Housekeeper's Diary

Once upon a time, a few months or maybe even years ago, who knows, I dreamt that I was keeping a spider down my bra I had christened “Little Jimmy” and ever after, every spider I come across is a “Little Jimmy” and right now the Jimmy’s are inundating Chez Brocante and trying to set up home wherever they see fit. 

So colour me appalled. For while I am a woman often dallying with ludicrous notions in my dreams I wouldn’t tolerate in real life, a clutter of spiders is not something I’m willing to entertain at all, having only recently managed to persuade the mice that ours was a hostile environment complete with lazy cats who might just work up enough energy to swipe them into next week. And yet all of a sudden we are indeed inundated with Little Jimmys visiting in droves and I have gone a bit high maintenance about the matter so Ben is having to climb ladders and do his bailiff bit and I feel wildly proud of his bravado and disproportionately ashamed of what has been something of a life-long revulsion of the darn things that was only temporarily alleviated while teaching Finn that spiders are completely harmless and look here’s Mummy carrying one out as if she wasn’t terrified that the blasted thing might take the wrong exit and rush into her knickers or take up residence in her hair.

Anyways. That’s this weeks neurosis shared for isn’t it true that a fright shared is a fright diluted and speaking it out is half the battle? It is so. So let’s move along now shall we?

It seems not. For in a world where we can have answers to even the most complex of mathematical equation in a matter of seconds, it seems solicitors are the last bastion of those doing everything at a crawl and I am on the verge of violence over the whole debacle, for we are fast becoming a Noah’s Ark of sorts with cats and dogs and mice and spiders and it surely won’t be long before the hippos and the crocodiles are joining us while I eat myself to the size of a whale out of sheer wont for anything better to do. Damnit.

Gosh. Who put ten pence in Moaning Minnie?

Let’s double up on the anyways. So yes, anyways, what else do I have to share this week? Twas Easter and Easter in my head happens in my tiny cottage living room from long ago. Wide Victorian floorboards that creaked in the same spot every single morning. Cath Kidston wallpaper I loved with an unreasonable, slightly embarrassing passion. The old farmhouse table heaped on Easter Sunday with eggs and small gifts, a basket here, a ribbon there, chocolate in every denomination. Tea brewing in the gingham kitchen. The whole house dressed up in its Easter best, holding its breath, waiting.

While I waited too. Because I wanted Finn to come downstairs and find it enchanting. I wanted to see the magic land, that unguarded, wide-open expression that arrives before self-consciousness does, before little ones learn to modulate their reactions for an audience. I wanted it every year. I engineered it every year, this little theatre of eggs and ribbons and carefully chosen gifts, because the look on his face was, if I’m really being honest with myself this quiet Easter morning, partly for him and partly a kind of sustenance I was feeding myself. Proof that I was doing it right. That the home was beautiful enough and the morning was special enough and that I was good enough.

But more than that, (and this is the bit that makes me wince): I wanted him to sit with me and watch old Judy Garland films. The way I watched them with my Nana, tucked into her particular warmth, the specific smell of her, the Sunday-morning quality of stillness that existed in her living room and nowhere else in the world, a stillness I have been unconsciously trying to reconstruct ever since. Meet Me In St. Louis. The Trolley Song. The particular ache of Technicolor nostalgia even when you’re too young to be nostalgic for anything. That cosy. That comfort. And a Caramac Egg.

I wanted the storybook Finn. The version of my son who would receive all of this, the table, the candles, the gingham kitchen, the carefully assembled occasion, the Judy Garland overture, and feel it the way I needed him to feel it.

But he was, of course, his own person entirely. With his own feelings about Sunday mornings that had nothing whatsoever to do with Judy Garland and far too much to do with Spiderman. He was Finn, gloriously, stubbornly, completely himself, and no amount of ribbons or carefully sourced gluten free chocolate or mantelpiece candles was going to turn him into a character from the story I was writing in my head.

Ouch, as I said. Really, properly ouch.

Because lately I have been squinting at something I suspect might be a little truth: I designed ceremonies that nobody commissioned. I ironed the tablecloth nobody asked for. I laid the table oh so prettily and then I stood back, arms metaphorically open, and waited for the room to rise to meet me. For the atmosphere to shift. For everyone in the house to feel what I wanted them to feel, to be grateful in the specific way I had imagined their gratitude, to understand without being told that all of this, the baskets, the eggs, the early rising, the effort dressed up as effortlessness, was an act of love.

But they did not always understand. Often wouldn’t play the parts I had allocated them, simply because they didn’t have a script.

Someone said this is nice in the tone that meant yes, this is fine and the fine would land in the kitchen like a small damp thing, not dramatic enough to argue with, just quietly deflating in the way that only fine can be.

But do we get to expect gratitude for rituals nobody asked for?

I keep spinning this around my muddly head and I keep coming out of it muddy because I can’t make sense of it. Yes, of course effort deserves to be witnessed. I gave my boy a childhood built to resemble the childhoods I had absorbed from books and films and a very deep, very unexamined belief that this is what you do. That good Mums make beautiful occasions. That love looks like this, like a basket, like a ribbon, like a house that smells of beeswax and madeleines, and then I stood back and expected him to feel grateful for a vision that belonged only to me.

And I wonder if this is what we do, we women who tend, we build the beautiful container and then stand back bewildered when the people inside it don’t feel contained in quite the way we imagined. As if the Cath Kidston wallpaper were itself a form of love, which of course it was, but only to me.

The story I was telling was always my story. And I cast my little family in it without asking whether they wanted the parts.

There is a psychology to all of this that I find both fascinating and uncomfortable and have been dwelling on for years. She who creates the rituals is almost always the one who carries the emotional weight of them, the planning, yes, but more than that: the hoping? The elaborate, often unspoken hope that the occasion will deliver what ordinary Tuesday cannot. That the table laid beautifully enough will somehow produce the connection she is hungry for. That the Easter basket will say what she hasn’t yet found the words for.

And when it doesn’t, when the chocolate is eaten in front of Doctor Who and the candles go unnoticed and the fine lands in the kitchen like a damp cloth, there is grief inside the irritation. Not just the sting of unacknowledged effort, but something deeper and older and harder to name. The grief of a woman who has been trying, through objects and occasions and carefully sourced tissue paper, to recreate something she once had and can no longer locate. The warmth of her Nana’s living room. Her own Mum. The particular quality of being held by a person and a place simultaneously, the way you are only held when you are young and don’t yet know to be grateful for it.

We were building the things we missed were’t we? And expecting other people to feel their significance, people who hadn’t lost what we’ve lost, who don’t know what it is to be homesick for a woman and a room and a Sunday morning that no longer exists anywhere except inside us.

Which is, and I say this with great tenderness toward that girl in the Cath Kidston cottage, an almost impossible thing to ask of another person. Especially a person who is five or twelve, or fifteen, or even twenty-two, and has never yet lost the thing they love most and spent the rest of their life trying to find it again in wallpaper and rituals and the perfect Easter table.

This Easter there was no roasted chicken. So I stood at the window and watched the April light do what April light does, watching the man next door plug tiny little plants into compost and I thought about Finn, asleep somewhere behind his curtains after another long shift, and I felt the whole complicated beauty of it: the pride, bereft, tender pride, and underneath all of that, unmistakably, and undeniably, with a small but real flame of something that might just be

Relief.

Relief that the performance is over. That there is no temperature of occasion to guage this morning, no mood to cajole, no one to jolly into the spirit of a thing they didn’t commission. Relief that this morning belongs to me in a way those other mornings, for all their loveliness, never entirely did.

Because I don’t think I was ever entirely in them? Or maybe I was both in them and above them simultaneously, watching myself perform Easter, waiting for my cue, monitoring the temperature of the room? Is it working. Do they feel it. Am I doing it right. (I’ve spent my life like that: not knowing if I was doing any of it right).

The psychology of the woman who tends, who tends ferociously, with great aesthetic intelligence and even greater emotional need, is that she often doesn’t know how much of herself she has submerged in the tending until the tending is no longer required. Until the table has no one to lay it for. Until Easter Sunday arrives and the house is quiet and eggs are just eggs and not canvases for proof she is playing her part oh so perfectly.

And then she discovers, in the quiet, something she hadn’t expected: herself. Still here. Slightly blinking. Wondering what she actually likes, what she actually wants, what the morning looks like when nobody is watching and nothing needs to be performed. It turns out she likes slow mornings reading in bed. She likes the April light even when it’s cool. She likes the particular freedom of a day with no script, even though there was a time when the script was the whole point, the script was how she knew who she was and what she was for.

Its rather like being sacked, the empty nest.

It takes time to get used to, but once you do, you discover a quiet bewildering freedom you fill for a while with irrational fears of mice and little Jimmys. With rages about solicitors and presidents (grrrr). Passing furies and fears loaned to fill the gaps that used to be filled by the tending and nurturing of children.

All of it has to be allowed. Because I think it is a kind of nostalgic grief for moments you worry you didn’t make the most of. For not making Easter a festival of Spiderman and Scooby Doo while you still had the chance. Guilt for being so caught up in the performance of ritual you totally forgot to enjoy it for yourself.

It has to be allowed so that we have a chance to catch up with ourselves, to meet the woman we are becoming as we shed the roles that once bound us. To celebrate who we are now the curtain has gone down on the performance and we can put the script down, and recognise that love and performance can be genuinely, hopelessly tangled and that the appreciation we were always hoping for, proof of it, real undeniable proof, comes now, unmistakably, in a grown-up child sleeping peacefully behind his own curtains after a long shift.

It has to be allowed.