I hope this email finds you well,” I read, and I look around, wondering. This is where it finds me, sneaking a look at my phone while crouched on the fire escape at my son’s new nursery, where I am in day two of his “settling in” period. For those who are not familiar with the way of the nursery, this is the week in which a carer accompanies their child until they feel comfortable to run off and play alone.
It begins with the adult following them around: sandpit, wendy house, Play-Doh, little sit down, no, get up, trains, etc. The day before, my mum had half told me, from the kitchen, about the Hawthorne Effect, which I gathered, from the hallway, describes the way people perform differently when they know they’re being observed, and the phrase rattled around in my head as I enthusiastically crouched down among the dinosaurs, aware of the other adults who appeared to be nonchalant. I was trying to play really well, I realised – to be the best at playing. I had to go inside for a bit and have a word with myself. I was, and not for the first time, envious of the toddlers who are allowed to simply whiz around a space singing Single Ladies, and, if another child approaches when they’re not ready to talk, find it acceptable to simply say NOPE and keep on whizzing.
On the second and third days, the adults continue to play, occasionally taking tea while sequestered in a bright little room. It was while sitting here, settling in, that the concept started not just to make sense to me but to offer itself as a solution to so much more than simply nursery school. We have tools to help us relax into difficult situations (tools which include alcohol and small talk), but rarely do we have a period of time set aside for somebody to help guide us from one stage of life into another. The stages of life are generally broken up into seven or eight, including adolescence and “late adulthood”, but within each of these, aren’t there seven or eight substages, each one of which requires a certain period of settling in? I guess I am in “middle adulthood”, the costume of which is a carefully balanced combination of Teva, Veja and windbreaker, our hair splitting symbolically at its ends.
And it is becoming clear that in this stage, I could do with assistance navigating a new transition every six to eight months – currently these substages land in my psyche like dumped mattresses, curling in the rain. A combination of realisations (“Whoops, I forgot to learn to drive”) and emotions and incomprehensible leaps in time. Like, OK: the sudden shift from, at 40, feeling sexy, wise and fundamentally lovely, to, one day around 42, realising you are no longer a human woman, but instead a sort of deflated bag for life half-filled with mince, dragging itself between bed, bar and playground emitting small caffeinated groans. Or what about the double-header of: “I’m actually quite good at my job, well done,” to “Oh no, I’m bad at my job,” and “Hang on, my job is bullshit, the capitalist system depends on me believing the deception of work as liberation and couldn’t eliminating tax loopholes for the rich practically fund a universal basic income?” A warm gentle hand on the shoulder, perhaps, as each stage comes into view, easing you gently onwards.
There is a moment in the mid-40s for many when, after a tumultuous few years of maybe fear, maybe guilt, or grief, maybe hope, maybe something looser that lives creakily in the chest, a peace arrives with the knowledge that you need never think again about the possibility of having kids. For this, the settling in period might take a little while. Faster but more urgent is the substage when it feels suddenly terribly urgent that you get fit. Something rearranges and you are aware of such new words as “cholesterol” and “prostate”, and you start feverishly exercising, or else, start worrying about not feverishly exercising. If you’re lucky, it coincides with the bit where you must come to terms with such realities as “care” for the first time, of the younger and the older, and then, the bit where you decide, right, that’s it, I’ve got to finally grow up. And, oh God, someone to settle you into settling down and its lasagne of anxieties – learning to put away your independence for best, learning to breathe through the weeks when you worry about what it means to never fall in love again, the stopping midway through a conversation about mould with the choking realisation of how far you have come since the night you two walked until dawn and kissed in the underpass. An elder, a wiser, a someone to hold on to your water bottle and cut the apple up small.
On the third day of settling in my son wanted to clarify something with me, before we parked his scooter and went inside. Would he be coming here tomorrow, too? Yes. And tomorrow, and tomorrow and the next tomorrow? Yes. And would he be coming to nursery on every single tomorrow forever, and would I be there? At which point I had to sit him down on the step and explain my new settling in theory and say, while I’ll be there for this bit, for the rest, pal, you’re on your own.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
