08. I Don't Carry It Anymore

A woman who fled her own house before her toddler woke up, survived a fork in the road she still feels guilty about, and built herself back into someone she barely recognises — in the best possible way.

This morning she left the house before her two-year-old came downstairs.

Not because anything is wrong. Because if she gets those last twenty minutes before the small voice wakes up — tidying a drawer, putting dishes away, the little jobs that otherwise won’t get done at all — the whole day runs that bit smoother. And she is six months pregnant, and there is only so much of her to go round, so this morning she got up, got dressed, and went, before the chance disappeared.

She tells me this laughing at herself. She is good at that — laughing at herself, mid-sentence, mid-thought, often losing the thread entirely and blaming the baby brain, finding her way back round to wherever she started. Most days is her daughter. Work. Home. Her daughter again. A good combination, she says.

But there is something else underneath the laughing. Something she says almost as an aside, near the end of two hours of conversation, about a very different period of her life:

“For a long time you either avoided talking about it, or there was that internal feeling of carrying it. I don’t carry it any more. Which is nice.”

This is the story of what she used to carry. And how she put it down.

*

The Cave

She went travelling in her twenties — a few months, not the year everyone assumed. Southeast Asia, a stretch of Australia cut short by illness. She talks about it the way people talk about the thing that changed how they see everything afterwards, even though, by her own admission, it wasn’t very long at all.

What it gave her wasn’t the places. It was the proof that change doesn’t have to be frightening. That you can just go and live, rather than do your nine-to-five and dream about living. She came home different — more willing to try things, less afraid of the unfamiliar.

She thinks about a woman she knew growing up, someone who still lives a few doors down from her own mother, on the same street she’s always lived on, doing more or less what she’s always done. There is nothing wrong with that, she says, more than once, as if checking herself. The woman is happy. Genuinely, visibly happy.

But she couldn’t do it. She needed to know what else was out there — and once she knew, she couldn’t go back to not knowing. Like the old story about the people in the cave who only ever see shadows on the wall, and the one person who gets out and sees the real, wide world, and goes back to tell the others, and they don’t believe her, and they stay.

She got out of the cave. And not long after she came home, she did something that surprised even her — she applied for a job she wasn’t sure she’d get, half hoping she wouldn’t have to worry about it. She got it. It changed the shape of her career, and her life, in ways she could not have predicted from inside the cave.

*

The Fork in the Road

All of that — the travelling, the cave, the new job — happened alongside a relationship that ran through her twenties and into her thirties. A relationship that lasted years and meant everything to her, and that ended slowly, painfully, and not entirely cleanly.

She loved him. In some ways, she still does — not in any way that threatens what she has now, but in the way you can love the person who shaped a decade of your life even after you’ve both moved on. There were so many good things about him, she says. She wishes, even now, that it had worked out differently.

It took her a long time to fully let go. And in the middle of that long, slow ending, she met someone else — a kind man, good to her, who helped her through a difficult time. And then she found out she was pregnant.

She describes this as a fork in the road. Not because of what anyone else thought — though she worried about that too, kept things quiet, felt the eyes she imagined on her. The real weight of it was something else. She had pictured this exact thing — a baby, a family — happening with someone else, for years. And suddenly it was happening, just not the way she’d always imagined.

She carried guilt about it for a long time. Guilt that the person she’d loved for so long never fully knew what was going on. Guilt that she felt she’d been, in her own word, deceitful — a word that clearly still doesn’t sit easily with her, because honesty is the thing she comes back to, again and again, when she talks about who she is and what she values.

“Honesty — people would need to know that about me right away. I treat people how I want to be treated. That would be my strapline.”

At the same time, in a completely separate part of her life, her sister was going through the end of her own relationship — a painful, complicated breakup that put her in an impossible position. She gave her sister her phone to message someone she shouldn’t have been messaging. She did it without hesitation, because that is what you do for your sister. And she carried guilt about that too — guilt for a choice she still believes, on reflection, was the wrong thing to do, that hurt someone she cared about.

Two situations. Two different kinds of guilt. Both landing in the same short stretch of her life. She had counselling for it, eventually. She needed it, she says — not because anything was wrong with her, but because she needed someone to help her hold the question that was quietly eating at her: who even am I, if I can do these things?

*

The Women Who Shaped Her

Ask her who influenced her growing up and she goes immediately to family. Her sister — fun, a party animal, someone who always knew how to live for the moment, who taught her, without ever meaning to teach her anything, that it was allowed to enjoy yourself.

Her nan — the fusser, the one who always wanted to get you a bun, tidy something, do something for you. Caring in a way that made you feel completely looked after, and completely special. She thinks that’s where her own instinct to fuss over people comes from — though these days, with a toddler and a second baby on the way, there’s rather less time for it than there used to be.

And her mum — someone who, even now, has a particular gift for walking into chaos and making it make sense. She describes ringing her mum when everything feels like too much, and her mum just sort of cleanses it. Not by taking over exactly, though sometimes that too — but by seeing a way through that she, in the middle of it, couldn’t see for herself.

More recently, she found a friend — a fellow mother, further down the road with three children to her one-and-a-bit, who somehow makes it all look effortless. Works full time, goes to the gym, glides through motherhood in a way that looks, from the outside, completely unchaotic. She admires her enormously, and wishes she’d met her years earlier.

Three generations of women, and a friend who feels like she could have been one of them all along. Each one giving her something — fun, care, clarity, a glimpse of what’s possible — without any of them ever sitting her down and explaining it. That’s not how it works. You just absorb it, over years, until one day you notice it’s become part of how you move through the world.

*

What Resilience Actually Means

She had three miscarriages before this pregnancy. She says this the way she says most difficult things — directly, without flinching, but also without performing how hard it was. It was hard. She knows it was hard. And she also knows, with the particular clarity of someone on the other side of it, that she copes with these things differently now than she would have ten years ago.

She is, by the medical paperwork’s own description, a geriatric mother. Nobody has said it to her face. She knows anyway. She finds this funny, mostly — the gap between how she feels and what a form says she is.

When I ask her how she defines resilience now, she doesn’t reach for anything grand. She talks about compartmentalising. About asking herself, when something goes wrong: what’s the actual worst that can happen here? About a colleague who once told her, simply, to rack it — to stop overcomplicating things, because good is good enough.

“It’s being stronger to what’s going on around you and choosing how you react. I do think I’m so much more resilient than I used to be.”

She talks about her partner’s work — long, physically demanding days that have only got longer and harder since she’s known him — and how she sometimes resents the toll it takes, on him and on the time they have as a family, while also knowing exactly why he does it and being unable to fault him for it. She talks about an argument over something as small as a toothpaste lid that was never really about the toothpaste lid. About learning to say: I need to be heard, not fixed.

None of this sounds like resilience in the way the word is often used — nothing dramatic, no single moment of triumph. It sounds like a woman who has quietly built a set of tools, sentence by sentence, from people around her and a fair amount of trial and error, and who reaches for them now without quite noticing she’s doing it.

*

Be Brave, Be Considerate

She is expecting her second child later this year. She has a partner she describes, simply, as her everything — someone who works harder than anyone she’s ever met, who she sometimes wishes she saw more of, and who she knows, without question, loves her completely. They are engaged. The wedding is, in her words, just a timing issue.

She wants her daughter to ask questions — as many as she needs to, in any situation, because there’s no such thing as a silly question, a thing her own mother always told her and that she still thinks about most days. She wants her children to be safe, happy, and unafraid to be exactly who they are. Not shy. Not waiting for permission.

When I ask what message she’d give to women everywhere, she doesn’t take long to answer.

Be brave and be considerate. You could probably do anything, with the right support — and believe in yourself. Otherwise, you could just go along in life and exist. But what if you did decide to take that job, or have that conversation, or change something?

Be brave. Be considerate. The two things that, on the surface, can pull against each other — the thing she wanted for herself, and the people she didn’t want to hurt along the way. For years, the considerate part won, almost every time, and she carried the cost of that quietly.

These days, she still carries both. But not in the same way. Not as weight.

She gets up most mornings before her daughter, sometimes a little earlier than strictly necessary, and steps out into a day that is mostly good. Work, home, family, the next twenty years taking shape in ways she didn’t map out at twenty-four and likes better than the map she had.

She doesn’t carry it any more.

Which is nice.