‘Well, I suppose there’s a lot of things I wasn’t interested in before that I am now. You’re not the only person that can decide to jump outside of their comfort zone after all.’
‘I’m not saying I am,’ I tell her, detecting the defensive tone in her voice. ‘I think it’s great.’ Okay, so technically I’m lying. I don’t think my mother going on TikTok is great. I think social media is not always the kindest of places and I worry what people might say or do. I’ve already navigated the twins through their earlier years online. Never once did I think I’d have to be navigating my mother through her own foray into influencing. This is the woman who until very recently refused to order anything online because ‘you never know who you might be giving your details to’, and who resisted online banking until she had no real alternative. Even now she uses it very much begrudgingly.
But online adventures aside, I am actually delighted to seemy mother trying new things. Her world had become very small after Daddy died and I feared she would become one of those women who just give up after the loss of their life partner.
I didn’t expect my discovery of a time capsule I made with Niamh and Laura when we were sixteen to spark a reawakening in her – but having seen what a positive effect it has had on my own life, I’m delighted that my mother is feeling some of the joy too.
Except, right now, with everything that is happening with Conal, and the Fabulous Forties Club, that joy I’ve been experiencing is a little complicated. In that very second, I feel it – a whoosh of adrenaline surging through me as if someone has just jabbed me with a huge needle and given me a bolus of their best nerve juice. It’s a horrible, sickening feeling that threatens to turn my stomach.
So I do what I normally do when my nerves are at me and I set about cleaning like a demon. When you think about it, it’s kismet that Daniel has provided a mess that requires my immediate attention. It’s therapeutic.
I am feeling proud of how I have managed to lift every trace of muddy paw from the rug when Mum appears at the door of the good room again.
‘Why don’t you come through to the kitchen and we can have a chat?’ she says. ‘The tea’s made and there are some chocolate biscuits out.’
I do my very best to push down my instinctual fear at ‘we can have a chat’. After all, she didn’t say ‘we need to talk’ and it is that expression above all others that has me reaching for the Valium.
I don’t tell her that the thought of eating or drinking is making me nauseous. There have only been two times in my lifewhere I have gone off my food. The first was when I was in my first trimester with the twins and the very thought of eating anything at all, knowing I would see it again shortly, was horrendous. The second time was after Simon left. For a full fortnight, I ate little more than a quarter slice of toast every few hours. My poor, emotionally abandoned self could not bring itself to allow any meaningful sustenance into my body. For the first time in my life, I felt no hunger whatsoever. It was the best diet I was ever on, and if only I didn’t need to be emotionally devastated to do it, I’d have loved it.
But I did not love it. And I do not love this feeling now. I also do not love that as soon as I sit down and turn green at the thought of a chocolate biscuit, Roisin Burnside – she who knows me better than I know myself – will immediately twig that something is wrong. God forbid she assumes I’m pregnant. I may be a forty-something-year-old grandmother, but I still don’t want to have the birds and bees discussion with my mother. Both my birds and my bees are my own private business.
Then again, having that conversation with her might be easier than one about my fears that heartache lurks around the next corner, or that I fear the Fabulous Forties Club could be morphing into the Fabulous Forties Flop.
The cup of tea – which is just the right kind of milky – sits on the table in front of me, steam rising from it and swirling towards the ceiling. The chocolate biscuits are not just ordinary chocolate biscuits. No, these are not Asda’s own brand, they are the luxury kind from the Marks and Spencer’s food hall. Normally I’d descend on them with the vigour of a plague of locusts, but not even the thick layer of milk chocolate can tempt me right now.
‘So what’s up?’ Mum asks, dipping one of the aforementionedbiscuits into her tea. ‘And don’t tell me it’s nothing because it’s clearly not nothing. You’re too quiet, and you offered to clean without any fuss at all.’
Offended, I look at her. ‘It was my dog made the mess, of course I was going to offer to clean it up. I’m not that bad, Mother!’
She raises an eyebrow, but no, I will not be shamed for crimes I do not commit.
Taking my worries one at a time, I realise I don’t want to tell my mother about Conal ‘needing to talk’. She has been deliriously happy that I have found a good man and have been enjoying a happy relationship for the best part of the last year. On more than one occasion she has told me that it has ‘taken a weight off her shoulders’ to know I have someone now who will look after me when she is gone, as if I haven’t been very capably looking after myself since Simon left.
Conal O’Hagan is like the second son she never had, and she seems to adore the very ground he walks on. There is no ‘that dog’ grumbling when he has his pooch Lazlo with him during his visits. No, Roisin Burnside loves Lazlo quite openly, much to Daniel’s disgust. I’ve warned her if she’s not careful, Daniel will leave her a little present in her shoes that she may not appreciate by way of revenge.
If I tell her that I fear I am about to be set free once more, she will look at me with the kind of disappointment and worry that only a parent can master. That sad look she does so well is soul destroying and while I know it comes from a place of love, and is not intended to shame me in any way, it does in fact shame me. I’ll have let her down and I really don’t want to let my mother down.
So I decide to swerve that particular emotional grenade.
‘Just work stress,’ I say, doing my very best to keep it vague. I want her a little concerned but definitely not worried sick.
‘But you love your work,’ she replies, and she’s right. I do love my work, especially now that I’m able to combine my business-to-business journalism with writing about things I’m really passionate about forNorthern Peoplemagazine. And of course, there is tying in the Fabulous Forties Club. If only I could make it a success.
My fear is that it may become a very public failure and will just fuel those online who like to say that middle-aged women these days are just whingers. These are the same people, sadly often women, who like to say menopause is something the fairer sex have dealt with forever without the need for support groups so my generation just need to get on with it. These are people I like to refer to as dry shites.
‘I do love my work,’ I say. ‘There are just a lot of deadlines at the moment. And then I’m helping Adam and Jodie with baby Clara, and, you know, helping…’
The sentence trails off because I have thankfully stopped myself just before I say ‘…look after you and Mrs Bishop’ because my mother cannot bring herself to publicly acknowledge, even to me, that she requires a little bit of help these days. It’s why I jumped to clean up after Daniel at lightning speed, because I knew if I wasn’t straight on it she’d have been down on her hands and knees scrubbing at it and her arthritis would be at her for days after she was done.
But we can’t acknowledge that – not openly. It has to feel to my mum that she is the one who is helping, always. She asks me to take her to Asda because it gets me out of the house. She takes me into town for a leisurely stroll around the shops, and tea and cake afterwards, to make sure I’m looking after myself and can pick up any clothes, or cosmetics, or new bed linen I might needfrom the array of shops in the Foyleside Centre. If I make her a casserole and bring it over to save her cooking, I have to pretend I accidentally made extra and she will be doing me a huge favour if she eats the leftovers before they have to be scraped in the bin. It’s our little routine and it works for us – but only because we never speak the truth of it out loud.
She’s looking at me now, daring me to finish my sentence – telling her exactly who it is I am duty bound to help. I think fast, scrambling to find something that doesn’t load her with guilt. Thankfully my brain unfreezes just before this thinking time stretches into the realms of uncomfortable silence. I remember one of the biggest things I’m trying to do just now and am able to finish my sentence admirably.
‘…set up the Fabulous Forties Club,’ I blurt. ‘Did I tell you Niamh has decided we should all go and join a choir? She’s getting a few of us booked in for that Just Sing! crowd.’ I don’t tell my mother that the ‘few’ of us is because there onlyarea few of us. I’m happy to let her believe that it, like my relationship, is all going swimmingly.
‘Just Sing! I’ve never heard of that,’ my mother says, dipping her biscuit into her tea once again.
‘You have! That choir you don’t have to audition for. You just turn up and they sing the classics. Just a bit of fun, but it’s supposed to be great therapy too. Great for stress relief.’
