Something happens to women in their forties in May. I have watched it now in three of them, and there is, as far as I can tell, no published treatment.
It starts around the second week — let's say the eleventh, which was a Sunday, which is when the AQA exam timetable lands on a kitchen table somewhere and a woman who had been, in March, perfectly reasonable about her child looks at the small print and stops being reasonable. The first sign is logistics. Suddenly there is talk of revision tutors, of the Pomodoro Technique, of whether ketogenic snacks aid recall. Talk that, if you had raised it with her at Easter, she would have found embarrassing.
A friend rang me last Wednesday at twenty past eleven. She had been marking a stack of GCSE history papers — not her own son's, she had refused on principle when his school asked her not to — and was eating cream crackers with her shoes still on. She has, at present, three toasters in her kitchen by some accident she has not explained to me. She said, Either he passes physics or I throw the toaster through the window. I said the toaster wouldn't fit through the window and we both laughed for too long.
She thinks her son is fine. He is fine, in the way that sixteen-year-old boys are fine — fine like a chair leg that's just started to wobble. She thinks she is fine too. She isn't. She is a headteacher running a school with her own son in it, and somewhere between the toaster and the second glass of wine she said, I cannot do it twice. Not in the same building. Not the same room. Then she said, He has gone to Halfords. I waited. She did not elaborate. Halfords has not come up since. There is, I think, something to be said about the way midlife husbands respond to acute domestic stress, and it is that they go to Halfords, and the going to Halfords is the response, and any further explanation would defeat the purpose.
Another friend has not texted me in a week. This is, in our usual signalling, a considerably louder communication than texting would be. The last thing she sent me was a photograph of her kitchen wall, on which her son had arranged what she described as "a system" of yellow Post-it notes in what appeared to be a cipher. There were arrows. I am not a cryptographer. I am also not equipped to assess whether a sixteen-year-old's revision is going well based on the geometric complexity of his stationery, but I can confirm that the woman who took the photograph was not, when she took it, in a state I would call coping.
The thing nobody tells you about being the friend of women whose children are taking GCSEs is that you become a passive participant in the marking of mock papers, the unpicking of timetables, the second-guessing of teachers and — most dangerously — the receiving of texts at hours that suggest the texter has stopped sleeping in any meaningful sense. You are not asked to fix any of this. You are asked, mostly, not to disappear. This is something I think I can manage. The bar, I now understand, is low. The bar is do not disappear.
[I have, separately, been reading the AQA history syllabus on the bus, which is an experience I do not recommend and will not be repeating. The bus is the Number 38. The syllabus is more or less what one would expect. The other passengers were not curious.]
They are not asking for advice. They are asking, mostly, that you not disappear. The bar, I now understand, is low.
It is the third week of May. By this time next month it will be over, in the sense that the exams will have ended. It will not be over in the sense that any of them will have stopped, on a Tuesday afternoon in October, casting a sidelong look at a sealed envelope on the hall floor and thinking, I cannot do it twice. I have decided not to point this out.
In the meantime, Tilda — who is a cat, and not, in fairness, taking any exams — has started sleeping on the cool tiles in the kitchen. I have been to bed with one foot under the duvet and one foot out for four nights running and have decided this is a system too. We have arrived at this independently. I am noting the convergence and not examining it further.
It is, in any case, too hot.
— Charlie is not a mother. She would like that noted in perpetuity.
— Charlie