My mother came to help with my baby and six months later her stomach was growing — I accused her of hiding a pregnancy, and then I watched the camera footage.
My mother came to help with my baby and six months later her stomach was growing — I accused her of hiding a pregnancy, and then I watched the camera footage.
"Who is he, Mum? Just tell me. Did you come here to help with your granddaughter or to hide a pregnancy?"
I said that. Out loud. In my own bathroom doorway, to a woman kneeling on the floor.
My mother is Frances Weir. She was fifty-three.
Widowed since 2016. Living on her own in Ardleigh, which is a hundred and forty miles away.
And she came to Corran in the March because I rang her at half eleven at night and asked her to.
Thea was eight weeks old. I was going back to work into the biggest project of my career. Owen was doing twelve-hour days.
And my mother said: "You go and work, love. I'll have her."
And she did everything.
I came in at seven and Thea was bathed and the washing was folded and there was food and the house was straight.
And I paid her back by buying things.
Clothes. Vitamins. Expensive hand cream. Eight hundred dollars a month into her account.
And she always said the same thing: "Put it towards the baby."
I thought that was her being gracious.
It was much easier to give my mother things than to ask her how she was.
By the fifth month I had noticed.
She was eating less every week and her stomach was getting bigger.
And I made a joke about it.
I said something like, "At this rate you'll be going home to Ardleigh with a proper little belly on you."
And she smiled and said: "It's bloating. And my back's been murder."
I bought her heat patches.
A few weeks after that her face had gone thin.
Her arms looked like somebody else's arms. And her abdomen was round and tight and high.
She looked pregnant. I had been pregnant eight months earlier. I know that shape.
I said she should see somebody and she said don't waste your money, it'll pass.
And Owen said she was probably just worn out from a baby, and I took that, because it was the comfortable one.
Then on the eighteenth of September I came home early.
And my mother was over the toilet being sick so hard she could not hold herself up on the rim.
And Owen was in the hall saying we should take her in.
And I looked at that stomach and about nine weeks of being frightened came out of me as cruelty.
"Mum. What are you hiding from us?"
She lifted her head. "What are you on about?"
"That." I pointed at her. "Who is he?"
Owen got hold of my arm and said "Nia, stop," and I pulled it away.
"She's fifty-three, Owen. She's been hiding something for months. Mum — if you're pregnant, say so. But don't come into my house and let us think you're ill while you've got my daughter all day."
And her face changed.
She did not shout. She did not defend herself. That was worse.
She looked at me the way you look at somebody you have never met.
Then she wiped her mouth and got up and went past me down the hall with one hand on the wall, and shut her door.
She did not have any dinner and she did not speak to me again that night.
And at about eleven o'clock, still certain I was about to catch her out, I opened the camera footage on my laptop.
We have one in the hall and one in the kitchen. Owen put them in when Thea was born.
I went back four days.
I watched my mother make bottles at four in the morning.
I watched her carry my daughter across the kitchen with her other arm pressed flat across her own stomach.
I watched her be sick into the sink at half past one in the afternoon, quietly, and then rinse it and wipe it and put the kettle on.
I watched her sit down on the kitchen floor with her back against the cupboards, twice, when there was nobody in the house.
And then I found that afternoon.
Thea had choked. On the mat, on a bit of banana.
And my mother was across that kitchen faster than I have ever seen her move, and she had her up and over and was patting her back until she got it up and started crying.
And then she sat Thea down and went and put her back against the wall by the door and slid down it.
And her blouse came up.
And there was something on her abdomen.
A drainage bag.
Taped on, with a tube going into her, and the tape was old and it had been changed a lot.
And under it, running down the middle of her, a scar from her sternum to below her navel.
There was no pregnancy.
I turned the sound up.
And on that footage my mother is on her own on a kitchen floor, breathing in a way I cannot describe, and she says out loud to herself:
***"Come on. Hang on a bit longer, Frances. Just till Nia's finished that project. You can't be causing her trouble now."***
My phone went out of my hand onto the floor and cracked the screen and I did not pick it up until the next day.
What it was.
Ovarian cancer. Stage four, with ascites.
Ascites is fluid in the abdomen. It is what happens, and it is why she looked the way she looked — the stomach filling up while everything else on her got thinner.
The scar is from surgery on the sixth of February.
The bag is a tunnelled drain, fitted in the August, so that she could let the fluid off at home instead of going in every fortnight.
She had been doing it herself. In her room. With the door shut. For six weeks.
And now the dates, which is the whole thing.
She was told on the ninth of January.
And I rang her and asked her to come on the fourteenth of February.
Five weeks after she was told. Eight days after her operation.
She said yes on that phone call.
And she got on a train on the eleventh of March, eleven weeks after a laparotomy, to look after an eight-week-old baby.
She started chemotherapy in the March and she had three cycles and she stopped in the May.
She did not tell anybody. She told the oncology team she was declining further treatment and she signed something, and they rang her twice and she did not change her mind.
Why.
I have had this from her own mouth, over four days in the September, and I am going to set it out exactly as she said it and not tidy it.
On the ninth of January a man called Devesh Narang told her what she had and gave her a range in months.
And five weeks later her daughter rang her at half eleven at night in bits about going back to work.
And she did the arithmetic.
Option one: stay in Ardleigh, have the chemotherapy, and spend what she had left in a day unit eleven miles away, on her own, being ill, with me coming up at weekends being guilty.
Option two: get on a train.
She said: "I wasn't going to spend it in a chair in Ardleigh when I could spend it with her."
And I want to say very clearly that I do not think that was noble.
Everybody I have told says "what a woman." And it was her decision and it was hers to make, and I have not tried to take that off her.
But it cost her time. It might have been months. Nobody will ever be able to tell me how many and I have stopped asking.
And she made it on her own, in January, frightened, without telling one single person — and by doing that she took away my chance to be in any of it.
I did not get to drive her to a single appointment. I did not get to sit in one room with her and a consultant. I did not know my mother was dying while she was folding my washing.
Both of those things are true and I have had to hold them at the same time for fourteen months.
And then the other thing, which I found on the morning of the nineteenth.
I sat outside her door from about midnight until half five.
And then I went in, and she was awake, and she had been awake, and she looked at me and said: "You've seen it, then."
And she got out of bed and got a carrier bag out of the bottom of the wardrobe and handed it to me.
She sold her house.
The house in Ardleigh completed on the twenty-sixth of February. A hundred and eighty-six thousand dollars.
She told me she was "letting it out for a bit."
And every single one of those eight-hundred-dollar transfers — all six of them, four thousand eight hundred dollars — went into the same account and was never touched.
And on the ninth of March, two days before she got on that train, she put the whole lot into a bare trust for Thea.
She arrived at my house with her affairs already wound up.
She had done her will, sold her house, settled the money and made a funeral arrangement in Ardleigh, and then she packed a case and came and made bottles at four in the morning for six months.
And Jinny Pryor.
Jeanette Pryor is seventy and she lived next door to my mother for nineteen years.
She knew. From the January.
She was the only person on this earth who knew, and she rang my mother every Sunday at six o'clock for eight months, and my mother took those calls in the garden and I thought it was a neighbour being nosy.
I rang that woman on the twentieth of September and she cried for about four minutes before she could say anything.
Seventy years old, carrying that on her own since January, because my mother asked her to and because she thought she had no right to go over her head.
She was at the funeral in the February and she has been down twice since.
What I did, which is less than people assume.
I did not undo her decision.
I asked her, on the twenty-first of September, properly, sitting down, whether she wanted to go back on treatment. I said I would take her, I would do everything, I would stop work.
And she said no.
And I said all right.
That is the single hardest thing I have ever done and it took me about eleven seconds and I would do it again.
I stopped work on the twenty-second. Handed the project over in four days, badly, and did not care.
Palliative care came in from the October.
She died at home, in our house, in the room she had been in since March, on the fourteenth of February.
Thea was thirteen months and was in the room for part of that afternoon and has no memory of any of it, and I have about four hundred photographs.
And the last thing.
I still have that footage.
All of it. Everything from March to the February. It is on a drive in a cupboard and it is the only moving picture I will ever have of my mother in this house.
And the clip I have watched most is the one from the eighteenth of September.
Not the choking. Not the bit where she saves my daughter's life in about four seconds at fifty-three years old with a drain taped to her.
The bit afterwards. The floor. The wall. The blouse. And eleven words to herself.
***"Just till Nia's finished that project. You can't be causing her trouble now."***
And here is what I found out in the November.
That project was shelved in the June.
Deprioritised. Reallocated. There is a slide about it somewhere.
Seven weeks before my mother sat on my kitchen floor and told herself to hang on until I had finished it.
She did not know. I had not told her, because it was embarrassing and because I was still going in every day pretending it mattered.
So she was pacing herself against something that had already stopped existing.
And nobody at that company has ever been told what the six months I stayed for actually cost, and nobody ever will be, because it is not their fault and it would not help.
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But I know exactly what I bought with them.
And the price is on a hard drive in a cupboard, in eleven words, said out loud by a woman on a floor who thought nobody could hear her.
