The One Day You Were My Husband (101)
I call my sister. “I’m just leaving now,” I say when she picks up. “How are they?”
“Appalling,” Maya shouts, over Maeve’s yells about something to do with skipping ropes.
Maya, somewhat improbably, is my children’s part-time nanny. I am a single mother training to be a surgeon once again, and the only way I can make it work is to have help. A few days after Dad’s funeral, I drove her to Heathrow to fly back to Colorado. Six hours later she had reappeared in my kitchen with her suitcase. She sat down at my table and burst into tears.
“I have no money and nowhere to live and you are my one and only plan,” she said, half laughing, half crying. “Can I stay for a while?”
I hadn’t been wrong; she was not happy in her beautiful Colorado life. Their setup had suited Eagle far better than it suited her. In the years since they’d stopped trying for a baby, Eagle had leaned into his alternative community, but Maya had not. She had become lonely, then depressed.
“Biscuit is my only real friend out there,” she said, laughing again, as tears drew gentle mascara stains down her cheeks. “Everyone we know is lovely but they’re just…they’re just not my people, Carrie. They are so far from being my people. In fact, I’m not even sure why I’m calling them lovely. I find them weird and culty and fucking annoying and I can’t go back there.”
I asked if she’d called Eagle to talk this through. “No,” she admitted, because no matter how many years she’d spent as a therapist, she was still Maya. “I will, of course. But he won’t put up any sort of a fight and I want to be mentally ready for that.”
She hugged her knees. “I thought the slow lane was a way for me to feel safe, but it’s just…it’s too fucking slow. I can’t take another day of it!” For a moment she looked happy to have said this. Then she realized she might never see Biscuit again and she started sobbing. Through the sobs she told me she’d had to give up booze for good. “I’m sorry I lied about that, too! I’m a loathsome fuckup.”
Days later I was given a six-month reorientation and update training placement at Derriford Hospital in Plymouth, with the promise of a further six months’ specialist updating if all went well. Maya offered to be my part-time nanny for the next twelve months. It was an obvious yes.
She started building an online therapy business at the same time, joined the local yoga studio, went on a bunch of internet dates before deciding never to try that again, and had regular FaceTimes with Biscuit. From the very beginning of her employment she ignored the vast majority of my instructions, and our household was all the better for it.
Nine months into my update training placement, they told me I’d more than adequately demonstrated my clinical competence. Once the year was over, I could move straight into a CT2 job: the level I was working at when I met Johan. Three weeks after that, Yanika called. We’d stayed in touch over the past year and she had, unbeknown to me, managed to persuade the Royal College and my deanery to fund a yearlong exchange program. A Swedish trainee from her hospital was to come to the UK for a year while a British trainee spent a year under her mentorship in Stockholm. “It’s yours if you want it,” she said.
There was never any question as to whether or not I wanted it. Any general surgeon would want this training, at this hospital, with this woman as their boss. But it came with many drawbacks: language barriers, Robin’s visits with the kids, schools, childcare, and—above all—uprooting the children, little more than a year after their father had moved out of the family home.
I was also very anxious about risking bumping into Johan again so soon after I’d begun to find my feet on my own. But Maya had solutions to all of these problems, including the offer of her ongoing services as a nanny. She had loved this city when she’d come to stay last year, and it made no difference to her therapy business if she was in a cottage in rural England or an inner-city apartment in Sweden.
The kids, who are now nearly eight, agreed readily to a yearlong adventure in Sweden. I started over with Swedish lessons while the two of them and Maya learned together online.
“And Johan is only a problem if you allow him to be,” she reminded me. “Of course you won’t bump into him.” So I said yes, and here we are, and of course I haven’t bumped into him.
As with my last job, this contract has been a thrilling reminder of the power of yes in a life that had become polluted with no. It’s reminded me once again of how I’ve missed surgery, Yanika, even on-call shifts. Above all, how much I have missed myself. It had been too long since I’d last woken up to the certainty that I could handle whatever was thrown my way.
“Put them on video,” I say, once the skipping-rope problem has been resolved.
“I might not,” Maya says, which makes my children cackle with laughter.
“Auntie Maya’s being naughty!” Maeve yells. “We went to the sweet shop and I’ve got a blue tongue! AND she’s letting us play in the pond in the park AND she’s taking us out for a dirty takeaway!”
I hear a corroborating splash and start laughing. “You’re fired,” I tell my sister, but she’s shouting at Raffy to leave the ducks alone.
“He mustn’t get too cold…” I begin, once I have Maya’s attention again, but she tells me to hush. “It’s out of your hands, Doctor Carrie,” she says, and she’s right. I’m going out for the evening for the first time since we moved here; Maya is in charge now. If she decides to feed them blue sweets and let them wade in a cold pond in their school uniforms, I am in no position to argue. And whatever the “dirty takeaway” is, it’s going to make my children very happy, and that’s the only thing I really care about.