Helsinki

A new way to be alone

I was having a really tough day with the baby (oh my GOD, not ‘the baby’ again, you’re thinking? Well, yes, that’s what I think sometimes too, when I wake up!), and around lunchtime I was struggling to put a new nappy on him, because he hates to have his nappy changed and so he requires full immersion in ***screentime*** in order for me to successfully and non-traumatically change his nappy, and we’ve lost (the baby has lost) the TV remote and so turning on the TV and finding the sufficiently stupor-inducing thing on Youtube to show to the baby in order to clean his stinky bottom has become more difficult. And as I was struggling to do this, let’s be honest, not thoroughly enjoyable or rewarding task — a task I had already performed JUST MOMENTS EARLIER by the way — while accompanied by the sounds of Hey Bear’s ‘Summer Dance Party’, the sky still steel grey outside, I noticed that my phone was ringing and that it was the nursery and it was then that I remembered that I had, upon realising that I needed some time alone, booked him into nursery ALL DAY THAT DAY. Somebody else could have been taking care of the baby, and I could have been doing literally anything else, but I had forgotten, so preoccupied was I with taking care of the baby.

I started this newsletter several years ago and called it How To Be Alone because I found being alone very difficult but a fortune teller had told me that that was how I was destined to live my life. In order to prove this fortune teller wrong, and because of pre-existing personality defects, I tried to finagle an almost-constant social life through parties, ill-considered and sometimes arbitrarily allocated infatuations (both romantic and platonic) and work in the service industry. If I woke up alone, I knew it was only a matter of hours before this intolerable situation rectified itself. I kept this going for as long as I was able and then decided that I needed to learn how to be alone, if not how to be entirely content alone, then how, at least, to be present.

Then I had a baby. Since then, time alone has been thin on the ground. My tiny son, sweet tumbling shadow, demands my company, constantly, holding a cartoonish mirror up to my own lack of self-sufficiency as he throws himself upon the ground to screamingly protest at a lack of attention. When I am not with him I think about him. He is present in my thoughts, alive in my blood, I check my phone, I wash his clothes, I make his food, I listen for the sound of him waking, I anticipate the next moment he will need something from me and what it is that he might then need.

How to be alone, then? We have to invent a new way.

On our way to Finland last week, my boyfriend and I watched the countryside disappearing through the train window as we left Kent, rapeseed fields in their high, incredible yellow, and I said without thinking, really: I’ll never go for a walk by myself again. This meaning long walks with no destination in mind, hot aimless walks by myself looking for tiny miracles, walks with detours through unfamiliar grasses and across thin brooks and into the woods, time spent by myself. Instead, I thought, I would be with my child, asking questions, waiting patiently, assessing risks that never would have occurred to me, going slowly, talking where I would have been silent, feeling a need other than my own in every accompanied step. It is nice to think of these walks that we might take. And yet, looking out across the fields, I felt the ache of losing something.

We spent a beautiful few days in Helsinki, together in a tiny flat, enjoying the baby in his brightly coloured snowsuit, eating handfuls of cabbage pie with gusto, screwing up his angelic face as the huge flakes brushed his pink cheeks, his extraordinary eyelashes. Then, one day, with my boyfriend at work, the baby asleep in the pram, I took the tram to an unfamiliar destination, the snow very thick on the ground despite it being spring, and I started to walk. I pushed the pram through thick, grey, freezing slush, across thin, white, snow-powdered ice, in my impractical but lovely wool coat, along paths not meant for prams, up hills and slowly down them again, the bare trees’ black, spidered branches against the blue sky, the frozen sea cracking in the sunlight. He slept and I walked, seeing new things and saying nothing about them to anybody, just swallowing each thing that I saw whole, greedy for it all, nourished, fattened by it, I’m doing it, I thought to myself, I’m going for a walk by myself!