. . . on a new dawn
BEFORE MONTESSORI, WE had a relaxed kind of regime in the morning. The children weren’t going anywhere much really and so could spend the entire day in mismatched pyjamas accessorised only with breakfast jam stains. “Sure who’s looking at them?” was my slovenly, self-justifying parental motto. All is changed, though. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been sending them out into the world alone and there are teachers and classmates and people on the bus looking at them and the pressure is suddenly very much on.
I now have certain pre-school jobs in the morning that cannot be shirked. My first job is to get them dressed. They are three-year-old twins and overnight it seems they have decided between themselves, during negotiations to which I have not been party, which clothes belong to which girl. The sparkly orange top is J’s and the top with the cat on is P’s and if I make a mistake they merely declare it a swapping day and laugh maniacally. I don’t care if it is or if it isn’t a swapping day. I just need to get their clothes on while their father is in the shower so I can get on with my next job.
My next job is to brush their hair. We got it cut in Westport on a whim during the summer because the tumbling golden curls were proving impossible to manage at bath time and at hair-brushing time and pretty much all of the time. We threw a dart in the digital equivalent of the yellow pages and decided on a tiny hairdresser in a hotel complex where Sandra gave them lollipops and didn’t make me feel like a Bad Mother for cutting heads of hair so adorable that people had been known to describe the pair of them as like something from a fairytale.
Sandra said there should be no guilt, that those fine tumbling locks were just baby hair, that I was doing them a favour, that I was to forget about your man Samson, that cutting the hair would make it stronger, that if they want to have their hair long when they are older then could always let them grow it again. I was, Sandra confirmed, definitely not a Bad Mother.
The woman sweeping their hair from the floor didn’t seem to have received Sandra’s no-guilt memo. Every time she passed me she said, under her breath but not so under her breath that I couldn’t hear her, “I don’t know how you can do that, I couldn’t do that”.
But I let my fairytale girls play with a game on my phone while their golden hair fell to the ground and they didn’t care that they now had Madeline-esque bobs. They were still the same people afterwards which was a relief. At the end Sandra gave me two envelopes full of their locks as a keepsake and she told me again that I did the right thing and that’s why if you need to get a child’s hair cut you should go to Talking Heads at the Castlecourt Hotel. Westport is not just the best place to live in Ireland, according to The Irish Times, it’s the best place to get your children’s hair cut in Ireland, according to me.
Anyway, Sandra made a big impression that day. In order to brush their hair in the morning I have to pretend to be Sandra otherwise they won’t let me near them with the brush. So I pretend to be a Westport hairdresser and I let them watch Ben And Holly so they won’t wail too much when I put their bobbins in. Then their father’s out of the shower and then it’s after eight and time for them all to go off together driving to Montessori.
Here they are about to leave: Fota wildlife park backpacks on, demanding apples for the journey, choosing one dolly each, hurried hugs at the doorstep, their mother still sleep-addled standing in a nightie blowing kisses in the rain. And off they go. Out into the world.
They’re leaving home. Bye, bye.
I close the door. Breathe in. Breathe out. This is new. The silence.
Their father presumes I wander straight back to bed but much as I love my scratcher I wouldn’t waste this new dawn in horizontal mode. I go down to the kitchen. I make toast and a poached egg and I have all the time in the world to swirl the water into a vortex so the egg doesn’t sit there but pirouettes nicely around the pan. Then I take my coffee and my plate and I sit at the table and I stare out the window and I think.
I think about all the books I am going to write and the decluttering projects I am going to undertake and the crafts I am going to take up and the songs I am going to write and how I am finally going to learn how to play guitar. I might do a gig. A small one. In my kitchen. I will tackle a lifetime backlog of thank-you letters and sort out my photo albums and start planning for Christmas because I know someone who has been at that lark since June.
In this new dawn suddenly everything feels possible but it’s the silence I love the most, followed closely by that perfectly poached egg.