THE LOVE OF A MOTHER FOR A CHILD

Kate Gross - 5 Feb 15

*This is an extract from Kate Gross’ memoir Late Fragments. Kate finished writing it in September, and received copies of the book several weeks before she died*

There is nothing so elemental as the love of a mother for a child. I think of it like an Anglo-Saxon góld-hòrd, a weighty treasure store heavy with adoration, and with worry.

Worry is the currency of my love, because worry is just what I do, and how love manifests itself in my world. Worry for them now, worry for the future. I have tried hard to pass on only the adoration, because little shorts have such small pockets, and carrying all my concerns around would make it very hard to climb the highest trees and slide down the sheerest drops.

I was first diagnosed with cancer when the boys, Isaac and Oscar were three and a half. They have grown up with my illness. It has shaped our lives, the mother I am and the father Billy is and will be. I don’t know how much they will remember from ‘Before’.

In the early days, certainly, they knew there was a difference in me. When I came back from hospital with my ‘tummy hurt’ they had to be deli-cat. I couldn’t carry them around on my back like little princes. Worst of all, we couldn’t go swimming together. This has been the greatest blow, because Billy is a scaredy-cat and I am a water nymph.

A few months after my first operation, we drove past the outdoor paddling pool at Lammas Land and Oscar said, apropos of noth- ing, ‘That’s where we used to go before your tummy hurt, Mummy.’ Later on, in my interlude of wellness, I tried and failed to cycle them both up a hill in our Dutch bike, and Isaac explained loudly to passers-by that ‘Mummies are weak but daddies are strong, that’s why she has to push the bike.’ I snapped back that it was only their mummy who was weak; the rest of the female sex are quite as robust as the daddies.

They were meant to grow up with a sibling. From the moment they were born, in the back of my mind was the idea that someday they would have a sister (I attribute this expectation to a childhood fantasy in which I was the naughty little sister to two rambunc- tious, smart, cheeky older brothers). But fictitious little baby Josie ceased to exist the moment I was diagnosed, another part of our future that melted away overnight.

Chemotherapy fried my ovaries and tipped me from childbearing thirty-something into the thin-haired, SAGA-holidaying, all-that’s-behind- me menopausal bracket in a matter of months. So, Plan Josie became Josie the baby ghost. Now she is a little girl who grows older only in a parallel world, the kind you find by accident at the back of a wardrobe, or through a crease in time. I think about her often. She is true and real in another life I’m having, somewhere else.

I don’t know if my real, live children – my darling Knights – can sense that the difference in me is not merely physical. It isn’t just that I am in bed so much after my ‘sleepy medicine’. I am different now. I am careful, diligent, emotional, fretful, where I used to be careless, disorganised, energetic. Now I only want to be the good guy, and Billy is left to do all the crappy bits of parenting: the tooth-brushing, the discipline, the hair-brushing.

I cuddle too tightly. I cherish the time spent watching ninja cartoons together before school, when I should be wishing it away so I can get on with work or the washing or something more important. I do not pretend this makes me a better mother. I think the opposite, actually, and I hope they remember something of the woman who was around before the spectre of leaving drained away her easy confidence in parenting. But now, at least, I am here.

You see, I find I am able to rationalise even the leaving of my beloveds. I still can’t bear it, but I can find a way to make it the best it can be. Because what we are given is time – time to make memories, time to say goodbye, time for me to write this so that when they are grown they will have something real of me to know.

More than anything, I can rationalise it because although there isn’t a world where I am there to commiserate when they fail their driving tests, to make an embarrassing mother- of-the-groom speech at their weddings, to coo over their babies, there is no world where I haven’t been there for the first five years of their lives. I know without a doubt what it means for them to have been surrounded by my treasure chest of love in these precious early years.

It provided security, even before they could register their surroundings. Now it is what makes them confident in their little world, able to go to school and make friends and explore the unknown. It is gold in their bank for the rest of their lives. Even without the Mummy-Master of the góld-hòrd, their accounts will remain full of the treasure  we  have checked  in  early  on.

And conversely, if they had not had this security, this love, at such an early age, there is no repaying it. In this, at least, they are luckier than so many children in the world.

Late Fragments: Everything I Want to Tell You (About this Magnificent Life) by Kate Gross – is a beautiful read & out now. 

Kate Gross

Kate Gross read English at Oxford University. She joined the civil service and worked at Number 10 for Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Aged 29, she founded the Africa Governance Initiative alongside Tony Blair. She stood down as the charity’s CEO during her treatment. In 2014, she was awarded an OBE for her charitable work in Africa. Kate died peacefully at home on 25 December 2014. She leaves behind husband Billy sons Isaac and Oscar (both 5). Kate finished writing Late Fragments in September and received finished copies a few weeks before her death.

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