THE HIDDEN COST OF caring

It’s been raining for days. I fantasise about floating away. We all agree that this wet week feels like the longest week ever. I’m counting down the hours until I can escape to Glasgow and be with Joe, and shut the mother away in a box. All week my two little ones, Tess and Emmie, have been as changeable as the sea, sitting at a piano singing Taylor Swift songs one moment, and brimming with worries the next.

- By CARO GILES

Tess has managed her hours at school well, but she is weepy and small and tells me she is worried about not being with me at the weekend. Just before we head out to circus school, Emmie flings a book at Tess and furrows her brow. This often happens on a Thursday, the night before she must spend the weekend in another house, with a different parent. Emmie doesn’t know how to express her anxiety. Her words fail her, so her panic becomes hands and feet that lash out and hurt the person she loves the most.

At last, after unravelling the panic, the hitting and the loving, we are sitting in the car. I am so tired my bones are aching and when I look in the rearview mirror my eyes stare out helplessly from a grey face. Tess and Emmie are sitting in the back, friends once more, although Emmie can’t speak and her shoulders are hunched around her ears. I think to myself for the thousandth time how much I wish I could take away her crippling anxiety, and that perhaps my own anxiety is in part an absorption of hers. I turn the key, start the engine, and talk in a singsong voice, 'You can hang upside down,' because earlier today she told me that was what she wanted to do more than anything else, hang upside down. When I asked her why, she told me it was because she liked seeing the world upside down. Maybe it makes more sense to her from that angle.

Always the mothers

In the hall at the high school, the scene is calm and I am grateful. Soft music is playing and there are less children than usual, maybe five others with their mothers. They are all mothers. Always the mothers.