The Mother of Your Children

Letter to a friend gone too soon…

Dear Chris,

How strange to be writing this from your house. From the house in Northamptonshire you bought with Jen, was it just before Ivy was born? If you’re wondering why I’ve come again so soon to the UK since my visit last year, which came in lieu of your funeral missed because of Covid, it’s thanks to the good fortune of a conference where I just gave a talk at a university (Warwick) that happened to be around the corner, practically, from your house, which is to say from Jen and your girls. Talk about things happening for a reason.

Over my weekend stay here I managed to see your parents and your sister, Lucy, and her girls, all of which was lovely, having a laugh and a bit of a cry with your folks, and them taking me to the bench by the bandstand that the school dedicated to you was a particular highlight. But most of all getting quality time with Jen (nights staying up too late with homemade vegan poke bowls and good cold beer and the kind of free-ranging conversation that has no end) and with your girls (play room games, park hangouts, in their bedroom story time) was truly special. I want you to know, as I also made clear to Jen, there is not the slightest sense of duty in this, in case you worried. This is not a sacrifice for me, nor is it in any way a form of charity. No, it is largely selfish because Jen and I have become close as friends since your passing and because of it. What can I say, she’s that fucking cool, mate (though her potty mouth is waaay worse than mine!). Being with your darling little girls at these precious ages (four and two) is special in the extreme. This thanks to their mother who is raising them not just with the utmost love, but with wisdom and empathy, with an unbelievable amount of both patience and devotion. A friend once said of the first grade teacher in charge of their six-year-old, that really all that teacher needed to do was love their child, the rest was secondary. And oh my how loved these girls are. But oh man, how much further with it than that does your beloved wife take it. I’m awestruck by who this person is, Chris. As I told Jen out at the park with the girls earlier today, I am amazed at how there is no yelling in this house. Now I realize I am a guest over a short weekend stay, but I’ve stayed over at enough homes with children to know: spend morning, noon and night with any family, but families with toddlers (and maybe teenagers?) most of all, and the truth comes out. And it did, and it was this:

A woman loses her husband to a horrific cancer not six months after the shock diagnosis, neither he nor Jen could have begun to imagine was coming for a person who never smoked, who ran marathons, who ate well and drank moderately at most. You were forty-two for fuck’s sake. Your oldest but two and a half. Your baby was three months old. Just repeating those details to people in my life … To raise a baby, as every parent knows, is for most the hardest thing they’ve encountered to that point in their lives until, if they are so lucky, and interested, a second comes along and then, in those early years (the first five at least), the work is more than doubled. To do this with a partner, with a husband, especially one as competent, committed and stand-out as you were, Chris, is an untold challenge. To do this alone, while grieving the love of your life, as Jen describes you, is several orders of magnitude harder than anything I’ve come up against in my life. To do it badly would be expected. To do it with love, if much chaos, a hectic and never cleaned house, much takeout food and too many screens for the kids, would honestly be impressive enough. But to do it as Jen has/is — to raise your girls with the patience and loving care of a nursery-school teacher-come-Merry-Poppins-level super mom (albeit one who swears like an English sailor after the kids have gone down), I’d hardly believe this seeming fantasy had I not lived amongst it for three-day stays, two years running.

Let me be clear, Chris, Jen is sweet to your girls but not beyond reason. She’s empathetic to their needs, to their very particular (and different!) stages of childhood, but not without limits. This is house with discipline that rarely requires a raised voice. A house kept so spotlessly clean and yet a spilled drink is not the end of the world (Mendelsohn take note). A house where three vegan meals a day are prepared by mum, the same mum who keeps that house cleaned, and engages with her kids, plays and interacts and reads and role plays for most of the hours of her long days. For Jen, letting her eldest watch more than thirty minutes of cartoons, while her toddler sister naps and mum is just trying to clean up whilst also playing catch up with her guest, felt a downright indulgence. In a house where the girls have set routines that help delineate clear rules, set bedtimes, and yet also open the door for them to create, to play, to hear stories and tell their own. This all by a mother who has made raising them her vocation. Not uncommon to any devoted mother, but profound in one who has been through the tragedy Jen has. To see her devote herself as mum, as keeper of one helluva beautiful home, she is taking on these challenges like the great English stage actor might tackle their career - with undue time and attention. Ambition on the largest scale if only that it occurs largely behind closed doors in her “small world” as Jen has described it to me. That is to say, like a great stage actor, minus the ego-stroking benefits of a rapt audience, an awards show pageant, a big salary.

In short, Chris, I am in awe.

What I witnessed was no act. Nor, do I believe, is it a grieving woman’s escape. While I know not all days, not all months, are equal in Jen’s life - some are just shit, as she’d not hesitate to admit - nonetheless, just two years since you’ve gone, Chris, this is a woman both vibrant and strong. Your girls are not the least hard done by. Here is a woman, the one you married, who has faced one of life’s greatest tragedies, beyond what many could endure, and I do not believe I exaggerate when I say that seeing her with her girls, with the care for her beautiful home, for the food she lovingly prepares, I spent the weekend observing all the ways I could learn from her how to improve as a parent, as a person. It’s easy to forget amongst all the sweet nurturing maternal kindness what a hard fucking worker Mary Poppins was. You don’t get to sing, discipline children and umbrella fly that good without a whole lot of training. You don’t get to run a house like Jen does without a pro athlete’s day-in, day-out grind.

This weekend I told both Jen and your sister, Lucy, that what’s often hardest for me now that you’re gone, is my failure in conveying to others what a superb human being you were. The challenge is that we have a habit of sanctifying those that are gone, especially those gone too soon. Except in your case, Bailey-san, your extraordinary humility, your off-the-charts EQ, your wisdom, your humour, your love, and of course as headmaster of a private school, your leadership, these things are as in true in memory as they were when you were alive. How strange that it took your sudden death to learn that so much of what made you a superlative man - one of the best I’ve ever known - is equally true of the woman you married. The mother of your children.

OLD FUN