My Animal Life(57)

The worst of it passed within six months, but I could not run or even walk as I used to, and my outline softened, and my head was too heavy, bending forward to avoid pain. For a year or so, I couldn’t even carry a handbag; it hurt us both that I could not carry Rosa; my muscles must have weakened, and I suppose my bones.

I did not mind too much, because I had my family, my little unit that had to survive, and much more to think about than my body. And there was so much happiness when Rosa was young.

I can’t write a ‘miserable mum memoir’. Yes, I was tired, and I got things wrong, and sometimes I must have hated her because she would not go to sleep—you can’t negotiate, or bribe, or order; she was herself, intransigent, and I ran against the rock face in myself; our needs were opposed; and hers had to win, but still, it made me furious. Or I hated myself for leaving her with the child-minder so I could work; and sometimes I got behind with the writing even though I knew I had short-changed my daughter, and felt ‘I’m no good as a mother, and no good as a writer.’ Once when Rosa was two and a bit I picked her up from her nursery late, and when she got home she cried with rage and went under the table in her room, stopped crying but would not come out, and said, ‘I don’t want you to work any more, Mummy. Don’t work any more.’ The words that I most dreaded to hear, but the next day she seemed to have forgotten it, she went to nursery school, I was not late.

On good days, I felt the most radiant gratitude: something amazing had been given me, and I didn’t seem to have paid the price. One winter afternoon when she was still quite small, I vividly remember hurrying to get her from her child-minder, after an afternoon when work had gone well: she was happy to see me: big gap-toothed smile; I hurried back home with her in her pushchair, eager to get her home and cuddle her, but a moon appeared in the cool blue sky, very thin and frail, growing clearer, whiter. ‘Oh look, Rosa, there’s the moon.’ Of course she was staring at it already. ‘Moon,’ she said, ‘Moon, Mummy,’ and every so often, as we sprinted through the twilight, past terraced houses and ugly cars, a pale thin mother with her pale round daughter, gazing at each other, and up at the moon, though I also had to think about the cars and the people, she said, ‘Moon, Mummy’, or ‘Mummy, moon’, and I felt I was part of an enormous happiness.

Rosa had made me part of the world. I was allowed to work and have a baby.

I talk about the hard bits because I feel I ought to; I don’t want to give an unreal picture; but my overriding feeling was that life had begun. A rich new life; we had started again.

Rosa was fiercely individual from the start. Lifted out of the bath, at around twenty months, and planted beside it on her own two feet, with a towel around her, she said, triumphant, ‘I’m a person!’—that essential knowledge some people never find. And again, I suppose at around the same age, when she was at the other end of a room where her father and I were complaining about her, half-humorously, half-seriously, for at a very early stage of toilet training she started hiding faeces round the room, and I had just found them, three little dried corms (it was like a joke she was playing on us)—she remarked, loudly indignant, to the wall, ‘But I’m a wonderful child.’ Maybe we had told her that too often, but she was a wonder, and we wondered at her, this child who came to us so late. Yet her dazzling youth certainly made us older (for some reason, I think men feel this more. I have heard two men—though not my husband—explain that alongside the love they felt for their first child was the sense that they had been evicted from Eden; it’s the child’s turn now; they are displaced.)

But Nick and I were closer than ever. I remember the absurd thought that came, the night we came home from the hospital. Nick’s face was beside me on the pillow again, and Rosa was at the foot of the bed, briefly asleep, in a Moses basket. ‘I love him because he is so like Rosa,’ I thought as I gazed, amazed, at his face. It was a back-to-front thought; of course she was like him, so like that their young photos could easily be confused; but I was stunned by the way in which my world had come together, for Nick, to me, was the infinitely lovable image of the baby, my new love-object.

All her life Rosa has been fun, and funny. Left to have supper, aged five or six, with our friend Fatima and her family, she did not eat all her food. ‘Why aren’t you eating your meat?’ said Fatima. ‘I don’t want to be a fat bastard,’ said Rosa. And the ‘stranger danger’ lessons at school bore fruit the teacher may not have intended. Rosa told us what they had been learning that day. Nick asked her, ‘So what would you do if a man stopped his car and offered you sweeties?’ ‘I would say “Bugger off!”‘ she said firmly.