The dismantling

Falling to pieces at forty.

The extract below is from the draft manuscript of Break Me in Whole, my memoir about my relationship with my body.

At the time I am describing I was an exhausted mum, my beautiful boys were four and two years old. I had recently sold the jewellery business I had founded and run for nine years, because, hard as I tried, I couldn’t reconcile the demands of my roles a business owner and a mother any longer. I had also been diagnosed with a liver condition that couldn’t be treated. It had dramatically changed the shape of my body, causing strangers to regularly comment, and, disturbingly, even reach out and touch me.

I felt like I was losing everything that defined me. I grieved, hard. But I came to understand that what I am describing below wasn’t a loss, it was a liberation. It was a painful but essential undoing that I needed to go through to reemerge as a truer, fuller version of myself. This is the story I am exploring, and I am going to tell it in full in my book.

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… I didn’t want to think about clothes, because they were now a source of sadness and regret for me. And I didn’t want to attract attention to myself anymore, I wanted to hide, so I found some black leggings and baggy sweatshirts online, bought three of each, and wore them mindlessly on rotation. The less time I had to spend agonising in front of a wardrobe full of my old clothes, or thinking about what I looked like, the better.

Then I turned forty, and bit by bit, I dismantled my younger self.

I didn’t stop colouring my hair suddenly. A twenty-year highlighting habit is hard to break. But at each appointment I’d reduce the amount of foils - just a half head, just a hairline - and I’d stretch the time between appointments, ten weeks, twelve weeks then longer. I’d cancel an appointment due to overwhelm and then not bother to reschedule. I resented using up those precious babysitting favours to find myself stuck in a chair doing nothing. Plus, I felt it was prudent to hang onto any money I was still generating, hairdressing felt like an unnecessary expense when I spent all my waking hours with my hair dragged up in a scrunchie. Within a year or two, I’d evolved completely from sunny blonde to my natural dark mouse colour. It was such a relief to shake off the burden of being blonde with all its implied glamour, like shrugging off a heavy fur coat that was making me hot and sweaty now that I was riding the tube rather than a limo. I felt invisible without it and this was a relief, because I was no longer a blonde that didn’t deliver on all the good stuff that was meant to come with being blonde. I was no longer a disappointing blonde.

The life-long commitment to a relentless cycle of nail painting stopped too. Perfect, chip-free nails were kind of my thing. But oh, the putting it on, taking it off, putting it on, taking it off. For years I had carefully timed each pedicure to align with the manicure, so I could take the varnish off my toes without destroying the varnish on my fingers. Finding headspace to plan and time to execute these mammoth weekly sessions was out of the question, especially as I would then have to block out the following two hours for the varnish to dry without having to wrangle a toddler into pyjamas or extract a piece of Duplo from somewhere unfortunate. But if I waited until the boys were in bed to start the nail routine, I was so tired I’d struggle to keep my eyes open, and have to scrunch one closed to focus on my hands. In the morning I’d wake up with nails imprinted with the weave of my sheets, and have to start all over again. So I gave up.

It didn’t matter how I looked, anyway, because I didn’t go anywhere, apart from the library, the swings, Fun in the Foam (a soft play that had an Ibiza 1990 ring to the name) and the supermarket. Anyone who has cared for small children knows how the daily minutiae of dressing, feeding and nurturing little people will balloon to fill the gaping hours between daybreak and nighttime in the most bewildering way. Knowing you will have to navigate a series of stumbling blocks and booby traps from one end of the day to the other means expectations of what is possible have to be drastically reduced compared to life pre-children. One goal each day is realistic: Post letter. Buy milk. Get birthday card. That kind of thing. I’d load the boys into the double buggy and push them into town. Post the letter, bring back the milk. Dressed in my black uniform, I was a stage-hand going invisibly about my day, moving the scenery and props of my life from place to place.

Early one morning I sat on my yoga mat, dust motes dancing in the sunlight streaming through the window, and I thought about my boys, as I so often did. They were all consuming; I thought about them when I was with them, and I thought about them when I was not. The paradox of parenting small children is real: they need me so much and I crave a break from the responsibility, but when I’m not with them I ache for them. My love for them is stronger than anything, and that makes me more vulnerable than anything. I sat cross-legged with my hands in my lap and closed my eyes, releasing tears rich with complicated emotions that washed down my face. I am utterly, utterly lost. My boys are so amazing and I am so shit. All that was ever good about me now walks around outside my body in them, I am nothing. I am empty. I thought about how incredible they were and another boom of blinding bright love for them struck me again. But a strange thing happened. In my emptiness and stillness I absorbed the residual warmth and light from the flash of love at my very core. It was fierce and it burned there for a moment before fading. For a few seconds, I felt the power of my own love directed not outwards, but inwards. I felt what it feels like to be loved by me, and it was glorious and radiant and blissful, and then it was gone. But I had felt it. I knew it existed.