is never coming back. I may meet someone else, and he may be wonderful, but he won’t be the father of my child; I will never have a whole, intact family again.