Maggie Gee - My Animal Life

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.

She was thoughtful, as well, with her own point of view. Sometimes she helped me see how to be a mother. One day I picked her up from her nursery school — a Montessori school she loved. (Bizarrely, for the most part, and despite frank criticisms of their foibles, she ended up loving all her schools, which made me feel shifty when I discussed school with mothers who were discontented. They obviously thought I was in denial, or simply failing to play the game, the great mother-game of criticising. The bottom line was, I was grateful to the schools. Without them, I would be home educating.) In any case, that day I picked Rosa up with a pushchair, so she must have been small, not much more than three, for as soon as we could, I dispensed with it. That day I had not managed to switch off my worries about my work before I went to meet her. I was chattering away to her, on automatic pilot, about the dilemmas of my day. We were pushing down The Avenue, a long straight road. I suppose I might have wittered on for ever.

Suddenly a little voice piped up. At first I could not believe my ears.

‘Big people can’t be friends with little people.’

‘What did you say?’ I looked at her suspiciously, her round clever head, her golden curls, her wide-set green eyes like an alien’s. Her cushiony lips had definitely moved.

‘BIG PEOPLE CAN’T BE FRIENDS WITH LITTLE PEOPLE.’

She was looking at me, not unkindly, but as if she had made a definite statement. Yes, she had said it. I had been told. I was ashamed, yet also delighted with her. Of course it was true, and I took note. Children don’t need to know adults’ worries.

I have already said that I lap up advice. One of the most useful things about motherhood was said to me by someone I didn’t know well. She had a daughter, too, rather older than mine, and we were worrying aloud about their happiness. ‘One problem is over-identifying,’ she said. ‘My daughter just got fed up with me worrying and said to me, “Mum, I’m fine, honestly, I’m not like you, remember that!”‘

I over-identified with Rosa. Of course, because although she looked like her father, with Nick’s small nose and curly hair, parts of her brain were uncannily like mine. Music, for example. A marvellous surprise. It has proved to be a never-ending groundswell of pleasure that we like exactly the same music. By this I don’t mean certain genres, certain composers, I mean we love the same notes and phrases. The same bar will trigger the same emotions. I can only believe this is coded, somehow, in deep folds of the emotional brain, because the response is so immediate and instinctive. Hearing something together, it speaks to us, and we often touch hands and look away, because a moment of such absolute intimacy has just come upon us. A flash of mirrors from far away, an unreasonable happiness hushing us like shyness (though at other times it makes us dance on the landing). When she sends me music, it is simple bliss.

And yet, in other ways we’re totally different. Hurray for that! Hurray for difference! Hurray for the things that our children can do that we could never in a lifetime manage! The miracle of the dance of the genes, throwing up unlikeness as much as sameness.

She is sociable, very, and I am not, has always had a lot of friends, except for a brief puzzling period when she was in Year 2 of her primary school, the local school, one hundred yards down the road. Because my own junior school years had often been miserable and lonely, I had a special reason to be anxious about this.

One night she said, ‘I didn’t have anyone to play with, today at break time,’ and I said, trying not to show my heart was sinking, ‘I expect you will tomorrow.’ But this refrain became more frequent, usually just as I was leaving her bedroom at night, after reading to her. ‘I didn’t have anyone to play with at break time.’ Of course it is possible that she knew this would halt me in my tracks and bring me back for another ten minutes, but still I know it was genuine. A little stone of misery from my own past arc-ed through the evening and landed in my chest. Rosa would be lonely, as I had been . My own fatal unpopularity, which I had felt deeply as unlikeability, must have somehow been transmitted to her. It was all my fault. I felt wretched, and helpless. My lovely, pretty, laughing girl would be unhappy. The curse had come upon her, she had not escaped.