Confessions of a Bad Mother (13 page)

‘I’ll think about it.’

‘Well, let me know if you solve it.’

‘I probably will – by the time they’re old enough to
drive.’

We revert to our habitual mode when facing a dilemma: inertia. A couple
of weeks later, another neighbour appears at the door.

‘Would you like this? Only Mira said you might want
one.’

‘A double McLaren! How incredibly generous! Are you
sure?’

‘Oh, yes.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘I’ve gone on for
as long as I can stand it.’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘There is one advantage to this particular model,
though.’

‘Cruise control?’

‘It’s actually slightly narrower than standard. So you can
get into more places.’

‘Like to buy food?’

‘Providing your children aren’t too—’

‘Chubby.’

‘Well, yes. Or you have to jam them in and it’s hard to get
them out. And each side does lie right back. So you can use it before six
months, and one of them—’

‘Or both …’

‘Or both – can go to sleep.’

I ring Peter to share the exciting news. Luckily, I have no idea how
heavy two children can be, even on wheels. Sleeping, their weight seems to
double. Maybe that’s why they call it a Double Buggy.

Now my life revolves entirely around which places I can get the DB into.
I can no longer go into the community garden and watch people planting their
mini allotments. The only stall at the market I can reach is the one at the
end, which sells batteries. The bank is up a flight of steps and has
no cash
machine
. Helen, my friend with three, has actually had to leave her bank
and join a flatter one. Months of turning up with passports and moving sixteen
direct debits, all because she didn’t leave a proper gap between kids. I
stand on the pavement and gaze resentfully into the Turkish supermarket which
has hitherto catered to all my needs. As they only ever open one of their
double doors, I am now banned. I can, however, still get into the homosexual
shop that sells candlesticks, vases and throws.

‘Hi,’ says Peter. ‘What’s for supper?’

‘A set of espresso cups.’

‘…’

‘They’re really nice, though. Look at the shape.’ The
next morning he gets up at seven and goes to Sainsbury’s, which is why I
married him.

Lawrence has got a word:
badu.
He uses it for a variety of
occasions, a bit like the French use
alors
. We take him to Hampstead
Heath to practise his walking, in a purple padded suit. From a distance he
looks like an animated bilberry.

‘God, you can tell he’s a bloke.’

‘Why?’

‘When we got in just now, I said: “Would you like your
bottle?” and he went over to his usual spot on the sofa. Like his seat in
the pub.’

‘Aah. And Lydia’s such a girl.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘She does incredibly smelly farts, just like you.’

In the weeks coming up to Christmas, Lawrence is sick quite a bit,
screams the place down when Peter takes him to the doctor’s for
amoxycillin, and then is suddenly better. His new achievement, going up and
down stairs, is augmented by his abnormally high intelligence:

‘Lawrence – can you turn round and come back?’

‘He did! Look!’

‘Amazing!’

Peter’s sister Jessica, mother of two grown-up boys, comes round
with some of their old toys.

‘Lawrence, where’s the car?’ (There it is!)

‘Where’s your
blue
car?’ (There it is!)

‘Put the phone in your other hand.’

‘He did it! He did it!’

Our son is clearly incredibly gifted. We can only hope that, when the
time comes, there is a school extraordinary enough to accommodate him. Of
course,
we’re
not competitive. But some people …

My old friend Mandy invites us round for coffee. Lawrence and her son
were born in the same week. The idea is that she and I will enjoy some adult
company with each other while the children play. But the children are nearly
two, which is the age of highest maintenance, and so after an hour we are still
trying to finish the one sentence. Also, I have Lydia with me, so the scene is
Joyce Grenfell meets Mike Leigh.

‘Well, don’t hit her and she won’t hit you! Anyway, I
had this idea for a – can you give it back, please? Give it
back
!
Lawrence, give me back my pen. No. Don’t
do
that!

‘Now, what toys have you got? Well … why don’t we
read Lydia’s first, then – what have I told you about throwing
books? Is it too early for a drink? Just sit down there. Not on
top
of
her. (Sigh.) No,
there
! So are you thinking of going back to BBC
Scot—? Right, leave her
alone
! I’m
coming
! Well, if
you do that, of course it’ll spill. Don’t cry. I’m not
shouting. I’M NOT SHOUTING!’

Mandy has invited another woman, Elisabeth, a Swiss – sort of
Amazon, tall and blonde – who is clearly very intelligent. In fact, I
wonder, after being in her orbit for an hour, whether she might be
too
intelligent. After all, with toddlers, you do have to reset your
coordinates a bit.

She wants her daughter Lena to be bilingual, but poor old Lena’s
never fast enough. Her mother barks: ‘
Ein, zwei, drei!
’
– over and over again.

‘Ein, zwei, drei,’ mumbles Lena, or something like it. (It
could be: ‘I’m not dry.’) Elisabeth looks at us. Are we
supposed to repeat it too? She’s so scary I almost do. Then she starts on
about Lena’s inadequate Gross Motor Skills. Gross Motor Skills, as every
mother knows, means stuff like walking, while Fine Motor Skills is picking your
nose. And Lena has just turned one. Can you remember when you learned to walk?
Did it ever come up at a job interview? Can you actually walk
better
than someone who learned six months later than you? I stumble home,
flattened.

‘
Why?
’ I ask Peter that night.

‘Not enough to do.’

‘What do you mean?! Looking after a child – or in my case
two
(I give him a pointed look) – is exhausting! How can
you—’

‘Nah, nah. I mean she’s bored, needs stimulation,
needs—’

‘To go back to work?’

Maybe he has a point. After many years in the pressured but highly
stimulating world of international whatever, poor old Elisabeth is suddenly at
home all day with someone whose intellectual capacity is measured by the
ability to shout ‘Doggie!’ when catching sight of any animal
smaller than a whale. It takes some adjusting to. And then there’s the
fact that motherhood is impossible to evaluate. You’ve got no way to
measure your progress and therefore no sense of achievement. No sooner have you
fed them, changed their nappies or picked all the squashed petits pois out of
the carpet, than it’s time to do it again. No one comes in and says:
‘
Right, so you’ve
done tidying, rocking them to sleep,
persuading them to eat a fish
finger – you can now do something
else.
’ You do not
move on
. The only thing that can be said for
the physical drudgery is that it at least makes you too knackered to care
whether your child is ‘ahead’.

I escape for a drink with my friend Mark, one of the links with my
Former Life. He has no children – yet.

‘That’s nothing,’ he says. ‘My brother-in-law
talks to all his children as if they’re the Nobel Prize
Committee.’

‘How old are they?’ I ask.

‘Jack’s only five. He can’t even swallow a simple
morsel of sea bass in fennel without his father demanding to know its progress.
‘“
And where’s it going now, Jack?
That’s
right! The – oesophagus.
”’

‘Ah, poor little thing!’

‘Nah. He’s just as bad. If you ask him a question, he
answers, ‘“
I think you’ll find
…
”’

I am reminded of this on a visit to my mother’s, when Lawrence
helps me get money out of the cash machine. I hold him up and start reciting
the buttons he needs to press: ‘Sev-en … two-o … six
…’ I am about to shout ‘eight!’ when Peter points out
that the whole of Folkestone can hear. By the way, for thieves reading at home,
this is not my actual PIN.

Lydia is five months old, and Lawrence has taught himself to put in her
dummy. He has expanded his vocabulary beyond ‘
badu
’. The
most useful word is
Mummy
, because it means ‘
Want it
NOW
’.

Lydia goes to Maureen’s for a trial day, and Lawrence is furious
when she picks her up and he is relegated to second cuddle. ‘So the
sibling rivalry problem that we avoided by having them so close together
…’

‘Is now her problem.’

‘That’s OK then.’

I’ve started crying after leaving Lawrence at Maureen’s: I
don’t know why.
Then
, the next time I leave Lydia I discover that
the older sister of one of the other boys is suddenly being left there as well,
on days when she doesn’t feel like going to school. And her
mother’s a teacher! This puts Maureen ‘over the limit’. I
know she can cope, but I’m angry with her for not telling us, and angry
with the other family for taking advantage.

Peter says: ‘It’ll be fine.’

‘Well, I’m not leaving Lydia then. I can’t.’

‘It’ll be fine.’

‘Will you stop saying that? Just say something helpful or fuck
off.’

While I’m worrying myself into a frazzle about how to handle it,
Kath – my favourite mother there – talks to Maureen on behalf of us
both. This is a relief, because I have discovered I am hopeless at this sort of
thing. God only knows what I’m going to do when they start school. I
express this concern to Peter, who says: ‘It’ll be fine.’

A week before Christmas, Lawrence wobbles off the landing and falls down
the stairs. The sound – like someone emptying a sack of potatoes –
is terrible. But his head doesn’t hit the tiles at the bottom. I’m
too scared to look, but there is only a little red mark. I tell my sister, who
berates me for not getting a stairgate.

‘
We
never had a stairgate.’

‘We lived in a flat.’

My emotions are in tatters. One moment Lawrence is charmingly pushing
his trolley round the kitchen, and reversing skilfully. The next thing we know,
he is screaming his head off, clinging piteously to Peter when being put in his
cot, and hurling his toys out with great force. While being dressed, he
head-butts me from behind, so hard that I shout, ‘How
dare
you?!’

He’s advanced all right: at sixteen months he’s starting on
the Terrible Twos. I write in my notebook:
Is this
the end of the
World’s Most Charming Child?

I’ve always been volatile, subject to dreadful swings in the space
of moments. But this is crazy. To a cinema fan like me it’s a bit like
watching a scene from
A Night
at the Opera
followed by one from
Schindler’s List.
Then it’s
Mad Max
, then
A Night
at the Opera
, then
Schindler’s List
again, over and over
again. I feel as though I’m being pumped full of uppers and downers.

Lawrence has started throwing his head back while being given his
dinner. Peter – almost arbitrarily – gives him some baked beans on
a spoon, and Lawrence puts them straight into his mouth. He
is
a
genius!

‘D’you think we should have given him the spoon
before?’

‘I’m sure we should, but it’s so bloody
messy.’

Having put away three spoonfuls, Lawrence is eating the remaining beans
individually from the table. ‘Look at those Fine Motor Skills.’

The next time we do it, he throws the beans straight onto the table.

‘So development’s not, like, a linear thing.’

‘It’s more of a spread out, all over the table and floor
thing.’

Peter has a brainwave. He takes one spoon and Lawrence the other. That
way, for every load that goes onto the table, we get one into his mouth.

‘Darling, you are clever!’

The
next
time we feed him, he dips the spoon into the rice and
chicken, then scrunches the food with his hand as if washing it.

On New Year’s Eve he has a sip of champagne. In January he takes
his first proper walk – of three steps – with a very light tread, a
bit like a Thunderbirds puppet. We go to Dorset, and we walk hand in hand on
the deserted beach, while Peter drags Lydia in the pushchair through the sand.
Lawrence is quite a chunk, with golden curls; imagine a piano mover in a
Shirley Temple wig. But when we take him out of the bath, hair all wet, he
looks like Michael Caine as the sleazy agent in
Little
Voice.

Now he is displaying a worrying tendency towards some kind of gender
confusion. In the bath he tells me:

‘My baby’s asleep.’ But there’s no doll
around.

‘Where is it?’ I ask him.

‘In my tummy.’

One morning he gets conjunctivitis and wakes up with his eyes stuck
shut. As he was busy wiping snot into them all night, we are not surprised.

Lydia’s gaze follows me round the room. She has movie-star lips
and my mother’s slightly flat-ended nose. She’s so beautiful I
wonder why the other mothers don’t just spit in my face. Maybe I can cope
with ageing, deterioration and death after all. Then she throws her tummy in
the air and screams at me, and I think: No, I can’t.

Feeding her is going far better than it even did with Lawrence –
her not being in an incubator and my eating properly does help – and I am
delighted by the convenience of it. Invited to a wedding by one of
Peter’s ex-colleagues, we set off with that ominous spring in the step
that almost always precedes a major embarrassment of some sort. The reception
is at the Orangery in Holland Park, a narrow conservatory jammed with standing
people. I have to find a waiter to get me a chair so I can feed Lydia, while
Peter dashes outside every three minutes to retrieve Lawrence, who has gone
rather suddenly from being unsteady on his feet to being
fast
. Outside
the reception is an entire park with a hundred directions to run in, and he is
evidently planning to try them all. I finally get the chair and sit down with
Lydia, bodies pressed around us as on a crowded tube, only to remember that my
lovely flowery dress undoes at the back. So to achieve full breast access, I
have to unzip the whole thing pretty much to the waist. This is the sight that
confronts Peter’s former boss, a tall, boffiny type who I remember from a
previous meeting is (a) extremely shy, and (b) somewhat uncomfortable in the
presence of women.