The End is Where We Begin by Maria Goodin (open ebook .txt) 📕

And then, mid-afternoon, Josh enters the lounge.

“Can I talk to you?” he asks, quietly.

“Sure,” I say, not looking up from my screen. I’ve learned through experience that he’ll talk more openly if I don’t look straight at him.

He sits down on the edge of the ruined coffee table and I wait for him to start, but when he doesn’t say anything, I look over at him.

He’s sitting with his head in his hands, tears streaming down his face.

I sit up slowly, place my laptop on the floor, walk over to him and crouch down.

“What’s going on?” I ask, placing my hand on his shoulder.

“I can’t…” he sobs, “…I just can’t…”

“You can’t what?”

He rocks back and forth, gripping strands of hair between his fingers.

“I can’t deal with all this, Dad. All this stuff that’s coming at me. I don’t want to do it.”

Tears drip onto the knees of his jeans.

“You don’t want to do what?” I ask, anxiously.

“Any of it! I don’t want to see my mum for a start!”

I shake my head, confused.

“You don’t want to see her?”

“No! It’s just too much! It all just keeps going round in my head. I can’t sleep, I can’t think straight. I just want things to go back to how they were.” He looks up at me with tear-filled, desperate eyes. “I just can’t handle seeing her right now! I just can’t!”

“It’s okay, you don’t have to see her,” I say, firmly. “Understand? You don’t have to. It’s entirely your choice. But if and when you do want to, you know I’m one hundred per cent behind you, don’t you? And that I’m completely fine with it.”

“I just don’t want to! Not right now!”

“That’s fine,” I tell him, calmly, “then you don’t have to, that’s fine.”

A part of me wants to revel in his rejection of Hellie, wants to throw it in her face. See what you did? You’ve lost him! You’re too late!

But, actually, I just feel sad. I’d been starting to entertain the idea that they could have a relationship, that he could finally have his mother in his life. I feel sorry for him, and, surprisingly, I feel sorry for her. They’ve both missed out on so much.

“Do you want to talk to her on the phone? Email her?” I ask a bit hopefully.

“No!”

“Okay, all right, that’s fine,” I soothe.

“Maybe. One day. But not now.”

He wipes the back of his hand across his nose and sniffs loudly.

“What else?” I ask.

“All this stuff about my GCSEs. I just feel like you’re always on my back about my future and—”

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry,” I tell him, and in that moment I truly am. Desperately sorry. “I didn’t know you were really feeling that pressured—”

“I tried to tell you!”

“I know, and I should have listened. I’ll lay off. I promise.”

My heart aches seeing him like this, knowing I’ve contributed to it, that I’ve made him feel exactly the way my mum used to make me feel; as though I had to measure up to some higher standard. How is it that the traits you despise in your parents get so easily repeated?

“I just feel like you want me to go to uni and have this great career and everything because you couldn’t, and I feel this weight, like this responsibility—”

“It’s not that,” I tell him, “it’s never been about that.”

“Then what?”

I give a heavy sigh. “I guess I’ve always felt like I had something to prove when it came to you. No one thought I could bring up a child. I was young, I was single. I felt like everyone just expected me to fail. And when you went to that primary school… all those cosy little middle-class families… everyone just seemed to look at me like I couldn’t do it. And I just… I guess I wanted to prove them wrong. I couldn’t give you much, but I thought if you could at least have a good education… but it’s my stuff, not yours. That’s about my insecurities. And I’m sorry. I should never have pushed that on to you. I’ll stop. I promise.”

“I just feel suffocated sometimes,” Josh continues, tearfully, “you’re so… I dunno… like, protective. It’s too much. I feel like you’re just so stressy all the time over me – my schoolwork, my future, where I am, who I’m with, what I’m doing… like, what do you think’s going to happen? It’s like you don’t trust me.”

“I do trust you. It’s—”

I’m about to say it’s other people I don’t trust, but I stop myself. Clearly I’ve been pushing all my fears onto him and I feel terrible about it. I didn’t even realise. I thought I was keeping him safe from the big bad world. But look what I’ve done.

For a moment I wonder if I should tell him; tell him about me and Michael and Max and Tom. About what happened. About how it changed me and how I viewed life. But that’s just more of my shit.

“Okay, you’re right,” I agree, “maybe I’ve been a bit much at times. And I’m sorry. I’ll try to loosen up a bit, okay? I don’t want to make you feel like I’m always on your back about things, I really don’t.”

“It’s just all too much stress, Dad,” he mumbles through his tears.

He slumps forward, resting his forehead on my shoulder and I rub his back.

“I know, son,” I whisper, “I know it is.”

He’s still just a boy, underneath it all.

The next day, I make a phone call to Hellie. It’s strange hearing her voice again after all this time. I notice the trace of Scandinavian accent is almost entirely gone, overridden by the American after all her years in the States. We exchange very brief how are yous, but other than that I keep the phone call purely perfunctory. It’s amazing how little two people with a child can have to say to each other.

“He doesn’t want any contact with you