Confessions of a Bad Mother (20 page)

‘You’re saying it now.’

‘No. I mean to lots of people. To everyone who’s sick of
being pressurized to feel
nurturing
and
fulfilled
twenty-four
hours a day. I’m going to start a magazine.’

I then outline my vision for the most stunning and brilliant publication
ever, which I shall edit from a beautiful office with white Bakelite phones,
and a curved, art deco desk. And a view. It’ll be on sale in all the
newsagents, and all the schools, and all the playgroups, and reach every mother
in the land.

‘Great idea,’ says Peter.

‘There’s just one problem. I need five million
pounds.’

‘Ah. What are you going to call it, anyway?’

It’s something Annie used to say. We stayed with her in Australia.
She started her own business when her children were small, and when their
father died, she managed brilliantly. But she never thought that. She was
always worrying about fucking up, agonizing dreadfully in a way we – then
childless – found baffling and hilarious. At the first sign of trouble
– one of the kids refusing to do their homework or whatever –
she’d turn to us and say: ‘Am I a Bad Mother?’ And we’d
say: ‘How would
we
know?’

‘So … here’s the thing. What if other women are also
thinking
they’re Bad Mothers, while actually being – like
Annie – perfectly good?’

‘God knows women waste megawatts of energy beating themselves
up.’

‘Exactly!’

‘Well, you could always do it on the net.’

‘Oh no. I hate all that. And I’m completely untechnical, you
know that.’

A week later I’m sitting in the office of RedSpy, who build skiing
and motoring websites. None of them is a woman or has kids.

‘Great! It sounds great,’ says Jay, the boss.

‘What, you – think you can do it?’

‘A website? Sure. What d’you want on it?

I show them my sheet of A4, with ‘Extreme Breastfeeding’
written at the top.

‘This is a section which people can contribute to, about the
strangest or worst places they’ve ever done it.’

‘Cool,’ says Sam, the designer.

‘And I want to add something about sending a team to the next
Olympics.’ The young man who was answering the phone has stopped
answering the phone and is now joining in.

‘And, um, I thought we could have a bit called “Tantrum of
the Week” – where mothers describe how they’ve lost it, sort
of thing.’

‘Great. And—?’

‘That’s as far as I’ve got. I thought I could write
some features, and maybe commission some.’

‘OK, and you’ll probably need a forum.’

‘What’s that?’

‘We’ll show you. And how are you going to fund
it?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘OK. Great.’

I’m paying them the money we’ve put on one side in case we
ever go on holiday again, so I spend carefully. I write a piece called
How
To Be Less Mumsy
, and one called
How
To Do Less
, and a survey
that asks,
How often do you get time
to yourself ?
And
When it
all goes wrong, where do you turn?
My friend Vida, who brought up her two
sons in Italy where they ran wild, has written a book in which her neighbour
describes her as ‘
Una Madre Terribile
’, and she writes a
piece for me about it.

I have no pictures. My only idea for the home page is an icon of the
Virgin Mary rolling her eyes. After looking at 200 Virgin Marys at a picture
library, I get an image in my head of a woman with a cocktail glass, only
instead of an olive or a glacé cherry on the rim, there’s a dummy.
Sam, the designer, and Becky, the photographer, go off and shoot it.
They’ve never seen a dummy before, so I carefully describe what one looks
like in case they buy a shop mannequin by mistake. The model is Sam’s
flatmate, Toni. Despite having no experience of motherhood, she manages to
strike just the right attitude of resignation and fatigue. The forum I call
Retell Therapy
, because sharing a problem makes you feel better. Then I
send a press release headed ‘
Join the Bad Mothers Club!
’ to
a few newspapers and chain myself back to my double buggy.

Sunday morning. Lawrence wakes us to order milk from the
twenty-four-hour room service he thinks we have.

‘Can you get it yourself?’

‘No!’

‘Yes, you can. There’s a bottle in the door of the fridge.
Go and look.’

‘I want it warm!’

This is Katarina’s fault. We never warmed bottles till she came
along.

‘Tired. Please let me sleep,’ begs Peter.

‘What time is it?’

‘5.30.’

‘Fuck …’

‘Please don’t make me get up. If I have to get up now
I’ll die.’ He often gets up first. If I admitted how often, the
tiny wisp of my credibility would dissolve altogether. On the other hand, he is
more of a Morning Person.

‘Mummmmeeeeeee!’

Lawrence is also a Morning Person. He is at the bedside now, pulling at
me.

‘OK. Wait …’

I accompany him down to the kitchen, get the bottle and put it in the
microwave. He presses the button.

‘I want to do it!’

‘OK, hang on … Now, see that one? OK, press that one
– not that one – then “Start”.’

Ping!

‘I did it!’

‘Now, just give it a little shake …’

‘I did it!’ He is delighted with himself. I put on
Fireman Sam
and get a lie-in until seven. What did they used to have on
the charity posters?
Give a man a fish and
feed him for a day. Teach
him to fish and feed him for life.

‘Peter! If we teach them to do more things for themselves, we get
more time off.’

‘Mmm. Very good.’

‘There’s a clear relationship between this ridiculous
mollycoddling, driving them everywhere and whatnot, and the fact that parents
are so worn out. We’re actually disabling our own children!’

I remember a story told me by a bloke I worked with, about his son
‘having to have’ a mobile phone. The son, aged fourteen, had gone
to stay at a mate’s. ‘When I asked what they did and all
that,’ he said, ‘he said they’d rung up this girl they knew
– at 2 a.m.! And she invited them round! I said, “Er, and did you
go?” And he said, “Nah. We didn’t know how to get
there.”’

‘You see? No initiative! Now, if the Bad Mothers Club could
somehow encourage parents to –
Peter
?’

‘Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.’

But he does agree really. And the next stage of our children’s
self-reliance develops the same way.

Their nursery lies on the right fork of two busy roads, and to avoid
crossing where there is no crossing, we walk up the left fork, then cut across
a bit of green the children call Railway Park, because it has an edged path
down the middle a bit like a mini train track. Usually Lawrence runs along it
being a train while I push Lydia. At the end, however, is a ‘kissing
gate’, the sort of ‘amenity’ favoured by the Dulwich Estate
to remind us all of when it was called
Dill Wysse
and had cows and sheep
roaming through it instead of under-slept women with pushchairs. With a double
buggy, forget it. You have to go the long way round, or move to Wales. Even
with a single, it’s infuriating. I have to tip Lydia out, keeping the
buggy on the fronts of its wheels like a trick skater, and can negotiate the
barrier if I position the buggy in
exactly
the right place, at
exactly
the right angle and swing the gate
just so
. I feel like
one of those people who helps horses to mate.

‘Mummy don’t swear. You’re very naughty,’ says
Lawrence.

‘Sorry. It’s just so fucking annoying, that’s
all!’

The children are aghast. But I have the solution.

‘All right, that’s it.’

‘We’re sorry, Mummy.’

Poor things: they’re so used to being shouted at.

‘No, no, I’m not blaming you! We’re just going to walk
from now on, that’s all.’

‘No
BUGGY
…?!’

The next day we set off, wheel-less, as nature intended. Allowing a few
extra minutes, we get there easily. I have to be an express train or a goods
wagon for part of the journey, but it’s a small price to pay. Less than
two years ago I pushed them up the hill from Maureen’s, breathing like an
obscene phone caller all the way. Now they’re running. Lydia is quite
fast. At a birthday party on Wandsworth Common she suddenly strikes out across
the grass, like James Garner in
The
Great Escape
, and has to be
retrieved by one of the dads. On the way home from nursery it gets worse. One
afternoon she outstrips me and by the time I catch up, limping, she is in
conversation with an elderly woman who has got out of her car ‘because
the child was on her own’.

‘She’s not on her own,’ I say. I have sent Lawrence on
ahead to explain this, but he has become absorbed in a ladybird which he
spotted on a leaf twenty feet away with his four-year-old eyesight.

‘There was no one here.’

‘
I’m
here.’

‘Yes, but she was on her own—’

‘SHE IS NOT “ON HER OWN”. I AM HERE. I AM HER MOTHER.
I CANNOT KEEP UP WITH HER BECAUSE I HAVE A BAD KNEE.’

This is true. I have tripped over some of that nylon binding that the
florist likes to leave on the pavement like a rabbit trap, and can no longer
run. The woman gets back into her car, to be superior all the way back to My
Generation Knows Better Land.

Fine. I’ve got nothing to worry about except Sports Day, when the
school punishes you for your misdemeanours throughout the year by making you
run the Mothers’ Race. This is our second year. Last year, the Goddess of
Bad Mothers smiled on me and – about thirty seconds before the start
– sent forth a plague of rain. But I don’t expect to be lucky
twice. Also, I have two children there now, so will need all my cartilage to
limp back and forth between events.

I’ve always been a crap runner, but it never mattered. My parents
understood why I spent games periods hiding in the lavatories; they’d
done much the same thing. For my mother, being Bad at Games is even a creative
sine
qua non
. But now we’ve got someone in the family who
LIKES sport, someone I don’t want to disappoint. Which is worse, to bow
out pathetically without even trying? Or make the effort, cripple my knee, and
run the risk of being given an ‘
I Tried my Best
’ sticker by
the Head? Eventually I decide a stay in an orthopaedic ward will be a small
price to pay for just one proud glance from my daughter. The teacher shouts,
‘
Go!
’

I leg it like fury, scattering babies and cool bags, and, to my
astonishment, come third. Lydia wins her race easily, despite missing the start
by gazing in the opposite direction and being the only girl.

Lawrence’s races are taking place simultaneously on the other side
of the field so I limp across to where his class is doing their ‘stick
and ball’ race, a sort of hockey dribble, just in time to see him lose
the ball, throw down his stick and hurl himself in a rage onto the grass.
Peter, who is still adjusting the wideshot facility on the digicam, goes after
him. I feel humiliated; this reflects on ME. I can see Peter trying to persuade
him to come back for the next race, and Lawrence getting more and more furious
with himself. I catch his teacher’s eye, and look ashamed.

‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘I’ve lost three
that way already.’

Lydia skips up, festooned with Winner stickers and sucking a triumphant
ice lolly.

‘Did you win, Lawrence?’

‘NO, I DIDN’T!!!’

Never mind designer babies. Can we just have two at the same level? I
can’t praise Lydia without making Lawrence feel worse. But I don’t
want her to grow up thinking everything brilliant she does is just ordinary,
and that to get any fuss made of her she has to be Jonathan Miller.

I tell Peter: ‘This is your fault for making us have them too
close together.’

‘Divide and Rule,’ he says.

So we walk home in two teams of two, one of us to distract Lawrence from
the ball and stick element of Life, and the other to tell Lydia she is a
star.

Half-term. Fiona invites me and the kids to the Royal Horticultural
Society Garden at Wisley.

‘I’m a member!’ she says, in case I think she never
does anything outside school.

We set off down the A3. Halfway down, squabbling breaks out and Lydia
undoes her seat belt to get a better shot at her brother. I can see her in the
rear-view mirror, but cannot stop. Anyhow, I’m in the fast lane.

‘Do your seat belt up NOW!
NOW!
‘She throws a book at
me: a board book.’OW!!’ I am so angry that when we get there I haul
her out and smack her. Fiona and her two watch silently. These were the people
I was hoping might one day invite us on holiday. Holiday to Guantanamo.

‘Who’d like an apple?’ says Fiona sweetly. Lawrence
and Lydia take one, the first time they’ve ever accepted fruit without
complaint.

We go round the garden, and everyone is pretty good. Fiona has brought a
picnic, and afterwards we decide that the children definitely deserve an ice
cream. There are tables in the cafe area, but they’re all full, so we sit
on the steps facing the lawn, with our backs to the dining gentlefolk.

‘Keep the noise down, though,’ I say. ‘People are
having their lunch.’ There is a slightly tense atmosphere, as if the
children are somehow out of bounds. And one couple is already glaring at
us.

‘Ssh, be very good now,’ I say. But this is a mistake,
because Lydia – with a wild look on her face – throws her welly
over her shoulder, and it lands right in the glaring lady’s lunch. Thank
God she’s too old to come over and thump me, is what I think first,
swiftly followed by, this child has embarrassed me in public for the last time.
She gets another smack and I promise Fiona never to accept an invitation from
her again. I feel dreadful, as if I have poison in my veins. I hate myself
beyond imagining. No one in the history of the universe has ever been a worse
mother than I am now. What can I do, promise never to do it again? Or am I like
an alcoholic, too weak to have any self-control? I am like an alcoholic in one
respect: the next day, and for weeks afterwards, I feel the need to
confess.