Confessions of a Bad Mother (2 page)

Yet, as I grew up, I failed to acquire the necessary credentials to
qualify as a proper child-hater. I lived in a swamp of magazines, books and
clothes. My home contained no porcelain lampstands, white carpets or thin,
wobbly vases perched on stands. My surfaces weren’t concrete or glass or
slate. I failed art O level with the lowest grade possible and didn’t
even
want
to do architecture, interior design or any of the professions
traditionally associated with extreme neatness. Anally, I just wasn’t
retentive enough.

I
wanted
to want children; I didn’t enjoy feeling abnormal.
I longed to join in, to see what all the fuss was about. I wanted to ‘get
it’. I had nurturing impulses, but they were all towards adults.
I’d go to a meeting with a magazine editor, and end up addressing her
relationship issues. I could stand at a bus stop while old people had a good
moan to me about the Poll Tax, the dangers of loose paving stones or the rising
cost of tinned salmon. Some people did aerobics for a hobby, or collected
models of old buses. I had listening. I felt all warm and open, letting the
shoals of problems wash over me. But uterine stirrings there were none. Maybe I
just wasn’t ready. One of these days I was bound to become the Maternal
Type. I just had to be patient.

Nothing happened. I had relationships, as you do. I got involved with a
very decent man who wanted us to marry and have a child. But we weren’t
right together. Meanwhile, without meaning to, I started drifting towards the
children’s departments of shops. In Marks & Spencer, I would slow
down on the way to the food or cosmetics, and linger by the tiny, little socks.
Then, when I thought no one was looking, I’d hold them, still on the
rails, and cry.

I knew I was trespassing. I must have looked like those men in the
lingerie department who don’t quite seem to be shopping for their wives.
After all, these were not the actions of an infertile woman, prevented from
receiving the Greatest Gift of All by a curse of nature; the only thing
stopping me from getting pregnant, was – as far as I knew –
myself.

Then at twenty-seven I was diagnosed with polycystic ovaries, a
well-known cause of infertility and in my case, something conveniently medical
to hide behind. At least now I needn’t mention my abnormal lack of
maternal instinct. I could plead Biology. But the chances of any man in my life
wanting to have children – if I did meet one I could stick with –
were likely to increase with age. And even if
he
didn’t want to, I
would be supposed to start pressing for it. Any year now, wasn’t panic
supposed to set in? I would stand out even more as a freak.

One by one, my friends crossed the Great Divide. My friends’
babies didn’t mind me, and were even rather cute. But they didn’t
make me gasp inwardly, as I had at the Ferrari Museum: ‘
Dear God,
Please, please, PLEASE let
me have that 1964 Dino 246, I’ll never
ask for anything ever
again, EVER!!
’ And I didn’t have
to be removed from a baby by security guards for holding on too long and
stroking its beautiful bonnet.

I passed my thirtieth birthday and saw Youth rolling away from me, as if
down a hill. My father died. By now, I was surely supposed to feel
something
. As my friends’ babies got bigger and began to move
around the room unaided, it got worse. I knew I should be asking questions, but
what? Was it about their food? Their pooh? When was the right moment to ask,
‘
And is he walking
yet?
’ But if you were sitting
there in the same room as them, having coffee, it was bloody obvious!
‘
Does he – er,
enjoy crawling?
’ Was that it? It
was worse than being abroad. When I went to China, I spoke no Mandarin, but had
something
in common with the giggling girls who approached me in the
street; a mutual desire to connect. But on my home planet, I was an alien. Out
with my friends for the evening, away from the visual cues, I kept off the
subject, knowing I’d get it wrong.

Birth stories, oddly enough, I could listen to. They were a bit like
really bad holidays, hilarious in their awfulness after the event, or car
accidents; being squeamish has never stopped me from slowing down to look.

But I didn’t want to give up my career – or what passed for
one. I pottered along, writing articles and not making much money. It may not
have been much of a career, but it was mine. My parents had friends who had
become mothers and also worked, mainly by not doing the housework for thirty
years.
That
I could sign up to. But I had trouble enough getting down to
work as it was, and was sure children would ruin what little focus I had. And
when I visited homes with small children, the constant interruptions meant a
ten-minute anecdote could take an hour, because every five minutes a two year
old would force the conversation to a halt. ‘
Mummeee!
’ And
not even for anything important! ‘
I want a biscuit!
’ What,
now
? Couldn’t they
wait
? Then I’d reboot myself, and
it would happen again. And again. And again. I was at a loss to comprehend the
inability of small children to be self-sufficient for more than thirty seconds
at a time. Couldn’t they just
go away
? And the mothers not only
tolerated these outrages, but seemed not to mind! How could they let themselves
be annexed by these tiny invaders, without even putting up a fight? Did they
lose the will to be separate, to exist in their own right? It was as if they no
longer had an outline, just a blur where their boundaries used to be.

And evenings weren’t even sacred. I went to dinner at Rob and
Cecily’s. They both worked long hours and would, you’d think, have
enjoyed some time together at the end of the day. There was another couple
there I knew, Alex and Tim. I never thought it was possible to feel so much
solidarity with gay men. We all sat with frozen smiles as six-year-old Hannah
ran round and round, bashing the furniture and shouting. Rob and Cecily kept
throwing each other nervous glances, as if waiting for the real parents to come
in. Or did they believe some mysterious form of anti-gravity would magically
waft her upstairs? Eight o’clock passed, and nine. ‘Invited’
to go to bed, she returned with all her bedding, which she dumped on the floor.
By ten she was literally hurling herself against the walls. When she was
finally carted off, Rob said: ‘If you think that’s bad, you should
see her brother.’

I made a mental note to come back in ten years, the great benefit of
teenagers being that they never want to be with the grown-ups.

Then I met Peter, and we were compatible in one major respect: our fear
of being impulsive. We had lunch, then two years later, dinner. It was about
the right pace – if you couldn’t hear your biological clock.

But I still couldn’t come down firmly against motherhood. I had a
double fear: fear of having children and fear of
not
having them. What
if I got to fifty and felt bereft? That might be even worse! Maybe it was like
skiing: if so many people were that keen, there must be something in it.

I decided to do some research. I was used to becoming an instant expert
on subjects I had no previous knowledge of, so I’d just take the same
approach. Researching was like revising for an exam; you spewed all the
information into the article and for a very short period became an expert. My
sister Claire, who worked for
Best
magazine, could remember everything
she’d ever edited or written about: wine, Norway, mohair … You
could dial her up and say: ‘
What’s that chemical in chocolate
that makes you feel
lovely?
’ And she’d answer straight
away: ‘
Phenylethylamine.
’

Could this work with motherhood? Did people investigate all the cots,
drinking cups and bouncy walkers and by the time they gave birth, be somehow
– qualified? If I began the research, would it lessen my anxiety and
confusion? I didn’t know, but there were two clear advantages. If I
did
decide to have kids, I’d at least know more than I knew now.
And if I didn’t, I’d have made my decision on an informed basis.
Either way, it would give me the illusion of control, which always helps. When
dealing with an issue completely driven by hormones and emotions, what better
strategy than to try and blind yourself with science? I would follow the advice
I’d got on a screenwriting course: when plagued by writer’s block,
go out and do research. There was no reason why it shouldn’t work for
mother’s block as well.

But all that was, of course, only a way of avoiding looking at the
really scary part. Although the actual birth counts for a very brief part of
one’s life, there was the most enormous emphasis on it – and not
just from me. People gathered eagerly to tell me stories of pre-eclampsia,
epidurals that worked only on one side, or too late, or not at all,
thirty-six-hour labours that ended in emergency Caesareans, and postnatal
incontinence. A friend of a friend was stitched up so badly that her sex life
was finished. Another tore nearly all the way round so she thought she was
going to rip in half.
‘I knew it wasn’t going well,’ she
said, ‘when the consultant called, “Hey everybody –
come and look at THIS!”’
And there were triumphant natural
ones, marvellous events in baths that were all over in time for
Newsnight
. But I knew there was no way of my achieving that. As someone
who cried at a smear test, I knew it was an impossibility. And anyway, there
was the loss of dignity. I just couldn’t see what was beautiful and
moving about expelling a live creature – covered in blood and slime
– from the most private part of you. And in front of other people! Were
they really asking me to believe that
I
could withstand an entirely new
person springing out of my body? I mean, I’d seen something similar in
Alien
, and it looked like a hell of a way to spend a Friday night. So
what if I knew all these people who’d done it? I knew someone who’d
gone down the Amazon with hallucinating, axe-wielding Yanomami Indians and I
didn’t want to do that either.

In any case, whatever the method of delivery, I had a problem with the
very
concept
of conception itself. To me this too lacked credibility. To
start with, two cells being the start of a wholly unique individual was frankly
stretching it.
Two cells.
Asexual reproduction made far more sense. Take
the hydra, from third year biology. A dull green plant that didn’t get
out much, it would get so far in life, then grow a baby hydra on the side of
its body. The baby then detached itself and went off to live an independent
life as a totally separate, dull green plant. That I could relate to. It
didn’t need weaning or nurturing, or any of that. It didn’t have to
split the mummy hydra half open to get out, and there was nothing in the book
about the mummy hydra missing its freedom and getting depressed.

Still, I carried on gathering intelligence, even if it was almost
entirely useless. I felt like an impostor, trying to choose a religion when I
didn’t even believe in God. But it was something to do. It felt objective
and practical. If I woke up one morning feeling maternal, I’d have all
the information at my fingertips. Or wherever. Maybe it was like becoming a
priest; the Call could come at any time.

Sometimes, when you can’t decide about something, Life decides for
you. While visiting friends in Australia, Peter and I were in a car accident.
When we came back, I was too feeble to manage on my own so the decision to move
in together was made for us. We both mitigated our fear of commitment by
pretending it was temporary.

‘Just until I get stronger.’

‘Of course, of course.’

‘I won’t bring too much stuff.’

‘No, no.’

‘Just my computer.’

‘You’ve got to work.’

‘And a few clothes and books. And maybe my mixer.’

‘Mixer?’

‘In case I feel like doing any baking.’

The domestic suffocation I’d been avoiding turned out to be a
mirage. My God, I thought, as we lay on the sofa eating chocolate and watching
Thunderbirds
: I’ve been running away from
this
? My logic,
that if I didn’t live with someone they couldn’t leave me, was
possibly a teensy bit flawed. On that basis, you’d never eat a nice meal
or watch a sunset or go to a film because at some point it had to end.
Life
has to end, you jerk! Don’t you think you’ve
wasted enough
of it already?

Then we went to see some friends who’d just had a baby. They lived
in a teeny-weeny house opposite a glue factory; you bumped your head on
everything, and there was this
smell
. While they were opening the wine,
the moment came when they said – as people do – ‘Would you
like to hold him?’

And I thought:
No
, because when I hold babies they always cry.
But Peter stepped forward and took him with great confidence, and smiled at him
and put him upright against his shoulder, and he stopped crying and went all
relaxed and sweet.

‘Aren’t you lovely?’ he said to it. I didn’t say
anything. I thought of saying, ‘
How do you know what to do?
’
or, ‘
If
you could be the woman and I could be the man, we might
be able
to sort something out
,’ but instead I just stood there
trying to look normal.

I liked the way he looked holding the baby, but when I tried to imagine
us with another person – someone who didn’t exist yet – it
was beyond me.

I mean, how was it decided what sort of child you would have? DNA, yes
yes, but I only had to look at my own parents to see that could go wrong. If
DNA was logical, I’d be tall, poetic and intellectual like my mother,
instead of short, hairy-legged and moody like my dad. What if we had a child
and didn’t – relate to it? I’d read about normal, average
couples who mysteriously produced maths geniuses. What if we had a lawyer? Or
imagine a child who
liked football
– all mud, crowds and shouting
– or worse,
cricket
? Quieter crowds and less mud, perhaps, but
totally incomprehensible. We couldn’t spend fifteen years in the
pavilion.