Last week I cried on the floor of my office, the ugly abandoned bawling I rarely do since becoming a parent because I can’t summon the time, or the energy, or the privacy to do it.
I was crying because I seemed to have everything a bit wrong and suddenly the panorama was of a life that felt all wrong. I teach in a university and despite reworking my courses, I’d struggled to connect with my undergraduate students. After two weeks of reformer Pilates, my knee was making an alarming cornflakes noise every time I walked upstairs. My husband and I hadn’t shared a Netflix show in weeks, the true mark of marital cohesion. Only that week our nine-year-old had asked us, like some 90s Cosmopolitan quiz sprung to life, how many times a week we did “it” or if we only did “it” the once? and how did we manage to ever do “it” when the dog was always asleep in our bed?
To and from work I listened to podcasts and scrolled social media where women my age spoke with technical precision about deadlifting, or were journaling or attending the music gigs I booked and cancelled at the last minute.
Monday marked one year since my son finished treatment for leukaemia and my husband and I are humming with low-level euphoria. But I wonder if the gradual return from crisis-mode to normal life wasn’t part of my recent meltdown. During a crisis, the bar I set for myself was a bit like the jumps I built for my childhood dachshund out of potted plants and yard sticks – proportionate and kind. A year on, I’ve gradually raised standards. Self-compassion has been rescinded.
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When my son was sick my duties contracted to caring for him. The facets of a well-rounded life, such as career progression or whether I was washing my hair, felt incidental. The measure of a good day was clear. Was he alive? Was I putting one foot in front of the other? If the answer to both was yes, then I deserved a great big bualadh bos.
There was a point in the early phase of his maintenance treatment, then, that felt strangely peaceful. Disaster mode muffled my inner critic. I was kind to myself and my partner. Other people were kind to me too. What I hadn’t expected was that crisis would feel, in some ways, simpler than normal life. The endless demands fell away. The return to normal, then, was a return to the pressure to keep a life running well.
One evening during Ted’s treatment a friend spoke about the horrors of a sick and sleepless baby, before pulling herself up, embarrassed. The conversation stayed with me. I’ve been the mother of an infant with strep sitting in the hospital emergency department at 3am juggling work emails. It’s grinding and exhausting but because it falls within the remit of normal parenting experience, you’re expected to cope. When you’re in crisis, the world is kinder and you’re kinder to yourself. You take leave, do less, expect less of yourself and whoever is in it with you. My friend with the sick infant deserved as much compassion as I did, but the system wouldn’t give it to her. She probably would not give it to herself.
Likewise, when my son was a healthy baby (albeit one who didn’t care for sleep), I wasted a lot of time bullying myself for the things I wasn’t doing. Eighteen months into motherhood, when it seemed that others were bouncing back into baby-making, I felt categorically unable to add more children to my plate. If I’m brutally honest the second-child guilt didn’t stop until my son was diagnosed, as though I needed a life-threatening illness to name my capacities.
If normal life keeps us driving forward crisis can be a kind of off-ramp. The future we were running toward – upward mobility, self-improvement, a life that steadily gets better – recedes, and with it the constant pressure to keep chasing it.
Sara Ahmed has written about happiness as a promise, a feeling we’re told will arrive if we live life in the “right” way. Illness, divorce, job loss, or even a collective rupture such as the pandemic cracks that promise right open. You fall out of sync with the life you’re “supposed” to be living, and may even become, briefly, the figure of someone else’s gratitude: the break-up that makes couples feel stronger in comparison, the mother who makes others hold their children that bit tighter at night. Nobody wants this role exactly. And yet there can be a strange relief in landing here. What might look like bare unhappiness from the outside can feel, from within, like a suspension of something more exhausting: the endless, failing pursuit of a happiness that never quite arrives.
I don’t think I’m alone in this feeling. Many people described an unexpected sense of relief in the early months of the pandemic as the usual pressures fell away.
A year on from Ted’s treatment, I find myself back in a world of expectations I can’t quite meet. Nothing’s wrong, exactly. And yet the bar feels impossibly high again. I’ve raised it myself in small, familiar ways. I think often of that earlier period when the measure of a good day was putting one foot in front of the other.
