“What I really want for Christmas is one hour, just one hour, where it feels as if everything in the family is steady. One hour where everyone is happy, and nothing is complicated, and I can leave maternal anxiety at the door and just enjoy the moment instead of worrying about how we’re going to handle the next crisis.” She stared out of the window, at the snow that was drifting slowly through the darkness. “Do you think people without children worry less?”
“No. They just worry about different things.”
“You don’t worry as much as I do.”
“I don’t need to, because I know you’re doing the worrying for both of us. You’ve got that covered. No sense in duplicating.”
After all these years he still made her laugh.
“How did I end up being responsible for worry?”
“Hey, I got bins and clearing the gutters. Serious stuff.”
“You pay someone else to clean the gutters.”
“Nothing wrong with delegating.”
“I wish I could delegate my anxiety. Just hand it over.”
He leaned closer. “I tell you what, for Christmas this year I’ll take half your worries. You can just hand them over and forget about them.”
“You won’t take them seriously. You’ll dismiss them.”
“You mean I won’t nurture them, feed them until they grow and grow and gradually take over? What I do with my half is my responsibility. Stop micromanaging.” He put his arm around her. “Which worry in particular is at the top of your mind?”
“I have a few fighting it out for top place.”
He gave her the same thoughtful look she’d seen him wear when he was checking a patient’s test results and was trying to figure out what they meant.
“One thing I learned when I was working was that it usually takes something big to go wrong for people to understand how worry-free their lives were before. Over and over again, I’d hear people say ‘I worried about stuff that just wasn’t important,’ or ‘my life was pretty perfect and I never even noticed.’”
“You’re saying that the answer to my worry is to give me something bigger to worry about?”
“I’m saying it’s all about perspective.” He glanced across the room to where Will and Becky were standing together. “We have healthy children, living their lives, and yes, those lives are full of ups and downs and drama, but that is normal.”
“Stop being so reasonable and logical.” She saw Becky smileat Will. “Do you think the kids know how much we worry about them?”
“No. We’re their parents. We’re the solid, dependable foundation of their lives. We’re like a charging unit—forgotten most of the time, until we’re needed and then they plug into us and hope we still work. They don’t think about us as individuals. They see us only in relation to them. They don’t know that we’re mere mortals with vulnerabilities and worries, capable of making decisions every bit as dubious as the ones they make.”
“Maybe we should tell them.”
“No. Best to allow the illusion to continue for as long as possible.”
And she realised she felt the same way about her parents, often seeing them in relation to her, rather than thinking of them as individuals with their own hopes and fears. She felt a pang of guilt and made a promise to herself to encourage them to talk more about their lives when they were growing up. To listen more. And she was going to tell the kids to do the same.
More often they teased them, or corrected and educated them, telling them that theyjust couldn’t say things like that now. There was a casual assumption that they were too old to understand, but maybe it was more that the kids were too young to appreciate just how much their grandparentsdidunderstand. The world changed, technology advanced, but people’s emotions didn’t change. Fear, excitement, hope, grief—those things were experienced by everyone, whichever generation you were born into.
She reached for Martin’s hand, doing it sneakily in case one of the children noticed and saidyuck, Mum, please!
“I’m glad I married you.”
His fingers tightened on hers. “Even now when I’m driving you insane, moping around and feeling sorry for myself?”
“Especially now, and you’re not moping. You’re adjusting.”
“Adjusting.” He nodded. “I’m going to use that as an excuse every time you try and get me to do something I don’t feel like doing. ‘I can’t do it right now, I’m adjusting.’”
There was so much they’d shared together, so many struggles they’d helped each other through. And she didn’t need something bad to happen to know she was lucky to have him.
