At Christmas in 1984, my baby was seven weeks old. I was in the last year of a cultural studies degree and simply saw Christmas as a time to get some work done. My mum could take the baby while I caught up with Marx, Foucault and Barthes, and worked out what my dissertation would be on. (Pleasure, as it turns out, but that’s another story.)
I am aware how pretentious this all sounds, but I don’t care. If you can’t be pretentious at 25, when can you?
Anyway, there I was, back in Ipswich with my mum and the latest of her awful boyfriends in a tiny house full of tinsel, her nonstop smoking and the homemade Baileys in buckets under the bed.
At least she loved babies. I loved my baby too, but I wanted to work. I had never fully realised that this was a choice that needed to be made. Maybe I was too young to understand that having a child meant giving up parts of yourself that you hold dear. To me, if not some of my lecturers, it was obvious that I could have a child and just carry on as normal. My mother dismissed education as something that people who couldn’t do proper jobs did. She may have had a point.
Cramped in her house of knick-knacks, we now occupied different universes. I had left home officially at 17, after running away at 16. Getting pregnant was, in her eyes, the most normal thing I had achieved, and even then I was doing it alone.
When I started breastfeeding my daughter on the settee in the living room, Mum rushed in. “Oh, for God’s sake, what are you going to do next? Go to the toilet in here?” Bottle feeding had been freedom for my mum’s generation. Most of what I was picking up in “that London” she found utterly disgusting. When I sat in the bath with a breast bump trying to express milk, she said sniffily: “Well, that’s not even enough for a cup of tea.”
I may or may not have made a speech about breast being best because mostly I hid in the bedroom with my books. Reading had always been an escape as a child, and it was now my liberation. I knew it in my soul. A concerned neighbour popped in and talked to me very oddly. She was hedging around a conversation that I couldn’t comprehend. She sighed. “Molly” – my mum – “has explained it to me,” she said. “About you reading. Alone.”
“Explained what?”
“That you have got postnatal depression.”
This was clearly the only possible explanation for my behaviour. Neither Mum nor her friend really knew what a degree was.
I realised, though, that I should hang out with my mum more. “Shall we watch Dallas?” I asked one evening. She was shocked. “But I thought you were against that sort of thing!” Don’t worry: I didn’t explain that it was a perfect deconstruction of the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism. We cracked open the “Baileys”, now poured into hoarded bottles, and my child slept peacefully.
Christmas dinner was fraught, as it always was. My mother usually cried through it, complaining that her life consisted of “a fight against dirt” – housework – and feeding us “gannets”. This time, the fact that I so clearly did not want her life made her cry more. But she was lovely with my baby, making me feel able to cope. “Whatever you do,” she announced, “is normal to them because they don’t know what normal is.”
What that Christmas brought home to me was that I was choosing to leave home for ever by leaving my class, by studying. Everyone was using the fact that I had a child to keep me in my place, but I was gone. I would not give up my ambition and I would not lead the life that a girl like me was meant to lead. And, although I did not have any money, I knew that I would not be dependent on some man’s wage and grateful for any “extras”. Social mobility is the term used now, but it lacks heart. To move class is to feel that you are, somehow and always, in the wrong place.
I could never properly go home after that, and any visits were accompanied by ever more surreal rows. As I was by then vegetarian, my mother declared that my daughter would grow up with no bones. “What do you think bones are made of, Mum?” I remember screaming at her. “Gravy,” she replied with absolute certainty.
She still hoped I might make something of myself, even when I had a column in the Guardian, a paper she insisted they didn’t have in the wilds of Ipswich.
That Christmas, I was in the right place and the wrong place, and in our fug of mutual incomprehension, she helped me. I studied; she held the baby. The older I get, the more I see that she wanted the best for me. It was just that I knew better. That was the gift she gave me.
