Page 3 of Stella is Starting Over

‘If you wanted more time with her then why didn’t you just. . .’ I trail off. This isn’t dignified. I’m about to make the same point I’ve already made and it’s not going to change anything.

Gavin looks out of the window, clearly unable to meet my eye as he says, ‘I’d really hoped you’d be able to do this with me, without us needing to involve anything legal. But she’s my daughter too. And if I have to, I will.’

‘Okay,’ I say, eventually.

I want to say, ‘How is it fair that you left me, you took away my husband, my security, my stability, and now you get to take my baby away from me once a week?’ But of course, I don’t. I say again, ‘Okay.’ I sigh, because I need him to leave before I lose the ability to hold back my tears. ‘We can try it.’

Stella

The second most surprising thing about your husband leaving you, at least if you have a baby, is that you just sort of. . . carry on. It would be nice to crawl into bed and cry but most days there isn’t time, and on the occasions that I’ve had half an hour spare I’ve genuinely attempted a bit of scheduled crying and found that – probably unsurprisingly – feelings don’t work like that and the tears won’t come.

I didn’t have many break-ups before Gavin because I married the first proper boyfriend I ever had (possibly my first mistake). But when a situationship did end, or a boy I was obsessed with stopped messaging me back, I went full wallow. I loved a break-up in the same way that I loved a hangover. It’s not technically a nice feeling but it is sort of satisfying to lean into the discomfort. Comfortable clothes, comforting TV, comfort food, the whole nine yards. Fun, because the heartbreak was a graze rather than a stab wound, and eventually sufficiently boring that I’d jack it in and go back to living again. This, unfortunately, was different. This was a bit like a bereavement and a limb loss tied into one. My routine, my home, my confidant, my financial security, my sense of who I was as a person, all gone up in smoke. Poof. Every shared memory, in-joke, every story about holidays together, all the gossip and the lore lost because I’ll never be able to explain them to anyone else and probably wouldn’t want to even if I could.

Surprisingly, the most helpful tool I had to get me through the unrelenting misery of post-Gavin life was Rose. Rose didn’t just want things, she needed them, and there was literally no option other than to get up, change her, feed her, get her dressed, take a lightning-fast shower if I’d got too grotty to tolerate, and then take her out in the pram, telling myself that the cold March air was good for both of us.

But it’s Thursday. So Rose is about to go on a sleepover with the person I’m angriest with on the face of the earth, and I’m going to magically transform from having 24/7 sole responsibility for my child to being totally alone. Since the moment she was conceived, I’ve been away from her for a handful of hours. She lived inside me and then always in the same room as me. The longest I’ve ever been without her was when she saw Gavin for those park visits, metres from our home, and I spent those pacing the house, chewing the skin off from around my fingernails.

Gavin arrives promptly at 4.30 p.m. I had been praying he’d be late enough that I could refuse to open the door. But he isn’t.

‘That’s a lot of stuff,’ he says faintly, looking at the bags by the front door.

I’ve packed her clothes, dummies, bottles, premixed formula, nappies, wipes, more nappies, more wipes, snot sucker, baby Calpol and various different books. There’s also the travel pram, the travel cot and the car seat.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Babies come with a lot of stuff.’

‘Maybe I can get some duplicates. For my place. Then you won’t have to pack all of this up next time.’

‘It wasn’t any trouble,’ I lie. It took me two hours because Rose screamed if I left the room to get something.

I buckle her into the car seat and then burst into tears as I watch his car, rented from one of those pay-per-hour services, pull away from the kerb. It’s like a physical pain in my chest. I go back into the house, sit down on the sofa and stare at the wall for a while. Then I clean. Once I’ve cleaned, I reorganise. Then it’s dinnertime.

I open the fridge and stare into it until it starts beeping. This fridge was the most exciting, and most expensive, thing I’ve ever bought. Double doors with an ice maker, like the cool girls at my school always used to have in the noughties. Gav and I jokingly called it my first child when it was delivered because I took so many pictures of it. It was briefly the background on my phone. It’s enormous, designed to see us through at least two children. It currently contains six pots of weaning-friendly baby food, a satay chicken ready meal that went off two days ago and half a bottle of wine from when Louella came over. I pick it up and look at the label. It’s something complicated and biodynamic because Lou is too cool to drink an M&S sauvignon.

I pour a glass and drink it quickly, then pour another one, feeling massively pissed because I barely drink these days. It’s a nice, fuzzy, numbing kind of insulation. Then I feel worse about feeling slightly better, in case it means that I’m actually an alcoholic. So I do three quizzes on my phone all titled ‘Are You an Alcoholic’ and conclude that no, I am not. Then I cook the ready meal and eat it, worrying that it’s going to poison me but figuring that having food poisoning is one of those things that is much easier child-free, and at least I’d be thinner as a result. Next, I put on the television and scroll through the options until I’m so bored and angry at not picking anything that I turn it off.

Do you want to finish watching White Lotus? the TV screen asks.

No, I don’t. I started it with Gavin. He’s probably finished it. Arsehole.

What about Game of Thrones?

Again, no. We rewatched it when Rose was born until I started worrying that the noises and violence were going to traumatise Rose (at that point, three days old).

At 10 p.m. I’ve officially run out of things to pretend to be distracted by and I allow myself to go to bed.

I wake up at 6.30 a.m. yet don’t move, needing to wee but so tired I can’t make my legs work, counting down the minutes until Rose will be home. I open my phone again and go to my conversation with Gav, just in case he has magically messaged me, admitting that he can’t manage Rose on his own and saying that I can come and collect her. He hasn’t. I swipe back on our conversation. We speak so rarely now that within a couple of minutes I’m six months back and there are endless pictures of Rose, messages from me asking him to bring me things from other rooms because I’m nap-trapped under a sleeping baby. I scan his replies, looking for signs that he was plotting his escape. Then I scroll further back, back to when I was pregnant. Pictures of me grinning into the mirror, showing off a swollen side profile. His replies about how beautiful I am, about how proud he is of me, how he can’t wait to spend the rest of his life raising a mini Stella. How did any of this happen? Where did any of that go?

A week later I recount the story of my first evening of freedom to Louella. She’s in my headphones as I push Rose in her pram, on the way back from ‘Jump & Jiggle With Mummy, Six Months Plus’. Louella, by contrast, is on her way home from reformer Pilates, which looks really easy but apparently actually isn’t.

‘Hang on, I’m switching to my AirPods,’ she says as I tell her the part about rereading my messages with Gav. ‘Sorry, did you say that you had your first night of freedom and you ate an expired ready meal, did a bit of emotional masturbation over your ex-husband and then went to bed?’

‘Yeah,’ I say.

‘Did you get food poisoning?’

‘No. Ironclad immune system, me,’ I say mournfully.

‘So you ate loads of microplastics and you didn’t even get skinny out of it.’