Jaclyn Moriarty

I took deep, shining breaths of it all, and let myself be both sad and glad, the way you’re supposed to, and felt my lost birthdays, all the lost birthdays stacking up behind me, all the anger and the anguish, the terror and the hope, all the harshness and the sweetness, the spoon a silver glint against the white.

See how you even shorten the word ‘babysitter’ like that? The casual, the abbreviated, the breezy: pop it in the freezer! jump in a cab! bang it in the microwave! shoot me an email! throw the kid in the car! Easy, breezy, bung-it-all-in-there, Jamie Oliver-style. As if the words themselves, the quick breeze of them, will do the job for you, will themselves tackle this relentless, this exhausting life.

We shouldn’t have children, it’s impossible, but if you want children, and you can’t have them, then that’s its own impossible. It’s impossible to lose them, but it happens, it happened to my mother, it’s happening all the time.

There is something smug about silence, or sad and pale and wistful, something lazy about it. Implacable, like death. But silence is the pos sibility of noise. Death is ear-splitting, it’s shattering with absence; over time, it’s quieter

We expect the four classic elements of balance, restraint, form and clarity.’ Their words fell beautifully, like stars.

I suspected other people were better at living than me. Did others elbow their way through fog, rising out of it some days, relief blending with terror of its return?

Maybe, by a certain age, we have all encountered some impossible loss, or at least the accumulation of small sufferings.

During sad patches, you are expected to wrench, drag, extract, syphon, tweeze some happiness out. ‘Black dogs’ are what Winston Churchill called the sad patches, but dogs are too small. They’re elephants.

Disjunctions, miscommunications, conversations at cross purposes, pretension, artifice, vicious jibes and, most especially, silence, all these things excoriate your soul.

As if the ‘real’ problems don’t have solutions too. Stop basing your decisions on profit margins. Stop selling guns. Stop flying your drones and your private jets. Stop stamping out your cigarettes on other people’s flesh. Let the lost and broken people into your big wealthy country. Let the children into their mother’s arms, stop with the shiny, plastic things. Toss these weapons into the garbage. Pop these frightened people into a warm house. It’s simple. Easy. Stop complaining.