What Are We Going To Have For Tea?

It was an anniversary of my Mum’s death recently. She died not long before my son – K – was born. On the day of the anniversary, I didn’t really feel sad – I was getting on with things as usual – so I felt bad for not feeling sad when everyone else was feeling sad. Now I’m in a café, writing this …

It’s June – and I’m ok, thanks for asking. I’m busy; happily bustling, getting myself and K up, and getting him ready for school; cleaning up; replenishing bird feeders; responding to 100 million emails and Whatapp messages; cleaning the house after our weekend away; thinking, ugh, what are we going to have for tea?; seeing to the cats; cleaning the weird bits of dead things off the rug; helping K with the epic Owen Grady (from Jurassic World) story he’s been engrossed in writing; dealing with the school run, and the totally understandable separation-anxiety regression he’s experiencing; going shopping; having lunch with my dad; trying to fix glitches with my manuscripts and files; writing blurbs (yes, in the plural); buying flowers for Mum and going up to the grave; checking I had enough petrol to get to work; checking my tyres because of all the bloody potholes; sorting Dad’s pots and pans cupboard; going to the tip; texting family; wondering what we were going to have for tea; arranging a hospital appointment; cleaning bird poo off the headstone; creating content for social media; dealing with all that changing publishers means for your writing platforms; trimming the grass around the headstone; wondering what we were going to have for tea; watering the wildflowers seeds I’d scattered the other day to fill some bald patches over the grave, for the bees, for the wider environment, for the future, for the here and now. Time goes on.

Mum has become these flowers – giving life from her life again. That’s the comfort of science. If I touch that plantain, it’s as if I’m holding her hand. One of K’s friends is coming round after school for a playdate – do I have enough snacks? Did I wash K’s football kit? Did I open the greenhouse this morning? The tomato plants will be crispy as anything! I need to get some lettuce for sandwiches. And what are we going to have for tea?

I pull up the headstone’s built-in vase thing from its hole, to remove the fading carnations from the metal thing with all the holes in it that’s supposed to help you arrange the flowers – the thing that looks like the rose of a giant watering can. The bunch of actual roses that I bought this morning to leave in place of the carnations – the continual ironic action of leaving cut (dying) flowers to actually die in a cemetery – lie on the grass beside me. They won’t last long in this heat. Flaming June, indeed! I go to fill the plastic container that acts as a vase, and I look down. Some of the crumbly earth trapped between the side of the vase and the side of the hole – an unusually large amount of earth, actually – has come out with the pot. There are tiny white capsules in it, and a lot of big, red ants running around. I look in the hole. I have disturbed an ants’ nest! For a few seconds, I crouch there, watching them. Some run around, defensively. Another gently pulls and egg back towards the hole with its antlers. I have to help them! I used the cellophane from my roses to push the eggs and the earth back into the hole, and out of the sun. The ants disperse. But down at the base of the headstone, a lone ant has found a far-flung egg, and is trying to drag it up the sheer edge of marble back to the nest, but there are puddles of water on the concrete from my earlier efforts with the seeds! One of the ant’s mates appears – as if sent on a mission to rescue a comrade MIA – and the one with the egg follows it, but they can’t get back up! I try to get the ant with the egg to stand on the cellophane so I can lift them both, but it’s suspicious. Eventually, I get the egg on, and tip it back into the mud-nest. I guess the two ants find their way home. By the time I’ve arranged my roses, the nest is quiet and inconspicuous again.

I’ll be more careful when I return to replace the roses. I doubt very much that the ants will mark this day as the day their nest was nearly destroyed, but I bet they remember it in their hive-mind, and choose a better place to construct their next nest. For now, they’ll be getting on with things, each playing its part, getting their hive back together. A day is just a day, and you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. I feel sadder for the ants today than I do about losing my mother. I can’t force an emotion to fit a day. The sadness will come as its wont, in certain moments when I’m getting on with my life. In the memory of a smell, or an expression on K’s face, or in the fact that I know she would have loved to have seen the epic Owen Grady story, in his erratic, felt-tipped handwriting. She would have smiled, and though we were never a huggy family, the hug would have been there in her smile.

I’m an atheist, but Mum’s always here, really. And here are the tears, days later, sitting in this café, journaling, before I have to start getting everything ready because I’m working my ‘real’ job tomorrow. Ugh. And then I smile as the saltwater falls, feeling the mild panic Mum always felt when she thought, what are we going to have for tea?!