You Will Always Be The Same

I spent the morning drinking coffee with old friends.

Women I've known ever since I can remember. I have photographs of us in short dresses in sand pits, clutching plastic spades in fat, toddler hands. Dressed up as fairy princesses with skinny knees. We were going to be in Starlight Express and sing and dance about on roller skates. We were going to save the whales, save the world - we organised a bake sale in my front garden and raised a total of seven pounds. Our contribution to the cause.

Three, thirteen, twenty three, thirty three.

And Starbucks fades out around us. I don't notice any of the other people. Just these two. Little girls and teenagers and young women. I remember their school bags and their childhood bedrooms. The way they looked at play school and at college and ten years ago. We talk about all sorts of things. And I'm laughing so hard I'm crying. Then I am, actually, crying. But I don't think that either of them notice.

Things change. They have changed. Relationships, jobs, houses. Stories.

But not me. The only major change in my life over the past three years has been Reuben's birth. And I became a mother of the rather confused number of children that so many of us have. Two? Three?

Since Georgina died, I seem to have become very indecisive. Often I will delegate the decision making process to Jessica, when it is something suitable for a three year old. Shall we stay here at the trampolines? Shall we go to the shops today? Shall we buy doughnuts or pancakes?

I seem to stay stuck, frozen.

Perhaps I'm frightened to leave 2008? And I'm still here, four years on, watching the Olympics again. A good night for the British track and field team.

Same house, same car, ever-so slightly different job. Actually, I do seem to have an entirely different husband, although he is the exact same person according to his paperwork. But that's another story altogether.

So many things change around me that are beyond my control. I am buying school uniforms for Jessica and my heart snaps at the small grey skirt in a size three and I feel that this entire world has simply run mad. Why am I doing this? Sending my children off to be looked after by other people to pay for a house that I'm not even that keen on. But the options seem to shut themselves down one by one. Until I'm left here. Not one to run off and join the circus.

I keep thinking that I should try to change  . . . something?

Because it's nice to have a plan. It's good to look forward. I always seemed to be scheming away at something when I was younger.

And because that I feel that I should have changed. That my first daughter should have left a mark on me. I don't have a tattoo or a scar. Nothing at all. Not even a stretch mark (bizarrely I only have stretch marks on my knees? perhaps I just have very fat knees?)

That I should be a hermit, or a drunk. A saint or a terrible sinner. I should still be wearing black. That I should be kind. Softly spoken. Or hard and fierce, itching for a fight. Because of her.

But, because of me, I'm exactly the same.
I match her, in her static-ness.

Older. Flabbier. Tired and looking for a way out. Reluctant to change anything. Scared to let go of anything. House, car, job, the way I do my hair, the same clothes purchased in a larger size now. Writing and re-writing the same old lines. That I miss her. That I love her. Still here, lurking about on the internet, muttering to myself.

I look at all the time that might be in front of me and sometimes I feel tired and frightened. That I don't have the energy to keep fighting to hold on to what I have, let alone try and make much needed improvements.

I desperately want another baby. I've never had to face Georgina's death without another baby. Sometimes with a desperately ill baby, sometimes with a baby that was just a hope. But always with a baby, or close to a baby. To hide behind, to fend off the memories of her death with, to hold close to me. Those babies, all three of them, that have so consumed me that I'm not entirely certain if there will be anyone left behind them. Just a pale ghost, a ghost of a mother. The mother who writes here. A mother who will never be, Georgina's mother.

And I think . . .

I should, I should . . . .

work harder,
try my hand at something else,
take a class,
make a friend,
go to bed earlier,
stop poot-ling around on the internet when I should be asleep,
stop using words like poot-ling and flim flam and toodle pip  - which century do I live in precisely?
drink less,
eat less,
exercise more,
read more books,
read fewer blogs,
talk to my husband more often,
talk to my friends more often,
talk to my family more often,
be kinder,
keep the house cleaner,
stay on top of the laundry,
wash my car,
weed the garden

And the list looks the same as it did before Georgina died (with the exception of internet and blogging related entries) and I find that I just don't have the heart for it. I don't have the heart for reinvention. I think that I will remain the person that I was when Georgina died, to some extent. The years pile up and it seems to be costing me all my effort just to stay still. I don't even seem to have the heart to cut my hair.

Maybe next month?

Oh Georgina. My poor little half-dead baby.
I keep meaning to look at your photographs but I'm frightened of them now.
To see your eyes looking at me, your dear blue eyes.
Your little legs.
I'm sorry that it went so wrong. That you will always be the same. Never change. And, as a result, I think part of me stays the same too. In sympathy with you perhaps?