“No. If you want the truth, I find it intensely boring,” her mother said. “I work in a quiet office, with quiet people, doing the same quiet thing I’ve done forever. I hate it.”
There was silence.
Rosie turned her head and saw a deep furrow appear on her father’s brow. He seemed as shocked as she was.
Even Dan, something of a conversational expert, seemed to struggle with a suitable response.
Rosie felt as if her world had shifted a little. “You hate your job, Mum? Really?”
“Why is that so surprising? Not everyone is lucky enough to do a job they’re passionate about. Sometimes you fall into something and before you know it you’re still there twenty years later.”
“I—I thought you loved your work.”
“It’s been perfectly fine. Ideal in many ways, because they were flexible about letting me work from home whenever you were sick which was important. It was a practical choice. I’m not the first woman in the world to make a practical choice.”
The practical choice sounded depressingly uninspiring.
Rosie felt a twinge of guilt.
Was this her fault? She knew that her constant emergency trips to the hospital had put pressure on the whole family but she’d never considered that her mother might have stayed in the job because it made it easier to care for a sick child.
“Why haven’t you talked about this before?”
“I don’t think anyone ever asked. Dan’s the first. His emotional intelligence is clearly as well developed as his muscles.”
Of course they’d asked about her job. For years when she’d been living at home, Rosie had asked how was your day?
But how had her mother answered? She couldn’t remember.
She was sure she’d never heard her say that she hated her job, but maybe there had been subtle hints that she’d missed. Maybe she’d heard a polite response and not recognized it as that. She hadn’t looked deeper, but that was because it had never occurred to her that her mother didn’t like her job. Why would it? If you didn’t like something, you said so. Her mother never complained about anything. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, Rosie had assumed she loved her life.
Growing up, all her friends had envied Rosie her mother. Maggie was always there to greet her after school with hugs and fresh wholesome food. She adjusted her hours to fit around whatever family crisis—usually of Rosie’s making—happened to assail the inhabitants of Honeysuckle Cottage at any point in time.
When Katie had developed flu a few days before her exams for medical school, it was their mother who had taken time off and driven her to the exam, plied her full of medication, and picked her up afterward. It was their mother who had slept in a chair by Rosie’s side when she was in the hospital, and her mother who had encouraged her from the sidelines when she played sports.
Rosie realized she’d never seen her father do any of that, and until this moment that had never even struck her as odd.
Her father had always seemed like an exciting figure to her. He was energetic, passionate and often elusive, disappearing from their lives for weeks and sometimes months at a time and then reappearing with exotic gifts and stories of sandstorms and badly behaved camels. This being before mobile phones, they often wouldn’t receive more than a single postcard during the time he was away.
Rosie recalled admiring her mini-Sphinx bookends, while her mother patiently fed the washing machine with clothes that seemed to contain more sand than the desert.
Their family had expanded and contracted as he came and went and her mother was the one responsible for that easy elasticity. She’d held everything together in his absence, and then welcomed his presence as if he’d never been away.
There had been no criticism that Rosie could remember. No resentment as he’d packed his passport and she’d packed lunches for the girls.
What must it have taken to be that flexible?
Compromise.
A whole lot of compromise on her mother’s part, and little on the part of her father.
Rosie realized with a flash of shame that she really only ever thought of her mother in relation to her role in the family, not as an individual. Her mother was her rock. The person she always turned to when she had a problem. When had she ever asked her mother if she was happy? Never. She’d made an assumption. Her mother had always been there for her, one hundred percent dependable, no matter what. Who was there for her mother? The answer was her father, of course, except judging from the look on his face that wasn’t the case. He looked as shocked as she felt.
Had he ever thought about the sacrifice Maggie had made for them all?
Rosie decided, right there and then, that she wasn’t going to burden her mother with her current crisis. She was going to make sure her mother had a relaxing holiday because no one deserved it more than she did.
“I’