23 May
Scarlett, the message says. Please answer my calls. I do need to speak to you, urgently x PS: I can also help you find something else work-wise. I know you must be climbing the walls in Mum Land!
Flick. It’s the anchor I need.
But I’m irritated too. Mum Land feels patronising. Flick doesn’t know what a support the women of Mum Land have been.
I delete the message without reply. No good can come anyway from talking about a life that doesn’t exist any more, to someone I can no longer look in the eye. I can’t bear the shame; the pity.
And for all my thoughts the other day about telling them, I’m relieved that my mum friends don’t seem to have seen the comments on the blog. That they still don’t know. That being with them is respite.
Flick sends me another message afterwards.
We’ve all been young, Scarlett. No one is judging you xx
And I laugh. Because everyone is judging me every day, everyone is judging everyone every day. What they’re posting, what they’re wearing, what they’re ordering, where they’re going. What their job is, who they’re married to, what car they drive, what make their bag is.
Sling a sex tape into the mix though and you up the stakes.
Everyone has to judge me so that they think I’m different to them. In another bracket. Way more sexually out there. Way more promiscuous. Way less careful. Otherwise it could have been them, and nobody likes thinking it could have been them.
No one is judging you? Ha.
As I sit looking at that text though, I feel something shift. The floundering, the sadness, it’s being replaced with a fury and a desire to scream at somebody for what they have done to me. I loved New Social. Ed and I would have been thinking about a second child soon, I’m sure. Now neither of us have mentioned it because it comes under an umbrella of ‘future’ that no one wants to put their cash on.
Somebody has reached into my life and shifted everything around so that I jiggle, loose, without form now.
But who?