Page 69 of Statistically Speaking
She has my email, my phone numbers, my address. She has had them for over a week, and it feels like the longest week of my life. I am spiraling between certainty that she won’t ever get in touch and sheer excitement at the thought of getting to find out about her.
I am made up entirely of questions—what does she look like now? What are her parents like? Does she have any pets? Is she doing exams and planning on going to uni or doing an apprenticeship or something entirely different? What’s her favorite food and color and song and book and film? Most important of all, has she been happy?
I have tried, over the years, to keep all of this curiosity under control. There never seemed to be any point in indulging it. Early on, when I was still very young, I seemed to have more resolve—I told myself I didn’t deserve to know anything about her, that I had given up all right to know a single solitary fact.
It was brutal, but it also allowed me to go on, to move forward with my own life. In fact, it motivated me—if I didn’t makesomething of myself, if I didn’t succeed in dragging myself out of the future that seemed to be mapped out for me, then it would all have been wasted.
As I’ve aged, it has grown harder—to ignore the questions, the wondering, the way I find myself imagining her and what she is doing and how her world looks. As I’ve matured, and as she has grown up, it has been almost impossible not to wonder—but I have still tried.
Meeting Katie, though, falling into that rabbit hole that had me convinced she was actually my daughter, showed me that it is not something that is likely to go away. I will always wonder, always imagine. Always yearn. Be forever hers.
Now, as my actual daughter and I make tentative steps toward each other, it is almost unbearable—knowing she is so close but also knowing that I have no way to make her take that final step. To reach out.
It is hard, and it is sucking the life out of me, and I know that I cannot go on like this for any length of time. I will simply burn out, fade away, lose my ability to do all the things I need to do, to be all the people I need to be. I have to find a way to calm down about it all, I know that much—but what I don’t know is how to go about that.
It is actually Katie who finally shakes me out of it.
She turns up on my doorstep on a Saturday morning, brandishing her phone and her pink tutu. I groan as I let her in, and say: “Did your mum send you? Is she worried about me? Are you going to try to make me dance it out?”
She pulls a face at me and replies, “No, my mum didn’t send me, and yes, she is worried about you, and dancing it out is a tried-and-tested method.”
“No. Sorry, Katie, but no. I cannot face another session of K-pop.”
“Doesn’t have to be K-pop. We can do something from your era, like Bach or Beethoven, if you prefer?”
She grins at me, and it is contagious. Cheeky pup.
“How about a walk instead?” I counter. “There was someone out there with a metal detector earlier. We can laugh when they get a beep and dig up a Guinness can.”
“Or look on in absolute astonishment when they find an Anglo-Saxon horde.”
“Unlikely, but yeah—that would be good. How are you doing anyway? And if your mum didn’t send you, why are you actually here?”
“Because I was worried about you as well,” she replies as we troop down the stairs and out again. I have already walked Bill, so I steel myself against the mournful howl he lets out as we walk past. It is almost human, as though he is trying to form the words “Please take me tooooooooo!”
“In class yesterday,” she continues, putting her tutu on her hair like some kind of strange ceremonial headdress, “you didn’t even line your pens up. And later, you said that Elizabeth the Second made a speech to her troops about the Spanish Armada.”
“Gosh—I didn’t, did I?”
“You absolutely did. And hardly anyone noticed, and those of us who did probably realized it was a mistake, but you never know... A couple of kids might fail their exams because of it. I mean, you could be ruining their lives, you know?”
I laugh at the drama, and as we make our way down onto the sand, reply: “I don’t think it’ll come to that. But it’s not likeme, is it? I feel a bit like I’m coming apart at the seams to be honest, Katie.”
“I know,” she says, her pink tutu streaming behind her in the wind, “and I think you’d better sew yourself back up. She might get in touch, she might not—but whatever she decides, she’ll have her reasons. You have to maybe try to trust her a bit.”
“You’re right,” I say, nodding, seeing the corgis run toward us. “But it’s hard. She has my details, and I feel like I’m on some kind of countdown. Plus, watch out for one of those corgis; he likes to pee on people’s feet.”
She nimbly moves her Converse sneaker just in time, and the dog looks up at her, annoyed as he only hits sand. We say hello to their owner—Corgi Man—as we pass him by.
“You’re not on a countdown, though, are you?” she asks. “It’s not like you’re on a time limit. Nobody turns into a pumpkin at midnight. Maybe signing up to the register was a big deal for her. Maybe reaching out and getting your details was even bigger. Maybe she’s not quite ready for the next bit yet. You have no idea what’s going on in her life outside you either, do you? She might be doing exams and feeling the pressure. She might have a complicated relationship. She might be dealing with stuff with her parents. You’re only seeing it from one side, which, as you’ve always taught us in class, isn’t right.”
My knee-jerk response to this accusation is to claim it’s unfair. To deny it. To say I’ve always tried to see things from her side. But then I start to wonder if I really have.
Life is complex, for everyone—and especially for a teenage girl making her way in the world. Add in the conflict she might be feeling about me, and it’s even more of a mess. I have no idea if her parents know she is thinking of getting in touch with me, and no idea how they might feel about that, but evenif they are supportive, there is bound to be part of her that is worried about hurting their feelings as well.
In short, Katie is probably right—this isn’t just about what I want, and it’s nowhere near as simple as I want it to be. Nothing ever is.
“Okay,” I eventually reply, “I see your point.” We stop at the edge of the waves, gray and white froth chasing our toes at the shoreline, the wind turbines waving at us in the distance.
