I argue with Mildred. In my head. Doing it out loud is just plain weird.
Now, I hear a rustle in Teddy’s bedroom and peek in. Teddy sleeps like a small bear who has found a duvet in a cave and decided to wrap itself up. One small arm pokes out at the top, clutching Bunny – formerly white, now grey, much darned by myself, and Teddy’s favourite thing in the whole world. Her other favourite cuddlies, alltwenty-two of them, are scattered around the small bear shape. I want to curl myself round her just to smell her scent, that little girl shampoo, yogurt andperfume-made-from-rose-petals scent.
Asleep, she is a cherub with the blonde curls that come from my family. All my family are white blonde, including me, and she is going to be tall, too, also like me. I am determined that she won’t slouch and wish she were smaller, the way I used to do during my hideous teenage years. I have grown into my body, a confident woman of nearly six foot who is described as a Viking Chef.
Note: if you are tall, blonde, wear a plait and are called Freya, you get called a Viking in the press. People really have no imagination, is all I’m saying.
Dan is tall too. Deliciously, much taller than me. Because he’s dark, together we look like a black and white photo.
Next, I peek into Lexi’s room. Lexi is fourteen and is ballerina tiny with long dark hair. Asleep, her face looks so much younger than it does when she’s awake and practising being fifteen. I want to stroke her but she’d wake up and on a Saturday during term time, she’d be grumpy.
In the third bedroom – wallpapered an unhappy green, but he did choose the room himself, even though he knows that it will be ages before we can redecorate –eleven-year-old Liam liesstar-fished on the bed with his duvet on the floor and a pillow under his feet.
Gently, I put the duvet back on my gorgeous boy with limbs that are confusing him because they are growing too much. Liam is still a hugging sort of child, which makes me want to cry because I know that one day, he’ll fight off all affection. But not today, for which I am grateful.
For a long time, I thought gratitude was an overrated, corporate invention dreamed up to keep stationery addicts buying more little notebooks.
But for the past year, since, well ... everything, I have been working hard on gratitude. Also: a spiritual connection; mindfulness; thinking about booking a yoga class; getting round to answering my Emails of Shame and actually finishingThe Power of Now.
‘Thank you for this,’ I murmur into the ether, to God/the goddess/whichever deity is in charge.
At that precise moment, Teddy appears on the landing, a small, exquisite sight in a forest of packing boxes.
Her cheeks are rosy with sleep. Her blonde curls are tousled adorably. She looks perfect. Apart from her frowny face.
Waking up in a new bedroom in a new house would send anyone over the edge.
It’s done it to me atforty-two and my poor Teddy is only just four.
‘How is Mummy’s little pet?’ I say, scooping her up, covering her face with kisses and getting that special ticklish place under her ear, which makes her giggle.
‘Stop!’ she commands, all suddenly right with her world again.
Mummy is here, kissing her.
She is adored. Back to normality. Teddy is in charge of our household and she knows it. I instinctively feel that when Teddy is older, there will be no critical inner voice torturingher.
‘Peppa Pig,’ she says now with an imperious duchess wave. Teddy came out of the womb waving imperiously. She was my hardest birthing experience.
Liam had been a blissful birth and I swear, if we’d had whale music, candles and a birth plan, Liam would have gone along with it and come out at high speed during the most operaticwhale-singing bit.
With Teddy, I got the full works – screaming pain that went on for hours, and no sign of a person to give me the promised epidural, even though I’d have consumed a bag of Class A narcotics during the worst of the pain.
Thisis the big secret of childbirth. Not the stitches which require you to sit on an inflatable rubber ring for two weeks. No, it’s the fact that one child can slip out like a dolphin, while another comes screaming into the world practically sideways (this is possible, I am telling you), having made their mother howl with pain during aneighteen-hour labour.
Lexi, my eldest, is not my birth child but I am her mother.
Totally her mother.
I have been her mother since she was just over two and Dan, her birth father, brought her round in desperation on a weekend he wasn’t due to have her because her mother, his ex, had left her in a restaurant by mistake. Yes, I am serious.
Keys, handbag, yes – oh gosh, I forgot the toddler. Silly me.
Lexi was the only child of his first wife, Elisa, a woman who was physicallytwenty-six when she gave birth but emotionally, still a wild,party-lovingnineteen-year-old. As someone who was never a wild,party-lovingnineteen-year-old because my sense of responsibility has always been in overdrive, I cannot grasp this concept at all.
‘She was indulged as a kid,’ Dan says now that his rage is gone over thechild-abandonment issue, which is basically standing up for the stupid cow in my book.
Myrage is not gone, I can tell you that.
