07. She Is Already a Warrior

Part Two: The Becoming of Emma — how 2018 became the year everything broke and everything began, and how a woman who gave everything to others finally started giving something to herself.

If you haven’t read Part One of Emma’s story, you can find it here. It will help you understand where she has come from before you read where she is going.

In 2018, Emma did three things simultaneously.

She left her husband of twenty years. She started a nursing degree. And she met Lee.

She was going through a divorce, a university application, and a new relationship at the same time her ex-husband thought it was appropriate to send a court summons. She was doing her final placements, her final assignment, her final exam. She was being assessed by social workers about her parenting. She was trying, as she puts it with characteristic understatement, to keep her shit together.

Something had to give. It did. But she submitted a better assignment. She passed everything. She graduated. And on the day her dad watched her walk across that stage, he told her “About bloody time!”. He had always seen something in her that she hadn’t been able to see in herself. She saw it that day.

She was forty. She was starting again. She was, finally, on her way.

*

The Year Everything Changed

She doesn’t have a five-year plan. She never has. Life, she has learned, does not respect plans. You can make them and they can be gone in a heartbeat. So, she lives for the day. For the here and now. For the people in front of her.

But 2018 was a pivot. Even she can see that. Three decisions in one year that redirected everything - leaving a loveless marriage, walking into a vocation she was built for, finding the man who would become her person. She didn’t plan any of it. It just happened. Or she made it happen, which is not quite the same thing as planning.

The guilt about the boys is still there. It probably always will be. She broke their family home. She’s got to live with that decision and she does, every day. But what she also knows - what she holds alongside the guilt - is that her boys now know what a real relationship looks like. They know what it is to watch two people who genuinely want to be in the same room.

Harry is twenty- six. Finn is approaching eighteen. They are, she says with a particular pride that doesn’t need to shout, not needy. They have strong opinions. They can deal with stuff. They talk to her about things most kids wouldn’t tell their mum. She has given them a safe space and they use it. She doesn’t know everything that goes on,  there’s probably stuff her mum doesn’t know about her either but they know she is a phone call away. They know they can come home.

“I’ve raised men. Men who aren’t really needy and can deal with stuff and have quite strong opinions. I’m quite proud of that really.”

Harry forgot her birthday one year. She was home after a night shift, Lee had gone to work, she was by herself, and it stung. Harry rang eventually. She was fine. But in that quiet moment before the call, she thought: if Freya was still alive, she wouldn’t have forgotten.

That hurt. She says it simply, without asking for sympathy. Just as a truth she carries. The absent daughter who is present in every room, in every decision, in every quiet moment when something is missing and Emma knows exactly what it is.

 *

Lee

She believes they have met before. In another life, or another version of this one. He just gets her. She doesn’t have to put anything on. She can just be Emma - all of her, whichever version turns up on a given day - and he is still there.

Life is never not chaotic. There is always something. A message from an ex. A situation with the boys. A difficult week at work. The menopause arriving without warning and throwing everything sideways. Lee grounds her. He keeps her balanced when she can get quite invested in things, quite emotional, quite determined to fix what is in front of her.

She laughs because Lee has never been to Liverpool. She’d love to take him. Her accent comes back strong when she goes. She still loves it - the city, the music, the football, the particular energy of a place that doesn’t apologise for itself. She left at sixteen, which was too young, just when she should have been starting to properly belong to it. But she carries it with her. She always has.

“He’s got my back. No matter what. Because life — I sit here now, but life is chaotic. There’s never a week goes by when there’s not something. But he’s just got this ability to just keep me balanced.”

She spent twenty years with someone who didn’t understand her. She knows, now, what it is to be understood. She will not take it for granted.

 *

The Woman in the Uniform

She wears her uniform with pride. It is a well-known organisation. People know what it means when she walks in. The atmosphere changes. She is not there to make their loved one better. She is there to help them through what is coming. She holds the conversations everyone else has been trying to avoid.

A lot of people ask how she does it. She cannot give them a definitive answer. She just knows she gets up, puts the uniform on, and meets whoever is in front of her. She has one chance to get it right. So, she gets it right.

What she doesn’t tell most of them - what she has shared with only two people in all her years of doing this work, both women, both in the early hours, both widowed, is that she understands. Not theoretically. Not professionally. She understands because she has been in that room. She has felt that particular heartbreak. The empty feeling. The what-if. The loss that doesn’t come with a handbook.

When she says she understands, she means it in the way that only someone who has lived it can mean it.

She believes Freya is with her when she works. She has to believe that. She wouldn’t be able to do the job otherwise. And she can feel it - her presence, alongside her, in those rooms where everything is at its most tender and its most real. She doesn’t share this with everyone. But she doesn’t hide it either. Freya is part of her life. She always will be.

“I’ve only got one chance to get this right. And I believe as the human race, we all were born and we all die. That’s the one thing we’ve all got in common. For me it’s about giving equality in death.”

She is in a leadership role now. A dark blue uniform. People look to her. She gives her all at a cost to herself sometimes, she knows this, she is working on it. A colleague recently set an alarm on her phone. Fifteen minutes before her shift ended. “Go home”, she said. “Turn off your computer. Put on your coat. They won’t thank you for the extra hours. You can pick up where you left off tomorrow.”

Nobody had ever said that to Emma before. She texted her immediate boss when she left on time. Just to tell someone. Because it was not a done thing. Because she needed someone to know.

 *

Learning to Say No

This year has been a year of change. She can feel it. Her tolerances have shifted. You either like me or you don’t. You take me as you find me. If you don’t like me, that’s more your problem than mine. Whereas Emma ten or fifteen years ago would have lost sleep over that. Would have spent weeks trying to figure out how to make it better.

She is learning to say no. It has taken practice. It is still not natural. But she is getting there.

She has been a mum for so many years. A daughter. A wife — first the wrong one, then the right one. A nurse. A friend. Always assisting. Always ensuring everyone else is all right. She is finding herself, she says, with the particular pleasure of someone discovering a room in their house they didn’t know existed. She actually quite likes her. Emma is foreign to her in some ways - this ballsy, boundaried, no-nonsense woman who will tell you straight and not apologise for it. But she is getting to know her. And she likes what she finds.

A moment earlier this year crystallised something for her. It was January, she was away with her friends, when her ex-husband sent a barrage of messages. She put them into an AI tool and what came back stopped her cold. It named what had been happening. The manipulation. The pattern. The way she had been treated for years by someone who thought it was acceptable.

Up until that moment she hadn’t fully understood that she had been a victim of it. That she had rights she hadn’t been exercising. That she didn’t have to respond. That she could block. That leaving someone for a reason means you don’t owe them continued access to you.

She blocked. It was the right decision. She has not looked back.

“I’m at a point now where I just. I’m learning to get to know me and who Emma is and I actually quite like her. She’s got a real zest for life and that’s something I haven’t lived for a while.”

 *

The Women Who Made Her

Her mum lights up a room. She always has. She stops for people in the street, helps strangers, makes time. She is kind and loyal and funny and creative and she has, Emma says with complete certainty, been her rock through everything. Their relationship has shifted as Emma has got older. Less mother-daughter in the traditional sense, more two women who adore each other and make time for the small things - a cup of tea and a good natter, just the two of them.

When her mum was diagnosed with breast cancer, Emma felt the ground move under her. It was, she says, a kind of immortality check. She had lost Freya. She knew what loss was. But her mum. Her world. She thought: what would I do without her?

Her mum came through it. But Emma knows now, approaching fifty, that time is precious. She makes it count. She shows up. She stops.

Carol the tutor. Terri at the hospice. Edna in the street in Liverpool. The friend from work, Bex, who she checks in with every day because it helps them both. The women she found later in life - found, she says, when they were all going through something. She wishes she had found them earlier. In the hard years. But she believes, as she believes everything, that it happened when it was supposed to.

She is finding out, as she matures, that even people she has known for decades are still sharing stories she didn’t know. A close colleague she has worked alongside only recently told Emma her story. Emma had known her all this time and hadn’t known. But she obviously felt it was the right time.

Emma understands that. She knows how long it can take to let people in. She knows what it costs. She knows what it means when someone trusts you with the real thing, not the version they think you can handle.

“I feel privileged sometimes to know when people let me in. Because I know how difficult it is. To know that from the information I’m going to give you, you’re still going to love me no matter what.”

 *

She Is Already a Warrior

She is approaching fifty. She is not going to make a fuss about it. She is going to kick the ass out of it.

She wants calm. She wants life to slow down just a little. She wants to make memories with the right people, the ones she enjoys spending time with, the ones who have earned the real version of her. She wants to get back to her spiritual practice when she has the capacity. She wants to travel with Lee eventually. She wants to be there for her mum as her parents age, for Lee’s parents too, for whatever is coming and something is always coming.

Her dad has recently been diagnosed with mixed dementia. She is worried about her mum. She has the resilience to come through whatever that journey brings. She knows that because she has already come through things that should have broken her and didn’t. Once you have survived that, she says, nothing will break you. Or you hope nothing will. Or you just keep going regardless, because what else is there.

Towards the end of the conversation, she was asked what her final message was. For women everywhere. For the younger Emma. For Freya. For whoever needed to hear it.

She went quiet for a moment.

And then she said something she hadn’t planned to say, something that came from somewhere underneath the rehearsed answers and the professional composure and the twenty years of holding everyone else together:

I feel like I’m about to go through a period of being a warrior. I don’t know what that means. That’s just what’s just come into my head. Whatever’s coming my way, I feel like I’m equipped and I’m prepared for it.

She was told: “I feel like you are, already a warrior.”

She said: “Do you?”

The way she said it. The genuine surprise in it. This woman who has buried a child and rebuilt her life and walked into rooms where people are dying and held their hands and said the things that needed saying - she needed to be told.

She is. She absolutely is. She has been for years. She is only just beginning to claim it.

She is Emma. She is nearly forty-nine. She has been to the depths and come back. She has a husband who gets her, boys she is proud of, a vocation she was born for, and a circle of women around her she would ride and die for.

And somewhere, she is quite certain, Freya is with her.

Every single day.

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