Magical Thinking

It took ten days for something to go wrong. Not a bad run, but not the six weeks of intensive nourishment I had hoped for from this period at home. We’re hoping to get married while he’s on a break from chemo and I’ve been training Ben like Rocky so he can get up the stairs to the town hall. One morning I woke up to find him with a piece of gauze taped to his neck.

‘Bad news,’ he said, ‘my throat’s oozing again.’ He peeled off the gauze to show me a dot of pus that was leaking from the middle of his scar. I went to call the doctor.

‘Don’t call the doctor,’ he said. ‘They’ll just put some gauze on it and wait for it to heal.’ I called them anyway and they told us to come in straight away. Yet another trip to hospital. When we arrived the curly haired doctor gave me a look that said ‘I told you so.’

‘Benjameeeen I think the hole in your oesophagus is not closed. You must stop eating and drinking immediately.’ Ben tried to back out of the room.

It was 35 degrees outside. He wouldn’t be allowed a sip of water for months. The weeks of starving and staring at the hospital ceiling were the worst of his life. To take it away again would take away his will to live.

‘We will reinsert the feeding tube and you must stay with us at the hospital.’

We both answer in unison,

‘No.’

‘My neck is not open,’ Ben whispers. The surgery has paralysed one of his vocal chords and he struggles to be heard. He’s lost his instrument but not his fighting spirit. He pours a sachet of thickener into a bottle of Aquarius and drinks it in front of the doctor.

‘See nothing’s coming out. Bella we’re going home.’ He gets up to leave and the doctor softens her approach.

I know this is so hard, I know you want to eat and be at home with your family, but food is going into your lung and it could give you an infection.’

I thought about the little cough he does when he’s eating a Calippo. What if there is Calippo in his lung.

‘OK Prove it,’ I counter. ‘Prove there’s a hole and we’ll let you put the tube in, but he has to be treated at home.’

My eldest has just started cuddling her daddy again after 9 long months. She finally trusts that he’s not going to leave her in the middle of the night. I won’t give him up without a fight.

‘He desperately needs to gain weight,’ I plead. ‘The heamatologist says its imperative for him to be strong enough for chemo.’

‘He needs to rest his throat completely for many months,’ she says. ‘Otherwise his throat won’t heal.’ I beg her for options. A soft food diet? Why not operate? She tells me the operation is complex. I tell her that if they can’t manage it I’ll find someone who will.

She agrees to order an emergency CT scan to check if there is indeed still a fistula between his oesophagus and his trachea. I am battered by emotional whiplash. When they wheel him away I collapse in a chair and sob.

‘Do you understand what you’re doing?’ I say. ‘When you send him home knowing he might have to come back. Do you know what it does to our family? You are responsible for so much heartache.’

‘She sits down with me and strokes my arm. You are doing so well,’ she says, softly. ‘This is very, very hard.’

I look her straight in the eye and ask the question I’m most scared to.

‘If he has to be on the feeding tube for months can he survive this?’ She pauses to search for the right words. ‘It will be very, very difficult and take a very long time, but it is not impossible.’ I go to the cafeteria and pray.

Ben always used to ask me, if I would pray if I was in a plane crash. I have been an atheist since my teens.

‘No. Of course not.’ I’d answer. ‘What’s the point?’

I still don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know now that I would pray anyway. I don’t know who or what I’m praying to, but something is always better than nothing. I think the reason I pray is the same reason that I write. I am looking for answers when there aren’t any. I am seeking communion with no guarantee of response.

People often ask me why I’m writing this newsletter. If I’m looking for catharsis, or a way to bring in some income while I’m off work. Of course these things are part of it, but what I’m really looking for is the illusion of control. I can tell myself that by choosing to write my own story, I have a hand in deciding how it will end.

I am loathe to talk of manifestation, something I neither truly understand nor buy into but I feel like every time I onboard a new subscriber, I add one more person to the energy pool who are hoping for Ben’s recovery.

I am not the type of person who usually talks of energy. I’ve lived most of my life as a spiritual grinch with little time for otherworldliness of any sort. My family joke that if I set foot inside a church I would burst into flames. While my friends asked psychics for clues on when they’d get a boyfriend/proposal/promotion, I laughed.

Religion. The zodiac. Tarot. Garbage. I was your friend who thinks she’s Richard Dawkins because shes doesn’t believe in horoscopes. I believed in believing in nothing.

A few months ago, Ben was briefly moved to a different hospital for palliative care. He was hallucinating, in agony and having daily blood transfusions. A doctor told him that not a lot of people come back from being this ill. His family flew out and we had hard conversations, about wills, wishes and ashes. My mum flew out and I climbed into her bed at 3am.

Contemplating his mortality again made me want to feel close to an older, familiar version of him. He didn’t even smell like himself any more, it was like his skin had been bleached. I drove to the village where we first met in search of the ghosts of our happiness.

I sat in the square and closed my eyes so I could see him driving his land rover with the windows down, slowing down to shout encouragement to cyclists, stuggling up the hill. I wondered if the kids will find this fun or embarrassing when they’re older. I hope we get to find out. I sat outside a bar in the shadow of the church and thought about who we were when we lived there. Fun, in love, a lot of the time quite pissed.

I looked up at the church and for the first time felt a pull to go inside. I walked up the steep steps into the cool, dark building and sat down awkwardly in a pew.

‘Please don’t let me find god, I said out loud. ‘I’ll never live it down.’

I went over to a large crucifix and lit three candles for myself, the kids and my mother in law. I figured that even if I didn’t believe in god, there must be some potency in this building. This, I think must be what people mean when they talk about energy.

I got back in the car and a house track on the radio urged me to ‘believe in the music.’

‘I don’t believe in fucking anything,’ I sobbed with my head on the steering wheel. But I knew it wasn’t true.

My magical thinking started when Ben was in the coma, and I started obsessing over signs. The number of his box in the ICU was 20, the same day as my birthday. I saw his stage name, Verse written on cars and buildings everywhere. Every rainbow I saw or song I heard on the radio held meaning. Friends pressed crystals into my hands and told me they would bring healing and love. Instead of laughing and shoving them in a drawer I kept them close, relishing the chance to physically hold someone’s hope in my hands.

My sister thinks that the natural evolution of this period is that Ben survives, finds god and writes a best selling book about his journey from Drum n Bass to Jesus. ‘Its your worst nightmare, but you know its true.’ She waits for me to laugh in agreement, but I can’t.

‘Honestly at this point he could start a cult that worships pineapples and I would not care.’

I do not tell her how much time I spend talking to the sea. That I have gone out with lanterns looking for something bigger than myself.

‘I think I’m in my woo-woo era,’ I say to a friend. ‘Of course you are,’ she says, ‘you’re looking for answers. You want to know why this is happening to you.’

The old me would have said that there are no answers, that sometimes bad shit happens to good people. But shit happens is an easier stance to take when the shit isn’t happening to you.

I tell my friend I’ve been up all night fretting about my karma. The day before I’d rushed to the loo to change an explosive nappy and didn’t tell a woman that she had her skirt tucked into her knickers.

‘Now I’m worried that Ben is going to get another infection because of me.’ She looks kindly concerned, then quietly nods when I tell her,

‘I’ve decided I am going to get my good karma back by giving blood.’

The jury is out on whether its magical thinking or mental illness, but my tolerance for mysticism has been slowly rising since I first moved to Mallorca. It begun with a conviction that the moon was trying to ruin my life. I shared my exasperation that I can never sleep when the moon is full and was immediately invited to a moon ceremony to set intentions and connect with my divine feminine.

On the last full moon Ben wasn’t yet home and the baby stayed up teething in my bed long after midnight. When she finally crashed out I lay very still on the precipice of the bed, too wired to fall asleep. I looked at the sky and wondered what the moon was trying to tell me, then I wondered what the hippies were up to. Aside from insomnia, my other sign that the full moon is incoming is the moon girls start getting busy. There is an entire moon mini economy on Mallorca led by women who’ve completed the marketing exec to healer pipeline. I could probably tell you the stage of moon cycle we’re in based on how often people bring up mushrooms in conversation. Although my friend Sophie assures me that everyone’s taking mescaline now.

If Ibiza is for hippies, Mallorca is for hippies with jobs. Multiple people have told me the Island called them to live here. Mallorca might not have Nostradamus touting it as Earth’s final resting place or a really magnetic rock but that hasn’t stopped Ley Line lovers from telling me the Island has mystical powers. Its for older hippies who take fewer drugs and wear more shoes, and an excellent place to dip a toe in the woo-woo water. It feels like every other mum at the school gates runs some form of retreat and through osmosis, my closed mind has been slowly shoved ajar.

During Covid, when socialising was restricted, an invitation to a drum ceremony or sound bath was like water in the desert. Were the sound baths somewhat diminished by the Shoreditch House photo booth pictures on the sound healer’s fridge? I’d say so. But its a nice enough way to spend an afternoon.

I continued politely declining my meeting with the moon until I found myself in Ibiza, visiting my friend, Nicola. We were both taking a break from our relationships and spent most of the time dissecting what had gone wrong. It was clear that neither of us were ready to let go. One night we were having dinner on the beach under the full moon. We spotted a ceremony happening at the other end of the cove so we tottered over with our espresso martinis while some hippies banged some drums. We both set our intentions and went our separate ways. Then a few months later I texted her to say Ben and I were back together and that I was pregnant.

‘No way!’ She said, ‘Me too!’ We were due on the same day.

Two kids later, I am starting to accept that I do believe in something, and that is fate. I believe I had my children so close together because Ben was always going to get ill. I believe that the Island brought us here so we didn’t have to go live through this nightmare in Tooting. It has taught me a lesson in resilience that cannot be taken away and that if someone were to take away all of my hard experiences, I would lose all of the strength they have given me. I believe he is going to keep on defying the odds and get well. I don’t know why but I do, and that means I believe in something.

Nine months ago, in the first few weeks of Ben being admitted to hospital, I thought my back might give out. I’ve had a dodgy disc since a fitness class where I swung a fat rope with too much vigour. My first pregnancy was plagued by sciatica and I can feel it niggling its way back in.

What I really need, I said to anyone who’d listen, is a massage and to do some bloody yoga. I said this knowing that I would do neither. As a newly single mother I had written myself off for self care for the forseeable.

It was boiling and the baby was little and couldn’t be outside for very long so I began every morning by walking the dog with the girls in the double buggy. I draped a giant muslin over the back so the baby was in the shade. My eldest daughter loves muslins. Half way round the walk she started to rub the giant muslin between her fingers, then with a dramatic tug she ripped it off.

‘No, I told her, this isn’t yours. Its to stop the baby getting hot.’

I re-secured it to the pushchair with clothes pegs but she was too determined. I had no option but to take off my t shirt and use it as shade instead. I walked down the road in my jeans and bra, my post-partum body out for all and sundry to gawp at.

‘Fuck my life,’ I thought. ‘Fucking Ben and his fucking chest infection. Fucking agonising back. Why do I never wear any fucking sun cream.’

We approached a house with a big scary dog so I put Roast on the lead. The dog gnashed its teeth behind huge wooden wheels that decorated an iron gate. behind a gate decorated with large wooden wheels. The closer we got the more frenzied it became, barking and throwing itself at the gate. Roast looked on with a pitying stare, then all of a sudden the dog burst through the wheel, shattering the wood. I shove the pushchair behind me and braced myself, but without the gate between her and Roast, the scary dog went all soft. I rang the doorbell, still in my bra but nobody was home. I started to walk but the dog was following, and when I went to put him on the lead she became not so nice again. She went for Roast and I started to panic. It was beginning to get very hot, I was still in my bra and I didn’t want to take a potentially not nice dog on a walk with my two kids.

A car pulled out of its driveway and the driver stopped. A glorious be-kaftaned woman got out and asked if I needed help.

‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘this looks so stressful. I’m going to call my friend and ask if he can help.’

I resisted the urge to give her a half naked hug.

‘I would take the dog myself,’ she said, ‘but I’m on my way to meet my father.’ I told her that the children’s father was in hospital, that I was knackered and I had a sore back.

‘You should come and see me,’ she said. ‘I’m a yoga teacher and I do massage.’ I side-eyed the dog. Of all the days for the gate to break. Her husband came and took the dog away. My mum came out to visit and I went for the best massage I have ever had in my life. For nine months my back has not so much as twinged.

‘The Island wanted us to meet today,’ she said as she was driving away. Last week I stood in the gin clear sea and wondered,

‘If the Island can give me a massage, why can’t it give me a life?

Now when the moon shines through my window and the baby is teething in my bed, I know what she’s trying to tell me. She is reminding me that just like her fullness, every stage in life is just a phase. I’ve survived awful mental health, terrible pregnancies, two under two. I have moved house more times in the last two years than should be legal. I can get through this fucking illness. We can get through this fucking illness.

In the end the prayer worked. The scan showed that the fistula is closed, and Ben doesn’t have Calippo lung. We’re getting married on my parents wedding anniversary as it was the only available date they had. The signs are everywhere if you’re looking for them.

I still have never done a sound bath where I haven’t had a nap, and my church visit won’t be repeated, but I’ll keep doing whatever I have to to believe that everything is going to be OK.