Confessions of a Bad Mother (10 page)

We say goodbye, put Lawrence back in the pram and walk home.

‘Well!’ said Peter. ‘I don’t know what Lawrence
thought, but I’d
love
to stay there all day and play with the toy
garage.’

‘We can’t,’ I said.

‘I know … Pity.’

‘No, I mean I can’t do it.’

‘What?! I thought you really liked her. Blimey, have I misread the
situation completely?’

‘It just seems so cruel.’

‘What? I thought you wanted a break.’

‘I do, but it’s inhumane – what were we
thinking
of ? We can’t give him away.’

‘We’re not Giving Him Away: you’re having a break. You
deserve a few hours to yourself.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Well, what about work? You want to go back to writing at some
point, don’t you? It’ll enable you to do that.’

‘Yeah, I miss my work. No, I don’t: I miss my freedom. Oh,
God, that’s
really
bad.’

‘No it isn’t.’

‘I love him! But I’d love a break, too. It’s hard,
doing this all day and night. But that’s because I’m not a Proper
Mother. Proper Mothers can do it. Proper Mothers don’t give their
children away.’

‘You
are
a Proper Mother. You’re not Giving Him
Away.’

Poor Peter. As my boyfriend he was spared the ‘
I’m
Fat’/’No you’re not
’ conversation, only to end
up with
this
.

‘Look it’s your decision. Whatever you want is fine with
me.’ Oh, cheers. That’s the trouble with these men who let you make
your own decisions; you can’t blame them when things go wrong.

‘I know!’ he says that evening. ‘Let’s ring the
references. With any luck they’ll tell us that she beats them and feeds
them on nothing but Pop Tarts, and the decision will be made for us.’

On the list there are two architects, parents of the baby asleep in the
pram, and two GPs – the parents of one of the boys playing with the
garage. The other one’s parents are teachers.

‘Well, we’ve found the catch,’ says Peter. ‘She
won’t take us unless we both do exactly the same job.’

None of them has anything bad to say. We ring the woman who’s
moved to Shropshire, who’s created the empty place. ‘My only regret
about leaving London,’ she says, ‘is losing Maureen.’

‘What do
you
want?’ Peter asks me.

People who like looking after children all day long – even their
own – are one kind of person. People who prefer to be at work for a full
day are another kind. And what do I want? Neither. And both. Too much time at
home with the baby, and I’ll go mad. I’m already feeling quite
weird from not going out enough. However, not enough time with him and
I’ll go mad there as well. Considering most people don’t get their
first choice, whatever it is, I’m very lucky. I can write part of the
time, and not write part of the time, which is what I’ve always done
anyway. Except that now I have an actual reason for not working that hard. Why
didn’t I do this before? If I’d saved all that shirking time I
could have had five children by now.

‘Why don’t we give it a try?’ says Peter reasonably.
‘If we don’t like it – if you’re not happy –
we’ll stop. OK?’

Does he deliberately wait for me to wear myself out before invariably
coming up with a solution, or does he just coincidentally always think of it
just as I grind to a halt?

‘Yeah. I’m tired,’ I say. ‘Pour me a drink, will
you?’

Meanwhile we’re working up to the First Solids, an event which in
retrospect occupies an unjustifiably prominent position in the infant CV.
Lawrence eats his mashed banana, looking at us as if to say,
‘So?’

The baby rice is also an anticlimax, in that he eats it. By Boxing Day
we’re blasé enough to give him mashed potato and gravy, which he
pukes up. I sing ‘
Night and
Day
’, and he laughs
– one of the kinder reactions I’ve had to my singing. On the third
day of the new year he grasps his bottle.

‘He’s a genius!’

‘Look at those opposable thumbs.’

We visit two-year-old Jack, who generously offers Lawrence use of his
classic pedal Mercedes.

‘Did anyone ever tell you,’ says Jack’s mother Rose,
‘how soon they start to be a source of Light Entertainment?’

‘No, I thought you had to wait till they were at least
thirty-five.’

She stirs her casserole. ‘It’s a bit like having
Sky.’

On 15 January I wake at 5.10 a.m., convinced I’m going to be
struck down by lightning for consorting with a childminder. We both take
Lawrence along for his first half-day, and Maureen asks us to take a picture of
them together, which we still have: she’s crouching in the yard with him
on her knee, looking up at us as if to say: ‘
It’s
OK,
you’re not bad parents. He’ll be Fine
,’ and he’s in
his blue and white matching suit and hat, gazing off to the side as if to say,
‘
I AM fine. Go on, shove off.
’

‘Are you sure it’s OK?’

‘He’ll be fine.’

‘Look, Lawrence: a Wendy house.’

‘Actually, we’re not allowed to call it that,’ says
Maureen. ‘The Council says it’s sexist.’

‘What do you have to call it, then?’

‘We have to say Play House.’

We say goodbye, and leave, feeling extremely brave.

‘Wendy house! Wendy house!’

‘Come on,’ says Peter. ‘You’re disturbing the
neighbours.’

As we walk down the road, he squeezes my arm and we look at each other.
Another milestone! He goes to work, and I get a bus to Oxford Street –
not to buy anything, but just to try it ‘naked’.

Lawrence settles into his routine. At 9 a.m. he goes to Maureen’s,
and I wander around town, heady with the excitement of it all, and amazed that
it can feel so normal. At 1 p.m. I collect him. As she likes to give all the
children lunch before going to the One O’Clock Club, I have to bring some
jars or a packet which she can make up. I bring some organic jars to start
with, then, when she keeps running out because I never bring enough, some boxes
of dried baby food, of dubious constitution. It looks like sawdust, and is
probably less organic than what we put in the car. The power trip, though, is
quite thrilling. Is it really up to
me
?

Whatever I do, however bumbling and disorganized I am, she gives the
impression I’m doing fine. Coming from a family in which you’re
constantly told how to do even the most basic things, I find this exhilarating.
In my early twenties I lived for a while in Dubai. My mother was deeply
concerned that I’d have to drive on the other side of the road, and was
sure there must be a separate manual which I’d have to read first. The
feeling, when I turned the key and set off perfectly well on the right, made me
wonder whether I’d been brought up just to be a
teensy bit too
cautious
. The remarkable thing about talented people, I realize, is that
even when they’re far better than you are at something, they empower you
to feel you’re brilliant too. Mr Silverstone had that quality: saying,
‘
Well done!
‘ to someone after an elective C-section almost
certainly isn’t in the NHS Guidelines; nor is addressing the patient as
‘
Commander
’ as he did on his ward round. Maureen makes me
feel –
competent.
Life really could run smoothly after all. I
could gradually restart work. Peter and I could get a babysitter and go to the
cinema. Anything’s possible! I feel a stab of guilt, then more guilt
because by my reckoning, I don’t feel guilty
enough
.

We soon solve
that
problem. We’ve just discovered another
thing that isn’t in the books, which is that whichever stage you’re
anticipating your child is about to move on to, they’re guaranteed to get
there first. Today, for example, we are about to find out that Lawrence is now
able to turn over by himself. It’s Friday, and Peter has left work early
so we can beat the rush-hour traffic to my mother’s. We lie Lawrence on
the sofa, move away to put various things in bags, and
BLAM
! He is lying
on the carpet. He is not visibly injured, but crying hard.

‘Right!’ says Peter. ‘A&E. Quickly!’

‘Are you sure?’

‘What do you mean, are you sure?’

I’m thinking about having to wait around for hours among those
coughing, twitching people who live in A&E. I’m feeling guilty, but
not for the same reason as he is. He’s thinking, Our Child Could Be Hurt,
and I’m thinking, Bang Goes My Weekend.

The A&E staff put us all in a separate children’s room with
big plastic toys and shiny cube seating units that you sit on and slide
straight off again, as if drunk. They take an X-ray of Lawrence’s head
and pronounce him fine.

‘We’re sorry to have wasted your time,’ says Peter,
making me feel somehow as though it was my idea.

‘No, no: you did the right thing,’ says the nurse. They tell
us to watch out for excessive drowsiness – in the baby – and we
restart our journey to my mother’s. I spend most of the journey worrying
that she’ll blame me.

I get a reminder about my smear test. The Margaret Pyke Centre is near
the shops: I think, I’ll make a day of it!

I waltz in, pramless, slingless and as irritatingly carefree as a girl
in a san-pro ad.

‘Just before I do it,’ says the nurse, ‘we always have
to check that you’re not pregnant.’

‘Well!’ I say. ‘That
would
be a turn up!
We’re planning to have another one quite soon, but …’

‘Shall we just do a test, to make sure?’

This time when I get the news, I’m alone. At least the nurse
thinks it’s funny too, so that helps. I can’t wait to see the look
on Peter’s face.

‘You’re
not
!’

‘I bloody
am
. From 0 to 60 in five weeks, same as last
time.’

‘Cup of tea, or something stronger?’

‘I’ll tell you one thing, Mr Super Sperm. After this one,
you’re sleeping in the shed.’

‘Hey, Lawrence, guess what?’

‘You’re going to have a little brother or sister!’

He doesn’t say anything. He is, after all, six months old.

Outside I bump into my neighbour, Mira, who’s just had her
second.

‘Hey! Guess what! I’m going to have another one too!’
She turns sideways and edges through her gate.

‘Well, I’ve got just one piece of advice,’ she says.
‘Enjoy life with just one while you can. Two is
not
one-plus-another-one: it’s a
crowd
.’ She makes this
point a trifle over-emphatically, I think. Mind you, she only gave birth a few
days ago. She’s bound to be feeling a bit jaded.

‘Two’s a crowd, eh? Ha-ha! Well, OK!’

How right she is we can’t even begin to appreciate.

We tell our friend Alison. The sibling rivalry, in her boys’ case,
is currently fuelled by pubescent surges of testosterone.

‘The boys fight over
everything
. When I drove them to my
parents’ last week,’ she says, ‘they fought all the way.
Connor said: “
Niall’s looking out of my
window!
”’ She shakes her head.

Poor woman, I think, to have such petty, unreasonable kids. Then I
remember what we were like.

My life was pretty wonderful for the first three years until my sister
ruined it, by being born. One moment the lovable toddler with dark curls and a
nice line in chat, I was suddenly last year’s model, in grey school
pinafore and boyish, too-short fringe. My ‘present from the baby’,
a hand-made bridal outfit, I ruined by refusing to pose for the camera without
the little white bag I had chosen as an accessory: a loop-ended sanitary
towel.

As everyone gathered to praise the blue-eyed wonder, cooing,
‘
Isn’t your little sister beautiful?
’ I felt utterly
cheated. As soon as she could pinch finger and thumb together, I gave her a box
of matches. Left alone with the scissors, I cut off her hair.

We fought over everything. Friends who came to play had to wait,
baffled, while we held up their glasses of lemonade and scrutinized them for
minuscule differences in the levels. Slices of cake were a forensic challenge,
to be examined from every angle. Was that crumb sticking out a millimetre
further than on the other piece? Space in the bath was measured using the tiles
along the side: five tiles each, plus half the one in the middle. To avoid
water fights – and potential drownings – the little chrome bridge
that we kept the soap on was placed across as a divide. Mum would put it in
position, then retreat, only to have to come back a minute later because one of
us had nudged it, and the other was now shoving it back. The bedroom was like
Belfast. Apple cores were lobbed over the bookcase that divided our
territories. At night I flicked kirby grips over, then said in a scared voice:
‘What was
that
?’ Whereupon Claire, petrified, would whimper:
‘I don’t know!’ If all went well, she would start crying.

By the time I had my first boyfriend, the bookcase barricade had been
changed for a long, fitted desk unit we were supposed to
share
. As he
and I looked longingly at each other, desperate to snog, Claire – now
eleven – sat under the desk, reading a comic. Polite requests for her to
piss off and die merely provoked the response of someone able to commit
atrocities in full view of a UN Peacekeeping Force.

‘
It’s my room too.
’

‘Well, it
is
her room too,’ said Mum. We were always
demanding she be fair, and now she was.

So as you can see, my life was utterly blighted. Feeble attempts to grab
attention, such as publishing this book, are all part of my forty-year struggle
to get back to that Eden when paradise was just me and two adults.

‘Er, a bit late to go back now,’ says Peter. ‘I mean,
unless you really don’t want to have it.’

‘No, I do. It’s just that—’

‘Hey, look on the bright side.’

‘You always say that.’