What Are You Keeping?
When I was recovering from norovirus which is what I am now calling it since I heard at the golf club it was doing the rounds, and I couldn’t face anything other than toast, soft white medium sliced only, and was afraid that I would never be able to put a martini past my lips ever again, and kept dozing off mid-conversation, and couldn’t concentrate on the hazy sentences in the novel1 about the retired policeman who gets a knock on his door from two former colleagues who want his help with a cold case involving the “fecking priests”, I decided to tidy the filing cabinet. It had been languishing on my to-do list. I sat on the floor and began to dig into the past.
As I excavated our history, I asked my husband if we had just locked the metal storage system and brought it complete with contents when we moved house six years ago. It was a museum to our parenting. “Is there something wrong with you?” said each of my daughters as I showed them what had emerged from the bottom drawer. There was a paper trail from 2008 when the eldest started primary school to 2020 when “hooray, we’re going paperless” and the pandemic aligned. It was a testament to their personalities, a preview of who they would become. Alice had signed a declaration of commitment to the choir, agreeing to attend all practices and performances in care homes and shopping centres, at flower festivals and the City Hall. She still carried the heavy weight of responsibility, was prone to guilt about letting anyone down. In 2012, Lucy had visited the medical area with a grazed knee. This pattern of injuries would continue throughout her formative education until I stopped answering the phone to the school nurse. Ella had ‘played’ the violin for six months. I’d refused to trip over it in the hall any longer and so I’d ended the peripatetic contract early. I’d driven across town to return it, keeping the receipt to prove it. Instruments could be added to the long list of activities she had started and never finished – gymnastics, Irish dancing, ballet, tennis. Occasionally, she’ll ponder the absence of extra-curricular interests on her CV. Lydia had to learn the words of a prayer for a teachers’ retirement assembly. “Bless them with friends and family to enjoy the journey that lies ahead,” it said, and I hoped they already had friends and family when they made the decision to retire. It wasn’t up to God to sort that.
There were newsletters, programmes, tickets, PTA meeting agendas, a note informing me that I was solely responsible for Group 5 at the zoo, and I remembered how I’d spent three hours continually counting hoods and detesting every single one of them. I’d helped with nails and tattoos and mince pies and the craft stall in Room 23. And I wondered why I’d been so prolifically present at sales and fairs and ‘let’s raise money for the school fund’ events and if this was just a rite of passage mums couldn’t avoid but dads could. It certainly wasn’t the person I’d agree to be now.
The teenagers were emotionless, but I set a few memories aside anyway, burned the rest. Then, I moved on to health care. There’d been regular mammograms and smear tests, a trip to the glaucoma clinic to have my eyes anaesthetised because the air puff test was reading dangerously high when the optician squirted my irises, and she was worried I was going blind rather than just highly sensitive. There were cards detailing four sets of antenatal appointments, handwritten names of the midwifery-led team who would look after me. I shivered at the thought of Vera who had attended my swift second delivery somewhat reluctantly just before midnight and made me walk to the ward in the early hours pushing a newborn in a cot. “You’ll heal,” she said. I concluded my clear-out with the complaints section. There was an extensive file on the warped laminate I’d purchased for my first house in 1999. I’d taken a flooring company to the small claims court. I didn’t know why I’d kept a tome of legal correspondence for a quarter of a century other than to remind me on days when I felt like nothing that I’d once stood up for myself. I had issues with the Larne rail line, traffic violations on the Sandown Road. Someone had been rude to me in the Halifax.
“But it’s not for me to judge the quality of someone else’s nostalgia,” says Hilary Mantel as she brings her dead stepfather’s boxes down from the loft2. They contain a tidy stack of National Geographic magazines, a set of engineering textbooks, his sketchbooks. She can feel his presence in the cottage where his belongings are stored. He is just one of the many ghosts she has to deal with. Plagued by pain and diagnosed with endometriosis, at twenty-seven, she has her womb removed. Her fertility is confiscated, the choice to have children taken away. She is haunted by the ghost of the daughter she will never meet. She calls her Catriona. She has a mental picture of her. She would be nothing like her mother. She’d have milky Irish skin that freckles but never tans. She’d manage her money well. She’d sing in tune. Hilary says we all have rustling ghosts in our lives. They represent the parts of ourselves that we never get the chance to know. For every lover, job or home we choose, there are several others left behind.
“You come to this place, mid-life. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led. All your houses are haunted by the person you might have been”.
And I think of what I am keeping not just in my filing cabinet but in my head, the ghosts I am hanging on to – the unfulfilled dreams, resentments, tired beliefs, narratives I’ll never write, stories I’ll never tell, intentions started but never finished, the person I once was, parts I’ll never know.
I put the antenatal appointments into the special bags I keep in the garage, as a reminder of what, I’m not sure, perhaps how I prepared for their births and willed them into the world. There are special bags for each of them, jumbo ones, massive memory boxes, my sentimentality management system, roses for Alice, cacti for Lucy, llamas for Ella, unicorns for Lydia, choices tinged with significance. There are tiny pink hospital bracelets in them, the crumbling ‘little girl’ icing from a christening cake, all the firsts – first birthday napkins, first shoes, first day at school cards, first Christmas stockings. There are ties and sweatshirts, hands drawn round fingers, early attempts at art and written communication. There are gold, silver and bronze awards for hard work and determination, certificates for special achievement, medals for this and that, and I decide that’s why we crave validation in later life.
Ella comes to see what I am doing. She studies an image of a scan, a twenty-week one. “Where’s the baby?” she asks. I point out the spine. She finds notebooks filled with her daily nursery routine. “I had three dirty nappies on my birthday,” she says. Lydia’s bag contains her collections - Lego cards, Frozen stickers, cuddly toys. Now, she collects skincare. There are numerous letters received from them, slipped under a closed door, fired down the stairs, left on my pillow. They are mostly apologies, filled with blame and shame, the desire for forgiveness, the urgency of getting an iPad back. I find one from Alice. I turn it over. “I am ugly,” it says. I am haunted by how I dealt with this, if I even did, if I told her she wasn’t.
And why am I keeping all this? For some future reminiscing party where we’ll laugh and cry, honour the past, celebrate the journey we’ve been on, or just because it’s MY nostalgia. Or maybe it’s because when I turn and look back down the years, I glimpse the ghosts of the life I have led.
Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry
Giving Up The Ghost by Hilary Mantel