Allison Pearson - I Don't Know How She Does It

“Why did Jesus get killed?”

Oh, God. “Because — well, because people didn’t like the things he was saying and they wanted to make him stop.”

I can see Emily searching her mind for the worst crime she can imagine. At last, she says, “They didn’t want to do sharing?”

“In a way that’s right, they didn’t want to share.”

“After Jesus died he got better and went to Heaven.”

“That’s right.”

“How old was he when they crossed him?”

“Crucified. He was thirty-three.”

“How old are you, Mummy?”

“I’m thirty-five, darling.”

“Some people can be a hundred years old, can’t they, Mummy?”

“Yes, they can.”

“But then they die anyway?”

“Yes.” She wants me to tell her I won’t die. I know that’s what she wants: the one thing I can’t say.

“Dying is sad because you don’t get to see your friends anymore.”

“Yes, it is sad, Em, very sad, but there will always be people who love you—”

“Lots of people are in Heaven, aren’t they, Mummy? Lots and lots.”

“Yes, sweetheart. Millions.”

As Sunday lie-in agnostics, Richard and I decided that when we had children of our own we would not give them the false consolation of a guaranteed afterlife. No angels or archangels, no harps, no Elysian Fields full of those people you couldn’t stand at college in dodgy footwear. That resolve lasted — oh, approximately three seconds after my daughter first said the word “die.” How could I, who wouldn’t let her have Roald Dahl stories on the ground that they were too cruel, open a furnace door and invite her to contemplate the extinction of everyone she would ever know and love?

“And the Easter Bunny is in Heaven?”

“No, the Easter Bunny is not. Absolutely not.”

“Sleeping Beauty is, though.”

“No, Sleeping Beauty is in her castle, and we’re going to see her tomorrow.”

EMILY’S QUESTIONS OFTEN SHOCK ME, but not as much as the fact that I’m allowed to give her any answer I like. I can tell her there is a God or that there is not a God, I can tell her that Oasis were better than Blur, although by the time she’s old enough to buy albums there won’t be albums anymore and Madonna will be as distant as Haydn. I can tell her that Cary Grant is in a dead heat for the title of Greatest Englishman with William Shakespeare, I can encourage her to support a football team, or I can tell her sport is incredibly boring, I can advise her to be careful who she gives her virginity to or I can give her brisk early advice on contraception. I can suggest she start paying a quarter of her annual income into an index-linked pension as soon as possible or I can tell her love is the answer. I can tell her any damn thing I like, and that freedom feels both amazing and appalling.

When they sent a baby girl home from the hospital with us almost six years ago, they forgot to hand out a Meaning of Life Manual. I can remember Richard carrying her in from the car in her little seat with the big handle and setting her down with extreme tentativeness on the living-room floor. (At that stage, we still believed we might break her; not knowing it was more likely to be the other way round.) Rich and I looked at our daughter and then at each other and we thought: What now?

You needed a license to drive a car, but with a baby you were expected to pick it up as you went along. Becoming a parent was like trying to build a boat while you were at sea.

What the hospital did give us was a thin booklet in a blue plastic binder with several cartoons to the page, each starring two stick-figure parents. There were stick-figure parents tentatively dipping their angular elbows into baths or trying out the temperature of milk on the back of their stick hands. There was a feeding timetable, tips on the transfer from formula to solids and, or so I seem to recall, a list of common rashes. But there was definitely no word on how to prepare your child for the fact of your own death.

As I look down at Em’s face, at once radiant and perplexed, I get that breathless feeling you get every so often as a mother, the pressure of hundreds of millions of mothers before you, all fighting tears as the child poses the most ancient of questions.

“Are you going to die, Mummy?”

“One day I will. But not for a very very long time.”

“How long?”

“Not for as long as you need a mummy.”

“How long?”

“Not until you’re a mummy yourself. Quick now, Em. Eyes shut.”

“Mu-um?”

“Go to sleep, love. Sleep now. Exciting day tomorrow.”

Well, did I handle it right? Is that how you tell them? Is it?

SUNDAY, 3:14 P.M.Em and I together on the Circus Roller Coaster, our screams riding shotgun with our stomachs. I close my eyes and take a Polaroid for my memory: I am having fun with my wonderful child. Her hair in the wind, her hand tight in mine. But even here I can’t escape: there’s something about this ride that says work. Equity markets going up, up, up, then whump! the trapdoor in your belly opens.

Oh, Kate, you stupid, stupid, unbelievably brainless woman…. God, no…. Forgot to place trades on Thursday. Needed to sell 5 percent of fund — Edwin Morgan Forster house policy is to have more cash, less equities with the markets melting down. As we crest the hill, northern France and my entire career flash before my eyes. EMF already has a recruitment freeze. Redundancies next. And who will be prime candidate? Step forward the fund manager who forgot to sell her clients’ shares because she was buying chocolate bloody Easter ducklings in Thorntons.

“I’m sacked.”

“What?” Richard is there to meet us as we clamber out of the little train.

“I’m fired. I forgot. I was trying to remember everything and I forgot.”

“Katie, slow down. Just tell me slowly.”

“Daddy, why is Mummy crying?”

“Mummy’s not crying,” says Paula, who has appeared out of the crowd and picked Emily up. “Mummy’s having such a great time she laughed till the tears fell out by themselves. All right, who wants to get a crepe? Do you want jam or lemon? I’m having jam.

“OK if I take them, Kate?” Paula says quickly. And I nod because, obviously, I can’t speak. And with Ben in the buggy and Emily skipping along beside her, Paula takes the children away. How would I manage without her?

4:40 P.M.Calmer now. The calm of the condemned woman. Absolutely nothing to be done. It’s a Bank Holiday tomorrow; can’t sell anything till Tuesday. No use spoiling the rest of our trip. I am climbing out of one of the Mad Hatter’s Dancing Teacups when I notice a man in the queue trying to place me. It’s Martin, an old boyfriend. You know that weird sensation seeing an ex can induce? I feel it now. The ghost of a passion, a silk handkerchief being pulled out of the heart. I turn away quickly and secure Ben’s already tight buggy straps.

a. Am wearing yellow plastic rain poncho, purchased from Disneyland Universal Stores, which is decorated with Mickey Mouse logo and smells of lightly rolled condom.

b. My hair, dried this morning with gnat’s buzz of a hair dryer in the hotel bathroom, lies basted to my skull like threadbare helmet of old lady in retirement home.

c. Am about to be fired, therefore poorly placed to show how sensationally well my life has gone without him.

a. He doesn’t recognize me. He doesn’t even recognize me. Am hideously changed and shriveled and no longer desirable to man once sexually obsessed with me.

Across the pastel blur of spinning teacups, I meet the eyes of the man. He smiles at me. It’s not Martin.