When writing my first book, Red Ink, about a dysfunctional Anglo-Greek family, I travelled alone to the island of Crete for a week of research. At the time, my eldest child was two and my youngest was five months.
I was nervous about going, excited too, and eager to talk about my plans. But this was the response whenever I did: “What, you’re just going to leave your kids?!”
Friends both male and female answered alike, with similar fervour. So I developed a set-piece reply.
“I am leaving them, yes.”
I tried to sound airy.
“I thought I would just plonk them on the sofa in front of CBeebies with seven days worth of sandwiches. They’ll be fine, I reckon, don’t you?”
Of course this was not the plan. I was leaving them with my husband, their dad, in the home that we all shared. If it had been the other way around – him going away for a week rather than me – I had to wonder if anyone would have considered that the kids were being ‘left’ at all?
There is a special kind of guilt reserved for mothers. “Won’t you feel bad?” I was asked, with the only acceptable answer being ‘yes’, making clear the deal. If I was to go somewhere that could turn out to be fun, indulgent even, penance must be paid. Travelling could only be tolerated if I was to be miserable when I got there.
So in the run-up to my trip my ‘feeling bad’ turned into crazy, magical thinking. I imagined, on a loop, my plane tumbling from the sky or my rental car veering off a cliff as divine payment for this particular kind of freedom.
I would be slaughtered by a psychopath who preyed on lone female travellers. I would choke on halloumi and no one would be there to give me the Heimlich manoeuvre.
Worse than all that, something could happen to my children as payback for me going, as sufferance for reneging on my unspoken superwoman promise to always be there, omnipresent, ready to prevent disaster.
I cannot switch it off, this imagination of mine, and most of the time it serves me well. I write drama for a living so must conjure it up easy. Life is filled with conflict and heartache, retribution and death – in books and plays at least – so it can be hard to accept that real life is, in the mainstay, mundane and predictable, with very little structure at all.
I believe it was this experience in part that led me to write Mother Tongue, a novel about a young woman, Dasha, who leaves her little sister (her daughter for all intents and purposes) at school for the first time and loses her forever.
By freeing Dasha from her guilt, I freed myself from my own and set my small worries into perspective. What a charmed life I live. Call it a tawdry phrase if you want, but your blessings are there to be counted.
No tragedy befell me in Crete. I wandered through hidden ruins, ate bread and honey and breathed Tsikoudia-fuelled fire. I took a roadtrip along the coast of the Akrotiri peninsula, made new friends and remembered who I was when not extracting chewed-up biscuits from the gaps in badly-made highchairs.
I felt bad, a little, I couldn’t help it. Late in the week when celebrating Greek Easter with my host family, a Christmas-like affair with candle ceremonies and roasting meat, the sound of Robbie William’s Angels (of all songs!) sent me weeping into my phone.
“I should be there!” I blubbered down the line to England. “I should be at home with my babies!”
“But you’re not sorry you went, are you?” My husband soothed.
“No,” I said, meaning it. “I’m not sorry.”
Julie’s novel Mother Tongue is published by Hot Key Books on Aug 25th