Lucy In The Sky With Donuts

“Gemma,” I said, “I’m disappointed”. It had taken her twenty minutes and much reluctance to come to the phone but I’d refused to hang up even though I could hear the beeping of everyone’s shopping going through the scanners and a whispered conversation between her and the assistant who happened to have the misfortune to answer my call just after 8am on a Thursday morning.

It had all started the previous Friday when I was surprised to come across Lucy in the kitchen in her school uniform at what, for a teenager, could be considered the crack of dawn. I was even more surprised when she defrosted the car, started the engine, and disappeared down the driveway. She had not told me where she was going. Find My iPhone let me know she was at 1009 Upper Newtownards Road which seemed to be a large complex more commonly known as Asda Dundonald Superstore. I interrogated her younger sister. It seemed Lucy was there to order eight x twelve packs of iced donuts, because after much scouting of supermarkets, extensive paper-based research, a bit of googling and picking up the word on the street, she had concluded Asda was the only option for the quantities she needed to sell using a 1000% markup pricing strategy to raise money for the hockey tour to Glasgow. Instead of focusing on her A-levels, she’d spent many hours creating promotional posters with images of beautiful donuts floating in the sky even though they looked nothing like the ones from Asda. There had been no one with the capacity to take a bakery order in the afternoons so she’d returned as the store opened. I was not only amazed at the early rising but also pleased that she now had a supply chain because maybe it hadn’t all started the previous Friday. The week before that, she had toured East Belfast trying to find enough fried dough for the first sale in the series of three. It had been a labour of love. She’d acquired a few here, a few there, Tesco, Sainsburys, Marks and Spencer, chunky chocolate chip cookies to make up the numbers, all taking up space on my worktop.  

“Lucy’s crying,” said Ella and I was shocked because Ella doesn’t normally speak before noon and Lucy doesn’t normally cry. “What kind of mother am I?” I thought, to not even notice the sobbing on the sofa. Have I become so self-focused with my writing about what church is for and recovering our own selves and thinking about sermon applications and preparing for a listening exercise in Larne. Does the Presbyterian Church really need me more than my children?  

And when Gemma was eventually dragged to the phone because there was a mad lady who kept repeating “I want to speak to the manager” and the assistant was running out of ideas, I told her the whole story about how Lucy had placed the order. It had been accepted, written down. She’d left her contact details. It was a verbal agreement, legally binding in the eyes of the law. It was a promise.

But when Lucy got up early again and went to collect them and didn’t tell me where she was going again, they weren’t there.

“It was the section lead,” said Gemma who seemed to have spent twenty minutes finding a scapegoat. And I thought Gemma, “what kind of manager are you?”. I left the public sector because of managers like you who quickly put the blame on other people and then rise through the ranks.

But Lucy hadn’t phoned me in tears. She hadn’t asked me what to do. She hadn’t given up. She hadn’t sat down in the freezer aisle like I would have done. She had made alternative plans. She’d bought other baked goods instead and then she’d come home to take her little sister to school and organise the donut stand. And I reckoned I was allowed to admire her resilience. And I told Gemma I was disappointed because my child was disappointed.  

And I slipped Lydia £20 to put in the tin for the hockey tour even though I’d be paying anyway for Lucy to go and stay in a four-star hotel, but Lydia didn’t even try to anonymously make her feel better. She just handed the note to her when she got into the passenger seat.

Later, I found myself heading to Larne with a woman I’d never met before and we bonded over stories about our children because that’s what women do and I said I wasn’t sure what the impact of the pandemic had been on mine and even though some people say we need to stop blaming it for everything, I will continue to say that we have never processed the trauma, that we rushed back too soon, that we haven’t dealt with the crushing disappointments. I looked at my four children and I saw them then, the nine-year-old who had grown up overnight as she managed her own schooling and whose self-sufficiency at times floors me. I saw the one who turned twelve on the day lockdown began and who has never celebrated her birthday since and how she is learning to trust what the world has to offer again. I saw the fourteen-year-old who withdrew as she lost not only her education but her social outlet, who believes in and would do anything for her team and I saw the sixteen-year-old who never got to take her GCSEs, who just as she should have had the chance to fly, had her wings clipped, who went away to university and returned after eight days and who is soft and kind and who always tells me where she’s going and asks me if I need anything for lunch because she cares that I eat. Each of them had been changed by it and I had been changed too because I could cope with anything now other than their disappointment.

There was nothing that Gemma could do. It was too late. If Lucy wanted to order more donuts, she should come into customer services and ask for her because it seemed Gemma never left the building. Lucy said no thanks. They’d already wasted loads of her time.  

“You’d enjoy it mummy,” said Ella. It was a revelation, yoga, the hour spent lying down in the Assembly Hall. She’d slept for thirteen hours that night. But it was what the instructor lady said that had landed with a roomful of girls and it made me want to raise my hands and shout hallelujah. “You have to take up your space because you’re worthy of it,” she said. “You should dig your feet into the ground”.  

I told Lucy she had every right to be angry because I’d be angry, and maybe it was righteous anger but even if it wasn’t, we’re allowed to be angry in spite of what the minister said on Sunday because women haven’t got anywhere near angry enough yet about injustice and all sorts of other things. But I told Gemma I was disappointed because when someone is disappointed with us, that stings so much more.

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This is dedicated to Lucy and to skies filled with donuts.