You end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with the face, the friends, the health and the children you have earned.
I used to say that when I was young. Now I am old, I don’t recant. I am alone, deserted, ill, and my children don’t speak to me. Very well. It’s no more than I deserve.
I hobbled to the cooker this morning and made a cup of tea. The milk had gone sour but I put in a slice of lemon, which looked old and dry on the outside, but was surprisingly juicy when cut. A shaft of sunlight found its way into the room. I saw the dust motes dance: I was elated by the wonder of creation and my spirit seemed to join the motes and jig about for a time in cheerful worship. When the fit had passed I hobbled to the mirror and recognised myself. Not Pattie the prisoner, but Praxis. My hair was thicker than I thought: my eyes were less rheumy. I saw that I might have a future, and I was afraid. Do I really have to put up with being Praxis?
Children!
When I was young it was rare for a mother to leave her children. It was considered an unspeakable thing to do – an unnatural crime. Bad enough not to love a husband – but for the misfortune of not loving a child, the penalties were, and still are, cruel.
I left my two children. I think perhaps if you want to leave a child, if you cannot love it, you should leave it before the look in your eyes shrivels its life and its hopes. I would watch the expression in Robert and Claire’s eyes, fearing to see there a look of Lucy or Hilda: and I would see Ivor looking at me with a love I was incompetent to return. I did not really feel good enough or whole enough to have children and trust them to exist in the simplicity of their perfectly healthy, perfectly ordinary natures. I was a good mother: years, years I spent: first for Mary, then for the next two, keeping the structures of life steady around them, allowing them to grow: encouraging Willy’s fondness for Mary: loosening Ivor’s fear that children, simply left alone, will grow rampant and wild, like a well-bred rose reverting briar; thorny; demonstrating to him time and time again that it is not discipline that is needed, but understanding, and an awareness that the world to a child is a dangerous place; and that fear of the dark needs not a slap and the light out, but fear of the dark shared and acknowledged. By the time I left, Ivor would sing the children to sleep and think nothing of it.
He was better at it than I was.
After I left, his knowing look disappeared: the innocent one returned. He looked happier.
Perhaps it wasn’t that I could not love the children, but that I loved myself too much. Certainly the neighbours thought so. Diana, Sandra, Beryl; wanton lot! Their children took to vandalism, motorbikes, and drugs. Mine didn’t: no thanks to me, they’d say. Thank Ivor. Good, decent Ivor.
Ivor, with Carol dancing up against his suit, bare-breasted. Good, decent Ivor. Have it your own way.
So I don’t recant. If I am alone now, I deserve it. I set my Mary free by imprisoning myself: that is sufficient reward for the likes of me.
The cat’s come back.