When I Ran Away Ilona Bannister (best free ebook reader .txt) 📖

Lots of love, Charlie xx

I’m still processing the fact that she’s outsourced me to the nanny when another email comes through.

Sorry hun, can’t do Thursday and I’m in Manchester on Friday. How about the third week of September? xx

She doesn’t mean to make me feel bad. She doesn’t know I’m in this room. She’s offering the little time she has to spend with me. But I feel bad anyway. It’s not about me, I know that. I know, I remember, that there’s a kind of ruthless self-centeredness that’s crucial to survival when you’re a working mother, especially if you want to do well.

She doesn’t hear what a playdate with her nanny sounds like to me. It just seems practical, efficient, because she’s thinking only about the list, how many things she can get done on the list, who’s watching her and how they’re keeping score. She doesn’t know I’m barely surviving. She’s barely surviving herself but trying not to make it look like she’s trying, because this is a new stage; the part where she becomes Superwoman.

She starts to succeed in her career and so she’s expected to hire someone to do the mothering. She has to tell this story, where things are just “crazy busy,” with a cheerful eye roll because she’s got to sell the myth or it crumbles. If she doesn’t make it look easy she doesn’t get the important cases that put her in the Guardian. She also doesn’t see her kids awake for five days out of seven but she’s not allowed to tell anyone how much that hurts. Pain is not part of her story. She can’t show us she misses them, but also she has to tell us that this career is for them. Everyone has to know that she’s built all this herself but it’s not for her, it’s for them—their future, their education, their inheritance, their image of women—because she’s a mother. Her achievements are never for herself.

Her success amplifies my failure. Highlights my mediocrity. I don’t begrudge her except that I do. I’m proud of her. I’m jealous of her. I’m in awe of her. I think she can’t really be happy like this, and I think she must be so happy, she’s really making it. I say to myself I guess she’s alright with another woman raising her children and I say to myself why don’t I have her drive? I want her to succeed but I also want her success for myself, and if I can’t have it, I want her to fail—fail at the mothering part at least, so she can feel as bad as I do. So that I can justify why I’m in the house and she’s out in the world. We all make choices, I say. We all make choices, she says. Each of us defending our choice, knowing that there are no real choices for either of us. There’s just what you do because you have to do something, because they all need you and they always come before you.

Another email flashes up:

Hello Gorgeous Mummies!

Reminder that tea and cake next week is at mine, the usual time. It’s Fiona’s last meeting with us before she goes back to work! So come ready to have some afternoon prosecco (pump and dump ladies LOL) and help us wish Fiona good luck!

You got this Fi!

Sukie and Humphrey xx

I hit reply:

Just because we happen to be at home with babies doesn’t mean that it’s OK to act like we’re day-drinking moro—

I delete it before I say something that I’ll regret—something valid, like I’m not an idiot, so please don’t send me infantile-cheerleader-prosecco-party-bullshit emails—but that I’ll regret nonetheless. And anyway, where’s my proof? My proof that I’m so smart, so accomplished and above this stay-at-home shit?

I pour more wine into my plastic cup, shut my eyes real tight; they’re dry now from crying so much. And that’s when I remember. I scroll through the phone till I find the picture. There’s me and Charlie in the office, arms around each other’s waists, wearing matching red patent-leather trench coats. I have to laugh.

Last year, Charlie had this terrible case of this mom who had got separated from her kids for years because of a series of visa rejections and mistakes. I helped Charlie with the appeal and when we won and her kids finally got here, she brought them all with her to the office and presented us with these two matching coats. She had tears in her eyes and she said, “Thank you. I’ll never forget you. God bless you.” And even though the coats looked like they came from a sex shop, we had tears in our eyes too because we knew that she had gone and found the most fantastic, beautiful thing she could afford to say thank you. And these wildly inappropriate coats were it. We all hugged, and I said, “Well, no chance I’ll ever forget you either, not with this coat in my house,” and we all laughed and hugged again. And then me and Charlie wore them out to lunch, pretty sure that people thought we were hookers.

I keep that coat on the inside of the closet door. It peeks out from behind some robes and belts left on the hook there. Some days I don’t even see it. But on days when it felt too hard to be a mom, and live in England, and have a job, and be pregnant, and wonder what the fuck I was doing all this for, I’d look at the coat, and I’d remember that I was good at something. I worked for me and I worked for Johnny but I also worked because my work meant something to people, maybe just to a few people, but it mattered. To them and to me.

We all make choices. But I feel like mine’s being made for me. Like I’m going down a road I don’t want to be on but if I