Dear M—,
You asked me at the park on the weekend how it’s all going, and I gave you a short answer because Iris was about to fall off the climbing frame. So here is the longer one. I am writing it on a Wednesday evening because I wanted to write it on a Wednesday. Wednesday used to be the hardest day of my week.
I woke up at 6:30 today. I did not pick up my phone for thirty minutes, which used to be the kind of thing I would say I was going to do and never do. I made coffee and stood at the kitchen window and watched the magpies. The dishwasher had been emptied overnight. Priya does that on Tuesdays, last thing.
Hugo came down at 7:10 in his school uniform, which had been laid out on his chair on Tuesday afternoon. He ate his Weetbix. He did not ask me whether his sports uniform was clean for tomorrow, because it was on a hanger by the door and he could see it. I did not have to think about it. He hugged me at the bottom of the stairs and then went back up to do his teeth.
The day was a day. I had three meetings before lunch, one of which was important; David had a court thing in the afternoon and was going to be late. Six months ago that sentence would have been the start of a long set of decisions I would have spent the morning making in my head, between meetings. Who is picking up Iris. What is for dinner. Has anyone fed the dog. Is the cleaner here today or Thursday.
Today I did not make those decisions, because Priya already knew. She had texted at 9: “Lamb in the slow cooker. Iris pickup is me. The cleaner moved to Thursday this week. Don’t forget you said yes to the parent rep thing.” And that was the day, sorted.
I left the office at 4:45. I drove home with the windows down. I went over a podcast in my head, instead of the list. There was no list.
When I came in, Iris was at the kitchen bench drawing a horse. Priya was washing up the slow cooker. Hugo was reading on the couch. The house smelled like lamb and rosemary. I kissed the kids and asked Iris if her horse had a name. She said Janine.
David got home at 6:30. We ate dinner together. He had a glass of wine; I had water because I am running on Thursday and trying that thing where you don’t drink the night before. The kids talked about a girl in Iris’s class who has a parrot. Hugo asked if we could go to the museum on Saturday. David said yes before he checked with me, which is a thing he would not have done six months ago, because we used to do everything by committee, by a rolling private ledger of who had agreed to what and when. Tonight he just said yes. I said yes too. The Saturday is on the calendar now.
After dinner the kids went up for baths. I sat on the back step with David and a glass of wine. The garden lights came on. He told me about a podcast he had listened to in the car that morning. We talked about it for a while. It was the kind of conversation we used to have at the beginning, when there was less to coordinate and we could remember things long enough to want to share them.
He asked me, at one point, whose turn it was to do dishes. I laughed, because I have not thought about whose turn it is to do dishes in a long time. We do them together now, when the kids are in bed and the house is quiet, the way you do them when nobody is keeping a list.
I want to be careful, in this letter, about what I am saying. I am not saying that life is easy. I am saying that the part of life that used to be a low, constant noise — the planning, the remembering, the small daily negotiation between David and me about who was holding which thread of the week — has gone quiet. The noise is not the same as the love. Once the noise is gone, the love is easier to hear.
Priya was here from 9 to 4 today. She will be back on Friday morning. Tomorrow she is not here, and the household runs anyway, because most of what she does happens in the slow setting-up of the week, not in any single hour of it.
I should also say, M—, that the thing I worried about, that having someone in the house would make it not ours, has not happened. It is more ours, not less. We invited her in, we agreed what was hers to hold and what was ours, and the things we kept (the bedtime story, the Friday dinner, the way David and I do the lamb together on a Sunday when we are pretending to be Italian) are kept more deliberately than they were before. They are not just what is left over after the other things have run us into the ground.
Anyway. That is the longer answer. Come over for a drink on the weekend if you can. Iris would like to show you Janine.
Love, Anna