‘And who looks after Rosie and Noah when you’re at work?’
‘We have a nanny – Harriet Stock – who comes in the afternoons.’
‘Do your kids get on with her?’
‘They adore her. She is an absolute godsend,’ Peter gushed, sitting down again, as though this was the kind of question he could tolerate, while my skin crawled with the implications.
‘But mum’s coming to live with us now, so we’ve given her paid leave for now, just while...’ I trailed off, not knowing how to say it out loud.
‘I see. That’s good, good, so your mother is coming to stay,’ she said, writing more. ‘So, she’ll cover the hours Peter’s at work, is that right?’
‘Yes,’ I said, through gritted teeth. She spoke of this as if it was an acceptable infringement of my freedom.
‘How many nannies have they had since they were born?’
The question riled me. Here we go. Here comes her judgement.
‘Harriet has been with us for three years.’
‘And before that?’
‘Before Harriet, we had Nicky, who was with us when we moved here.’
‘Mmmm... uh huh... okay... So, why did Nicky leave?’
‘She moved back to Australia.’
‘And you’d say the children bonded well with her?’
‘Yes. She’s a primary school teacher now.’ In truth, Rosie had screamed for half an hour every day before Nicky arrived.
‘And before Nicky did you have anyone?’
I looked to Peter, a veiled warning shot before my white lie. ‘In London, we had Jola, who helped us out until we moved out here.’
What I didn’t mention was that sandwiched in between Nicky and Jola, we had employed two more – one Filipino lady, who we soon discovered was stone deaf, and one Czech woman who fell pregnant and implied it was Peter’s – but I wasn’t ready to admit to those two mammoth mistakes.
‘So you went back to work when the children were how old?’
My mouth felt dry. ‘Rosie was six weeks old. With Noah, I took three months.’
I waited for a look of disgust from Miranda Slater, but she kept her head buried as she wrote this information down.
I wondered if she had children of her own, and how long she had taken off work. ‘How was that?’
‘What?’
‘What was it like going back to work after having Baby?’
‘Which baby?’ I was being facetious, but I couldn’t help myself.
‘Tell me about Rosie first.’
‘I had a good support network.’
‘Uh huh... Hmmm... Any family members help out?’
‘Mum sometimes, but she had a lot on at work.’
‘But she’s not so busy now?’
‘She’s decided to take a sabbatical, of sorts.’
‘Okay, right... Hmmm... Yes... But you say she wasn’t supportive when Rosie was a baby, is that right?’
‘I didn’t say she wasn’t supportive, I said she was busy. She helped out when she could.’
She nodded slowly before she spoke. ‘Did you suffer from post-natal depression after either of their births?’
I had been waiting for this question. It was the one I had worried about most in the middle of the night.
‘No,’ I said, sipping my tea, unable to look her in the eye.
After Rosie’s birth, I had barely coped. I remember pacing around with her, crying, while she cried. The soreness and tenderness in my body made everything more difficult, like I was doing the hardest thing I had ever done in my life while injured and ill. Deep down, I feared we had done the wrong thing in fighting so hard to have her. When the health visitor had come round with the ‘Is Mum Depressed?’ survey, I had lied on the form. I was transported back to our dark kitchen in London, where I had read the form that the health visitor had slid in front of me. Each tick that I had made – through bleary eyes – had been a lie: ‘5 – Do you have suicidal thoughts?’ No, tick. I was scared to tick the boxes that might reveal the true depths of my despair, and shock, and the sense of profound inadequacy. Maybe some women are not meant to be mothers, I had thought at the time. Maybe my body had been telling me something during those gruelling years of being prodded and punctured by fertility doctors.
A sense of impotence engulfed me. My ineptitude as a mother was being brought to the table – the truncated maternity leave, the flow of nannies, the lack of mummy-and-me time, Rosie’s tantrums, the big lie, the arrest. What terrible endorsements of my parenting. Gone was the urge to laugh. I suddenly wanted to give up, present Miranda Slater with my wrists. Apathy, or worse maybe, numbness, stopped me battling. How could I possibly convince this woman that I was a good mother, when I knew that I wasn’t? Could I admit to this? Would this be conceding defeat? Would this mean I would certainly face prosecution?
‘Yes, Your Honor, I love my children but I have a strong aversion to being a mother, guilty as charged.’ The crash of the gavel. ‘I sentence you to life imprisonment for fucking up your kid!’ Arguably, two life sentences.
As though Peter had sensed this in me, he spoke up, out of turn, ‘She is a wonderful mother. All of this is absolutely ludicrous. I can’t actually believe we are sitting here having to justify our decisions just because of some terrible misunderstanding. Didn’t Rosie tell you up there? That she got confused?’ he asked.
‘I’m afraid I can’t pass on what she tells me.’
‘Well, I’m telling you now, Gemma would never have slapped her. Honestly, if you knew her, you’d know she was incapable of it.’
Tears that would not fall blurred my vision. If I had looked at Peter, I would have broken down.
There was silence for a while.
‘You understand, Peter, that we are here to make sure that your children are safe,’ she said.
‘Yes, yes, the system,’ he said, dropping his hands into his lap.
And then she turned to me. ‘How do you feel about being a mother, Gemma?’
The question was like an electric shock, and I swiped an errant tear.
I remembered looking at Rosie when she was lying in her cot, her fists in little cotton mittens to stop her scratching her face with her miniscule nails, wishing she would sleep for a little bit longer, wishing I didn’t have to wake her for her feed. I did not like breast feeding her. Her hard gums on my nipple; a violation almost. Every suck gave me an unpleasant shudder. I kept these feelings to myself, ashamed of them, knowing I would sound wrongly-wired if I admitted it to anyone. A week before I returned to work, I weaned her onto the bottle. It was revelatory. I think I loved Rosie a little bit more as she gazed up at me, her lips locked around the plastic teat. I was liberated, hopeful again. The bottle helped me to feel a little bit more like me.
‘I don’t know how I feel about being a mother.’ I hesitated, knowing how I should have answered her but worn down by all these questions, worn down. Who was ‘me’? I would never be the Gemma I was before I gave birth. Gemma the mother was in her place. Rosie had needed me to be defeated and to relinquish control of that pre-baby ‘me’. Her needs were designed to consume me absolutely. It shouldn’t have been too much to ask. I had failed her. And I would probably fail the next one.
‘I suppose sometimes I feel like the worst mother in the whole universe,’ I said, pressing hard into the centre of my chest, as if pressing at the place where all my tension was held.
Peter gaped at me, outraged, as though I had just stopped dead in the middle of a running race I had been winning.
But Miranda Slater gave me her first genuine smile. It was a sad smile, actually, and there was recognition in her eyes, from woman to woman, from mother to mother possibly.
‘I guess that was a really hard thing to say out loud,’ Miranda Slater said gently.
I pressed my fingers into my eye sockets. It was my turn to nod excessively.
Chapter Forty-Two