At 16 I lay awake worriedly asking myself: “Does my ideal woman exist? What if I never meet her?”
At 25, having limped from a broken relationship, I lay awake asking myself: “How can anyone love one person for the whole of their lives?”
Tonight, with P away and scratchy with loneliness, I ask myself: “How could I live without her?”
After so many years, finally the right question.
It is said that wine brings out your true character. In my case, I very much hope that is not true. If it is, it would seem that my true character has difficulty walking straight, pronouncing consonants and restraining its mouth from running on ceaselessly, addressing subjects it knows next to nothing about. In fact my very essence, the very truest me, would be a figure bent over a loo moaning and making promises to God he knows he will not keep (I would be grateful if those who have met me would refrain from confirming the accuracy of that portrait).
But if wine is not the soul-microscope it has been made out to be, what is? I nominate “news”. Have someone drop an unanticpated development into conversation with you and your inner self always beats your conscious self to the punch. Sometimes even forewarning can leave results unaffected.
Regular readers will know that P and I cannot have children. Coming to that conclusion has been a tortured process in which hope has ebbed, flowed and, ultimately, evaporated away. When I discovered that my brother and his wife faced similar difficulties, I was devastated for them. After a number of years and some sizeable private treatment bills, they recently reached the same full stop we had: the final round of treatment. Their last round produced only a handful of eggs and only two embryos. If you know anything about IVF you will appreciate that this represents a dwindling prospect of success and, with that in mind, their last two embryos were replaced.
When P climbed from the car, looking pale, and informed me she had had news from Jeremy my heart froze. I had spoken to him a few days before and his usual boundless good humour had been replaced by a stress-pinched unhappiness. I could imagine what he was feeling.
“They are pregnant”
At that moment I felt relief and happiness. I am telling you this because those feelings were immediately replaced with a different kind of relief: relief that my first reaction had not been bitterness. Infertile couples are assumed to be as bitter as burnt coffee. I have lost count of the friends and family, people who know us well, who have, on telling us that they were having a child, expressed themselves nervous about telling us. When my brother called to tell me it was twins, he insisted repeatedly that he knew how difficult it must be for me. You wonder - is this true? Am I now the sort of person who is made unhappy by the happiness of others? I wasn’t sure any more which was why I was so relieved when the news made me smile.
I am over-simplyfing. Whilst I am not incapable of sharing my brother’s joy, it is complicated. Once the flash of the news fades, you do look inwards and what you find is darkness. I want to be honest and describe what it feels like but it is difficult to pin down. Emotional auto-anatomy is not a skill I possess in abundance. One part of it is a sense of self-pity, edged by anger and resentfulness. It has the smack of a toddler’s over-developed sense of unfairness: “why me?”.There are notes of dread; a subtle fear of the future, of creeping towards death without a family. There is, despite P, a hint of loneliness under-pinned by the fact that grief is difficult to share: it isolates you. Finally, you feel a sense of purposelessness, as if, for all your career plans and indulgent self-development, Nature is reminding you at some genetic level just beyond your hearing that your real role is to create people and love them.
Congratulations little brother! I will love the newest members of our family just as much as I love you.
This is not the entry I had originally intended to write. My mother was 70 last weekend and P and I were hosts as the family gathered to celebrate. I had in mind a short but heart-warming piece about how much I love my Mum and what a fabulous time we had all had.
On Friday night, wine glass in hand, I asked my mother how she intended to spend her next decade. Her reply: “Preparing for the afterlife”.
In many families that would pass with a smile and chuckle. My mother, however, is serious. There is nothing wrong with the end - who wouldn’t prefer heaven to hell as a final destination? The problem is with the means that she has decided to adopt to get her past the pearly gates. Mum is a great believer in the sanctifying power of misery and victimhood. There being little real opportunity for misery she finds herself compelled to create a steady supply.
She turned from our conversation to provoking an argument with my brother-in-law; accusing him of drinking heavily every night. He pointed out that he only drinks on a Saturday evening and that is limited to three small bottles of beer. That could not be true, Mum countered, because every day she sees three empty bottles on the kitchen counter. They were, it seems, the same three bottles waiting patiently for the weekly recycle. This forced Mum to switch to accusations of slovenliness. Feeble though that allegation was it proved to be enough to prompt my brother-in-law wearily to move away from the table.
“Oh dear” said my mother “have I said the wrong thing again? I am always in trouble”. We all went off to bed with the smell of martyred flesh hanging in the air.
The next morning it was time to spring the big surprise. P and I have a photograph of three generations of her family clowning about which my mother has long coveted. She likes to stand in front of it and sigh, observing that our family could never be persuaded to gather for a “nice photo” even though we all know how much she would like one. In preparation for Mum’s birthday, my sister H contacted a professional photographer, checked his portfolio and then arranged for him to travel 250 miles to take the definitive Moobs family portrait. P and my other sister C were deputed to tell my mother what was happening so that she would have plenty of time to gussy herself up.
I arrived on the scene to find C in tears, P eyeing my mother murderously and my mother striking a pose like St Catherine on a mass card. “It’s not what I want” my Mother was saying “It’s all too much trouble. I just want each of you to give me a nice little photo I can put on the wall next to each other”. “Too much trouble” is a trope my mother resorts to a lot. No-one in the world is as skilled as my mother as using a supposed desire to avoid trouble to create so much of it.
C was heart-broken and left the room crying. Mum found her and stooping to comfort told her “I don’t see why I should be made to feel guilty for not wanting something”. To which C replied “I don’t see why I should be made to feel guilty for trying to make you happy”. C, bless her, misses the point, being unhappy is what makes my mother happy.
Being the eldest, I have a few more years of mother-wrangling experience and knew that the best thing was to fight passive aggression with passive aggression and told her that it was no problem and that I would immediately phone the photographer and tell him that when his train completed its three hour journey into London he should turn right round and go home. It would be, I suggested, no trouble. Mum demurred.
P had to take her to buy shoes for the photo shoot. My mother informed the shop assistant that she would probably give the shoes away to charity the following week as she only buying them because she had been forced to. P simmered.
Over the next few hours we were treated to the following:
Once the photos were taken we got her round the corner to our local restaurant and kept her wine glass filled. She immediately cheered up. It was such a joy to see her laughing and the relief was palpable. Once home again, she even joined in throwing a frisbee about the garden.
It was not to last. By 8:00pm, she insisted that I cancel the breakfast at the Dorchester Hotel we had booked for her, again on the basis that being carried by taxi to a luxury hotel and eating a breakfast produced by a kitchen run by one of Europe’s star chefs, was “a lot of trouble and inconvenience”.
The weird thing is that whilst we may have spent the weekend chewing our tongues and tearing at our hair, I think she enjoyed herself. Happy Birthday Mum.
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