A Quarter Tab of Loss

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “A Quarter Tab of Loss” by Katy Whitehead. Katy is a mother of two living in Walthamstow, London. She is currently a reader for The Literary Consultancy. She has been shortlisted for the Bridport and Myriad Editions Prizes. Her essay “Kidzania” was published by Granta. In 2017, she won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize. Her short gothic novel, Wonderwood, is on submission to agents.

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She opens the door—in full Insta-ready make up, waist-length hair tied in a neat ponytail, hoop earrings, dressed in the latest trendy togs from some vendor of fast fashion—then disappears straightaway to her bedroom. I can visualise it, so neat, so orderly, almost purely white, decked out in Ikea with little trinkets and pink accents, the dressing table where she experiments with adulthood. She’ll be doing homework, probably, or texting with friends, or checking her mascara, the mysterious tasks required to fashion a separate self, and I will be left wondering: how can she already be almost 14?

Later, I’ll see her in snatches—laying the table, complaining as she mucks out the animal hutches, or playing with her young cousins, my kids. At mealtimes, I try to ask questions and really listen to the answers, but it will feel thin, cursory, too shallow—and at the same time, too intense, too pressured, by the brevity of our time together—and I am rarely able to get beneath the respectable, rote chat of subject choices or her quasi-coy, quasi-proud, always offhand talk of boyfriends.

Before I had kids of my own, I’d always prided myself on my relationship with my niece. I found her inspiring. Literally. For years, I had struggled with writer’s block; after visiting Laney as a toddler, I would write for hours. I felt through her I had a stake in a future that I’d never really imagined before: a young person is an envoy from the future, a way to imagine the future.

The queer theorist Lee Edelman has spoken of this negatively, how the child represents specifically ‘the possibility of the future against which the queer is positioned as the embodiment of a relentlessly narcissistic, antisocial, and future-negating drive.’ But someone else’s child embodies the possibility of the future without endorsing it. If the relationship between a mother and child is heteronormative, conservative, and prosocial, there’s something potentially queer and radical about the relationship between an aunt and her niece.

I remember when Laney was born, I felt obligation and responsibility, but they were light, manageable burdens. I thought I could be like a dad to her—not a great dad, by any means— but certainly as present and reliable as many actual dads. Leslie Jamison says of travelling with her baby, ‘I can be the father who goes away, and the mother who stays.’ There is immense power—creative, especially—in being the father. The father is the one who gives what he can, who takes what he needs. Who leaves.

In truth I was naïve. Once I entered a new relationship when Laney was two, I started to get giddy, greedy. To imagine a Laney of my own, as though it was as easy as that. As though a Laney grows on trees. My monthly visits were like microdosing parenthood. All the joy of being loved unconditionally—all the therapeutic benefits—with none of the exhaustion.

And now, with a two- and a five-year-old, the microdoses aren’t having their effect. I’ve ODed on the heavier stuff. My own children pull at me, my breast, my mind, they want things I feel incapable of. A constant need for—I can’t even finish the thought half the time.

When Laney comes down and takes them to play a game of ‘hide the pompoms’, I crash on the couch, mindlessly scrolling through my phone, like a pig truffling, for articles with adult intelligence. I want to be present in the moment with my niece, but I want this more. A long read, a murder mystery, incisive literary criticism. For half an hour, or an hour, my dilettantism at adulthood, will be eclipsed by Laney’s radiance, her expertise at care and play.

I feel sad that I can’t be as present for Laney, moment to moment, as I was, but I also feel the loss on a grander scale. 

When I was 16, I went to stay with my aunt, my mother’s sister, for two weeks. The pretext was to attend a nearby drama school. Privately I suspected that my parents’ marriage was going through a rocky patch, but I suppose a more innocent interpretation was that they just needed a break. Also, my aunt had cancer.

In the time I stayed with her, I grew huge crushes, ignited several romantic entanglements that would keep my heart broken for months if not years on end, did an audition of All the Worlds a Stage wearing a black velvet dress, holding a cigarette lighter, affecting the air of weary indifference that would eventually become my brand, and somehow got cast as the courtesan in an abbreviated Comedy of Errors. My aunt took me to a pub quiz, and I told her she was too competitive. When I got home from rehearsals, I’d drink green tea and eat chocolate cake that my aunt had bought to wean me off from pure chocolate and sleep in a box room beneath a shelf of books. Those two weeks were a capsule of discovery, and I loved everything about it, learning independence in baby steps. Stepping away from my parents, under the wry, loving, knowing, eye of my aunt. Two years later, she was dead.

I always imagined I’d have Laney to stay when she turned 16, install her in some course or other. A rite of passage; also, a way to honour my aunt. But that is just two years from now. I didn’t realise everything would be back to front, her mum the single mother and my kids so little still. So draining.

One time she adds me on TikTok. The rich deflation I feel when I see it’s so I can help her win something.

            OMG I WOULD DIE FOR ALL THIS STUFF YOU’RE SO KINDDDD @kitA   DONE XXXX  🩷 🩷 🩷 🩷

I find myself thinking of the day she was born, getting Dominos delivered to the hospital, not realising that the cheesy stodge was the last thing her mother might want—after the long induction, the difficult birth, the moment the cord got caught around Laney’s neck.

I remember driving so carefully over the speedbumps away from the hospital, my sister and our precious cargo in the back seat.

My sister had given birth without a birthing partner, a decision I couldn’t understand at the time—I would have been there in an instant had she asked—but later I understood how the most useful person to be in the room was already there. My sister didn’t need anyone else to motivate her. She had Laney.

That first day home, I took care of Laney whilst her mother showered, placing her between my legs on the couch and sketching her. A baby is the smallest unit of human, and you feel it, it’s there in the soft curly hands, the blinky eyelids. I hadn’t planned to make art; it was a spontaneous reaction to the urgency of my feelings. Like Wittgenstein (quoted by Elaine Scarry) says, ‘when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it.’

Later, after I left them, I worried so badly that my sister with her weak ankles would stumble in the night and drop her. I worried the next night, and the night after. I didn’t realise this long-range terror, these jagged imaginings, were the birth pains of a new sort of love.

There is supposed to be anxiety in the gift giving—to gift is to risk. The chance to say this is how I see you, am I close? But now when Christmas, or her birthday swings around, I get specific Amazon instructions, totalling almost exactly the £25 I’ve budgeted to spend. It feels more like admin than caring. I don’t pay extra to get them wrapped.

Recently, after she was visibly unhappy with her eyebrows and the pencil she’d used, I broke our family’s agreed budget and bought a Boy Brow stick from Glossier. ‘Do you know what that is?’ I asked, needily. ‘Oh yeah,’ she mumbled, then something like ‘fancy.’ One time I sent her an un-asked for a chess set. It got lost for months in the post. And even though it wasn’t my fault, it felt symbolic of something. That she could no longer depend on me. That my love had faltered, the capacity of love that had compelled me that first day to sketch her—because art, as Lewis Hyde says, is a gift too—had stuttered over time, had become too diffuse, too widely spread, diluted by more pressing commitments.

I have a gif on my phone from 2017, already a mother of sorts, but pregnant, the baby conveniently enclosed inside me. It’s from a photo booth, taken at an immersive experience I’d taken Laney to, just us two, in London, on the bus. Alice’s Adventures Underground. In the gif our bodies move jerkily. In the images—I have two versions—we are grinning, hugging, and pretty—there’s some kind of filter on it, that makes freckles pop and cheek bones glow—the pictures of youth and naivete. I’m wearing stripes, and we’re moving in time, in sync, twinning, Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

The painted roses on the backdrop contain, on closer inspection faces: mean, or pig-nosed, or dopey—the flowers know something we don’t. The production had taken place in a vault somewhere, on the Southbank, and afterwards passing St Thomas Hospital, where six months later I’d give birth, I’d experienced a strange pre-resonance, a sense that something would happen there that would change my life.

I find something poignant looking at that gif. I think it’s the slowness of our movement in it. Cartoonish. And glitchy, buggy. As though we are not quite catching on to our fate.

The speed with which Laney has grown up, grown beyond and away from me, it’s thrilling, vertiginous, scary but there’s also something nonsensical about it. Topsy turvy. I should be maturing at the same or greater rate. I should be getting wiser, more selfless. Better at living in the moment. So how is it she that is almost my height, who calms my sister, who occupies my kids? Maybe when we emerged from the vault all those years ago we’d swapped somehow. Like Alice, whose Through the Looking Glass I’m now reading to my small kids. She goes through the mirror and becomes her reflection. We’d drunken different potions—she’d grown up, and I’d stayed small.  

My aunt was older when she had me to stay than I will be when Laney is 16, by ten years. I want Laney to know how much she is loved, and I want to be with her when she experiences adulthood. But maybe what I’m experiencing is a microdosing of a different sort, the pulling away. A quarter of a tab of loss. Maybe she’s teaching me something new, something that will be useful to me eventually. How to be weaned off.