When I was contemplating whether I should try to have a child, at a point in life when the question was close enough to being biologically decided for me, I would often find myself thinking about it on the train, or on the Tube in London. I’d be returning from somewhere in the evening, usually: another lovely dinner with friends, another interesting play, another fascinating cultural event in the world city that is my adopted home. Another good, cozy, predictable, controllable evening, planned and executed and enjoyed with the freedom I then had to do all three.
I didn’t need to have a child to fix something. If anything, I think I hoped to become unfixed, disrupted. I craved something that wasn’t set. Approaching middle age, you glance out to the horizon and realise with a shock how it has narrowed while your back was turned. Bring another human being into the world, and suddenly it’s all blown wide open, with everything to play for. Life is full of surprises again, replete with situations you haven’t encountered before. A winding path full of novelty stretches ahead as far as the eye can see.
So I went for it. For most of the time, fortunate as we are, it’s been a journey of near-unmitigated joy.
When I and my classmates were ‘tweens’ ourselves - that strange period between the end of primary school and the start of adolescence proper - my middle-school music teacher cast us in an abbreviated production of Stop the World, I Want to Get Off, a very British, rather bizarre, circus-themed 1961 musical featuring a disgruntled clown who kept breaking the fourth wall and addressing the audience every time something went wrong in his life, which was often.
My memory of the songs and plot have faded, but the sentiment of the title remains and is resurgent. Watching their mysterious, alien, hormone-ridden 12-year-olds performing Stop the World, I Want to Get Off in 1982, I can only imagine our parents resonating with it then, and they didn’t even have to worry about vaping and Snapchat and kids being able to get on the Tube by themselves and go to their friend’s house when they’re mad at you, because it was suburban southern Indiana and if you grounded your kid you knew there wasn’t very much they could do about it. I wasn’t even allowed to ride my bike across Middle Road to get to the Dairy Queen.
Now I’ve been reminded that Stop the World, I Want to Get Off (With You) is an Arctic Monkeys song from 2013, which I probably knew before, but it’s been driven home to me because my kid is somehow currently obsessed with that and other Arctic Monkeys tracks that were on the radio when she was an infant and well before, and how? TikTok and YouTube, I guess. What they’re watching on TikTok and YouTube is another thing to keep you up at night if you’re a parent. She ripped all the anime posters off her walls - I guess she’s not going to own an anime shop when she grows up anymore - in preparation for the Arctic Monkeys and AC/DC and Nirvana posters she hopes she’s getting for Christmas.
Six months ago I was convinced she was never going to read a book with paragraphs in it again as long as she lived. I’ve now been whisked down the track to the next station, the next set of things to fret about.
Until very recently, I was full steam ahead on writing my third book, the manuscript of which I submitted a couple of weeks ago. I was so looking forward to that deadline, which I could both not imagine meeting and couldn’t imagine not meeting, and which I knew in my heart I’d observe. I knew that by the 28th of November, it’d be done and dusted, a draft polished to a high sheen for my editor’s delectation, and that I’d be able to exhale. Everything would be okay after that. Things would settle down.
So I exhaled, and 24 hours later all the parenting worries and dilemmas that had been waiting in the wings while I’d been performing my role as a writer came raging out of the shadows of stage left and pounced on me. And now I’m the fucking clown breaking the fourth wall, a device I’ve always hated, and pleading to any audience members who’ll listen to take pity on me.
Stop the world, I want to get off.
The thing is, every time we hit a new phase, a new incarnation - especially one that scares me - I think it’s the final station, the destination, the forever. Intellectually, I know how crazy that is. Has experience taught me nothing?
When I was a teenager, I was a good kid. At the same time, I did things at that age that were absolutely daft. Most of the time I had no idea why I was doing them. I squirrelled myself away in my closet, like my kid sleeps under her bed. I wrote on my hands constantly, like she does.
For everything that happens, I lose my shit, and then I remember some correlate from my own history. Who knows what else is to come?
Sometime during my teenage period, for absolutely no reason I can figure out, I went to the garage and found a can of spray paint. It was touch-up paint for my father’s car, so it was hard and glossy, like enamel. Having noted their locations with a pencil, I removed each poster and artwork from the walls of my room and spray-painted words underneath - gothy, weird, vampiric, punk stuff. I can’t recall exactly what I wrote, but I’m pretty sure that drinking blood featured. Then I covered them up with the posters again. Sometimes, when I knew no one was around, I’d take down the posters and sit surrounded by my scrawls like it was some middle-class pretend crack den. At some point, I got thousands of safety-pins from somewhere and strung them into chains that festooned my room like a gigantic metal spider’s web.
Who knows what satisfaction I derived from this? I was a child with absolutely no real-world problems, no adverse childhood experiences, and no depredations. I was just full of hormones and angst and the desire to disrupt. Comfort and ease were too comfortable and easy. I was angry and sad for reasons I didn’t understand and wanted to smash shit up.
I wish that these memories would make it easier for me to empathise. Sometimes they do, but I guess I also wish that my empathy would do a better job of helping me calm down. But everything feels like the end of the world, and god, some days I want it to stop so I can get off, just for a moment.
When she was only small, and sweet, and no trouble whatsoever, just innocent blue eyes and soft wispy curls, we visited our friends in the Yorkshire Dales. We took the train back to London from the station in Dent. Dent is the highest mainline station in England, at 1150 feet above sea level, and having boarded the train for the capital you go through the most stunning scenery on the Settle to Carlisle line, beloved of rail enthusiasts, who do not count me amongst their number.
I’m not sure, but I think the photo above - which I didn’t take - might actually be of Dent. I remember how quiet it was, just like in that picture. We were there early, and utterly alone. The high, country air was sweet, and all around was silence. I could breathe, and felt blissfully peaceful as I watched her noodling around the platform, investigating the posters in the waiting areas, commentating on them in her reedy little voice. I was perfectly happy, and it seemed like things would be that way forever.
But that, like all the others since and all the ones to come, was only an interim station.