You Do The Walk, Yeah, You Do The Walk Of Life

Photo by Felix Koutchinski on Unsplash

When I am stressed, I wipe. I wield my dishcloth and run it over the hob on repeat. I eliminate the coffee stains around the sink. I lift the toaster and sweep under it.

On Sunday morning, I can feel it starting. This week, I know I will be obsessed with the worktop. I will not allow anything to land on it for more than a second. I will activate my crumb management system. I will make my children stand and eat the fifteens their nana has stress-baked for them until they are gone, and I can chuck the doilies in the bin and wash the tin and put it in the boot of my car and get it off my worktop. The worktop and its cleanliness will be the last thing I focus on at night and the first thing I focus on in the morning. I will find the dishcloth clutched tightly in my hand. I will almost take it to bed with me. I have to be in control of something.

“Are you in one of your anxious moods,” said one of my daughters on Sunday afternoon as I was tossing all the Tupperware across the kitchen and asking people to claim it immediately before it went somewhere, I wasn’t sure where. I had dumped a pile of clothes on the landing. I’d been sold some story about Vinted, but they’d been lying at the bottom of a cupboard for months. If these aren’t listed within the next thirty minutes, they’re going to the recycling, I said.  

On Sunday evening, I notified the approximately 120 people who see my Instagram stories, in case they might care, that I’d seen my husband off to Las Vegas and two children off to their student accommodation. We were now three. My living room was very quiet. I lit a candle. My husband had left me a bottle of malbec with a screw top but maybe that’s how they all come these days. I don’t know, I don’t usually open them. Maybe he didn’t think I was worth a cork. I put reminders in my phone for the next few days, as if being a single parent until Friday had given me short-term memory loss. M&S mash on Monday, sausages and strawberries on Tuesday, Sullivan drop-off on Wednesday, visit Jean and Noel on Thursday.

“Who will want to read this?” I think as I type it. This is like the diary of a lunatic. I don’t have an interesting life. I can’t tell you about parties and events and launches and premieres as I’m not going to any. I go out in the evenings to drive my children about. I don’t listen to pitches and keynote speakers and up-and-coming bands. I listen to Heart 80s and Gold and Greatest Hits Radio. I’ve heard Don’t Stop Believin’ a lot this week.

Towards the close of the Sabbath day as I am contemplating whether to have a second glass, and my daughter who has been to the Freshers’ Week ice-cream get-together sends a picture of her bedroom and I study it carefully and note she has closed her curtains and has a throw on her bed and has curated a photo wall above her desk and will probably be ok, the mums’ WhatsApp group bursts into life. It has 131 media, links and docs. It was established in January 2018 when the seven daughters we have between us met at ‘big school’. But maybe due to some contract switchover in the pre-2020s or because that’s when everything changed, the first message I can see is from 18 March 2020. “It’s started” it says. And the group is called ‘Year 10 girls’ even though they have done Year 11 and 12 and 13 and 14 and have now left secondary education altogether. It is the weekend that all parents of undergraduates dread, the weekend you leave them. There were some wobbles. There were lots of tears. Some parents had met other parents on the boat. One daughter wanted to meet people in Edinburgh ‘like the girls at home’. Their teenage friendship had seen them through many things including a pandemic. It was hard to go their separate ways. I shared how my daughter, currently only three miles away according to Find My, had taken around 150 pairs of shoes with her and enough food to feed the entire halls. There were jokes about Imelda Marcos setting her alarm for her induction. But one mum was now Holly-less. I sniffed my way through my second glass.

On Monday morning, I discover two brown cardboard containers in my fridge. One contains some congealed beef, the other a solitary piece of chicken swimming in curry sauce. It is the leftovers from the Saturday-night-Chinese-takeaway, the one that involves heading across town and doing the drive-thru and paying in cash which seems like fun when you’re nineteen. It’s bin collection day. I think I must nip out to the gate. I can’t have this rotting on my premises for a fortnight. There is no sign of the lorry but then it is only 6.47am. As I turn, I look up and see the sky. It is ablaze. It is on fire. It is stunning. It is a surprise. I run down the driveway and grab my mobile and capture it before it disappears, and I give this gift to the approximately 120 people who see my Instagram stories. And when my husband texts “just landed in Vegas” at 6.49, I respond with an image of our house, the heavens glowing behind it. “Have you been out already,” he says.  

I read a quote by John Ruskin. “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way”. And I am more and more convinced that we may have over-complicated it, what we are meant to do in this world, with our success and our image and our status and our religion, because all we are really called to do is to do the walk of life and pay attention to it. And then speak of it. Then the ordinary becomes extraordinary. We don’t miss anything. We see the sacred in everything. We find that meaning we are always searching for. It is possible to be moved by shared experience, one human connecting with another. It is possible to be moved by vehicles that pull in to let ambulances past, and by rush-hour drivers who let someone out into the traffic and then the car behind does the same and so it becomes a ripple effect. It is possible to be moved by the guy in the coffee shop who remembers you like the hand brew and shows you the painting he is working on, and by catching up with fellow sandwich generationers because they get it, and by the daughter who shares on the family chat that “our dinners this week have been magnificent” because she realises the domestic is not her mother’s gift and she’s had to up her game this week and she’s missing her dad and she’s always holding a dishcloth in her hand.

Damien was one of my subscribers. In fact, he still is as I can’t bear to remove his email address from my list even though he died in July, and I like to think that what I’m saying every week is still going into his mailbox and I’m doing it for him because I know he would have been interested in it. “Keep it up Deborah, great to read your posts,” he would regularly reply or “enjoyed that Deborah” and when I wrote about my fear of standing too close to the tennis net, he told me about hurling and breaking his jaw and having his teeth wired together and living on liquidised meals and in the last reply I had from him at the end of June, he said he was building a guitar like Brian May’s and he’d bought a Strat style neck and a router to create the body. And I had no idea what that meant but I was glad he’d shared it with me. He promised to send photos when it was finished. “Take care,” he said.  

And I think most of us don’t have a very interesting life. We’re just navigating it and dealing with stuff like children leaving us and parents leaving us and partners leaving us and friends leaving us and we’re doing the walk of life as best we can and sometimes to make sense of it, we need to know that someone else is doing this walk too. And I think there’s something of the divine in this, this doing the walk of life together.  

“To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one,” said John Ruskin.