Eliot and I had been together for ten months, but so far he hadn’t stayed over at mine.
If we spent the night together it was always in their shared flat in the north end of London, while my ex-husband Simon came to the family home to look after the children because he didn’t have space for them in his rented flat.
It worked well, but six-year-old Emi and 12-year-old Maude hated to see me go (15-year-old Hector was very happy to see me go).
It was Emi’s bath time that convinced me that it was finally time for Eliot to stay at my house for the night.
She always played with her Barbie Mermaid doll, making her gracefully dive into the water, her colorful tail flashing. But on this particular night, Emi pushed Mermaid Barbie underwater, turning one side of her tail into a fin, cutting through the surface.
Eliot and I had been together for ten months, but so far he hadn’t stayed over at mine.
Emi was the writer and director of these bath time scenes. I voiced the more boring and anatomically realistic Lottie doll. “I’m a bad pink shark,” Emi said. “Imagine you’re going swimming and it’s getting wavy.”
‘Oh, it’s getting wavy!’ I parroted obediently.
“Imagine you don’t really know how to swim.”
‘Oh, help!’ I said.
“Imagine that you are alone because your mother is out with her boyfriend.”
‘You’re not alone!’ I protested. “Dad is here.”
She ignored me. “Imagine you are alone and now the bad pink shark is coming to find you.” The Mermaid Barbie flashed menacingly through the water and hit me on the arm.
His father, Simon, was also dating someone, also much younger than him, and he liked to show me pictures of her if we were in the middle of an argument.
However, it didn’t seem to be on the pink shark’s target list. And he left Emi and her two brothers ‘completely alone’ with me six days out of seven.
But I was his mother; Different rules apply. I was furious about it most of the time, but helpless, like mothers everywhere.
I had been careful to choose the neutral territory of Borough Market when I introduced Eliot to my children a few months earlier.
The older two were fine (at 28, Eliot was older than them than I was), but Emi studiously ignored him and spent the entire hour shouting for Bubble Tea. The night Eliot was due to arrive, I cleaned the house, changed the sheets, and prepared a complicated eggplant dish that could be left to cook while we had a glass of wine.
When he entered my narrow hallway he filled everything, and I experienced my usual dizzying desire to kiss him, long and hard, but the children were behind me in the kitchen.
I really wanted Eliot to spend the night. I hadn’t had a man in my bed for three years; Simon and I had stopped sharing a bed long before the official separation.
But playing the roles of mother and girlfriend at the same time was always a struggle. There was no peaceful glass of wine: Emi spilled her bead-making kit all over the kitchen floor and demanded we help her clean it up.
No one liked the eggplant bake I had made. And while we ate, I heard myself talking in a fake voice, asking about Hector’s Taekwondo and Maude’s kick boxing as if I were putting on a show. It was difficult to maintain composure when Eliot was sitting there, radiating heat, with pale jeans clinging to his thighs.
Eliot asked the kids all the right questions, but I could tell he was feeling self-conscious, and so were the kids.
At bedtime, I didn’t rush Emi. He didn’t want her to think he had less time for her because Eliot was awkwardly waiting downstairs. But it took her hours to brush her teeth and even longer to choose a story.
When I finally tried to leave, she clung to my arm. ‘A little more, please!’ she cried.
“You will always be first in my heart,” I finally said at the door. ‘No matter what.’
But she sank back into the pillow, desperate.
I tried not to feel guilty as I sat with Eliot. What was I supposed to do, become a nun?
I snuggled closer to him, loving the feel of his wide thighs next to mine, his muscular arm around my shoulder.
And when we were finally in bed it felt delicious. We saw each other less than once a week, so even though the kids were home, I wanted to make love.
Eliot didn’t like it, but he relented when I got under the covers and kissed him all over. However, he was terrified of the children breaking into the bedroom. He struggled to act, eyes fixed on the door, and then it was all over rather quickly.
In the morning, Eliot dressed quickly: he had to go to work. I didn’t want to feel sad about his departure; I had to go to school.
She loved him incredibly, but it was a painful love, limited by both of their situations.
- Annabel Bond is a pseudonym. All names have been changed.