Everything will be fine, because it has to be

It’s all a bit tough at the moment isn’t it? Along with most people I speak to, I’m struggling more with this lockdown than the previous iterations. We’ve had January, which is perfectly depressing in its own right. It’s still dark. And it’s been freaking freezing. I sacked off the tough Northerner chat a while back, cranked up the heating and started wearing a woolly hat in the house. I highly recommend it.

Anyway, I’m setting the tone because if you’re reading this for a pick me up, a) I’m flattered, but b) I’m not totally confident it’ll have the desired effect. However, as we’re all kind of treading this fine line between order and chaos, and appreciating just how fine it really bloody is, I thought it might be helpful to remind myself – and you – that we’ve each been navigating our own personal brands of chaos long before all the Covid crap came along. And just maybe, on the flip side of it all, we’ll be able to relinquish some of our previous attempts at controlling the things we never really could anyway. I know that’s what I intend to do. So here goes an overshare of the not particularly sophisticated inner workings of my mind. ‘Cos what else is t’interweb for, if not oversharing?

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“Well Jess, we’ve kept a human alive for a whole year.”

“Please don’t say that until tomorrow morning.”

On the eve of Ruby’s first birthday, this was our conversation. I was mostly joking, but – a year in -parenting remains very much a case of keeping our child alive one day at a time. As my friend Coco said of having kids: ‘your peace of mind is gone for ever’. And my mind wasn’t overly peaceful to begin with to be honest.

One of the hardest things to get my head around when Ruby first arrived was – and this may sound ridiculous given we clearly had wanted a child and not a pet hamster – the permanence of her. That whatever happened from there on in, our lives were irreversibly changed. The enormity of that realisation was both mind bogglingly wonderful and shit scary. Even now, it’s almost too much to comprehend.  

And so, as our baby crosses the one year milestone and looks less baby-like by the day, I wanted to share my experience of the ‘emotional load’ of parenting so far. Some people who perhaps know me a little less well may conflate a relatively smiley exterior with someone who is ‘emotionally together’ – whatever that looks like (?) Let me qualify that I am very emotional and very rarely together. I think so few of us are, and that being together is probably overrated anyway.

I’m the sort of person who assumes there’s been a family bereavement the second I see my mum calling. Mam, you see, is not big on outbound phone calls, although this particular anxiety of mine has been somewhat tempered by the sheer volume of accidental WhatsApp calls she’s made whilst intending to send a WhatsApp of late (sorry Jano, but for a slender woman you have a classic case of the old fat finger).

There are, as Tom knows only too well, more extreme examples of my unpeaceful mind. A few years ago when I was commuting to work, I heard about an issue on the Jubilee line and – for reasons I later realised were probably connected to a colleague who had unexpectedly died the previous week – I jumped to the conclusion that Tom had fallen onto the tracks on his commute earlier that morning. His phone rang when I called it, indicating he was above ground, but when he didn’t answer I then became convinced he’d been hit by a car on his way to the office instead. A severe panic attack ensued before he called me back two hours later after he’d had a particularly busy morning in the office. The path my mind had raced down seems impossible to retrace now, but at the time nobody – not my parents who I’d hysterically called nor my boss – could convince me that he was safe until I’d spoken to him.

While this was, for me, thankfully a relatively unusual episode, I have long had the propensity for my mind to run away with me to the most unpretty places. Although she’ll hate to be reminded of it, this started – I think – after a car accident my mum had when I was eight. Thankfully she was mostly ok, but in the seconds between hearing there’d been an accident and knowing this to be the case, my aforementioned peace of mind was shot to smithereens. I was as blindsided by the fact something like this could happen as my poor mum was by the Parcel Force truck that went into the side of her car.

In the immediate aftermath I developed what I now know to be OCD. At the time, it manifested itself as an obsession with evenness and a particular affinity with the numbers 4, 8 and 16. I would do things such as rinse my mouth out after brushing my teeth or switch lights on and off this number of times (God knows what this was doing to the electricity bills?) I would also feel the need for both sides of my body to be even, so if one side of me bumped into a wall, I’d need to bump the other side of me into the same wall in the same way. As you can imagine, if the repetition varied at all, evening up the sides would become increasingly complicated. A fixation with the alignment of my slippers was another one. I’d spend half an hour before bed lining them up next to each other while, ironically, the rest of my room looked like a bomb had hit it.

To me, at the time, these were all checks and balances to ensure nothing like the accident happened again. Thankfully I grew out them over the years as a preoccupation with boys and hanging out with friends – and talking about boys – took over. (I know I am a cliché, but at least an honest one.)

Since then, in moments when lovely logic loses out, I have never felt far from slipping into that blind panic I first experienced as a kid. Of not only imagining the worst but believing it has actually happened. And that slippery slope, I was all too aware, would only get steeper when I became a parent. Suddenly I would have the capacity for constant worry – for imagining endless eventualities. Not just when Tom has collapsed on the sofa after a big work lunch and doesn’t pick up his phone for a few hours, or mam is accidentally calling at 11pm, but when our little tot is simply sleeping in her cot.

And sure enough, along with Ruby came an even more irrational worry. The first time Tom took her out on a walk on his own I should have been enjoying the first moments of time to myself. Instead I stood by the window waiting for them to come back, feeling more and more concerned that something had gone wrong. And as I stood there, it began to dawn on me that this worry wasn’t sustainable. That I couldn’t keep entertaining these worst-case scenarios, especially when it came to Ruby.

When I feel myself slipping into that space now, like my favourite David line in Schitt’s Creek, I tell myself “it’s a quick no”. I’m retraining myself to function on blind faith instead of blind panic.  Everything will be fine, because it has to be. It’s a work in progress, and I’ve noticed just being aware of what my mind is doing makes a big difference. It has also occurred to me that maybe giving myself ‘permission’ (Jonathan Van Ness style) not to worry might be the most important bit. After all, I guess it’s only me that can let me off the hook here.   

So, as we mark the most life affirming 12 months, I’d like to thank our little girl for being the one to kick start the long overdue restoration project on my peace of mind. For making me see that while love undoubtedly makes us vulnerable, it can also make us stronger. And for helping me to understand that the fleeting and fragile nature of life is central to our enjoyment of it, and the best we can do is try to embrace that and all that comes with it.  

Now just don’t grow up too quickly little Ruby June, because I’ll need some time to brace myself for the teenage years…