I finished another book, and sold a toy kitchen

It felt… OK? I guess?

And, I mean, it’s not like in the movies.

In movies, an author who’d just finished writing a book would type the words “The End” (Which you don’t do in real life, because novels don’t generally end like that. It’s kind of implied that it’s the end by the fact that it’s … ended. ) then sit back, and look at the screen, a small smile of satisfaction playing on her lips. Then she would reach for the bottle of 100-year-old malt/something that makes sense to people who actually drink whisky1 and pour herself a generous measure. “Another one down, Jiggles,” she would say, raising a glass to her faithful animal companion, who would simply blink its yellow eyes (Er, it’s a cat, obviously, in this movie. Your animal companion may vary.), then get up and stalk away, whereupon the author would down the glass in one, still smiling that enigmatic smile.

In real, non-movie life, meanwhile, I just typed the last sentence of the %^$%&*& thing, deleted and re-typed it a few times, then got up and went for a shower, because, honestly, I’d been in those PJs all day at that point, and it was starting to get ridiculous, really.

“Oh, I finished the book, by the way,” I told my husband as I was running Max’s bath later that night.

“Cool,” said Terry. “We can talk about it later.”

And that was that.

By the time you reach book 4, no one is particularly surprised or impressed by the fact you wrote a book. It’s just what you do, basically. (Well, that and spend money on stuff you can’t afford. But that goes without saying.) This week, however, it has not been what I do. Because, other than correcting a few typos that Terry picked up on his first read through, I’ve put the book to one side for a few days, so I can start the edit afresh next week.

In the meantime, I’ve mostly been cleaning.

After my big closet clear-out of a couple of weeks ago, Terry also got bit by the declutter bug, so we’ve been gradually working our way around the house, clearing out cupboards, and trying to remember why, exactly, we have such a large collection of rubber bananas.

On Wednesday, the clear-out reached our office, which is also home to Max’s toy kitchen, and the vast amount of absolute junk that’s stored inside/on top of it. Now, Max hasn’t really played properly with this kitchen for a couple of years at this point. He just uses it to store… well, junk, basically. And also all those rubber bananas.

But Max has lots of junk storage in his own room now, so, at least twice a week, I would walk into the office and say, “I really think we should work towards getting rid of this toy kitchen, so we can have a proper office again, with, you know, only grown-up furniture and absolutely no rubber bananas.” And, every time I’d say this, Terry would completely ignore me and go back to whatever it was he was doing.

But then, this week — without me even mentioning the toy kitchen — he told me he’d been speaking to a woman in the street who has a toddler, and he’d offered her the toy kitchen. She’d said yes, her little girl would love it. And also Max’s vast collection of baby books, which he no longer reads, but which are all stored in his room, taking up space that could better be used for books about the Titanic, the Hindenberg, and other great tragedies of the 20th century.

(Aside: this week he found out I was alive when the Costa Concordia sank, and immediately started treating me like an important historical artefact. Which made me feel, ooh, at least 102…)

Max, surprisingly, was on board with this, on the condition that he was allowed to keep the “Deck The Halls” Christmas book, which plays the tune really loudly every time you open it.

“Great,” I said, jumping up from my desk. “When can she take it? Can she take it NOW?”

She could take it tomorrow, apparently. So we got to work emptying and cleaning the toy kitchen, and as we worked, I grew sadder and sadder until the sadness reached a point where I thought that, instead of getting rid of this thing that had been annoying me for months now, I would maybe rather just keep it forever.

It seemed like a solid plan.

Because this dusty toy kitchen was, of course, not just a toy. It was an accumulation of memories. It was the looks on my parents’ faces when they brought it round one day for one-year-old Max. It was his chubby little hands pulling himself up to stand at it. It was years and years of dusting and tidying, and living with something that I would one day never see again, and this suddenly seemed absolutely intolerable to me.

But parenthood is like that, I’ve found. It’s essentially just one long exercise in letting go. In realising everything is temporary: the carefully-chosen little outfits, the beloved toys, the way he used to end stories about his friends by saying, “Click for more stories about Zak.” None of it lasts for more than a few weeks: or maybe a few years, in the case of the toy kitchen. All of it has to be let go. And when you’re right in the middle of it, it can be hard not to feel like the little things are really the big things, and to be unable to accept that this one specific toy will now just be a memory — and for you, rather than him.

There’s a line in the movie International Velvet, which I watched obsessively as a pony-obsessed child, which goes, “Sometimes, getting what you want is a kind of losing.”

And that pretty much sums up my feelings about the toy kitchen, really.