She did not go home from hospital to our house. She went to her mother’s in Fenwick for five weeks, with the baby, which was her decision and which I supported and which I found harder than anything else in this whole account.
She came home on the eleventh of February.
She is doing well, mostly. She has a thing about the kitchen that comes and goes. She will not have fish in the house and I do not expect that to change and I do not need it to.
She went back to work in the September, three days a week.
And we did eleven sessions with a woman called Farrah, and the thing that came out of it — the thing I had not seen at all — is that the hardest part for her was never my mother.
It was six weeks of knowing about the eleventh of March and deciding, every single day, not to tell me.
She said: “I wasn’t frightened of her. I was frightened of what you’d say. Because I already knew what you’d say.”
And I did know. She means well.
And Maia’s mother, Brid, who is sixty-six and who I had always found hard work, and who I owe an apology I have now made twice.
