Confessions of a Bad Mother (9 page)

‘Way-hey!’ says Peter. ‘No sterilizing!’

It’s the parental equivalent of being told you never have to shave
your legs. We try to share the good news, but when we mention it to one or two
friends, they clearly think we’ve gone mad. But that’s fine. We
don’t mind the sterilizer in the cupboard. Everyone’s giving us
their used baby gear, and it’s brilliant.

‘The house is turning into a jumble sale,’ says Peter.
‘I know! Isn’t it great?!’

So far we have a cot and cot bedding from Marie, a great pile of clothes
from Claudia, a sling from Vicki, the pram from Sam – sounds like a Dr
Seuss story – and a burgeoning store of smart winter coats and other
worn-once chic stuff from mother of triplets Judith. My mum has got a
second-hand cot for £20 to use when we come to her place, and a
second-hand playpen (£10) ‘for the crawling stage – or
you’ll have to watch him every minute.’ Peter has found a pushchair
– for six months onwards – in a skip. There is, however, one item I
do need to buy.

I go back to John Lewis – on my own with Lawrence – and buy
myself a baby bag: a soft, black Fiorelli briefcase. It is made of that
shinyish material, with a zip you can pull easily with one hand, a shoulder
strap and a pocket on the outside for wipes. It does not have bunnies on it.
Afterwards, I go for lunch and eat soup over Lawrence’s head; he is
sleeping so nicely in the sling, and also if I take him out, I can’t
always quite remember how to retie it. Even going to the loo is possible
without unloading; I just lift him up slightly like a detachable beer gut. When
I come back home and take him off, I feel cold and a bit naked.

After this I am ambitious for new horizons. Peter has passes to the
Motor Show, so Lawrence can get his first view of the new TVRs, and we can
experience the hell that is taking a pushchair on the tube. But it isn’t
hell at all – it’s fine! All you have to do is make sure you have a
man with you at all times, to carry the whole lot up and down the stairs.

Olympia is bristling with ultra-blokes, most with cameras. We sit down
for lunch on the Honda stand, and Lawrence immediately wakes up and cries.

‘Hungry,’ says Peter, perceptively.

I look round for a suitable place. I’ve seen the loos already, and
they’re cold and concrete with no chairs. It’d be like
breastfeeding in an underpass.

‘Come on,’ says Peter, ‘it’ll be
fine.’

‘But …’ Then Lawrence ups the volume, and I get my
next taste of that thing I thought only Proper Mothers had: instinct. I stick
him on, and we continue to chat about this year’s models. No one from
Honda tells me to put them away, or that in Japan, a woman doing this in public
brings shame on her ancestors. A man shares our table. He has a notebook, a
tape recorder and a huge backpack containing – a toddler. My God:
we’re not unique! As we walk round, people on various stands – male
and female – admire Lawrence and stop us to talk.

‘Ah, makes me miss my little boy,’ says a bloke from
BMW.

‘Ooh, can I hold him? Here, you go and get yourselves a cup of
tea,’ says a woman from Rolls-Royce. While Lawrence is passed round,
Peter and I get in and out of the new TVR Cerbera, the new Ford Ka and the new
Alfa 156 with concealed rear-door handles.

‘Hey, look at this!’

‘You think it’s only got two doors, but it’s actually
got four.’

‘It doesn’t
look
child-friendly—’

‘But it is!’

We put our names down for one, and go home thrilled.

Then one morning, a funny thing happens. It’s been an average
night. We got up about three times; I barked at Peter’s boss when he woke
me by ringing at 10 p.m. Anyhow, I pick Lawrence up, shuffle downstairs to the
kettle, and feel something is different. Not the room: it’s still
littered with the same mess as the night before. When I look at him,
there’s a new feeling, quite strong. It isn’t like the pain I felt
in hospital, when that nurse wouldn’t take him out of the incubator, and
it’s not like the guilt when he didn’t put on weight. All the other
feelings I’ve felt so far – pride, triumph, outrage, contentedness
– have had to break through an overweening layer of fear: fear that
something bad is about to happen all the time, and fear that I have Made the
Wrong Choice. But today, a normal day with nothing new to look forward to, no
prospect of novelty – the fear has subsided a little. I am experiencing a
sensation that
is
new. Yet it’s also strangely familiar. Is it
merely the absence of fear? No, something more. Suddenly it clicks.

I’M IN LOVE! WHOOPEE! This is AMAZING. Ooooooh. Wowwwww! I wonder
if anyone else knows about this? I must tell them. I must tell everyone. I must
spread the Good News, so that all personkind can worship this heavenly –
uh-oh. OK, I get it now. Stand down the angels and shepherds. Cancel the star
in the east.

‘Hey, husband!’

‘What?’

‘I think I’ve just bonded.’

‘There, you see? I told you not to worry.’

‘No, no: you don’t understand. I think I’m in
love.’

‘What about me?’

‘You’ve served your purpose. Tell you what,
though.’

‘What?’

‘You’ve got
lovely
DNA.’

It has taken me twelve and a half weeks. Can’t find that in the
books either. Can’t find the bit that says: ‘
You may
bond
quickly, like superglue, or you may be the slow-acting kind,
where the
two parts must be held together for some time until they
stick.
’

Weirdly, at around the same time, I am beginning to think it might be
nice, now and then, to have a break. I am clear that I love this baby
I’ve had for nearly four months, but I’m also rather missing my
Self. And the space that used to be around me when I was detached. I wonder if
I could – no, I can’t. I feel guilty at even having the
thought.

Nick comes round for supper. He is in his sixties, a journalist and
grandfather. We have tremendous confidence in him. He can write you 1,000 words
on anything and sound like an expert. And just having an older person in the
house, we discover, can be immensely reassuring.

When he arrives, I am cooking – distractedly – while Peter
tries to get Lawrence to go to sleep. The magic he can work, with his
forwards-and-backwards swaying, is totally absent tonight. Why
do
babies
go to sleep sometimes when you want them to, then suddenly not? Why do they
feed for so long? Is there a pipe going through them, leading to ten other
babies all having a drink at the same time? We pace around, pondering these
pointless questions, while Lawrence grizzles. Suddenly Nick looks up and says,
‘D’you want a hand?’

He puts him up against his shoulder, as Peter has just done, sits down
and says, ‘Now, stop bothering your parents and go to sleep, will you?
There’s a good chap.’ Then he gets out a copy of the
Financial
Times
.

Lawrence is asleep within seconds. In the kitchen, Peter and I lose
concentration on the dinner as we marvel at this mystical event. Is it the
upright position? Well, yes, but we did that and it didn’t work. Is it
the deep voice? Possibly: babies are supposed not to like shrieks. But then,
Peter’s voice is hardly Julian Clary-ish, and I sound like Michael Buerk.
Also, there is no one bouncing up and down, jiggling him –
that
helps. But maybe Lawrence is just at that moment ready to drop off. There
is the x-factor, certainly: the mysterious alignment of the planets that causes
children suddenly to do what you want. There is one more thing, though: more to
do with what Nick isn’t, than what he is. He isn’t Lawrence’s
parent, and as such has no huge investment in his going to sleep. He
doesn’t – ultimately –
care.
And that’s where he
has the edge.

This proves that
anyone
can be parental, not just a mother and
clearly not just women. Often
not
women: I am proof of that. You can be
a man, and not related to the infant at all.

A vision forms in my head … of me, Peter and perhaps a third
person – to Help.

But it’s a crazy idea, and anyhow, we don’t know anyone.
I’m not ready to go back to work, and anyhow the whole idea is –
when you really think about it – too terrifying. Like many people
nowadays, we have family either too spread out geographically, or not in a
position to help. And in any case, there aren’t enough of them. The
‘extended family group’ ideal my mother waxes on about is hard to
assemble when all you’ve got is a sister each, both with full-time jobs,
sixty miles apart. Anyhow, they need their own time. One has finished her
family and the other hasn’t begun. They’re doing other things with
their lives. Besides, there is a downside to family – well, mine anyway:
they have an opinion about
everything
. A person we pay could give advice
but we needn’t have to listen. We’d be in charge!

‘We could get an au pair,’ says Peter. ‘I could show
her around …’

‘Good luck to you,’ I say. ‘Sad old git.’

Anyhow, I want someone who knows more than me, not less. But who? We ask
Claudia.

‘I got Bobbie from a magazine,’ she says. ‘Been with
us for three years.’

‘Hmmm.’ But she’s confident and relaxed.

‘I used an agency,’ says Barbara. ‘But they sent
someone with an awful boyfriend who banged on the door at night.’

‘Hadn’t they checked?’

‘They said, “
If we’d told you, you might not have
given her the job.
”’

‘!’

‘Exactly.’

‘Advertise in
The Lady
,’ says Jane.
‘That’s what all my friends do.’

‘Much too scary. And I’d have to interview
people.’

‘I don’t mind interviewing,’ says Peter, ‘but I
still want a personal recommendation.’

To see what it feels like, we ask my friend Alison to babysit. She has
two boys at primary school
and
works,
and
is learning to drive,
and
is currently repainting her flat. She’s like a throwback to an
earlier generation, the sort you could imagine welding Spitfires in a
hairnet.

‘D’you think you could cope with Lawrence while we go to the
cinema?’ we ask her.

‘Don’t be silly. I thought you’d never ask!’

She puts him in his car seat on the table, where her boys gaze at him in
wonderment.

‘Get on with your homework!’ she says.

‘Isn’t she
amazing
?’ we say, as we drive
away.

Discovering we can cope with having a few hours to ourselves, we start
asking people we know if they have any great nannies they don’t need any
more.

But the nannies of people we know – if we could afford them, which
we can’t – are all fully employed, working for people we know.
There is no equivalent of ‘Shea’ – Pat O’Shea –
who looked after my sister and me. Shea is great with children despite having
had none of her own. Come to think of it, she’d had no previous
experience at all before coming to us, but those were less anxious times. She
had sound instincts about kids and and her techniques always got results. When
I locked myself in the bathroom at three, she offered me a chocolate bar which
helped me remember how to work the bolt. And when I flushed her gold watch down
the lavatory, she didn’t even shout at me. Hell, the woman could write a
book on kids – ten books. She’s perfect! There is one little
problem, though; she is now seventy-seven.

Another month goes by. Wherever we go, we ask for recommendations, but
the horizon is bare. I begin to resign myself to a lifetime at home. My career
– so important to me, so long fought for – will wither away.
Eventually I’ll be someone who
used to write once
, the glory days
of pop star interviews and Fleet Street gossip a speck on the viewfinder of
Time … Shit! Look what’s happening to my style! I’ve already
gone stale.

A couple of weeks later I bring Lawrence back to Carol, the quiet-voiced
health visitor. She puts him in the scales, congratulates me on his weight
gain, and lays him down to measure his length. Then she says, out of
nowhere:

‘Do you want a childminder? Only I know a really good one, and
she’s got a space.’

‘God! Are you telepathic as well?!’

‘She almost never gets spaces – only really when people move
away. And someone has. Here’s her number, if you want to give her a
ring.’

This is typical; the moment you give up on something, along it comes. I
take the number back to Peter, holding it carefully in case it explodes in my
bag.

My mother wags a middle-class finger: ‘Childminder? She’ll
put him in front of the TV all day, and
smoke
.’

Maureen lives on a respectable council estate of houses with little
gardens, gradually going private. No one has written
Kelly is a Slag
on
any of the walls. No children try to sell us crack or offer to mind our car for
a pound. A gate opens into a small yard full of trikes and pedal cars. The
house is warm and spotless. In the kitchen, two little boys, aged two at a
guess, are playing with a toy garage. We stand there, and I know Peter’s
thinking the same as me:
I hope she doesn’t ask us anything
too
difficult.
Luckily, Maureen knows the questions as well as the answers;
without actually saying, ‘
You don’t know
what
you’re doing, do you?
’ she succeeds in imparting the
information. This is good because we have no idea what we’re supposed to
ask.

She speaks in soft, measured tones. As someone who babbles, and too
loudly, I’ve always been fascinated by people who can command attention
by saying relatively little, and without barking. Where children are involved,
it’s really impressive.

The whole atmosphere is cosy, safe and deeply restful – like
sinking into a bath. The two boys vroom their cars up and down the gleaming
kitchen floor, and we notice another baby of Lawrence’s age, sleeping in
a pram. How could anyone look after this lot and be so
calm
? How could
anyone get their house that
clean
? Maybe she’ll spoil it all by
turning out to be insufferably smug. She insists we follow up at least two of
her references. She opens a folder full of letters, and gives us a few to read.
While we talk, she asks to hold Lawrence, which she does with great tenderness
yet a marked lack of fuss. She’s older than me, and far wiser –
which at this stage wouldn’t be difficult. She’s only forty-two to
my thirty-seven. But her own sons are nearly grown-up. She is, in terms of
experience, another generation.