a certain end

[Trigger warning - breast cancer scare, fear of death, climate breakdown - all the fun stuff]

Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

- from Good Bones, Maggie Smith

“People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.”

― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

“The Gods put you here in a troubled time, then you could decide that that's an affliction or you could decide that that's an assignment.”

- Stephen Jenkinson

Last year I found a lump in my breast while I was lying in the bath with my five year old. I was six months pregnant, and terror tightened all the alive parts of me even as I continued that most sophisticated of parental sleights hand of hand - the gift of omission. I laughed with my daughter while my mind arrived at various scenarios: if I have to have chemotherapy then does that mean the baby will die? Or will we have to delay chemotherapy because of the baby but that means I die? Maybe I will get to have the baby but die shortly afterwards, leaving my husband with a new baby and a five year old girl? 

Around the same time, my daughter was really Going Through Something, enough to encourage me to buy a book about parenting an anxious child (I’m pretty sure I read the first few pages). Looking back I sense the origin was partly pandemic and partly her sibling, growing a little inside me every day, already taking up space in the imagination of the person whose attention had thus far been on her entirely. But maybe she sensed a fear in me too, she knew that the signaller of safety did not feel safe. As I was consumed with morbid nightmares, she became afraid of tiny separations - daddy going to Sainsburys, mummy going for a walk around the block. She wailed and clung on to me as she had done as a toddler.

A year later I am not dead; instead I am lying on the floor in a church hall on a Wednesday evening, the sky already dark outside. When the cheerful sonographer had said the lump was “nothing nasty”, I felt euphoria course through my body, the somatic joy of being here to live my life, being here to hold my children in my arms, as consuming as the last weeks of fear had been. But by the time I was in the car on the drive home, I started to worry if they had missed something. Technically speaking, “something nasty” could start growing right now, which is the place anxiety - if anxiety desired something - always wants us, permanently teetering at the mouth of disaster.

Driving home that day, I wanted to know if there is a place I could get to which is past the fear.

In the church hall it’s the end of the yoga class and some beautiful choral music is playing. On the journey here I had been listening to Nick Cave’s Lavender Fields:

Sometimes I see a pale bird wheeling in the sky
But that is just a feeling, a feeling when you die
Where did they go?
Where did they hide?
We don't ask who
We don't ask why
There is a kingdom in the sky
There is a kingdom in the sky

Perhaps all of it, the choral voices and the kingdom in the sky and the vaulted ceilings of the church hall lead to the experience I’m having, a strange and frightening visualisation of falling through a white space. I realise, alarmingly, that I am falling away from my children. A jolt of terror - the thing I do not think of much, the fact that I will one day leave them forever - pierces me again.

It strikes me that in a way, the parenting phase I’m in right now - in all its deep intensity, in its physical, relentless nature, is easy. It is demanding but straightforward - I simply mother with my whole body, with all of me, all of the time. They are close, they need me, to them I am the most special thing in the world.

***

I hold my boy in my arms or maybe he holds me - he wraps around me like a koala, buttery croissant roll thighs, a sumptuous mouth and four cute teeth. People in cafes and shops who say they are “not baby people” are vehemently, immediately won over by his smile and dimples and his eyes, so blue that strangers cannot hold back from commenting. I try and think of something botanical to describe the shade but I cannot locate it. It is not cornflower or forget-me-not, it is paler, more aquatic, somewhere you can float away. I carry him around the garden in the last warm days of the year and my heart is both joyful and heavy to see his unbridled delight at a slant of light, a bee buzzing around a flower.

As my children grow a few centimetres every year, It is hard not to focus on certain facts - that in the same timeframe the sea levels rise by 3-4mm, carbon dioxide levels creep up and Greenland loses 280 gigatonnes of ice. It is new for our generation in this part of the world, the idea that we - our children - might not get a happy ending, though likelihood of all manner of horrors is woven into life for so many people in much of the world. There is our indignance about it, our hitherto arrogance. To accept all of it is not a moment but a process, with in-built stages of grief alongside fear of an unknown fate. 

It is a lot to ask of a human. Last year when I was busy worrying about death, my daughter had a fall whilst running fast down a steep hill. In the few seconds it took me to reach her she cried out an agonised “help me!”, and as my knees sank into the mud to envelop her in my arms, “don’t leave me!”

As if I would.

As if she knew a little of me was leaving her, readying my arms to hold another tiny, enormous love. Last year, I was anxious for her whenever she was scared, her fears of separation triggering my own childhood ones. At the heart of certain fears is my sense that my children could not be ok without me. But another part of me refutes this. It cannot be the only truth.

I had to learn that I am not here to fix her, to believe that she would be alright amidst separations big or small, else she would not believe that she was alright. At first when she reported pain or discomfort, I wanted to find the solution. She would say that she was sad or scared at school and I would say, did you find a teacher and tell them? Now it seems better just to reflect back to her that something sounds difficult and that I think she handled it very well. The subtext is that I trust her, that she can do it. Trust has always seemed to me to have a necessary element of wishful thinking - there are no guarantees, but it’s pointless to assume the worst. There’s good reason to believe in fallible things. 

There is much collective loss to mourn these days, but I feel that I owe my children more than my melancholy, more than my worst fears. Kimberley Johnson writes about finding blue, an idea drawn upon in the treatment of trauma. It’s about finding something that feels good, or at least finding something that does not feel bad. It might mean finding somewhere in your body that is not painful, or somewhere neutral. It is not about bypassing the truly difficult, painful and uncomfortable facts, but a refocusing of your attention on other truths, other things that are good. It’s remembering that this exists even in the worst places. It is hope in the dark. It helps me because the root of my anxiety has always suggested the obliteration of everything good. And I’m not sure, anymore, if that is a real thing.

What do we owe our children? Perhaps we owe them our imagination about how the best possible future could look. The act of imagining matters. The act of imagining changes how we live. In the blissful, dreadful uncertainty about exactly what will happen is a space we can start to fill. We may as well. We might just need them - the things we start to assemble here.

When I was scared I was dying last year, one thought that plagued my mind was household disarray in my absence. Untidy drawers, too many carbs and not enough veg for dinner, the next size of clothes unpurchased until cuffs got short up towards elbows. Was this my biggest fear, that I would not be here to hoover for them? It is very hard and frightening to let go of being in control. Thinking of the little ways we hold tight to order, and practising letting go of them a little, is useful these days I think, and it will become more so.

The white space I was falling through - it was actually quite beautiful.

Now my daughter is old enough - I mean, I have been at this game long enough - I understand how children weave into us so profoundly. When they are born it’s like a meteor has fallen and wounded a huge crevice in us. But it takes years to understand the exact impact of it. I found the wearing away of the self, like the tide on a rock, depressing in the early days. I wanted to know exactly where I was now that this new devotion was in me. But now I am not sure it is so much erasure but addition, a new direction. I want to orient to this, even if I am not sure where it is pointing yet.

Imagining a new future requires a type of clearing from inside out, a shedding of things that we no longer have the luxury to bring along for the ride. I long for more simplicity and clarity. I want less things. I want to be brave and do radical things but I am afraid, too. 

I will always be frightened that something terrible will happen to me or them or to the world. I will always be afraid of deaths both big and small. I know I don’t have to obliterate the fear, but I do have to make room to live with it. It is the other side of my love, it is words carved into rock and it cannot be erased.

In the early morning I stroke the soft head of my boy. My daughter sleeps soundly, safely in the other room. Here we are on planet earth. There is just this, all of this, right now, wildly, inevitably enough.