FFS. Let me just lead with that FTASOF.

Look, I don’t know how this is going to come out, but in for a penny, as the saying goes… to be fair I’m in for somewhere in the region of the Bank of England gold vault, so here goes.

No more hiding, except in name, which doesn’t feel so protective when you write as dirty as I do. (No, not that kind of dirty.) I lay out all the grot and grime in myself and others and even if I sometimes hide behind metaphor, abstraction, and pretty words (less so today) it’s true, it’s all true. But. There’s a but coming and I think I’ve had my head up it.

Anyone who has had even the faintest brush with my writing will know I did a lot of inner work, which sounds twee, but is true. I woke up to a lot of things in my life and in life in general and now, after opening up every fault line in my life, I am balancing on the shaky bridges I am building over them to a new future.

But I have also written that I have handled a lot gracefully, and I still think I have, but also somewhere along the way I have been a giant twat. Repeatedly.

Not just because I was silently conducting this song, which by the way is a metaphor for my brain today, on the way home from the school run in my battered Passat. Battered because I have repeatedly reversed into things over the last few weeks, my drive gates twice, and my daughter’s Polo once because I am quite often stressed and generally I’ve been driving like a twat too.

It’s the repeatedly part that’s the problem, though I am not bothered about the car.

Let me tell you how I arrived at twat. Sorry, I am angry today and maybe it even started crossing over into resentment, something I absolutely refuse to allow to settle when you’re as lucky as I am, so I have to go in, again, to the pile of darkness and find out why.

I was marching along on my walk with this same song on repeat on Sunday and I walk through a pair of trees and say in my head, “gateway,” then I see a great, round black stone. It is warmed by the sun and a good size for my hand and I squeeze it hard. Really hard. I keep walking, keep holding and all of a sudden I think, “see no evil, hear no evil.”

Okay weird, I think and then because I am weird, I think about it. See no evil. Hear no evil. And I stand there in the field, stone in my fist, and think: what a load of old bollocks.

Because you do have to see it. You have to hear it. That’s not the problem. The three wise monkeys have had the wrong marketing team for about four hundred years. The problem was never looking. The problem is what you do once you have.

His family don’t communicate. They haven’t, not really, not about the things that matter, not for generations as far as I can tell. And the harm from that hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s just gone underground in their bodies, quietly poisoning things. Currently one family member is attempting to change a will at ninety-seven just to spite a few perceived slights. Imagine your last act in this world being one of spite. Why?

Silence doesn’t neutralise things. It’s acid. But noise isn’t the cure either.

My mother, on the other hand, never once shut up. Paranoid, delusional, on and on, the same fears in the same shape, decade after decade, and none of it ever went anywhere either. Not because speaking is the wrong instinct, but because nothing she said ever led anywhere. It just recirculated, a rant looking for a landing strip that never existed, because there wasn’t one, because the thing she feared wasn’t real in the first place.

So there’s my two failed monkeys, right there, one in each family. His silence. My mother’s noise. And I have spent years being fairly smug about which one I inherited.

Except.

Here’s the bit I had a stone in my fist for.

I have said true things to him. Repeatedly. Things he agrees with, actually agrees with: the contempt, the women, sixteen years of emotional absence. He doesn’t argue the facts. He says I hit him over the head with it. And he’s right.

Which means: mine is true and hers wasn’t, but the shape is the same shape. Something said, again and again, to a person who has already heard it, who can’t do anything further with it, who has nowhere left to put it. That’s not an accounting anymore. That’s a rant with better sourcing.

The stone was warm and I was gripping it like it owed me and I thought, you giant twat, you've been doing your mother's thing in your father's tradition.1

Here’s what I’ve landed on, for what it’s worth, standing in a field, still holding a rock like an idiot. The problem was never the seeing or the hearing, it was never even, always, the speaking of it. The problem was telling the hurt on repeat, for the months that I did, hoping that repetition would finally do what the first true telling couldn’t. It won’t. It never does. Not for her. Not for me.

And it’s done now, maybe it’s been done for a year. The whole account can stay under Threadneedle Street, where a different me once stood. I’ve understood the pattern, my part and his and the next step isn’t laying it out in a way I can feel justified or that he will finally see.

The next step is putting the stone the fuck down.

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I stole the basic premise from a prostitute on another writing site, and from a blog I used to read that seemed to think in much the same way I did. It was full of strange synchronicities. For a long time I thought they were directing me somewhere, but really they were only directing me back to things I had forgotten in myself. The ideas landed somewhere inside and I went digging, trying to understand why, but only ever half getting it.

I wouldn’t write this poem now, not because I think it’s wrong, but because I’m no longer asking the same questions in the same way. Looking back through my old writing feels like reading the work of someone else, yet I can also see how much of it continued to direct my life until I eventually found the right shelf.

My own.

Until I realised I was just the right size for my boots.

Disguises

I try on lives, as others do coats,
Leave them on the floor,
tracing moments.

I sit naked, buttonholing hopes,
weaving patterns into components.

Like the time we kissed— it was awkward,
That form in your trousers imposing,
hiding the signs of an untoward
lamb, about to feed a wolf’s loathing.

The price was terribly dear, so I
looked in some other wardrobes, and shades
on rails were tempting: a hopeful tie,
a big city suit, country plaids and

too big for your boots. I tear at seams
to see what this lost girl is made of,
graze of bones, clots of blood, what she means
to be, dressing up truth with sham love.

I haven’t found the right outfit yet.
Empty hangers grow rusty in time;
shelves house other disguises. I bet
someone’s already wearing mine.

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This morning, on the school run, I don’t talk much. My daughter sits next to me and we listen to music. I am wearing a green cord skirt, a navy top and sandals your granny might wear. I am also wearing a half-smile, which lasts the whole way because I realise why. I am at peace with who I am becoming.

But come with me first on my Sunday, where dreams and realisations fell like the willow down I like to call summer snow.

It is some godforsaken hour of the morning: 06.35, which is probably a normal time for some people, but I am not normal. The air is warm. I am wearing a dress with my swimsuit underneath and a half-frown because of the time, and because I am one coffee back from full consciousness.

I am going to Fallen Willow Sauna. In truth I am not much interested in the sauna. I go for the lake, which you can cool off in between. I put my bag down on a bench, slip my dress and sandals off and walk barefoot over the gravel to the water. The sign tells me the water is 22 degrees. That is the wrong temperature for June and it makes me think of the blackberries I saw yesterday that are already fat and green. Selfishly, I don’t want my autumn rituals messed up. Less selfishly, I think of the wilting flowers and the burning world.

The woman tells me somehow the sauna is overbooked. Why don’t I start in the lake? I smile and walk into the water.

I swim first to the right, into a curve of bullrushes, but it gets shallow too fast and my foot hits something and I get freaked out, irrationally. I push quickly over to the other side, which is flat and wide and deep.

It is bliss.

There is another woman in the water. We smile. She says something and I laugh lightly in the way I often do when I am not wearing my hearing aids, because I have no idea what she said. I swim all the way to the end, to where the buoys are and the water is cold and shaded by willows. Big clumps of algae and scum float past. To my right, two mayflies, or maybe pond skaters, are having a battle and, for a split second, it feels as if my eyesight is telescopic. I zoom in on their secret world before they dip under the water.

As I turn and swim back, the wind blows the ripples against me. It is beautiful. Maybe I am finally making my peace with the wind.

I stay for an hour and warm up once in the sauna. Towards the end, I stop thinking about my stroke and do what I sometimes do at the end of a session in the pool when it quietens. I play. I don’t care about the couple at the other end of the lake. I slide my limbs through the green water, one leg, then the other, then my arms, wrists crossing and sliding. I turn and float. I look up at the clouds. One looks like the head of a dragon.

I think how little I play these days. I go back to the bullrushes, stand where it shallows, step forward off the rocky bottom into a thick, deep pile of silt and sludge. I shudder, laugh at myself and swim back. It is time to leave, though with the smell of the wood, the fluff of the bullrushes and the water still on my skin, I know that if I could live a little more like this, I would be more at peace.

My daughter and I draw and chat for a while. Later, her dad takes her swimming. While they are gone, I visit my half-sister on my dad’s side. We don’t look much alike, except in the squint of our frequent laughing, but we are alike in our path through life and the way we see the world. We have tea in the garden and try, unsuccessfully, to have adult conversations, which are interrupted by my nephews showing me their Lego figures, pressing pictures into my hands and a new puppy weeing at random intervals. I see this book on her table.

I am at ease.

Molly gets back and we go home, where we draw some more before bed. Her teenage sisters return home, squabble, and I referee until at least one storms off. I shake this off with my youngest by having a giant pillow fight that feels exactly the right move two minutes before I expect her to sleep.

I read the book on Kindle. It’s good if you take it in an embodied, less magical-thinking way, but I like what it says about consciousness and your mindset before sleep, so I adjust my own, shove the dog over and turn out the light.

When I wake today, I wake content.

I set my alarm at an awful time because I need two coffees and journalling before life begins. In my journal I think about the girls. I think about the last time I felt truly content. I was teaching at a university, running every day and drawing prolifically, even if not well. Over the last week I agreed to take back my lecturing job. I drew, I swam, I walked. I made all these decisions, not really knowing if they were right, but simply accepting what came.

I think about drawing.

About sixteen years ago I was sitting at the table of another life, another house, with very small children asleep upstairs. I thought briefly how having these small children was like my life suddenly being taken over by wild pirates. Then, all at once, a story came to me. Wild creatures come into a house and take it over. Each picture, each page, fully formed in my mind.

There was one snag, I couldn’t draw.

One character was a toddler crossed with a monkey, because my oldest daughter was early and still covered in fine hair, even on her ears. Another was a toddler crossed with a bug, because the other was late and had these alert, beady eyes that followed every move you made. They come into the house, fight with each other, then form their own army and trash the place. The story ends with the words: All was well in the world of Monkey and Bug. They sit on a wall in front of a skyline with the moon, large and rising behind it.

Then I realise something, very slowly.

This book is doing the same job as my memoir.

The characters might be my daughters, but the stunts they pull are me and my sister.

They blow up the shed (my sister burned our bedroom cupboard with her chemistry set). They cut off the cat’s tail (my sister got caught trying to do this). They block up the loo (I did this with three loo rolls and a bottle of Matey bubble bath). The world of the characters is warm but dark, mischievous, with a hint of danger. The rooms are rich with colour but poor in material wealth. The city is there, but so is the natural world: the moon, the stars and the trees. I grew up in the city, but we watched the stars and ran wild on the water meadows.

I am creating worlds in words and pictures to understand the world underneath, and to move well through the world outside.

Today, at least, I am content. Today is really all we have.

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I am the last one up, and the last one up does the dogs. I open the back door and follow them into the night. The air is still warm from the heatwave and I miss the chill. I prefer autumn now, and winter. I used to love spring, used to dream of chasing it around the world, to possess its potential, its energy. I don’t chase anymore.

I look up at the stars. The dogs charge past me back inside.

For a long time I wanted someone who knew how to do this, to look up and watch the swifts fly, who wouldn’t say oh, that’s nice but would just be still, watching the same sky. I don’t need that anymore either, but sometimes I still want it, only differently now.

I open my bedroom door and let the dog in. She settles on the end of the bed to wait for me.

I walk down the hallway to kiss my two older daughters goodnight. In a few short months they won’t be in their beds every night. One begins university, one returns to it. They don’t know yet which house those beds will be in when they come home for the holidays, and I am so sorry for that.

I tell each of them this separately. I have always kissed them goodnight and told them something, small or large, something the busyness of the day didn’t allow enough quiet to say. Last night it was a variation of this:

‘I’m so sorry. This family was created in incredible love. It was all real, it was all meant to be. It still is. But it still can’t stay.’

‘I’m sorry Mum. Love isn’t enough on its own.’

‘No. It isn’t. But don’t worry about me. You know I’ll always be okay.’

I walk down the hall. Sit on another bed, stroke the side of her head.

‘I’m so sorry, darling.’

‘You don’t have to keep saying sorry.’

‘But, I wanted it to be perfect, right to the end.’

‘But we don’t want you to do that.’

‘I know. But what a life. What lessons. That you can love so deeply, and be loved the same, and it still can’t stay. I don’t have any regrets.’

And that is true.

I believe there is a place where all souls gather before moving through lives, as people, as trees, as birds or daisies and when a life is over they return and add a small spark of knowing to the pool. I have believed this for a long time, in the smell of dusk and coal smoke on the air, in dead birds and standing herons, in love and in grief.

Love, I think, is the most beautiful spark you can return with. To have known it, in whatever form that takes, is the greatest gift of a lifetime. And still, after all the souls that have ever been, it remains a mystery. That is what holds everything together. That is why it doesn’t end.

Real love, like the spring, cannot be possessed. Many poets, artists, truck drivers and people waiting at the bus stop have known this. I know it now too, as someone who has let the knowing move through me and change me. I know love differently, because it happened to me, in this house, in this hallway, on this ordinary night.

I saw these words on a wall once: Love is free. I thought it meant love didn’t cost anything. Now I know.

I may never feel anything like this again. All at once it is the most devastating tragedy of my life and the most beautiful one too.

I come back to my room. The dog lifts her head. Outside, the stars are sending out their light from somewhere so far back it may already be gone, arriving here anyway, to this garden, to anyone who thinks to look up.

I forgot to buy milk. Tomorrow I’ll buy milk.

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I am eight years old.

Our bedroom is large, though not in the way large rooms feel generous. A cold Victorian terrace on the edge of the city. My sister’s bed beside mine. Across the room is a cast-iron fireplace, which my mother lights with coal in winter because the house never quite warms through. Above it hangs a crucifix I cannot bear to look at after dreaming it reached down to pull me from my bed. At the end of the little gingham-covered sofa stands the cupboard. For years it was simply a cupboard: shelves crammed with old toys, books nobody wanted, pens without lids, odd socks. The door never shut properly and at the top there was only a line of darkness. Until I discovered it wasn’t.

I don’t remember finding the gap. Only that once I knew it was there, I had to know what lay beyond it. Looking back, I think I have always been drawn towards hidden things. Not because I wanted to possess them, but because I wanted to understand them. A locked attic, a sealed box, a diary, a mystery. The world has always seemed full of concealed rooms. My mother even learned to wrap my Christmas presents in old clothing, odd boxes and misleading shapes because I would always peek. I did not simply want the present, I wanted the before-knowledge. So it was only a matter of time before I climbed up to find what was behind that line of darkness.

Outside the cupboard I had to be a certain way. My family told me without telling me: be pleasing, be funny. Don’t make a fuss about the dress. Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Be cheerful, because there wasn’t space among the moods of my mother and sister to be anything else. There was no space to be me, so I made it myself. I had to shut the world out somehow and this was one of the places I did it.

I don’t remember taking the bowl of oats for any practical reason, perhaps there simply wasn’t anything else to eat, perhaps I had been reading about Scotland and oats felt somehow Scottish. My book was about a rescue dog in the Highlands and with each page I turned the cupboard faded away. Coal smoke became peat smoke, rough pine beneath my hands became damp rock. Rain against the bedroom window became weather rolling across the moor. Somewhere a curlew called over water I had never seen and yet somehow knew.

My body had arrived before my mind remembered I was still in my bedroom. The book was the doorway, the cupboard was only quiet enough and dark enough for me to walk through it.

At some point I grew too big to squeeze through the gap, so I built dens instead. Blankets stretched between chairs, plastic propped over my guinea pig’s hutch while rain drummed above me. Once, I even broke into an abandoned garage and carried my books inside and made a world in there. I know many children do this, but looking back I think mine was a little less usual, because I didn’t visit other worlds. I inhabited them with my whole being. It is like crossing water onto another shore. When I travel now, I don’t collect places. I let unfamiliar words settle in my mouth. I breathe different air until the place has altered something microscopic inside me. I come back changed.

I have written often about houses. About old cottages, empty rooms, the way afternoon light falls across worn floorboards. I thought I was searching for the perfect home. But maybe I was looking for the cupboard, not to hide from my life even with its difficulties. I don’t think it’s ever been about that quiet dark space. It isn’t about cob walls and shutters, never the scent of jasmine through the window. It was about finding a place where the strangeness in me had enough silence to become itself.

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Instead, I sat with my tarot cards, asking questions I already knew the answers to, while they told me things I had not asked and showed me something I must have known already, because as soon as I saw it, it felt familiar: whenever a relationship breaks down, my mind wanders towards past lovers.

Not because I really want to return, but because they are known, their shapes, their stories. A new person would require something else entirely. I would have to trust my judgement, trust my intuition, and let someone arrive without knowing the ending.

This, as it turns out, is terrifying to me, because I like to know everything, and I have spent so much of my life understanding myself in relation to another person, writing their story, reading their silences.

But I like myself now, I respect myself now, I know what I need, and I believe I am allowed to need it, which is wonderful, of course it is, but it is lonely too.

I put the cards down and beat myself up for wasting the evening, for not sitting with my daughter to watch TV, even though I do not like TV much, except sometimes when I need to turn off my brain, or on Fridays when we do movie night, because really there are so many other things I want to do instead: read, walk, draw, write.

I am tired, but annoyed with rest. I look around the dark room, everything is uncomfortable tonight, although I have made it beautiful. On the mantelpiece there are candles, unlit, and in one corner there is a tall candle lantern, also unlit. I wish there was someone to light them for, someone to watch the night through the window with when the air smells so beautiful, not to talk to, just to be present with, someone who notices.

As I always do when confusion settles, I ask my dreams to tell me more or bring me peace. They often oblige. The night was long and very hot, full of rich and explanatory dreams, but they flew away before I could catch them.

There was no coffee on the chest of drawers when I woke, no token of existence. I wasn’t rested. I reached down to the side of the bed and pulled out my journal. Every day I do this before anything else, but today I don’t have the words. I don’t know what to write anymore, because there is nothing left to do, nothing left to analyse, only the waiting, which feels like passing a long confinement.

The nothing days are the worst. I don’t reply to my emails or messages, I don’t walk, I don’t write, but I go through the motions: the school run, the lunches, only the necessary.

I remember that film, The NeverEnding Story. The villain is the Nothing, and it devours everything, which is how I feel today. I sit on the floor by my bed and I know I must do something to fight it, although I have no horse, no magical dog-dragon, and there is no one who can make beautiful wishes to make this pass.

There is only time to pass now.

My life taught me relentless resilience, so I get up and strip all the beds, changing the sheets because it is something to do with my hands, but it’s still only going through the motions. The Nothing is still winning, so I stop. I breathe. I cannot make a wish for myself at the moment, because that wish would be someone to watch the flames dance with. Someone curious, clever, creative. Someone kind. Someone to share with.

I cannot make a wish, because it’s still that someone would wish for me.

I shouldn’t let the Nothing win, so I lift one fresh white sheet and tuck it neatly at the corners, put the pillowcase on, fluff the pillow, pinch each corner out. One, two, three, four. Then I lift another white sheet, take it in two hands, wave it into the air and, like a moment of magic, it floats softly down onto the bed. I fold the top down, so gently. I slide my fingers down the edge of the sheet between the wall and the bed as if it isn’t a sheet but the finest gossamer of tissue.

Nothing comes from nothing. I line her slippers up by the edge of the bed and walk out softly.

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A Favourite bed in Charleston

By Edward Thomas

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. What I saw

Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

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Last night my daughter woke at 2am with a bad dream. It couldn’t have come at a worse time, because at 1.59 I had just arrived somewhere I’d been trying to reach for years. Not an idea, but a knowing. The kind that doesn’t arrive through argument.

She called for me. I went to her. The dog came too, which is how it is now. The three of us finding our way through.

The story of this relationship is twenty-nine years long. I’m going to tell it straight, because writing has both saved me and destroyed me, and I am done hiding behind either metaphor or over-explanation. Both are the same avoidance in different clothes.

We met at seventeen, at college. We dated briefly, but the intensity of it frightened me, and there were things he couldn’t quite deliver that I needed even then, even at seventeen. So I broke his heart. I committed every moment of it to memory. I carried art he made for me everywhere I went for years.

We stayed friends across diverging lives. Different universities, different relationships, his engagement, my marriage. Every time life came to a crossroads we would find each other, and though sometimes years passed between meetings, it would be as though no time had moved. We saw each other in the way that goes beyond the logic of time spent together.

He knew, when I was eighteen and working in a chicken factory with a bad boyfriend and a fantasy of being a surfer, that this wasn’t who I was. That knowing sent me to university, which sent me all the way to a doctorate.

We met many times over those years. Looking back, it almost felt like checking. Are we nearly there yet? A real question that became, eventually, an in-joke between us. The kind you only understand from inside.

Eventually I got engaged to the wrong man. I was pregnant, though I didn’t know it yet. We met in a little country pub and he turned to me and asked, are you sure you’re making the right decision?

And I told him, it isn’t fair of you to ask me that.

Then I drove away. He came to my wedding. He argued with his fiancée there, because he told her he could see I wasn’t happy.

Five years later, leaving a violent marriage, I went driving down a country lane, following a feeling in my stomach and a song on the radio, until I found myself passing the place where he happened to be working outside. I hadn’t known he’d be there.

What followed were walks in the countryside, and after one of them, as I went to leave, he turned to me and said, you are meant to be with me. I have always known it. But you didn’t choose me. So what was I to do?

I got in the car and drove away dramatically, the way you do in films. And as I drove, I knew. If you have ever had that kind of knowing, you understand how it works. It doesn’t announce itself, it simply arrives, already certain. I was due to collect the children from their father’s house. I was late. I kept driving, just to hold the feeling a few minutes longer, because I knew that as soon as I put the girls and their little pink bag in the car, ordinary life would resume. And the magic of the moment would be over.

What followed was, for five years, mostly magic and real love. But even then, there was a crack. I did not come to him clean. I came with alarm already threaded through me. And he did not come without hunger. His need for outside validation never became physical betrayal, but it was there, and it touched the oldest wound in me.

My fear activated his shutdown. His shutdown activated my fear. Play that on repeat across sixteen years, add an ex-husband who tormented us for ten of those, add a mother who had damaged him in ways that only became visible when we took over the family farm, and you have a system that couldn’t hold.

The love was real. The damage was real. We were in the eye of something neither of us fully understood until we were already too deep inside it.

We have both floated above it. Me in compulsive analysis, him in diagnoses and intellectual frameworks, both of us intellectualising because to come down from that means letting the grief land. Not in the moments we have both had, where it grazes you and recedes, but fully. To be drowned by it.

Because the truth inside the grief is this. We were supposed to find each other. The love wasn’t only myth, though myth was there too. And to finally accept that there is no way forward except separately, after twenty-nine years of circling, is a loss so large that it can only come in waves. Rising and receding, because if it came all at once you would lose your breath and lose your way.

One year ago tomorrow I went to Avebury Henge, and somewhere inside the stillness of it I knew I had to stop moving to understand. I knew I would return this year. On Sunday at sunrise, I will watch the light come up over the stones.

I thought I would be in a different place by now. The truth is I am not in a different place, but I am exactly where I always needed to arrive, which is where my father told me I would arrive, before either of us knew what the journey was. He said life was about learning to see the landscape with new eyes.

And I am where the Eliot quote I have always carried has finally brought me.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

I am back at the beginning. The beginning of me.

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Last year’s solstice:

There’s the judgement, there’s the financial struggle. There’s the empty cupboard, the shoes missing from the back door. There’s the silent weight of writing “single” under marital status on every stupid form that reduces it all to paperwork.

There’s her face greeting him with excitement, because he isn't at the dinner table every day, there’s me swallowing that for her. There’s no one to remember that disastrous camping trip when the wind blew a hole in the tent and we had to listen to the Tale of Mr. Tod on repeat.

There’s no one to help me take my favourite photos off the Google home in the kitchen that break me every time I make a cup of tea.

There’s no plan, there’s no path.

And I will resist the urge to disappear into the little glade and rest, really rest for the first time in my life.

Because there’s this too:

There is living whole. There is loving myself. There’s self-respect. There’s drawing until 2am. There’s dancing without wondering whether he sees me or someone else. There’s girls movie nights and red nail varnish. There’s cereal for dinner. There’s them coming home to a me they haven’t seen for years that has remembered how to be soft and how to laugh again.

Because I am relentlessly choosing to live as all of me. To feel alive.

To rise more like the dawn, every day.

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There is something you need to know about me. Well, strictly, you only need to know this if you’re in a romantic relationship with me.

I will make you a myth.

I don’t think I have ever known true love, apart from my love for my children, which is probably my saving grace. All my hard-won grace comes from this.

Every other kind of love has been limited by illness, fear, damage or capacity. And even if there was a chance that my adult relationships could have been different, I think I would have kept that chance at arm’s length, or maybe ten thousand leagues under the sea.

Because if you are a man I love, I will make you a myth.

If you send me a song, I will follow every plucked string back to the root of you. I will read your soul in the breaks between notes.

I will learn the curves of your body by heart. I will learn what you want before you know it yourself, and give you more.

I will commit your scent to memory and connect it to every wisp on the wind I have ever known, and I will ask you to carry memories that were never yours.

If you give me a window into your thoughts, I will follow the thread of your secret weaknesses and loves until our hearts must be joined in some Platonic fever-dream, written in a language older than either of us.

If you don’t give me a window, I will look for one. I will stand outside the locked door, listening, and convince myself the silence is part of the story.

I will tie this up with a silent whisper asking you to rescue me.

And I will think I am giving you all of me. I won’t. I will keep one eye on the cracks that threaten the myth.

This is too much for anyone to hold.

It is too much for me to hold.

No one ever really knew what they were holding. I did not show them the secret of me. I showed them the myth of them.

So I burned it down.

I will follow every plucked string back to the root of me.

I will let my own songs carry in the wind.

I will let my own scent carry me home.

I will know the parts I have hidden even from myself, and I will not make a myth of them. I will sit with them in the dark.

I cannot see the path. I don’t know what it looks like, what it tastes like, or what it sounds like.

I am lonely. I am fiercely brave. I am terribly scared.

And I still want you to rescue me, but I know now that no one can do that.

So I just keep walking, even in the dark.

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It is early November 2006. The sun is bright through the attic Velux window, which is open a crack, and the breeze coming through it is scented with the lake it crosses before it reaches the house. You are asleep.

I have laid your soft warm body in the Moses basket by my bed. Babies, finally and heavily asleep, have a particular weight to them, as if they trust you enough to drop all the way to the centre of the earth. You are a funny little caterpillar because someone invented baby sleeping bags with poppers at the shoulder, and I am learning you by heart, though I had begun even before I knew your face, when all I knew of you was the beat of you through a Doppler, fast and hidden, like horse hooves beneath my skin.

All of these moments are etched into the cells of my body.

You were my first adventure into motherhood, and the days were beautiful, heady, car-crash, never-ending days. As time has passed and the rose-tinted spectacles have been donned, the tiredness, the worry, the painful expressing into hotel sinks, the nappies hurled out of that same Velux at two in the morning, have all paled into insignificance, because those days, oh those days, were sugar-sweet like the milk I made.

Any mother will recognise the smells of birth and those early weeks. One day you may too. I know you want a family, though even wanting that can be fraught with difficulty. The smell is rich with sex and life and blood and milk, and you may be bruised, and maybe torn, and maybe you need to take a warm jug of water to the loo with you, if you know, you know, but if all is well, and sometimes it isn’t, and I know that story too, so if one day, my darling, your adventure with your own children holds days of cloud and storm and darkness, I will be there to carry you through them, the same way I carried you to that basket.

Because this was one of the gifts motherhood gave me. It made me feel, for the first time, that I had stepped into a river of ancestry and history and life, something that stretched long before me and would continue long after me. Somewhere in that river, I began to understand how women carry each other, whether we are mothers or not.

But if you are one of the luckiest people alive, as I consider myself to have been in those first days, and your first step into motherhood is as beautiful as mine was, you won’t mind the stitches, the bruises, the water jug, the nappies, the milk, the sleeplessness, because you will recognise the miracle of it all. Pregnancy and birth, when they go well, are so ordinary that people forget how miraculous they are. Anything could happen. Anything could go wrong. And yet, there you were, sleeping beside me in a basket.

The house we first lived in was new and white and beige, like all those Babygros. A silent bliss followed us around the house. It curled up banisters and slipped under doors. It felt as if the whole universe was holding us in suspended time.

It didn’t matter that I hadn’t slept in weeks. During the days when I had you alone, I watched you obsessively, the way your mouth opened to coo at the room, as if a gentle music box had become the soundtrack to our lives. Sporadic, harmonious, little raindrops of sound left on the air, alighting with the sunlit dust on your cherry lips.

We lay often on my bed, with no pressing thing to do, because this was the most important thing to do and I knew that. We lay enveloped by the eiderdown, maybe watching a feather fall, and I am awestruck again even now as you reach out one unfurling hand to it. Opening, closing, turning your hand up, turning it down. Breathing in, breathing out.

Even as I did the washing, I inhaled the milk stains on your tiny vests.

Because, my sweet girl, your arrival, and then the arrivals of your sisters, though you were the first, made me the happiest I have ever been. The love was so pure and so uncomplicated, something that in my twenty-six years so far I had not had. I had done it. I had changed my life into what I had always wanted, a simple Peppa Pig world of family and normality, a mother and a daughter done the right way.

You had grandparents, aunties, uncles, a lovely home, a father. It was simple and normal and easy.

Now we both know this wasn’t the end of the story, but I hope that this beginning, this love, this intention, the intention all of us began with, gave you some cushioning, an early bubble for the life that followed and the life you are now living. I hope it gave you somewhere soft to return to.

You reminded me of the incredible wonder of the ordinary. A leaf. A conker. A puddle. A ladybird. If I die tomorrow, I will die knowing I have already known heaven, and whether it is tomorrow, or next week, or many years from now, you never need to worry that anything has been wasted, because nothing that has happened, and nothing that could ever happen, can erase the gifts that you and your sisters gave me, just by being.

Yesterday we shared some writing with each other. We cried and talked honestly, the way we always do now. We spoke about the journeys we are both on, which are, on the face of it, separate more than together now you are older. We talked about the things I got wrong and the things you thought you did. I was so very proud, but you knew that the pride you had cultivated in yourself, in the very best sense of the word, mattered more than mine. Which was true, and only made me prouder. Still, I wanted you to know that you had mine too.

For now I am going to fast forward through eighteen years of tantrums and teenage fights, of hilarity and joy and trauma. I am even going to pass by your grave illness, which you handled with a grace that scarred me deeper than the illness ever could have. I am going to pass all of this by until we reach the moment everything changed between us. The moment we stepped into a river that became a sea, not only as mother and daughter, but as different people who respected that difference.

It is May 2025. It is two o’clock in the morning. We are sharing a double bed in a New York hotel, The Shoreham, which looked great on paper but in reality was pretty shabby. You didn’t care. It was your first time in New York and you were alive with the wonder of it all, but I watched you more than the skyline.

In a few short months you were leaving me to begin university, to step properly into the world alone, into one I could not and should not share with you in quite the same way. With that knowledge came the questions of how I had spent our short time together, whether I had done enough, whether I had made too many mistakes. Those questions pressed on me until they opened up every faultline in my life.

Real love will do that.

We had spent the evening with your Aunty and Uncle. We went to a fancy sushi bar, after which we ended up getting drunk on sangria and singing karaoke in Koreatown. You were you and I was me. We laughed at the freedom and gusto with which you sang Back to Black, and I worried briefly at the shade of darkness you were able to call up.

We said our goodbyes to family and stumbled back. The room was hot and dark. I am not a drinker, so I felt scratchy and uncomfortable under the duvet, which, like all hotel duvets, was tucked in too tight. Then you began to talk, about a bad boyfriend and college experiences, things I hadn’t known and couldn’t save you from.

The whole time I was lying there, I was thinking, do not react. Do not say too much. If you do, she will never tell you anything again.

The stories were hard. The life experiences were brutal, but now, as I reflect a year later, they were also sadly normal, even when they shouldn’t be. I have recommended this as an important parenting technique, by the way, to every mother I know. When your child is on the brink of leaving home, do whatever it takes. Get drunk. Take a trip with them. Let them see you and really look at them. Find each other as people, because that is what you must be now. You must grow into more than mother and daughter. You must grow into entirely separate individuals and begin to hold those things together at the same time.

You know this was hard for me. I am possessive and passionate, protective and sometimes reactive. It was hard because I had fiercely protected a love that was rare and beautiful in my life, and because somewhere inside I knew that this was my chance, maybe the last one I would get, to begin healing the difficult parts in our lives, the mistakes I made and the almost unavoidable trauma that comes for teenage girls, and with them.

And I didn’t waste it.

I listened, even if my teeth were gritted, even if I held on to that duvet for dear life. I let you speak to me of you as you. Not as my daughter, not as my baby, not as the person I had made and fed and carried and worried over, but as a friend, a confidante, a whole separate person with a private life and private pain.

I saw you.

I shared my own stories in return, and I still remember your surprise as you realised that I was a real, flawed, ugly, beautiful human too.

You saw me.

We saw each other just in time. Just in time for love, which does become heavy with the challenges of life, to give us both a bubble we could climb inside again when we needed to. Because, my sweet, I have to tell you, and you already know, there are things, just like our stories that night, that you can’t know until you know.

Life, however hard I tried and tried again, cannot be made simple and safe forever. Even though I thought I had learned that when you were three, I really didn’t learn it by heart until now. Life isn’t only the scary beginnings you and I have had over the last twelve months. It isn’t only the sad endings we’ve lived before and are living again.

It’s the in-between.

It’s always what you make of the in-between that counts, and I think what I am noticing is that the in-between starts with a moment. A moment grace is secretly behind. And grace is something you possess in abundance.

It can start with the moment you make a different choice and begin to live it. It starts with a particular hue at sundown that I know you pay attention to too. It starts with the moment you look in the rear-view mirror at a landscape that helped define you and you let that landscape pass. It starts when you say goodbye to someone in a hospital bed. It starts when you drink your cup of matcha, watching the trees through the window in your new flat, and you feel peace, a peace which you wrote yesterday you know you can only cultivate yourself.

The in-between is always now.

All those bigger moments, they’re not really the important ones. It’s the feather on the air. It’s the disgusting Caesar salad pizza at one in the morning. It’s the Friday Night Movie nights all blurred into one. It’s even your empty space on the sofa.

You are a scientist in training now, and I remember reading to you, when you were ten, from an article about how a baby’s cells can live on in the mother’s body, and the mother’s cells can be found in the child. So even though we journey separately from here on in, you will always carry me and I will always carry you.

We carry each other, darling.

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New York, May 2025. You were you and I was me.

My sister scowls as I tip more Matey into the bath and turn on the tap.

The bottle is blue and sailor-shaped, and the bubbles taste the way all forbidden things taste when you are little, chemical, exciting, probably poisonous. I scoop a handful into my mouth for comedic effect and chew them like meringue.

She does not laugh. Not yet.

She is sitting at the far end of the bath, lining up the shampoo bottles beneath the tiles with the grave concentration of a scientist preparing an experiment. The bathroom is damp and faintly furry, with floral green curtains at the window and tatty carpet round the bath, because it is the eighties and apparently no one has yet decided that bathrooms and carpet are natural enemies.

‘Pass the toothpaste,’ she says, barely looking up.

I pass the toothpaste.

‘Can I be the professor this time?’

I already know the answer. I ask anyway, because this is one of my little rituals of hope.

‘No. You are always the elephant.’

Of course I am.

I turn solemnly towards the taps and assume the position. This involves kneeling in the bath, pushing my wet hair out of my eyes and wiggling the rubber hose onto the taps. The hose is a cheap eighties workaround for a shower, relying entirely on tension and prayers. If you turn the water up too high, it shoots off and soaks the curtains, the carpet, the professor and the elephant. I know this. I still turn it up too high.

The hose bursts from the tap and sprays the room. Water hits the tiles, the mirror, the green curtains, the carpet. My sister shouts. I trumpet. She is trying not to laugh now, which is almost better than laughing, because making her lose her face is the point. The stony-faced professor is weakening.

I wiggle the hose off, flap my hose-trunk.

She laughs.

And there I am, where I want to be. Ridiculous, triumphant, useful.

The elephant.

We have always played roles, my sister and I. She was Garfield. I was Odie. She was the professor. I was the elephant, mixing diet potions in the bath for our sometime-delusional, sometime-golden mother.

She was the adult too soon. I was the court jester in our matriarchal hell house, eating bath foam, making fountains, breaking the tension before I had words for it.

Our mother was sometimes apple pie and Shakespeare, warm slippers and Christmas. Sometimes delusion, shouting, danger and eyes you read before speaking. In that house you listened to the stairs. You learned which version of her was coming by the sound of a footstep, a cupboard door, a breath.

My sister made herself clever and hard and older than she was. I made myself funny.

There are worse things than being the funny one. The funny one breaks the spell. The funny one gets a laugh from the hard face. The funny one makes the bath less frightening, the house less suffocating, the darkness less total. The funny one can turn a shower hose into a trunk and make herself ridiculous before anyone else can do it for her.

This is a useful survival mechanism if you are a child. Less useful, perhaps, if you are trying to become a woman you never let yourself know.

Because at some point the joke becomes a small room you are stuck inside. And you are still inside it, pressing your nose against the glass, stacking up jobs and degrees like proof, wondering why nobody has noticed that you are clever too. That you are real.

Later she became a scientist, studying the effects of THC on cannabinoids before returning to art. I became a writer, making fictional stories in real time and on the page, before returning to my own love of science. Perhaps we were always crossing the same ground from opposite sides.

She taught me to feel her face arrive before my own pleasure did. A song. A dress. A way of speaking. Anything too earnest, too soft, too pleased with itself, too Odie.

I pretended, as she did, that sung evensong was something to endure, though secretly I loved the smell, the cold stones, the choir notes rising into the vault. I hid my church dress fondness, though secretly I liked the beige florals and the funny concertinaed flowers. I learned to smuggle my own pleasure past her, as if joy were contraband.

This was not because she was wicked. It was because she was the only other person who knew the world we were growing up in, and I could not bear to be exiled from her too.

She told me once that there were gingham curtains in her Wendy house, before I arrived. That she loved them, that they were perfectly neat. Later they were folded and buried, along with pigtails shaken out too soon. Sometimes I still want to dig them up. To hold them to the light and remember who we were before.

But before what? Before Mum was ill? Before we knew she would never be properly well? Before Dad became a word we said carefully? Before I started doing little performances in the corner to keep the mood from turning? Before she learned to leave while still sitting beside me?

I don’t know.

The trouble with childhood is that by the time you understand what happened, the children who lived through it have already become adults with their own doors heavily bolted.

When Dad died, news of it reached me through a friend, not her. She had built a secret relationship with him, looking for answers in private, and left me outside. I cried my heart out and wondered where she had gone, where she had always gone. It was not only the news. It was the feeling of being outside the room where our shared life was being interpreted without me.

Christmas in our house was always, until recently, a little brighter. Mum usually put things aside then. She could hardly ever afford a car, so some years my sister and I walked the three miles home carrying a huge Christmas tree, hands sore, sharing a pair of gloves and laughing at the sight we made.

I loved that. I’ll love that always.

That is the difficulty. I cannot make the bad memories behave badly enough to erase the good ones. I cannot make the good ones strong enough to redeem the rest. They sit together, the way everything in our childhood sat together. Thomas Tallis and terror. Shakespeare and shouting. Warm slippers and slammed doors. A sister who shielded me, then vanished. A sister who laughed with me, then learned not to look.

My sister is the only one who could ever know what we lived through. The bathroom trunk. The professor, the elephant, the potions. The long walk home with the tree, sore hands, sharing a pair of gloves. The careful listening for which mother would come down the stairs. The strange golden patches, and how much worse they made the rest of it.

I think I have been waiting for her to say, yes, I remember. Yes, you were there. Yes, you were not just the funny one. Yes, I saw you too.

But perhaps she cannot. Perhaps looking at me would mean looking at herself. Perhaps my light feels like an accusation. Perhaps she had to decide I was stupid, because otherwise she would have had to admit that being hard was not the only way to survive.

Or perhaps that is my story, and I am doing it again, making meaning because meaning hurts less than silence.

She may never be ready.

And I am tired of standing in the hall with my little trunk and my handful of offerings, waiting for the hard face to soften. I am learning to like what I like before anyone clever has had a chance to sneer at it.

I like evensong. I like the smell of churches and cold stone. I like songs that are too sentimental if the ache is true. I like flowers on dresses. I like ridiculousness and joy and earnestness when it is real. I like the part of me that still points at the light out of the window.

I will always love the girls we were. The walk home with the tree, the shared glove, the sore hands, the two of us small and stubborn under a winter sky, carrying something far too big because nobody else was coming to help.

But I do not want to carry what is too big anymore.

I always think of you when I hear Joni Mitchell’s River. I wish I could give you one, long and cold and wide enough to skate away on, somewhere quiet, away from all of it. I love you darling, I always will. But I can’t keep waiting at the bank for you to jump in with me.

So I am stepping off the ice. Teaching my feet, at last, to fly.

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You were Wittersham summers,
evenings by the inglenook,
strawberries in the rain,
a room kept ready.

When I arrive, you are asleep,
a wisp
under the blue hospital blanket.
The water jug sits full.

When your eyes open
you whisper,

‘Your room is always ready.’

Just when we both knew
I wouldn’t need it again.

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It is August 2006. It is roasting hot, and the heat is made worse by the fact that I am pregnant with my first child. Every day I eat enough to sink a small ship. I particularly like large bars of chocolate and orange juice, because it makes the baby kick, and I like to know she is well.

I am the queen. I am absolutely fantastic. Anyone who has been pregnant will probably know this feeling. You behave like you are the only person in the history of the world ever to have been pregnant. Make room for me. I am making life. I am incredible.

Someone trying to take your space in the car park? Move out the way, I'm pregnant. Someone not offering you a seat on the train? Move out the way, I'm pregnant. Queuing too long in the shop? I'm pregnant, don't you know.

Well, that's how it felt for me. And perhaps it was one of the few times in my life where I felt entitled to take up space. I certainly did, considering I was the size of a small sofa and eating for about fifteen.

I am sitting in the beautiful garden of my fiancé's best friend's house in Portugal. Bougainvillea tumbles over the covered porch in great falls of pink and orange. A gecko holds absolutely still on the warm stone wall, then vanishes. I am wearing a pink satin dressing gown. My face is plump and red with the heat. My hair is lush and glorious for once, and I am deep in conversation with my fiancé's friend, who is kind and curious and genuinely interested. I am, in this moment, entirely myself.

All of a sudden a grating, nasal voice says:

'Look at the camera. It won't break.'

I have that video still, and I came across it recently. I watched it and saw the light leave my face.

This is how it works. Not a single blow but a slow erosion, so gradual you barely notice the ground shifting beneath you. An insulting comment here, argued against, called out, sometimes even apologised for, though in that particular way some people apologise, the kind that leaves you feeling somehow they don't mean it, somehow you are the one at fault. You know the kind. Most of us have someone in the family greatly skilled in this art.

But then you have the baby, and whatever confidence had been carrying you burns away in the sheer shock of it. Even in the ecstasy of new love for this creature, you are lost in nappies and hormones and a torturous lack of sleep. It is then, if you are not alert, that small aggressions take root and grow, robbing you of the last semblance of self you had.

I had ten years of this. There have been too many occasions on which I have realised that the bar I set for myself was far too low. The trouble is, my life had taught me to limbo.

I remember saying, not too long ago, to someone else, in a different life and a different story:

'Why do you do it? Is it to keep me in my little place? You weren't even kind to my dog.'

Well, I'm not in that little place anymore.

So I stated it, and then I left the room.

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If you’re reading, you know I’m trying to find my voice in every sense of the word. It’s what my father tried to help with before he died. It’s where I hold back.

This is not what Sylvie would post. But who is she anyway.

I have spent my whole life hiding and I think I am nearly done with that.

Anyone game?

For the love of God, please like this.

Yes, I am using my daughter's broken hairband as a mic.

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I don’t have anything particular I want to do, or if I do there is no one to do it with. The house is quiet and I am standing in the dining room near the edge of the long table. It is too big for the room and could easily seat twelve. Somehow, I have even made a myth of this.

It is the seat of Christmas dinners and Sunday roasts, where my sister would kick me under the table with a grumpiness that always had just a bit too much force to be okay. When it wasn’t being used for that, a garish plastic-coated mat was spread across it, printed with snakes and ladders and holding the faint smell of PVA and poster paint.

The mat is on the table now, but I am not looking at it. I drop my head and stare at the brown carpet, with its quite ugly pattern, one you can make into shapes and faces and anything else your imagination can think of. It is dated, even for the early eighties. I already know this.

I stare at my white sandals and slowly I begin to spin. My eyes lose focus on my feet and there is only the brown pattern of the carpet, and even that blurs as I turn and turn, faster and faster. The edges of the room loosen and even though I am very close to the corner of the large table, I never hit it. I had perfect balance for whirling.

I don’t remember thinking about anything good or bad. Nothing profound. But perhaps that is both the joy and wisdom of children who live properly inside their bodies. I only remember doing this until the dizziness was too much, which seems as if it might have been a long time in my memory. I remember only the simple pleasure of making the world move without needing permission.

I was more in my body in those years than perhaps I have been since. This was when my body knew joy. Later, it learned shame.

In my reception year at school we had this awful teacher, Mrs Kay. She had a straight, flat, metallic bob cut just under her sharp jaw. One day we were supposed to be writing our names. When she moved towards my table, she loudly and angrily commented that the dot over the “i” in my name was too big. She whipped up my paper, screwed it into a ball and threw it dramatically in the bin in front of the whole class. Then she marched back and slammed a fresh piece of paper on the table in front of me.

She walked away and started writing something on the board.

I scowled at the paper until it became smooth. I ran my hand over the surface and then, halfway down the page, I wrote my name out, very large. Then I took my pencil and drew a small dot over the “i”.

I looked at the dot.

Then I began to circle around it, spinning my pencil round and round until I had created a giant black sun that filled the top half of the paper.

I looked down at it with something like smugness, or defiance. The teacher didn’t even have to get close to my table to see it, and I didn’t care. I knew how to write my name, and anyway, what was the point of all this? It was so boring.

But this feeling dissipated instantly as she barked my name and called me up to the front of the class.

I don’t remember the words of her telling-off. But I remember what my body did. At the end of the tirade, at the end of every primary school telling-off that involved having to walk to the front, my body was completely incapable of not displaying my shame.

My cheeks flushed. My shoulders drooped. My head dropped and my knees bent. I walked without straightening, my feet almost sliding across the floor.

Like a scolded dog, I realise now.

Much to my embarrassment, I knew I was doing this, but I was completely unable to stop it. I don’t remember anyone else reacting like this, though a child’s inner world is very much her own, I suppose.

But these are the ways my body learned. Perhaps healing is not about becoming someone new or returning to a person you knew but can’t be anymore. Perhaps it is about walking your way back to that first intelligence, the one that knew joy before it learned shame.

Which is why I have been thinking about everything I have been thinking about. You can already tell this is going to be fun, can’t you?

Mostly, I have been thinking about unreliable narrators.

I have always thought of myself as honest. I am honest, as far as I know how to be. Everything I write is true from inside my own memory and experience. I try to be fair, even to people who have hurt me, which is either noble or deeply irritating, depending on how much sleep I have had. But honesty is not the same as reliability.

I am beginning to understand that I have been an unreliable narrator of my own life. Not because I have lied deliberately, but because I am a good myth-maker. My mind is very good at meaning, pattern and beauty. It is also very good at turning pain into a story a little too quickly. I tell the truth from inside the stories I needed in order to survive.

The body, though, has fewer literary ambitions.

I began these memoirs, journals, trauma diaries, whatever you want to call them, because my body had started to feel stiff and detached, as if it belonged somewhere adjacent to me rather than to me. I reached my hand through the shredded paper, like a lucky dip at the childhood school fêtes I loved, and the first thing I pulled out, wrapped in old Christmas paper, was singing.

As a child I was always singing. In the bath, in the garden, up trees, in the playground, in the kitchen. It was my first love, but there was always a moment of restraint. I always pulled back before I gave the note its full shape. It was as if my voice might reveal something I was not ready to show.

My dad spent hours and hours at the piano with me trying to free the note. I always left a little of it strangled. It didn’t sound that way, but it felt that way.

In my life now I sing in the shower, while I cook, while I walk, while I paint. But when things are out of balance, I fall silent. My body had tried to tell me this, but I ruthlessly ignored it.

I have written about clenched jaws, stomachs tightening, cold that can’t be fixed by coats, shoulders responding to mood. The body tells the truth, but not always simply, because sometimes it is remembering the past. Sometimes fear is old and sometimes shame belongs to a child in the classroom, not the woman standing in the kitchen.

Today, when I got home, I decided to spin before I sat down to write.

I went up to my room and closed the curtains because there is a water company working in the road and no one else needs to know that I am one sandwich short of a picnic. I lit some palo santo and played the finale of Stravinsky’s Firebird. Then I spent a few moments spinning. By the way, my current carpet is much nicer and I did not have perfect balance. I hit my bed a couple of times.

I lifted one palm up and one palm down, because my body told me to, and I twirled and twirled. Just for a moment or two.

Then it was time to put the sandwich back in the metaphorical basket.

But the twirling made me laugh. The simple spinning made me remember something, not an idea, exactly, but a state. A body before apology.

Am I stretching this metaphor too far? Well, I don’t care, because I knew joy before I learned to apologise.

Returning to the body is not crazy or indulgent. It is simply returning to the place where truth first appeared. Not as a cure, not as a revelation. Just as a place to begin again, with shoulders down, knees straight, one hand lifted, one hand lowered, the room moving, the body laughing before the mind has time to explain it.

The paper is not white again. It has been screwed up, smoothed out, pressed under a small hot hand and marked once by a giant black sun. But it is still here.

So am I.

Ready, perhaps, for a new word.

A new sun.

So what happens now?

I don’t ask anymore.

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Writing with this song, because at some point during those days, my mother would have been playing this…

There is something you need to know about my mother. Actually, you don’t need to know it, but if you’re reading this you’re along for the ride, and writing these things down is how I find my way back to myself. So here you are, my unwitting victims.

I grew up with a loving mother, a curious one, and quite an intelligent one. I also grew up with a mother who was violent, who had paranoid delusions, who was possibly schizophrenic, but never got diagnosed. As children, my sister and I never knew which mother we would get. Sometimes she took us to Shakespeare plays, to London museums, to concerts. She warmed our slippers on the radiators and filled them with talcum powder. At other times she reacted violently to small things, and so the soft happy memories are interspersed with my sister and I defending each other from her rage. She was an unreliable mother and an unreliable narrator. This is probably why I write my essays so brutally honestly.

But there is something else you need to know. She is an incredible grandmother. The distance in that relationship has made it easier for her.

Last night, to drag out the half-term holidays for my youngest, we decided to camp out in the living room. But first we drove to a high place called Combe Gibbet, which despite its bloody history is extremely beautiful. My youngest wanted to collect her granny along the way. I have seen my mother very little lately, because I cannot process the rest of my life and manage her too. But my daughter was right. She would make it fun. It was a sacrifice I was happy to make.

My middle daughter is in the midst of exams, but we dragged her along too. She has been hard and sad with the changes in her life. Like me, she doesn’t like change much, and though I held on as long as I could, many of those changes became unavoidable.

When we collected her, my mother clambered into the car coughing. Her health is very bad. She is diabetic but pretends otherwise. She has multiple stents and angina and in reality will not live a long time. Sometimes it is almost impossible to leave every visit on a good note, but I do try, because I never know when it will be the last time. None of us do, really. Did you hug them goodbye? Did you give them a final kiss? I try to live this way, keeping one eye on the future, while treating each moment as if it might be the last. The irony is that all this writing makes me less present than I should be. But currently, writing is a necessity. I do it to keep myself together, because I have a responsibility to so many beautiful lives.

As she climbed in, she pulled out a CD of sea shanties and a tiny wildflower book for my daughter to keep in her back pocket. She always greets them with joy and gusto, never empty-handed. It could be packets of crackers, boxes of tissues, chocolate Freddos, or bowls lined with kitchen roll full of sausages. My daughter and she sang along to the shanties in the back, my mother in a fake child voice, the joy entirely infectious. Her once large life seems very small these days. I was happy to give her this. But I can no longer take responsibility, wholly, for making her life better. I have spent a lifetime on that work. Now it is my time.

At some point everyone tired of the sea shanties, and I put on Neil Diamond, having remembered him recently. Everyone sang along to Sweet Caroline as my mother repeated, “Oh, Neil Diamond, my lifelong love.” And then eventually my teenager cracked, and it burst out of her, the “bah bah bah” at the trumpet bit. She had needed this more than any of us. She grinned. She smiled. Everything was worth it for that moment alone.

We stopped at the beauty spot, ignoring the teenagers there who had come to kiss and get stoned, then drove back. At every crossroads I took a vote on which way to go and followed whichever road they picked, getting us all pleasantly lost despite the fact it was close to midnight and my youngest is only ten. Every now and again I opened all four windows and shouted “air change,” to much screaming, laughter and protest.

Eventually we found our way back and headed home to drop my mother off. As we got closer the car quieted, not from sadness but from tiredness, and we switched to Al Green. Lord knows the neighbours are bored of me singing Tired of Being Alone in the garden.

And then the brass instruments in the song brought a memory with them.

As a child I was very shy, and every year in the city where I grew up there was a carnival, with acrobats, baton twirling, floats and costumes, and at the very end, always, a marching band. I hated the brass band. My cheeks would flush with second-hand embarrassment at their brashness, their noise, their absolute inability to be anything other than loud. When I was very young I would misbehave at this point. I would tug at my mother’s hand and demand to be taken away.

I remembered what she did. She would hold my hand very tightly, and no one would know, but she would dig her nails in, hard, until I went quiet. When she finally let go, sure she had subdued me, there would be nail marks deep in my soft, small hands.

I held this memory gently in the car. This is just how it was. I looked at my daughters, my youngest nearly asleep, my middle one softened at last, relaxed in the passenger seat beside me.

There was so much good in my childhood. The apple pies she baked, the warm sweet juice I drank too fast, the pretty clothes she liked me to wear. There was real love. Real tenderness. But it doesn’t erase the bad. It didn’t make it safe. It didn’t make it whole. And I see now how this has been the truth of all my relationships. There has always been good, but the good didn’t erase the bad, and I had been perfectly trained to endure and to hunt for whatever warmth or light existed.

We dropped my mother off. She fussed about her keys, as she always does. My daughter helped her in with such sweetness in her voice and gestures. I didn’t get out of the car because it was so late, but I smiled and told her I love her. “See you soon,” I called.

I don’t know whether I will. She carries a small spray with her everywhere she goes, something for her heart, her hand always close to it.

Will this be the last time I see her? If I’m being honest, it was such a happy night, apart from my unspoken memory, that a small part of me wished it was. If you have lived with this, you will understand.

During one particularly hard time, many years ago now, she told me that when she died, she would like a Trumpet Voluntary, because she would finally be at peace.

I don’t really like trumpets. But quietly, privately, I know just what she means.

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I am in a line behind a tall grey-haired man, and somewhere in front comes a whispered

‘The body of Christ.’

I pull at the smocking of my church dress, which I hate on principle because my sister hates hers, though in reality I quite like the beige florals and the funny way the flowers are concertinaed together.

‘The body of Christ.’

Everyone shuffles forward. I look down at my hands, cup them, try to remember which way round it goes, which shoulder I tap first when I make the sign of the cross after the wafer. Even then it struck me as strange, the body, the blood, despite the explanations from my strict Catholic school that the blessing made it real. They didn’t talk about it as symbolic. They talked about it like a spell.

We shuffle forward again, and when I get to the front, I switch my hands around a bit and look up. It is strange to see him in fancy dress because just a few hours ago I had been snuggled up beside him in bed, lying as still as possible while he listened to the stocks and shares report, while he said repeatedly, ‘Stop fidgeting, Bubs.’ He smelled of the inside of a clean car, clean not because it had been cleaned but because it never had any food or dirt or any unclean thing in it. He smelled of that, and Imperial Leather soap. He was a father to me and also a Father to a whole congregation.

Father Paul placed something into my cupped hands and closed my fingers around it. I knew instantly what it was. He winked. I was both mortified at the naughtiness and entirely happy. I didn’t even make the sign of the cross as I scurried back to my seat, and I didn’t open my hand for the rest of the service. As everyone filed slowly through the door so he could shake hands and make small talk, I squeezed and barged my way through and slipped around the side of the church.

When I finally opened my hand, it was to the hot sticky multicoloured mess of a few melted Smarties.

On face value, because of all the horrific abuse that has been uncovered in the church, you might think this story had the potential to be sinister. It doesn’t. He was one of the first people to hold me when I was born. He had been friends with my parents before they separated. He taught me to draw the gargoyles on one of the many vicarages I stayed in over my childhood. He gave me my first shandy one sunny afternoon in a pub by the river. He drove excitingly too fast. And he knew what no one else knew, that my mother was mentally unwell, and over the years helped my sister and I manage this when she was, as he would put it, ‘wandering the streets in her nightie again.’

I loved Father Paul and I am fairly certain he loved me. But was I to him what he was to me? Almost certainly not. I have been thinking about this a lot lately, how much family and love I made out of people who had no idea what they were holding.

This memory came to me as I drove to my wood one evening. I put on Neil Diamond and then found myself wondering why I wanted to listen to him, why I even liked him. He’s not really my taste. And then I realised I was sad, and I wanted something familiar, and I liked Neil Diamond because Father Paul used to play him all the time. That golden, warm-wine voice. I had taken it and made it his. I always gave people the soul of the things I built them with.

Then a larger realisation arrived, quietly and all at once, the way true ones do.

I have spent my life making myths and legends out of sensory scraps. Not because I am crazy, though I am of course, but because I was deprived.

There were three people in my childhood home and not one other single family member. My mother was ill and distracted and very often simply not in the room, whichever room I was in. I spent my childhood on hills and meadows and fields or knocking on doors to see if anyone could come out to play. So I learned to make people whole out of fragments. With my father who was wise in ways I still recognise, it was the smell of Old Spice, a conductor’s baton on top of the piano, the letters and the Lord of the Rings tapes he sent, the way he packed tobacco into his pipe. I turned all of it into a person. I made a man from a wisp of pipe smoke.

With my mother I took the apple pies, trips to museums, concerts and the bedtime songs and I used them to paper over the violence, the aggression, the incredible life-altering lies, and I made a loving mother out of what I could find. Was there love there? Undoubtedly. There were real pies, real songs, real tenderness. Was it enough, was it safe, was it reliable? No. But I was a child and the alternative was emptiness, so I made do, and more than that I made it beautiful, because that is what I have always done.

Years later, in my first marriage, I walked into violence and called it home. I had been trained, very carefully, to look for scraps of warmth and not at what was really there. I had been doing it my whole life and it was the only way I knew how to love.

And when I tried to build again, I did the same thing differently. There was love there too, I think. There were real moments of it. But I took a man who listened to music that moved me, and I heard the music as him. I gave him the qualities of the songs, the depth, the ache, the beauty, as though they lived in him rather than in the speakers. I took his sensitivity, which did exist, but not always in the places I needed it to, and I called it evidence of a rare and feeling soul. I furnished a whole person from atmosphere and longing. I had been doing it since I was small enough to be carried. Of course I did it again.

What a thing to realise. All at once. Driving into the sunset with Neil Diamond on and scraps flying out of the window into the hot air. But I actually smiled, even if later I was sad. Because if you want to break a pattern you have to be able to see it, and now I can.

Real love, I think, is far more boring than the kind I kept trying to build. It is probably in repeated, small, reliable things. Not grand demonstrations, though those are lovely sometimes too. Real love is safe. It is there on a Tuesday when you’re happy and still on Saturday when you’re moaning about laundry and dishes. It is not a cathedral built from incense and music and longing. It is tea, made the right way in my favourite cup.

Last night, a storm lit up my room and cleared the air. This morning, the writing has done the same.

I might not know much about the real people behind the myths I made of them. But I never entirely lost the truth of who I was.

I adapted. I survived. I kept her alive.

The next step is to let her live an ordinary life, which is to say an extraordinary one.

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Last night I realised something about myself that felt, all at once, desperately sad, shattering and powerfully freeing, but I need a few days to process it before I write.

So much of what I have been realising over the last couple of years has been revelatory to me. Sometimes I have wondered whether it is possible to feel this awake without something in you dying.

But maybe this is just what it feels like to come back to yourself.

One day, when I am gone, my daughters may look through these words and recordings, as I once looked through scraps and fragments myself. They are young now, and busy with their own lives, as they should be, but one day they may want to know who I was, what I loved, what I learned and what I was trying to become.

In the book, the grandmother is doing something like this too: leaving a voice behind, making the journey from ‘intransigence to compassion’.

These words have saved me more than once. Maybe one day they will save them. Maybe they will save you.

Now, I think I am learning to have some of that compassion for myself.

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