Hello! I’m sorry I haven’t written sooner. There have been deadlines and illnesses and bad sleep and not one, but two weddings. But that’s not to say I haven’t wanted to write.
I’ve been tempted to write many times since my last newsletter because the world continues to reveal itself to be so unspeakably horrific for women. It’s been a particularly chilling few weeks: 33-year-old Ugandan Olympic runner Rebecca Cheptegei was set alight by her ex-partner and died from her injuries. Gisele Pelicot’s husband is on trial for drugging and raping her for over a decade and inviting over 50 other men to do the same. Life for women and girls under the Taliban is only getting worse, and the West seems completely unbothered as my algorithm feeds me videos of faceless women, draped in blue, being violently flogged, watched by a circle of silent men. I can’t seem to separate these facts from the other fact that Donald Trump might win the election in November. He’s currently one point ahead in the latest Times/Siena poll, and young men are turning towards him in alarmingly high numbers. I can’t help but notice that this election is a referendum on gender; on who and what Americans will allow women to be and do. One of the issues that could sway the whole thing is abortion, a topic that is so fundamentally about a woman’s right to exist in this world on her own terms. I guess that’s why this election feels bigger than two individuals - it feels like it’s about all women, everywhere.
The war on women is raging but I know from writing my book and meeting so many remarkable women that desperation and hope are very close neighbours. In the darkest of moments, in the darkest of places, there is always hope, and it burns all the brighter. Right now, you can’t ignore the bravery of Gisele Pelicot. Or the bravery of the Afghan women who are singing, and even taking to the streets in protest, despite the recent ban on their voices in public. You can’t ignore that Donald Trump could well lose to a mixed-heritage Black woman, a daughter of immigrants, a liberal who laughs in his face on national television.
So for now I keep reading and watching and listening. ‘Stay angry’, my A-level drama teacher told me just before I went off to university. It has proven wonderful life advice. Right now I’m furious - but not without hope.
On with the show
***
I’m sitting on the floor surrounded by two-year-olds. Mostly, they are just staring at me, but one is leaning against my arm like he’s mistaken me for a wall. One, who I’m told is called Annabel, is smiling at me like we’re in on a private joke together. A little boy in yellow wellies runs towards me, gets uncomfortably close to my face and yells, ‘I’m Alfie!’.
Somewhere in this gaggle is little A. We’re at a settling-in session at his new nursery. He’s being brave, seemingly unintimated by the bigger kids around him. He points to each of them with a paintbrush, perhaps his way of saying hello. He goes about his business, putting play bracelets on his wrists and collecting wooden fruit to place in a colander. Our childminder tells me he’s good at sharing but it’s hard to believe as he tries to push Annabel out of the rocking chair. As he potters around, I feel like I’m letting a balloon loose into the sky, watching as he starts to make his way through life without me.
I look at the bedraggled bunch. Their jittery movements, drunken tottering, big Disney eyes staring at me as they clutch books and dolls and dart into a playhouse. It is a dozen Shirely Hughes sketches brought to life, all chaos and sweetness and mess and warmth. But in that moment, unexpectedly, I see the shadow of their parents, too.
I see the early mornings and interrupted nights. I see the wild fight to get a pair of trousers on or to remove a toy from gripped, determined fingers. I see the books on bedside tables unfinished, the sofa overworn, the house that needs tidying, the jeans that don’t fit anymore. And I see that these little creatures, covered in rain and dirt and fairy dust, are as magic to someone else as little A is to me. I see that all these tiny people are little miracles to other people. That they have all upended someone’s life. They have all caused profound anxiety, sleeplessness and an existential reckoning like no other. I see that they are all an experiment, a live, daily experiment, that is made with love, executed with terror and watched with hope. And at that moment, on the floor, surrounded by tiny flashing trainers and protruding tummies, I wasn’t just seeing them. I could see what it takes to make them. To get them here each morning. To get them to this point. And what a staggering achievement that is. To birth these miracles, keep them alive, find tiny clothes, cook tiny meals and offer them all the love you never knew you had, whatever hour of night or day. On their perfect skin and their crooked smiles, on their striped leggings and their paint-stained sweatshirts, I see the labour of it all. The love of it all.
When we’d first arrived earlier that morning we had to wait near the nursery office for A’s keyworker to fetch us and buzz us into the space where the children play. As we waited, I realised, just for a minute, how similar we must have looked. Everyone says A looks a lot like me. But it wasn’t just that. We stood off to the side, holding hands, both in our green raincoats. We both silently watched other parents arrive and drop off their children, both unashamedly staring, but ever so slightly removed, a step back from it all, keeping out of the way, as if this wasn’t really meant for us. We clung to each other in this new place, neither wanting to let the other go.
For the last 21 months, A and I have clung to each other in a new place - this brave new world of being each other’s worlds. Both the new kids, we are magnets pulled towards one another, fitting together, a part of each other. That is how it has felt. It has felt like we are always holding hands, side by side, watching the world together. For the past 21 months, his world has been mine. But here, in this place, it is no longer our world.
He has been at his childminder’s since April. But the childminders - a couple in their sixties who have become surrogate grandparents and are now sadly retiring - only looked after a small number of other children. In many ways, it felt like a familial extension of our world. This place, a free-flowing nursery that can feel like the Shibuya Scramble crossing in Tokyo, is his world, and for the first time it’s a world I can’t follow him into. Sharply, it exposes the unbearable yet essential truth of parenting; this is a lifelong project in preparing the thing you love most to leave you behind.
And all I can do as I watch him dip his toe in this new place is give. Give more than I ever have. Give parts of myself I didn’t know existed. It’s more than trying really hard. It’s emptying out your bones, scaping out your soul, offering everything you have, all there is of you, physically, emotionally, spiritually. And yet you are just another exhausted parent. And your child is just another child at the nursery and from the outside, it is so ordinary, so pedestrian. But every now and then your vision becomes kaleidoscopic as you catch yourself on the wonder of it all, and you almost can’t move for how incredulous this project you’ve embarked upon is. And perhaps now more than ever, now his world is growing bigger, existing in your orbit but not entirely in your control anymore.
And so you will give all your heart, lay it out like a red carpet every time you drop him off and pick him up. And every time you can, you will offer your hand, hold his tight as you watch the world together, an exhausted parent and her little miracle.
Some brilliant things:
Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets by Clair Wills. A beautiful and painful memoir uncovering the story of the author’s Irish family. This is the story of how a decision made many years ago will echo through the lives to come. It’s the story of the Mother and Baby homes, the violence of them, the unchecked power of church and state, of those who play along, and those who pay the price, of those trying to understand the actions of others when they defy belief. Beautifully written and profoundly thoughtful.
Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence by Anna Lembke. Chasing a dopamine hit feels like a national if not global, addiction. This book tries to suggest how we step away. The relationship between recovering drug and alcohol addicts and the desire for a sort of healthy pain was particularly fascinating.
Democrats have needed someone like Tim Walz for decades by Sarah Smarsh. I love everything this woman writes. She’s the anti-JD Vance. Like Vance, she’s from poor, rural America. But unlike Vance, she’s ferociously smart, her writing is next-level beautiful and she isn’t terrified of women.
PSA: Apply for the damn thing! by Catherine Lacey. I am a fan of American writer Catherine Lacey because of her beguiling and original fiction. This is from her newsletter, Untitled Thought Project, and is something very different. If you need a confidence boost, if you need to convince yourself to ‘apply for the damn thing’, to put your hat in the ring, to take the leap, whatever it is, read this now.
As always, thank you for reading,
Marisa
I'm about to do something that I really hate and it's making me cringe, but in a week of new drop offs, I wrote this piece, and I hope it provides some solace to you, in this time of transition- passing the baton on: https://0ruthabrams0.substack.com/p/motherhood-part-two?r=17k5ju
Thanks lovely for this beautiful piece. I had such a clear image of the two of you "standing off to the side" 💕 My boy who stood off to the side just started his actual proper graduate job. He's standing off to the side on his own two feet now and I so love how he's confident to stand off to the side, after so many years worrying about it 🙄 Your writing of this piece was even more beautiful than usual I would say.