Perhaps this is why I can’t shake the expectation that you are going to walk through the door, hold me tighter than you ever did, and tell me it’s all been a brutal mistake.
I’m waiting, because you can’t be gone.
You are here, living with me in my heart, every moment.
xxxx
May 2019
We’re having the kitchen done. It needs it, but I didn’t want to. The cooker hasn’t worked for 7 years; one quarter of the hob gave up 3 years ago. The floor’s peeling, cutlery and knives fall out of the drawer bottoms (ideal with a toddler), and I have to fight, quite literally, to open the pan drawer. Then have to kick it shut. So I’m not being frivolous, Steve. It’s needed. I started discussions last summer with the kitchen fitter, with the aim of completing it and being warmer through last winter than we were the previous one. But I had to call a halt. I had already been uncertain, because I didn’t want to replace the kitchen that was ours. We danced endlessly in there when practicing our wedding dance. We ate in there, still gazing at each other and holding hands. That hadn’t worn off. You would come to me in the kitchen when you got in from work and put your arms round me. We did the chores together. You cooked porridge at the weekends. You were there. So I was afraid to change the kitchen and risk losing your presence in it. I want to feel you sat at the table with us, and if I redo the kitchen, perhaps you’ll be gone from there entirely.
Your anniversary last Autumn was not the time, so I called a halt.
It’s being done now though, but it’s been stressful. It’s a big deal, so I suppose always would be for anyone, but I’ve found the decision-making hard without you. That’s even with having decided from the very beginning that I wanted it to be as close a replica as possible to maximise the chances of still being able to feel you there. So same wall colours, same layout, same French Country feel. I’ve driven in spirograph circles around town taking sample cupboard doors to meet floor boards, to meet tiles, to meet worktops. Along the way I’ve discovered they don’t do tiles like we had; I finally chose, with help and advice and three days running spent at tile shops (Little Bug was NOT impressed). But I wasn’t convinced you’d like what I settled on. The best of the options, but you’d still have thought they looked distressed, and too ‘chintz’. (They weren’t, but you’d have felt they were). I spent hours online searching before settling. Then having chosen, days later, I found the PERFECT tiles. Exactly the look and size, perfect for the small area required above the hob. Got all excited. They were hand painted. £12 a tile. More than £1000. No go. I might have had a bit of a sulk and a cry about that. (Bear in mind none of these decisions has been easy or quick and that I’m always trying to choose for you as well as for me). Completely by luck days later I found an independent place nearby, took a ‘what have I got to lose’ last attempt trip, and found what I’d been looking for. This time a couple of pounds a tile, not hand painted, beautiful, subtle, exactly the French Chateau type print I wanted. Better, I think you’d really like them too.
I know what you didn’t like, and that’s made it easy to discount those things. But still the responsibility of choosing everything, and getting it right, has been tough. In the grand scheme my darling I do realise it’s a kitchen, and that it doesn’t matter in the way that choosing a preschool for Little Bug mattered. But it’ll be our kitchen for another 20 years, and I have to like it, and it has to work for us, and it has to have you in it. The thing is that under normal circumstances it might have been stressful, just as all big home projects are for anybody, but they’re also a lot of fun. We literally were able to start from scratch. A blank canvas! Whatever I (we) wanted! What I found though was that under the circumstances it’s harder to find things that “spark joy” (I’ll tell you about Marie Kondo another time). Other than Little Bug, ‘joy’ has sort of evaporated, so other things are just things of necessity. For many many months of planning there was nothing that I simply had to have, that I fell in love with immediately. I resent that, because some of that fun has been missing.
I am getting a little excited now though. I’ve watched the kitchen be ripped out and then retake shape; the tiles are going in today, and actually I really am looking forward to seeing them in place, with the beautiful new floor and oak shelf. I’ll put the things I want back in place, and then stand at the sink and ask you what you think.
I think you’ll like it.
xxx
3rd February 2019
I hate being mad at you Steve but I’m fucked off with you again tonight. Double pissed off because I wasn’t, earlier in the day, and then suddenly I was. We had a lovely hour or so in the snow at the park with the cousins; there were dogs. After the park, instead of what I’d planned (jobs), I sat on the sofa with her while she fed and slept, and I started the little embroidery I’ve been wanting to try. I/we relaxed. In fact we had a lovely list of 5 things to be grateful for at bedtime:
But then this evening…I got mad at you, because you’ve left me to do EVERYTHING. Everywhere they’re talking and writing about the mental load that (largely) mothers carry, even when there are two parents. On a Sunday I try to give myself a break of this element of the mental load and not constantly tidy/return things to vaguely the right room as Little Owl diligently practices redistribution of goods with every step she takes; I try to just let it be for the day. But at some point, it needs sorting. The dinner needs making, the washing needs to be hung on the rack, the still-slightly-damp stuff from the previous load needs to go in the drier (oh sod it, it’s sat in the basket by the back door all night, again). The shredded tissue that’s a speciality of hers needs to be picked off the living room floor and binned. The kitchen bins need binning in the big bins outside.
And this is why I’m mad at you. With two of us, this stuff would still need to be done, but at least it wouldn’t take a virtual Gantt chart in my head (mental load) to plan when and how to take the bins out to the bins, to take the stuff to the drier in the garage, to put all the toys and books away at the end of the night. While there’s a 15 month old to be supervised and contained.
And there’s the problem. She needs to be considered while I get this stuff to where it needs to get to, and BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT HERE, it’s twenty times harder. Even just clearing the toys at the end of the night requires more mental effort than should be reasonable, since while I’m manically shoving Duplo and Happyland spacemen into the tin at one end of the room, she’s pulling the books I’VE JUST TIDIED back off the shelves at the other. I end up doing some sort of comedy sideways jack-in-the-box trying to keep it all done while she hurtles back and forth trying to make it undone.
Laughing her head off.
And breathe…
She’s only playing….
She’s not playing though when she’s wailing to be held while I try to make dinner; chopping butternut squash with one hand while holding the toddler in the other doesn’t work. (I know, I started to try it with courgette. Visions of little finger ends everywhere called a halt).
BUT BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT HERE, she has to cry while I cook and try to come up with a new distraction every 30 seconds.
Thanks for that.
And thanks for the fact that this is only going to get harder, because there will come a point where people (and I) will start to think it’s about time I just got on with it on my own, like everyone else on their own has to. I won’t have the 2 or 3 nights a week company and help to contain the toddler/do chores, and I’ll have all the bloody homework that parents get as a result of children going to school (filled in the 90 billion forms every week? Remembered the Harvest Festival donation? Made an Oscar-winning World Book Day outfit?).
I’m fucked off too that even the simplest thing requires a favour from other people. Fortunately our families and friends are amazing, but it does my head in that finally we were married, own house, own money, work organised so we could stop calling in favours all the time and I felt like a Real Grown Up….and now I can’t even have a hot bath at night free from the floating company of DuckDuck, Crocodile or squidgy bath books, without the favour of someone else being here in case Little Owl wakes up. I literally can’t put an appointment in my diary – bank, dentist, nurse, grief counsellor – without checking with more grown-up grown ups for childcare first. Way to feel like you’re not in charge of your own life. Thanks, Darling.
And do you know what really, really makes me mad?
The fact that you were about as bloody perfect a housemate/husband/teammate as it was possible to have. You would have pulled your weight (and sometimes mine), and shared the load, and had I ever been overwhelmed (which, face it, was quite likely given anxious and perfectionist tendencies), you’d have done your utmost to relieve the overwhelm. You always did the bins, and the laundry. Knowing you, you’d have had as much, or more, creative and production input into World Book Day outfits as me.
And all the time I’m pissed off with you, I’m also absolutely not, because I know, utterly, that you would not have chosen this in a billion years.
xxx
Letters to a Small Baby 