As I put my key in the door, I noticed a wonderful scent wafting out from my apartment. It smelled like the best meal my mother, or indeed anyone’s mother had ever made. Suddenly I was ravenous. I opened the door and my youngest daughter raced up to greet me with a huge hug.
“We’ve been having the best time, Mummy. And we made you a surprise. Almost all by ourselves.”
She tugged my arm and I followed her into the living room.
“Surprise!”
My eldest daughter jumped up from the table where she was adjusting a place setting.
“This is your happy birthday dinner.”
She was practically glowing with excitement.
“We told Mrs. Brinkley that it was your birthday and she helped us to make all of your favorite foods. We even made a cake.”
“A cake that you’d better get back to decorating if you want your mother to eat it tonight, my little angels.”
Mrs. Brinkley stood in the doorway, wiping her hands on a floury apron. The light from the kitchen cast a halo-like glow around her head and I smiled inwardly. Of course. Now I was seeing angels everywhere. My daughters rushed off to the kitchen and my benefactor gestured to the table, set with an unfamiliar but beautiful china and strewn with gardenias and white roses.
“I hope you don’t mind but the children were quite desperate to make a special treat for you and I just didn’t have the heart to say no to them.”
Her kindly eyes surveyed my face with a touch of concern.
“No, of course not, it’s a lovely surprise,” I lied, wishing the children were in bed and I could just sit down and dwell on the injustices of my life.
I reached for my purse.
“But you must tell me what I owe you for the flowers and the dinner ingredients, and of course the babysitting.”
I knew full well that a bit of leftover roast chicken, some mango yoghurt and a mangy salad – the contents of my fridge the day before shopping day – were hardly likely to be the basis of the mouthwatering scents that were wafting into the living room and making my stomach growl in anticipatory delight.
Mrs. Brinkley looked horrified.
“Of course not, my dear, it’s only some things I had floating around at home. And I hope you don’t mind but the girls asked me if I would join you tonight.”
She looked wistful for a moment.
“But perhaps you’d rather be alone with your lovely little family?”
I smiled at the sweet old dear who had clearly gone to a lot of trouble, suddenly happy that for once we would have another adult at the table with us, not just me and the girls.
“I would be thrilled if you would join us. I hardly know how to thank you for taking the girls this afternoon, let alone cooking us what smells like an amazing meal.”
I looked at the table.
“And loaning us your crockery. It’s absolutely gorgeous.”
She fussed with the front of her apron.
“It’s very precious to me and I’m thrilled to have a reason to use it. I’ll tell you about it later but for now I must go and supervise my charges. Why don’t you sit down and rest until dinner is ready?”
The idea was so alien to me that I obeyed out of sheer curiosity. This was the evil hour, when my body was normally running on third or fourth steam. The hour of cooking dinner while making school lunches for the following day while emptying the dishwasher whilst supervising homework and piano practice whilst answering emails from clients whilst washing sports uniforms for last minute soccer meets. A single, working mum always had something to do, even if it was just watering the plants, but as I looked around me, it seemed that I had suddenly been made redundant.
The kitchen was clearly out of bounds and anyway, dinner was being made by someone else. Due to a school trip to the museum the next day, lunches were unnecessary. The washing was in the machine – I could hear it running. I’d finished the ironing last night. We’d done the homework and piano practice earlier that afternoon. I could have sworn that the house had been vacuumed and dusted. I stuck an experimental finger into the soil of the house plant next to my chair and was surprised to see that not only was the earth damp, the leaves had also been polished and trimmed.
I sat back in the lounger and closed my eyes for a moment. “Look for signs,” the crazy old tattoo man had instructed. But this wasn’t a sign, it was a blessing, and I for one was grateful. Only this morning, in a moment of soul-shredding frustration, hadn’t I begged the powers that be – the ones I didn’t believe in – to send me someone to lighten my load and share at least one dinner with, someone who would help instead of add to my current exhaustion levels. Hey, maybe I should have asked to win lotto too.
A gentle kiss on the cheek and a faint giggle dragged me out of a strangely deep dreamy doze in which I was being pursued by a crowd of unicorns screaming “you can do it, you can do it” while I ran as fast as I could up the mountainside.
“Mummy, it’s dinner time. You have to wake up.”
My youngest daughter, Grace, now dressed up in her ballet clothes and a pair of white feathered angel wings, pulled gently on my hair. I stood unsteadily, still a little in the grip of my dream, and walked over to the chair my eldest daughter Lillia was holding out to me. She too, was dressed in a long, ethereal dress of some gossamer material, and wearing angel wings with a silvery white glitter on them.
I gazed down at the gorgeous plates, set traditionally for a multi-course meal. They were really elegant, very simple, very good china with only a faint decoration around the outside of the plates. I looked again. Unicorns. Lots of elegant little unicorns dancing around the edges of the plates and bowls, the light catching the silver of their horns. I could have sworn they were moving, but then again, I thought I’d seen my life on a television in a tattoo parlor that very afternoon, not to mention a rather large unicorn that spoke to me. All this without wine, too.
As I was contemplating the mysteries of the dishes, Mrs. Brinkley bustled in, carrying a largish crock-pot with steam billowing out from under the lid.
“The girls told me you adored lobster bisque, my dear, and so that’s what we made.”
She placed the pot gently in the middle of the table and laid an intricate silver ladle next to it.
“Just as well I had some lobsters at home. Imagine if you’d preferred steak, we would really have been stuck then.”
She laughed merrily and the girls joined in, as if everyone kept fresh lobster in their kitchens in case a neighbor suddenly needed a birthday dinner. As Mrs. Brinkley sat down next to Grace, I noticed that she too had angel wings on her back. Small, elegant ones made from tulle and lace, but angel wings nonetheless.
Before I could ask the silly question, everyone raised their glasses to me.
“Happy birthday Mummy,” cried the girls, as Mrs. Brinkley beamed her benevolence.
I looked at their joyous faces and every bit of tension in my body melted away. Who cared if the world was going to hell in a hand basket? I had my magnificent, healthy, happy, loving daughters, and that was truly all that mattered.
By letting us down yet again, my ex-husband had done me the greatest favor of all. He’d given me the opportunity to enjoy my children, something I did so very rarely these days. I cooked for them, cleaned up after them, worried about them, helped them, took excellent care of them, but I couldn’t remember the last time I simply spent time being with them. Not the quality time accorded by my driving them somewhere whilst hectoring them about piano practice or good manners. Just sitting, listening, talking, sharing a meal. Allowing them the joy of doing something for me.
I listened to them chattering away about how much fun it was cooking and cleaning, especially knowing it was all for me. How come I didn’t feel that happy when I was cooking and cleaning for them? Pushing the vacuum cleaner around generally involved fantasies of full time help or lottery wins for me – I don’t think I had ever once run around, overflowing with passion, simply thrilled to be removing the dust and t
oast crumbs from the rugs of our lives.
More often than not, I did my daily and weekly chores in a fit of barely suppressed fury and resentment. Certainly because I generally had far too many things to do to actually spend time doing any one thing properly. And perhaps because I resented doing the grunt work that I had once paid someone else to do for me. But that wasn’t the real reason. The real reason was that I had forgotten for whom I was doing all of this. I remembered back to those extraordinary, unforgettable days when I’d discovered I was pregnant, and how I swore to myself and my unborn children that I would willingly give my life over to taking care of them for as long as they desired. I was the one who offered, I was the one who brought them into the world. So why the bad attitude now?
Across from me on the other side of the table, Grace was chopping bread as if carving a diamond. Every slice was perfectly cut, and when she was finished, she arranged them on the plate like a florist arranging blooms. She looked so pleased with herself, and the bread looked so good that I couldn’t resist either the bread or her smile as she proffered the plate. It was just your usual bread but I swear that tonight, it tasted different, better, sweeter.
To my left, my other daughter Lilia was gently tipping her plate this way and that, watching the unicorns dance in the soft candlelight. She was totally and utterly lost to the glittery creatures. I watched her for another moment, marveling at her beauty and wondering what was going on in that golden head of hers, when Mrs. Brinkley spoke.
“Shall I serve the birthday girl first?”
She leaned over and poured a healthy serve of the fragrant soup into my bowl, then into the girls’ bowls, and finally, served herself. Before we could begin, she cleared her throat and timidly asked if she could say a blessing.
“If you don’t mind, of course, it’s just that it seems the appropriate thing to do…”
I didn’t mind. On very special occasions, like Christmas or Easter, we gave a prayer of thanks – and no, I don’t know who we were giving it to - for loving family and good food, and today seemed as special an occasion as any.
We bowed our heads and closed our eyes, and listened to the comforting tones of our new friend as she began by blessing the food on the table before us.
“May this meal feed our bodies so that they may remain strong, may this meal soothe our minds, so that they remain open to the many possibilities of life. May this meal be the first of many to be shared amongst new friends, a chance to nourish each other with sustenance and beauty. And finally, may others enjoy the same bounty as us tonight. Amen.”
We all said “amen” and began to eat. The bisque was amazing, just the right side of creamy and fragrant with the particularly pungent odors of the lobsters. The flesh was tender and sweetly fresh, and I realized that this was undoubtedly one of the best meals I had ever tasted. As I listened to the girls and Mrs. Brinkley nattering away about cooking, I thought about her blessing, and about my peculiar day.
The events of the afternoon were beyond strange, and now, with a little distance, I could see that some of the more difficult moments were, well, too odd to be anything but the truth. I knew I wasn’t going crazy, so if I saw a unicorn, well then, I saw a unicorn. As my good friend Ombeline often said, “reality comes in many guises”. What was more troubling was the little film of my life. Looking back was one thing, but seeing myself so tense or distracted all the time frightened me. Was I like that, not ever really in the moment, only worrying about what had been or what was to come?
“So Mum, what are your wishes this year?”
Grace was looking at me expectantly. It was our tradition, on the night of our birthday day, to tell what we hoped to accomplish, see or do during the year to come.
Mrs. Brinkley and Lillia looked up from their conversation, and I smiled beatifically at them all.
“Well, you know, I want my family to be happy and healthy…”
Everyone groaned, even Mrs. Brinkley.
“Mum, that’s like saying you want world peace.”
Lillia frowned at me.
“You always teach us that words are important, and to be precise, but right now you’re just telling us…” she wound off, searching for her own precise word. “Cotton wool. Or that plastic packing stuff they put around fragile things. You’re not telling us a truth.”
She said the word with emphasis and looked at me with a challenge I was unused to seeing in her eyes.
Mrs. Brinkley smiled at me and said, more gently.
“She has a point. What do you really want? Imagine that you only had one year left on earth, how would you like to spend it?”
She’d nailed it, the exact reason behind the tradition. When I was twelve, my father died suddenly in a car accident, and immediately I lost all of the great things we were going to do. We’d had so many plans, but he was just starting his own business, always far too busy to take time out. Everything – his dreams and mine – were put on hold for a later that never was. I liked to think that if he’d known that he had such a short time, he would have spent it better, spent some of it making memories with me, doing things of which we could have been proud.
I looked around at my waiting audience. One year? Only one year, three hundred and sixty five days? Such an impossibly short time when you have children. At once, it became blindingly clear and I laughed at the simplicity of it all.
“Easy. If I only had one year, I would spend it living the most extraordinary adventure I could find, with my daughters. I would want to create enough memories in that year to last them – you – a lifetime.”
Grace leaned in, her blue eyes huge in the candlelight.
“What kind of an adventure, Mum?”
“A learning adventure. A teaching adventure. A trip that would take us to a completely different part of the world, a place where we would meet all different cultures and types of people. To a place where we could help others and have experiences that you could look back on and find life lessons in, the kind of advice I would give you if I was still around…”
I sat back and looked fondly at my girls.
“That’s what I would do if I only had one year left.”
Mrs. Brinkley picked up the bottle of wine and refreshed my glass.
“Bravo, my dear, that’s admirable. But I do have one question.”
I smiled to thank her for the wine.
“What’s that?”
As she leaned in, it seemed as if the dress-up wings on her back were fluttering of their own accord.
“My question is, why wait? Why wait until you only have one year left?”
“Yeah Mum,” piped Grace. “Why can’t we have an adventure now?”
I laughed a little insincerely, trying to make light of the responsibilities that so overwhelmed me.
“Well, I have to work, to feed you, for a start. There’s school, and your friends. We have an apartment to take care of …”
“But you said the adventure would be a learning adventure,” Lillia interjected. “So why do we need school?”
“Well, yes, but the thing is, you don’t just pick up and take off, just like that. I have responsibilities!”
Now Mrs. Brinkley smiled over at me and I saw that her wings were flapping rapidly, fluttering with a barely suppressed excitement.
“Your mother is most certainly right, girls. It’s quite a leap, to just leave everything that’s stable and safe, for an adventure.”
She paused, and then continued.
“Although, I suppose that you would learn so much about life and the world and yourselves, traveling.”
A wistful tone entered her voice.
“And if I were young enough to rent out my apartment and use that income to have such an adventure, I would be very tempted.”
She shook her head and looked off into the distance, as if contemplating another life, then briskly rose and started clearing some of the plates.
“Now then, my little angels, it seems we have a birthday cake for you
r mother.”
The girls flew to their feet and rushed off to the kitchen. I went to get up too, to help at least clear the last of the dishes, but Mrs. Brinkley patted me on the shoulder.
“Oh no, my dear, this is your special day. All you have to do is enjoy.”
With that, she whisked away the last of the dirty plates.
Minutes later, the lights went out and a trio of singing angels emerged from the kitchen, bearing a magnificent cake in the shape of a – what else? – unicorn, candles flickering in tune to their rendition of Happy Birthday.
As always, the girls and I blew out the candles together, and then Mrs. Brinkley turned the lights back on as Lillia passed me a knife.
“Make a wish, Mummy,” she said, kissing me on the top of my head.
“And don’t tell us what it is! And don’t let the knife touch the bottom,” squealed Grace, almost incandescent with delight.
Mrs. Brinkley, who was passing out the plates, looked over at me and winked.
“Be careful what you wish for. It might come true.”
5
Yoga, diamantes and
Ubud tea