We’re on the sunny beach at Sitges. It’s 2013. My seven-year-old son splashes in the shallows. To my left is a bottle of hot mineral water and a packet of sandy crisps. To my right is the absence.
Emily Morris shares her perspective on single parenting
The absence loves idyll. That’s when it slinks in and sits down next to me, uninvited, like a pervert on a bus. Birthdays are a particular favourite; it arrives in the evenings, when my son is asleep and the balloons are shrunken and I’m alone on the couch, picking at cake.
My book is in my hand, crumpled with sun cream and sweat, but I can’t read it because I mustn’t take my eyes off Tom. When he goes out too far, I beckon him desperately back, flapping my hand violently. I can’t go in because I’m guarding my handbag, my phone, the euros. The precious things; none of them as precious as him.
I’d love to run in there and hitch Tom onto my back, for the pair of us to cut through the water like a magnificent raft. That’s how single parenthood feels, sometimes: as if we are a formidable team afloat no matter what. That I can do anything with my son by my side, or on my back. That it’s OK that his father told me he was infertile then did a runner. We can do this!
But sometimes it is lonely and frightening and tough. The fact often hits me just before I fall asleep: I might never fall in love again; I might never have another baby. It jolts me awake like one of those half-asleep dreams in which you fall over. Afterwards, the absence lies next to me in bed, and then I’m awake for the night.
Since I became pregnant with Tom at the age of twenty-one, I’ve been blagging it. Other mums-to-be swatted up on the part about giving birth. They attended classes with their partners and learned breathing exercises and made birth plans. I didn’t want to know.
In the aftermath of the birth, the health visitor insisted I attend mother-and-baby groups, but they only made me feel more inadequate. I got a glimpse of another world, in which women had people carriers, houses and husbands. I was single, sharing my teenage bedroom at my mum’s house with my baby, hoisting my huge pram onto irregular buses in order to get around. At one group, when I explained I didn’t have a partner, a woman laughed and asked me whether my child was the result of the immaculate conception.
If I had a partner, we could do shifts with the reading and the swimming. If I had a partner, we could stay up late with a decent bottle of wine and I wouldn’t neck cartons of Don Simon sangría by myself. If I had a partner, we could take turns to cook tea and clean the strangers’ kitchen afterwards. Actually, if I had a partner, we’d have probably been able to afford to rent an apartment to ourselves, instead of a windowless room in someone else’s home. If I had a partner, maybe he’d be strong enough to carry Tom back from the Metro station when he was weary at the end of the day. If —
‘Mum, can we make a sandcastle?’
Tom bounds towards me, slick from the sea.
I can’t remember how to make sandcastles and we have no bucket or spade, but somehow I can’t say no. I start to scrape clumps of sand with my fingers. It gathers under my nails and I know I’ll be eating grains of it later.
‘How long will it take?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know.’
It doesn’t look like a sandcastle at the moment; it’s more like a burial mound.
The tide is creeping closer and the sun is dipping down towards the horizon. This whole exercise feels increasingly futile. The mound is now a funny shape: high and straight at the front with a sloping back. I try to carve a moat around its edge, improvising with a sandal.
‘It looks like a hippo,’ Tom says.
‘A hippo?’
He’s right: it does. Quickly, I add nostrils and ears and eyes. Now it is uncanny.
The light is beautiful and the hippo glows like copper. I photograph my son standing next to it, his beach towel slung on his tiny shoulder, watching the pink sky.
Tom is thirteen now and I am single. I did have a male partner, for a while. It was sweet for as long as it worked. But very few things are permanent, I have learned. And that’s fine, because not everything is supposed to be. I don’t own a house or a car or have a husband, but I am happier and more comfortable than I have ever been. At night, I sink into my marshmallow bed, spread out and rest easy. The absence moved out years ago, and it’s never coming back.
Abridged from ‘The Absence’ by Emily Morris, which is published in the collection ‘The Best, Most Awful Job: Twenty Writers Talk Honestly About Motherhood’ (out now in paperback, Elliott & Thompson).