Too busy to wallow

Turmoil. It's September 2005. I'm sitting in a Southampton clinic. Back home in Winchester it's all going down. My eldest son Gabriel is starting his A levels, my five year old is entering Year 1, I am just 44, suffering from sleep deprivation courtesy of my toddler's colourful nightmares, and I'm wondering whether to wear a wrap dress or boot cut jeans at the school gate so I don't stand out as 1664 woman (that's 16 from behind, 64 from in front) amongst all the gym slip mums. And now 'my' neurologist (I refuse to claim him as my own in the possessive way of sick people. Maybe it's comforting, but it would be like adopting an albatross) has just told me I've probably got multiple sclerosis.
It will be another three years before I get the definite diagnosis. So until then I'll ignore my dragging leg, weak bladder and nagging fear, and leave it there. I bury what is a 'definitely maybe' firmly in the sand along with my head, not even telling my darling husband. It's called denial. I know. But I have my reasons.
Firstly, my older sister also has MS, diagnosed around 1997 and managed so superbly by beta-interferon injections that with her hectic schedule teaching the art of silver smithing, her immaculately cut Joseph suits and teetering heels, you'd never know. But she had it first. My illogical, childish instinct (because logic isn't located in your guts, is it?) is that everyone will think I am copying her, yea, even in developing something as terrifying as this. My family is just getting used to her illness, relieved that she is managing it so well. How dare I come along and ruin it with a misjudged bid for attention?
You see? It's straight back to the nursery, as a psychotherapist would say, where as the weediest of my four sisters I was not only consistently teased for my big feet, big ears, sore eyes and early potty training problems, but also frequently told that I was a changeling.Not in the romantic, fairy story sense. More in the found in a cardboard box in a public loo sense. As a result, although I patently am part of the Stokes clan, right down it would seem to these infernal MS genes, I always felt an outsider looking in, pushing her nose up against the window watching the party going on without her. That weird, intermittent melancholy continued into my teens, into university at Oxford and beyond. The one it rarely happened was when I was living in Cairo. I wonder if that was because I was so obviously displaced, so gloriously foreign? Anyway, this intermittent disorientation eventually gave itself a name. Depression.
But that's another story. For now, apart from a love of committing my experiences, and other people's, and imaginary ones, to paper, I have no intention of stealing the limelight, certainly not for something as potentially devastating as this. And I do not, even when it is later definitively diagnosed, want a flashing neon sign round my neck labelled 'I've got MS so you can all worry like hell and overnight treat me totally differently because soon I'll deteriorate into someone wearing elasticated trousers twitching in a wheelchair'.
The second reason I keep it zipped for now is frankly that I have my hands full. After several fraught years as a single mother fuelled by love and pride in my son, fierce determination to reunite him with his father, the odd handful of Prozac, too much wine and plenty of unsuitable liaisons, my dreams have come true.
After knowing him for eight years, working with him for five, and even attending his previous wedding, I have finally married my lovely Richard, a gorgeous husband and fantastic father and stepfather. We have had our own two boys and live in our small but perfectly formed nest in possibly the nicest city in England. But waiting so long to marry and have more babies has meant I'm an older mother, and Richard, though full of beans, is sans doute an older father, pushing 60 at this stage of our story.
Our situation, brutally rammed home by the neurologist's dour words, contains issues that would never cross your average yummy mummy's expensively highlighted head.. In our world modelling mini Boden and baking perfect cup cakes for the school fete comes a very poor second to wondering whether there's time for plastic surgery before the quiz night or if you'll be doddering, ill or dead when your littlest kids graduate from university.
John Lennon said that life is what happens when you're busy making other plans. So, in this September 2005 I don't have time to wallow or even face head on what is thus far only a grim possibility. I have three boys who need me. Six if you count my husband and the foreign students (usually boys) who we take in as lodgers. I work part time for criminal lawyers. I write erotic short stories. I take photographic portraits. I like to party. It's not my time.