Confessions of a Bad Mother
Read Confessions of a Bad Mother Online
Authors: Stephanie Calman
S
TEPHANIE
C
ALMAN
M A C M I L L A N
First published 2005 by Macmillan
This electronic edition published 2008 by Pan Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd
Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Rd, London N1
9RR
Basingstoke and Oxford
Associated companies throughout the
world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-0-330-46595-3 PDF
ISBN 978-0-330-46594-6 EPUB
Copyright © Stephanie Calman 2005
The right of Stephanie Calman to be identified as the
author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit,
reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in
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photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of
the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this
publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for
damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library.
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This book is rated `PG'
Having children is a bit like assembling a shelf unit from a flatpack: you start off looking at the picture, sure you can do it perfectly. Then you get all the bits out and realize it's a bit more complicated than you thought. You start in with the screws and dowels, and quite soon you're overwhelmed. Getting tireder and more confused, you succumb to anxiety, anger and then panic. Finally, you shove it together, hide the bits you've left out, and just hope it doesn't collapse when there's anyone nearby.
This book is not a manual.
3
Babies Do Come Out of
Mummy’s Tummy
4
How Many Breastfeeding Women
Does It Take to Change a Lightbulb?
14
Sex with Thomas the Tank Engine (&
Friends)
15
The Worst Mother in the World
18
The Cheeseless Tunnel: Why Parents Are
Stupider Than Rats
19
A Little Light Bedtime Reading
22
Sex in the Ad Break of Friends
24
Nature v Nurture: Pink Blizzards and the
Great Escape
Mark Lucas, who steered me to George Morley, whose notes made me
laugh.
You can’t make a baby alone, even these days. And as the whole
point of Bad Mothers Club is to ease the load, I would like to express my deep
and lasting appreciation to those who did it for me:
Marie Thomas
Liz Irwin
Deborah Phillips
Anthony
Silverstone
Dr Anne Szarewski
Dr Sarah Tunkel & Dr Penny Noble at
the Fetal Medicine Centre
Tammy Whyte
Alison Salmon
Tilly
Vosburgh
Claudia Stumpfl
Maggie Hamand
Angela Roche
Rose
Prince
Nicholas Faith
Ruby Azhar
Katherine Shonfield
Joan
Maker
Jessica Chappell
Joe Moran
Sally Craddock
Mary Banham
Pat O’Shea
Dr Edward Douek
Katarina
Wendy
Clare
Tompkins
Nicky Oldfield
University College Hospital Neo-Natal Unit
Margaret Pyke Centre
Lucy Lindsay
Betsy Tobin
Amanda Brown
Judith Apter
Vida Adamoli
Sarah Litvinoff
Dr Dora Waitt
Anne
O’Donovan, the original ‘BM’
Jay Murphy, who helped show
the way
For www.badmothersclub.com:
Sam Blagg
Jay Nagley
Toni
Morden
Becky Hill
Tony Slack
Kathryn Lamb
Jo Hage
Julia
Porter
My mother, Pat McNeill, who said: ‘Actually, I think you’re
doing really well.’
My sister, Claire Calman, who said – on more than one occasion:
‘Would you like me to come round…?’
And…
My husband, Peter Grimsdale, who said: ‘It’ll be
fine.’ And – it hurts me to say this – he was right.
We’re in a pub in the West Country and Lydia has no chips.
Lawrence’s scampi has arrived with plenty, her fishcake with none. I know
he can’t possibly finish that huge pile, and I hate waste.
‘Lawrence, can you give Lydia some of your chips?’
‘No! Why should I?’
‘Because she hasn’t got any, and you’ve got
loads.’
‘It’s not fair!’
Peter and I start to turn into badly dramatized versions of my
parents.
‘Why don’t we just get some more chips?’ (my
father).
‘Because he’s got loads already, and is going to fill up on
those and not eat his scampi as it is!’ (my mother)
Being a female, I am engaged in the pointless process of distinguishing
one fat-soaked component of the meal from another, to create a fictional
nutritional hierarchy. Even as the meal degenerates into chaos, I notice that
when it comes to the differences between the sexes, this is
Confessions of a
Bad Mother
one of the most intriguing. Women use even the most rudimentary
knowledge of food chemistry to at least attempt to care for their families by
regulating their diets, whereas men tend to throw themselves down whichever
route leads – they think – to an easy life. But the tactic that
lends peace to the dinner table
now
, is often the cause of trouble
later
– of the ‘
Daddy always lets us have
chips
’ variety – frequently when Daddy is not around. This is
called writing cheques your wife has to cash, and is one of the reasons women
often want to hit their husbands with pans.
‘Well, none of us can come up to your exacting standards,’
says Peter, leaving the relatively constricting field of my parenting
deficiencies for the wide-open prairie of my failed personality in general.
I ask my daughter: ‘Lydia, would you like some of my potato
instead?’
‘No!’
‘Lawrence, give Lydia some of your chips.’
‘NO!!’
‘
Right
…’ I say this decisively, but fail to
back it up with any kind of action, or even the rest of the sentence. Peter is
now refusing to be either of my parents, and has cast himself as The Reasonable
One.
‘Can’t we just have our meal?’ he moans desperately,
the innocent Red Cross worker caught between warring rebel factions.
This makes me want to punch him really hard.
‘If you won’t give Lydia any of your chips, you’re not
having any pudding.’
‘Da-ddy …!’
‘This is ridiculous.’
I take five of Lawrence’s chips and put them on Lydia’s
plate.
‘Thank you, Mummy,’ says Lydia in her lion-cub voice.
‘She took my chips!’
‘Well done,’ says Peter. ‘Happy now?’
‘I’ll tell you what’d be great. If you’d just
once
back me up.’
‘I’ll never be able to do what you want, that’s pretty
clear.’
‘You shit …’
‘Mummy said shit!’
‘Daddy! Mummy said s-h-one-t!’
‘Brilliant!’ says Peter. ‘Well done.’
I want to hit him, and get out of this awful place with its purple
carpet and pathetic attempt to be a brasserie by putting a copy of the
Mail
on Sunday
on the bar. I want to scream at him, push him through the window
and go back to the junction where I left my life, the manageable one. And even
if it wasn’t always manageable, it didn’t keep suddenly getting
away from me like this. I should never have become a parent. It’s
impossible. In the magazines, parenting looks like a cruise. When you get
there, it’s a tiny rowing boat, in a storm. And some bastard’s not
put in any oars.
Mother’s
Block
I wasn’t going to have children. I was too frightened to have
them, and I was sure I was physically and emotionally incapable of looking
after them. Following the terrifying assault of birth, it would be one long,
ever-repeating loop between the A&E department and the washing machine. And
anyway, I wasn’t the Maternal Type.
Whatever I was, it didn’t appear to
be
a Type. I loved
cartoons and comic strips, children’s books and toys. I still had my
Sindy, and her BOAC flight bag, on the shelf beside my desk. And I was
intensely nostalgic about childhood games, especially ‘Orphanages’,
when my sister and I placed our dolls in far corners of the flat, often with an
arm or leg sticking out to indicate injury, then went round rescuing them with
our pram. We often turned the bedroom into a dormitory, and by the age of about
ten I was fantasizing in vivid detail about finding an abandoned baby in a
phone box, which I would bring up to universal acclaim.
I loved the
idea
of fostering, adoption and rescue; it was just
actual babies I didn’t like. As a child I hated them coming round to
play, resented the attention they got from my mother, and was infuriated by the
implicit order of precedence that meant they were allowed to mess up my toys.
As I got older, with the need for ready cash, I’d take any job so long as
it didn’t involve children. In my entire adolescence I babysat once, and
that ended with the children playing football in the kitchen and my calling the
seven year old a racist. (Well, he was.)