Maybe they cracked? Yeah. Maybe they ordered this because we WENT TOO FAR. So, like, we’ve been cast out and this is our punishment and they’re above us in the roof — he looks up — surveilling everything and seeing how we cope.
They were really pushing it towards the end. Among all the snipping and shouting between Motl and you were three kids flurried up. It was like flint in the air before a storm. Everything charged, as if each one had new batteries in. All the squabbling and Chinese-burning, the hair-pulling, name-calling, toy-snatching, kicking, biting, even that.
Then after that last drive, the stopping. Back in the house. That awful moment when the air itself seemed shocked. You, of course, at the centre of it. Becoming a woman you hadn’t seen for years, since the kids were babies and they’d drag you into that deep, deep tired and you’d wake up tired and never find a firm footing with the day. Standing there wailing that you couldn’t cope any more, couldn’t cope, with your fingers curled frozen at your head and the bones in your hands little rakes. ‘I can’t do it any more,’ you keened, ‘can’t — do — it.’ All of it, everything. Motherhood, Motl, Project Indigo, the way it was vining your life, dragging everything along with it, all the uncertainty of what was coming next.
Then Tidge rushed in and clung like a wet plastic bag slicked about a tree, one that’s impossible to prise off, and as you held him tight you found calm again and apologised for the mother you’d become, and wept. They all ended up on you, trying to still you down but the shuddering wouldn’t go, wouldn’t stop.
Nup nup nup. Something else was breaking Mum that day, something far beyond any of us lot. Being here isn’t because of plain old naughtiness. It’s something FAR BIGGER than that. Is this all Mum’s fault? Where is she? When is she coming?
I am as if intoxicated with the grief of my heart.