Confessions of a Bad Mother (3 page)

The only children I had to go on were the ones I’d already met,
and they hadn’t so far engendered waves of maternal joy so much as the
desire to be somewhere tidier and quieter. I had no sense of giving rise to a
fresh being, a unique individual. I didn’t see them as anything to do
with
me
– or their perfectly normal father-in-waiting. I sort of
imagined you picked them out from what was already there, like those sofa shops
where they have a set choice of fabrics and styles: ‘
I suppose
I’ll have
the loud, snotty one in the pink and
white.
’

I had no wish to pick them up, or wipe their noses or, God forbid, look
after them for any length of time. If their parents left the room for two
seconds, I panicked. The command I most dreaded after, ‘
Pop your
things off
and open your knees
,’ was, ‘
I can hear the
baby crying; can you
just finish giving x his lunch?
’

So when I tried to imagine my own, I was sure I’d feel the same
way. What could possibly motivate me to pick up a spoon and go near any of that
stuff
? The stickiness, the sliminess of it, made me want to gag.
Anyhow, as I wouldn’t know how to get on with the actual child in the
first place, I was doomed. I should just give up and Get on with My Life.

Then, one night, Peter took me to meet an Italian couple he knew. Their
house was festooned with ornaments, pictures in curly, gold frames and tiny
tables with just one thing on them. Very unchild-friendly.

We were introduced to Ilaria, their two-year-old daughter, and as she
opened her mouth and said: ‘
Ciao,
Stephanie!
’ my
insides turned to mush.

There was charisma, even star quality, as if Elizabeth Taylor had come
into the room. She was more gorgeous than the Ferrari Dino! I couldn’t
look away.

We put on our coats and went for a pizza. It was evening, and there were
no other children there. Ilaria sat down, ate her Margarita and – here
was where I lost all restraint in my admiration – drank out of a glass. I
gazed helplessly at her until it was time to leave.

All I could think, all the way home, was:
How can I get
one of
those?

Clearly, there was a problem. Though I may look and sound as though I
could be from Italy, I’ve never even lived there. Therefore having
Italian children would have meant probably moving there or at least sleeping
with an Italian man, which would have confused the issue – literally,
since Peter was a half-Welsh Yorkshireman. Should I dump him and go on a
mission to Rome? A bad idea, as I had a dodgy track record in this area. This
dated back to a school trip to Pompeii, when I attempted to have sex in a Fiat.
It was a Cinquecento – tiny even by Italian standards – and the guy
was
tall
; for us to engage conclusively would have meant his legs
sticking out the window, which might have caught the attention of the Latin
teachers. So even though I had nothing actually against Italian men – and
loved their cars, even the small ones – I knew the case for geographical
engineering was weak. And even if it hadn’t been, I just didn’t see
myself moving to a country where they served meat without vegetables and
changed governments once a week.

But there was yet
another
obstacle. Even if I could find a way of
having an Italian child in Britain, with a half-Welsh Yorkshireman, I
didn’t like the accessories. Being marketed very efficiently, the props
were high profile. If you didn’t ski, there was no reason to know what
ski-sticks looked like. But baby gear you couldn’t avoid. Even if the
nearest you got to children was getting a lift back from a party in someone
else’s car, you’d never forget how long it took them to unhook the
special seats.

‘Hang on a sec, I’ll just do the back for you …
Nigel, could you grab the thing, and pull it down? I can’t
reach.’

‘Just unclip the thing under the other thing.’

‘I am.’

‘No, no, the
other
thing—’

‘Ow!’

It was easier to reconfigure the interior of a 747. And because of their
ubiquity, I was convinced that you had to order children
with
certain
things, as from a set menu. And they were all things I didn’t like, for
example puppet shows, and clowns, and teddy wallpaper, and group singing,
particularly with
clapping
, and birthday napkins with smiley faces on
them, and those slimy party bags that feel like condoms, and snot. I
didn’t like cot bumpers or child seats that make your perfectly nice car
suddenly look like a Wendy house, or cups that you could tip upside-down but
which didn’t go with anything because for some reason they had to be
orange
. Nor could I stand to see grown women putting their purses in
bags which were quilted and covered with
rabbits
. What, they were no
longer allowed anything smart? And why couldn’t they have
corners
?
Suddenly their world was a padded cell? When I saw them pushing those prams
with the matching changing bags I wanted to scream. Other people appeared to
have all this paraphernalia, and more amazingly, to like it. And some, to my
horror, even downgraded themselves as well. How could women refer to themselves
– with a simpering smile – as ‘
Just a mum!
’ as
if that meant they ought to have their credit cards taken away and no longer be
allowed to vote.

My encounter with Ilaria had changed me, but it only served to plunge me
deeper into my dilemma. I was afraid that if I wasn’t vigilant, whatever
had happened to my parents would happen to me. They had got married and
divorced, so I’d better not get married. They had split up and made me
commute between them, so I shouldn’t have children because they would end
up torn in two. If my parents, who weren’t actually mad or cruel or
negligent, produced someone as hopeless as
me
, then
my
children
would have to be total head-cases. It was a kind of formula: marriage +
children = emotional melt-down. So I had cleverly protected myself from it by
always making sure I ended up single, lonely and miserable. As formulas go, it
was crap. Even after meeting Peter and wrecking the ‘single’ part
of it, I clung to the other part by picking an argument whenever he mentioned
marriage. I was so blinkered I hadn’t even worked out that if I
did
marry someone stable, I could counteract the effect – or that
marrying the right man might make me happier. And I certainly never thought
that motherhood itself might bring me any pleasure. As for the outlandish
possibility that
I
might bring something good to the equation – it
just never occurred to me.

Clearly, then, motherhood was a faraway place of which I knew nothing.
The destination and the journey were too hazardous. I would have to remain
behind at Base Camp, in charge of something easy, like tidying the maps. When
the real explorers came in, I’d be relieved to be out of the blizzard,
but perpetually ever so slightly angry with myself for having given into my
fears. Oh, and there was one more thing. I’d always supported the
principle
of breastfeeding, but of the breasts themselves I was
proprietorial. I really didn’t want people sucking them unless I was 100
per cent totally in the mood.

Finally, curiosity gets the better of me. Despite the inhospitable
mental conditions – can my body actually grow a
real, live BABY
?
There’s only one way to find out.

‘With all this talk about will we, won’t we, let’s not
forget to have sex!’

‘Ha-ha!’

I miss a period, and when it seems unlikely that I’ll be having
the next one, Peter and I go to the Margaret Pyke Centre, central
London’s home of family planning, to have a test.

‘Let’s get one from the chemist,’ he says at
first.

‘I don’t trust them.’ I just don’t accept that
you can establish something so
massive
, so Life and Death
major
,
using a product bought in a shop. If there’s a nurse in the room,
I’ll be more inclined to believe it.

The Margaret Pyke has just relocated to trendy Charlotte Street, amongst
the wine bars, but I rather miss the old building, in the last seedy bit of
Soho, behind the apocalyptic-looking Soho Women’s Hospital; I liked going
for my condoms to a place surrounded by used needles and retired prostitutes in
slippers. To warn of the follies of unprotected sex, they had only to point out
of the window.

A senior nurse takes my sample and we sit in suspense, the atmosphere
strangely like that of a quiz show.
And the winner is …

‘You’re pregnant,’ she says with a smile. We must look
stunned because she adds: ‘And – you’re happy about
that?’

Oh, yes. With the
idea
of having a baby I’m ecstatic. But
then, communism looked good on paper. If there is an actual person inside me,
who is going to get bigger, it’s going to have to Come Out. And I
can’t do it.

‘We have a teensy bit of a problem,’ I tell Peter. ‘I
can’t do Natural Birth. In fact, I can’t do Birth at
all.’

‘I’d have it for you, you know.’

He would too. He is that rare thing, a man who knows no medical fear.
When his dodgy kidney was removed, he asked if he could
watch
. And he
still has things done to his teeth – thanks to a cycling accident when he
was eighteen – that make
Marathon Man
look like Winnie the
Pooh.

‘It’s so unfair,’ I say. ‘You’re the brave
one.’ He puts his hands on my shoulders.

‘I’ll back you totally,’ he says, ‘and do
anything you want, except grow a beard and be in an active birth
video.’

‘If only I was the man.’

‘Well, you are half-man.’

‘What, you mean I hate chatting on the phone and can read
maps?’

‘No, that hormone thing.’

‘Oh,
testosterone
.’ It’s true, I do have too
much of it; it goes with having polycystic ovaries and a hairy upper lip. If it
wasn’t for electrolysis I’d look like Tom Selleck. In fact, since
my hair’s been going grey I’ve dreaded being stranded on a desert
island, because without my hair dye and tweezers, I’d be unrecognizable.
If it took them more than three months to rescue me, I’d look like
Einstein. On the upside, though, if I ever become a war correspondent and get
taken hostage, I could just wait for the transformation, and – disguised
as a poor holy man – escape.

Peter points at me in what he thinks is an amusing way.

‘You have got one orifice in your body that would probably be big
enough.’

‘My mouth? Oh, fuck off.’

The baby’ll just have to stay in. Maybe I can make it hang on
until, say, it’s ready to go to work, and then we can negotiate it out,
like a mad gunman. Except then it’ll be a lot bigger. But at least
I’ll be able to reason with it. Perhaps, as with moving a piano, I can
say, ‘
Can
you twist to the left a bit?
’ and,
‘
Watch that corner on the
landing, that’s my
perineum.
’ Or if all else fails:
‘Here’s a scalpel
– can you cut off your shoulders?’

What am I going to do?

I could start smoking again, I suppose. But even a very small baby will
be too big for me. Besides, managing to give up fags was one of my few
triumphs; I don’t want to go through that
eat-loads-of-crap-and-put-on-a-stone thing again.

What other options do I have? Well, let me see. If I were a man –
a man who isn’t Peter – would I be queuing up to do this?

‘Men dash off to do things like climb mountains and freeze to
death in the Antarctic because they can’t have babies,’ my
mother’s always said, and I used to think:
Oh,
blah.
But
now I’m beginning to see she has a point. If you’d had a
third-degree tear like my friend Harriet, you wouldn’t need to go up a
mountain. You could say,
I have
touched the fucking void, mate. In
fact, my void is a bloody sight
bigger than it used to be, thank you
very much.
Given the choice, I’d rather crawl across the Andes with a
broken leg than tear my – I can’t even say it –
naughty
bits.
Can you believe I used to write about sex in
Cosmopolitan
?
I’ve led a double life, only the other way round from most people.
Usually it’s, ‘
Vicar was secret cross-dresser
’ or
‘
Head-
master’s wife posed nude in magazine
.’
With me it’s ‘
Fearless
sex writer was secret
prude.
’ I did the first ‘
What Women Really
Want In
Bed
’ piece for
GQ
, but I can’t say the c-word. Unless
it’s ‘
Can
you not press so hard, please?’

I’ve got to
focus
. I’ve set a bomb ticking inside me,
which cannot be defused. Or, as Cecil Parkinson memorably put it, ‘
You
cannot put the toothpaste back in the tube.
’ You can bet if
he
could have got pregnant he would have stayed in a lot more. Use the barrier
method, Cecil: shut the front door.

‘As far as I can see,’ says Peter, ‘it’s very
like buying a car.’

‘If you’re not going to say anything useful, could you shut
up?’

‘You study all the specifications, and then you make your choice
… So, Ms Calman, what can I interest you in? We have the Sport Pack,
with hard suspension, which keeps you in touch with every twist, turn and bump
of the road. A
Real
Driving Experience. Or there’s the Super
Comfort Fully-Automatic model with cruise control, air suspension and a choice
of six entertainment sources which lets you glide along in style and peace,
ensuring that you arrive at parenthood relaxed and refreshed, ready to get on
with the next phase of your life.’

‘Yeah, well actually—’

It’s no good; he’s warming to his theme.