pre-xmas funk
‘There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.’
Richard Rorty
‘Do you actually like gardening?’ my son asked, home to collect his bike before a ride.
‘Yes, I do’, I said, leaning into a bank of euphorbia to lop off dry seed heads.
‘I like its physical side. I like not quite knowing what I’m doing and making things up as I go along. And’, I added, ‘I like being outside’.
That night, my kids and I played a board game after dinner called Buccaneer, a pirate game one of my uncles introduced my kids to when they were young. We wouldn’t normally play a board game on a Saturday night, however, my daughter was looking down the barrel of a wisdom tooth extraction in the chair, and my son had come around to cheer her up, something he is good at.
A few years ago now I promised my family that I wouldn’t write about them in print any more. Along with my ex-husband, they’d been good sports about appearing in two of my books and it was time to draw a line in the sand. So, this isn’t a story about family life. It’s a story about me, as revealed through playing a board game.
As for so many others, Christmas a powerful time of year for me, especially in its lead up. It taps into countless longings and what ifs. ‘How come my life has turned out this way’, my child self asks, ‘rather than all the ways it could have gone?’ Round and round I go, as I reach back into childhood wishes, sideways into pinch-me-they’re-so-real dreams, and forwards into fantasies of an unwavering family life that, by virtue of being separated from my ex-husband, I now feel disqualified from.
Last night, as I sat at the kitchen table playing Buccaneer, instead of concentrating on my next move, this question kept coming up: Does being a mother tap into my essential self? Has it made me more me than I might otherwise be? Or, more unsettlingly, have I become the mother that my particular family dynamics have turned me into?
Even before James ended our marriage, in the days running up to Christmas I often felt split. On the one hand I wanted to celebrate my life, to feel proud of it. While in my next breath I wanted to crawl under a rock and to stay there until the festivities were over.
When the paediatrician turned psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott worked with babies and their mothers in London after WW2, he focused on the emotional bond between them. In his theories of infant development, a key question was utterly basic. Who, he asked, hates who first? Does the mother hate her baby for the unceasing demands that his helplessness makes on her? Or does the baby hate his mother first for not devoting herself more fully to him, for withdrawing her breast and her goodness from him? Winnicott’s answer was clear. The mother hates her baby before the baby hates his mother. She hates him, not because she’s bad, but because she has multiple reasons to feel this way. A healthy baby, without meaning to be, is a raging antifeminist. Imperious in his demands, he lacks the emotional wherewithal to accept that his mother has a centre of gravity and emotional needs as powerful as his own. He can’t fathom that she might be both a mother and a woman. For the baby, the mother is an extension of himself, and a big part of her job is to relieve him of bodily and emotional needs that, at times, feel relentless and scary. According to Winnicott, a woman doesn’t become a mother, in the full sense, by virtue of giving birth. She becomes a mother by transcending her hate for her baby, for the mess that he unwittingly makes of her freedom.
As a mother, I’ve done my best to suppress the mixed feelings that were triggered by my kids making a mess of my freedom. Instead, I thanked them for expanding me, for opening me up and for making me more me. I let my love for them triumph over my hate for them a gazillion bazillion times. In Winnicott’s sense, I’ve been a good enough mother. On countless occasions, during their childhood, I overcame myself, composting my bad feelings rather than taking them out on my kids. I still do this.
However sometimes, and it’s happening now in anticipation of my daughter’s dental surgery in the run-up to Christmas, the dragon of maternal ambivalence comes up from under the stairs, rears its head, looks at me straight in the eye and says, ‘What are you doing with your life? You do know’, it snorts, stamping its foot, ‘that you’re not getting another life, that this is it, and that you can’t afford to go on bowing to your family’s needs? Surely’, the dragon ends, ‘you were made for better things than mushing up food for the sore gums of your offspring?’ Then, with a puff of red-grey smoke, it pulls its neck in and is gone.
When it comes to playing family board games, I’m known to be rubbish at strategy. As a result, I lose regularly. Not, I like to think, because I’m stupid, but because I don’t care enough about winning until, that is, I start to lose, by which point it’s too late to turn my fortunes around. I don’t play a few rounds ahead, guided by some wily strategy. I’m so used to being beaten that, after a few sallying forth rounds of the board, I resign myself to losing with a glance down at my watch, and a silent hope for early bed. My son, in contrast, makes it his business to get ahead of the game, even putting off his inevitable win. While my daughter plays mindfully, glad of the gathered company, grateful for it even.
By the end of our game of Buccaneer, I feel grumpy and depressed. My ex-husband, I ruminate darkly, now based in London and growing a beard, seems to have exited family life. His nights of playing board games seem to be over. And, by the grace of an unspoken acknowledgement of the difficulty of life, all three of us around the board, this Saturday night, have let him go. We’ve forgiven James his exit and are glad to hear, in his voice over the phone, that he’s in good spirits, certainly better than the ones he was in towards the end of my marriage to him.
On all the other days of the year, I’m with my kids. Like them, I let James go so as to move on without bitterness. Except, that is, for when I lose at Buccaneer, a game I’ve been playing, not very well, since I was ten years old. Except, that is, for last Saturday night, with the prospect of household chores ahead of me and an early class the next morning, enough to lure the dragon under the stairs back up from the basement.
‘What if it was you taking on a flat in London, not James?’ the dragon asks from the corner of the kitchen, leaning against the doorframe and curling a hairy lip. ‘What if you were beginning a new life in north London, rather than continuing your old one in South Hobart? What if you woke up tomorrow morning in a flat around the corner from where your kids were born, and got to walk to work over Hampstead Heath, as you once did?’
Later that night, before charging my phone, and after clearing up the kitchen, taking the dog for a walk and hanging up a forgotten load of washing, I texted my son what I’d been thinking. When I looked at my phone the next morning, he’d texted me back. ‘That’s a stupid thought’, his text read. ‘You have a great life.’
My son is right. Even I, in the clear morning light, could see that. Especially after teaching a morning yoga class and scoffing a filled bagel at my favourite café, with a pot of the Marco Polo tea that I first tasted as a newly-wed at Mariage Frere, a quintessential Parisian tea shop. Especially now that I’m off to the farmer’s market on a sunny morning, in a walkable city, to look for food to puree in the days ahead.
The dragon under the stairs is sure to revisit me before the New Year rolls in. But for now I’m at peace with what I find deep down inside myself. It can stay where it is. I don’t have to chuck it all out and start again, in north London or anywhere else. Still, I do need to get better at being single-minded and at following through, and at throwing off my role as a mother whenever the coast is clear.
Yet even as I write these words, I suspect that who I am now is so imbued with years of mothering, with caring for others as much as myself and with looking after little things that often become big things, that no shrugging off is possible. Motherhood is under my skin. Being a mother is not who I am, but it accounts for a lot of what I do and how I do it. These days, I see the vulnerabilities in others as quickly as I pick up on their strengths.
Rather than shrugging motherhood off and liberating myself from it, like some shackle-come-cardigan, perhaps I can rearrange it, deep in myself, and so make the most of the freedom that, hopefully, lies ahead of me.