Rosie and Noah had pushed me to the edge. They had fought over the soap in the bath; they had smeared toothpaste on their clean pyjamas; they had upended three toy boxes, twice; they had performed acrobats on their beds, messing up the sheets. I had barked orders at them in a low-level bad temper until they were both in bed, ten minutes or so before Peter was due home at nine o’clock.
After tidying the kitchen and preparing supper number two, I trudged upstairs to make sure that the children’s lights were still out. Noah was splayed out, eyes half closed. I picked up his teddy and placed it in the crook of his arm and he smiled sleepily at me. In Rosie’s room, I saw the glow of her torch under the duvet. The sense of failure was monumental. Every ounce of patience evaporated in an instant.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
‘Nothing.’
I whipped back her covers and she quickly snapped the cover closed on her pink, plastic diary.
‘It’s nine-thirty!’ I cried.
‘I couldn’t sleep.’
I pointed at the diary. ‘Give it to me, please.’
The cheap, box-like contraption, sold as a ‘Secret Teen Diary’, contained a large pink notepad that was hidden behind a special battery-operated flip-door. It was her favourite possession. She wrote in it every day, delighting in the special code-pad that locked it up.
‘I was just finishing the page, that’s all.’
‘I’m afraid you’ve pushed me too far this time,’ I said, shaking my head, trying to take it out of her hands.
Rosie held on tight, wailing like a siren. ‘I’ve got to put the light back in properly!’
I let go of it, allowing her to slowly and carefully press the mini plastic arm of the LED light into the slot above the diary door, and click the two pens into the side panel. Reluctantly, she handed it over.
‘Right. This is confiscated for a week,’ I said, putting the diary high on the top of her bookshelf.
She let out a scream of protest. ‘You can’t confiscate it, Mummy! I need it.’
I heard Noah’s door slamming. He probably knew what was coming, just as I did.
* * *
Standing stock still, I closed my eyes and crossed my arms over my chest. Her small fists pummelled at my thighs and her fingernails ripped at my shirt and her scream penetrated my brain like a thousand pinpricks.
Her temper had shot from zero to one hundred in seconds.
‘Give it back!’ she yelped, leaping up pointlessly at the top shelf where her diary lay. ‘It’s mine!’
As her piercing, high-pitched shrieking bore into me, I tried to disassociate. I dug my nails into my arms to counteract the pain Rosie was inflicting, to quell the panic that now mingled with the anger. I felt dizzy in the dark behind my eyelids. Opening them, I looked over Rosie’s head to fixate on the pretty polka-dot curtains I had chosen for her.
During Rosie’s tantrums, when she loathed me with such ferocity, I lost that reassuring sense that I was in charge of my own destiny. That wail of hers! How it cut into me. While in the grip of it, she personified absolute chaos, carnage, collapse.
‘You can have it back in five days,’ I said, reducing the sentence, wishing I had not started this, wishing I had let her continue writing in her diary all night.
‘But I need it!’ she yelled back.
The timer for my and Peter’s supper rang out from the kitchen. I tried to prize her limbs from my body to walk downstairs, but she slid along with my steps.
I stopped walking, worried she’d hurl herself down the stairs. She circled me, tugging at me, hitting me, weakening the barrier of calm with every bruising throw of her fist. It was like the whole world stopped turning while that noise deafened me, echoed through the house, shaking the walls, piercing enough to break glass.
‘You don’t understand!’ she wailed. She lunged at the wreath she’d made which was now lying on her beanbag, and hurled it at me. It whizzed past my head and hit the banisters behind me, leaves and acorns coming loose.
‘That’s a shame,’ I said, picking it up and putting it back on her beanbag.
‘It’s your fault!’
‘You threw it,’ I said, wondering why I felt the need to qualify that.
She let out a shriek so loud it felt like my brain was splitting in two. ‘I HATE YOU!’
I tried to move away again, to get downstairs to turn the oven off, but it would have been dangerous to go near the stairs while she was thrashing about at my feet.
‘Get out of my way,’ I said through clenched teeth. She clamped her arms around my ankles and writhed on the floor.
‘Daddy’s supper’s burning.’
It was like having a rabid dog snap and bite and growl at my feet, while the noise of her screaming was like a bird squawking as it circled around my head. Fear and powerlessness overwhelmed me, and then a biting resentment took chunks out of my sense of reason until it was physically painful to resist retaliating.
A black fog of rage rose from the pit of my stomach. I didn’t know how to stop her.
‘Get off me, Rosie.’ I tried to prize her off my legs, but her grip was too tight. I pushed her body away from mine, but she lashed out, leaping up and slapping at my head. The more I struggled the tighter she coiled herself around me. I was trapped. It was suffocating. I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t find a way out.
‘THAT’S ENOUGH!’ I bellowed, deep, guttural and frightening.
Violent images of my hand across her head flew into my mind. I wasn’t the kind of mother who hit her children. But the image came again and again. Every obstructive twist of her body around mine as I tried to walk downstairs to where our supper would be burning brought another appalling image of my hand at her head, my loss of control, my physical power against hers. My mind wiped out the abhorrent thoughts and a more superficial fury consumed me.
I grabbed her by the arm and yanked her kicking and screaming back into her bedroom and onto her bed. I slammed the door, and held it shut. The panels bowed and cracked with each of her kicks. She pulled it open harder, and I slid along the carpet under her strength as I clung to the doorknob. I was completely out of control. As I tried to pull it closed again, her little arm shot through the gap and the door slammed onto it. I let go and she went flying onto the floor behind her.
‘You hurt me Mummy!’ she howled, cradling her arm, rolling around on the floor.
‘Let me see?’ I barked.
She stopped writhing to show me her arm. The small, raised welt on her wrist sent a shock of guilt through me.
‘Can you move it?’ I asked, just to make sure.
‘It stings!’ she cried, flapping her hand back and forth easily. It was clear the injury wasn’t serious. Relief flooded through me.
‘Into bed, Rosie,’ I said, through gritted teeth, unable to show sympathy, unable to apologise, while she, too, was unable to back down. She resumed her rolling around. We were in deadlock.
I left her there and stormed downstairs, away from her.
The relentless screaming continued, emptying me out further, the stress killing me slowly, surely.
Dry-eyed, I was desperate to cry, to be weak, to collapse, but I clung with both hands to the edge of the kitchen sink, terrified that if I let go I would fly at her in a rage.
I would not cry. I never cried. I was Helen Campbell’s daughter. Campbell women didn’t do crying.
I thought of Mira next door. Her kitchen window was only a few feet away from ours. During the renovations, Peter and I had decided to keep our drafty Crittal frames for the aesthetic, in spite of the flimsy glass. Now I wished we had thick double-glazed PVC. There were lights twinkling through the thinning hedge that separated our houses. Sometimes I could hear Mira chatting to Barry. If she had been standing in her kitchen now, or feeding the hens down the side alley, she would have heard me shout like that. It was shaming. Heat crossed my cheeks.
And then I heard Peter’s voice. He was home. I pressed my fingers into my eyeballs and heaved a deep, deep sigh of relief.
‘What’s going on here, then?’ Peter said, jangling his keys. ‘I could hear you all the way down the road.’
‘Daddy! Come up here!’ Rosie cried from the landing. Her hero.
I turned to see Peter perform an exaggerated march upstairs, swinging his arms like a soldier. ‘What’s all this racket about, young lady?’ he hollered officiously.