Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years

by Stephanie Calman

  STEPHANIE CALMAN

  To Katarina

  There was a Third Parent, Lawrence: it just wasn’t you.

  Contents

  Prologue

  1 Ages 7 & 8: The Sticking Point

  2 Guerrillas in the Mist

  3 Pret à Shouter

  4 Ages 8 & 9: The Brace Position

  5 Conflict Resolution

  6 Ages 9 & 10: The Art of the Deal (1)

  7 Lost and Found

  8 Understanding the Facts of Life

  9 In and Out the Pupa

  10 Two’s a Crowd

  11 Ages 10 & 11: Expandable by up to 20 per cent

  12 Credit Crunches

  13 The Art of the Deal (2)

  14 The Eternal Wisdom of Sid Arthur

  15 Freedom Riders

  16 Ages 11 & 12: The Third Parent

  17 Trespassers Will Be Irritated

  18 Too Clever by 0.5

  19 A Mermaid on Speed

  20 Postgate and Firmin’s Stars

  21 Superpowers

  22 Doctor Not in the House

  23 Ages 12 to 14: Monsterosa Deliciosa

  24 Ages 13 to 15: Route Master

  25 At the Temple of Cake

  26 Ages 14 to 15: Relationships Through the Ages

  27 Orange is Not the Only Black

  28 Festival Dad

  29 Ages 15 & 16: Uber Your Own Piglet

  30 Regime Change

  31 Ages 16 & 17: Animal Magic

  32 Ages 17 & 18: Au Revoir and Toodle-Pip

  33 Baby Come Back

  34 Last Exit to Westworld

  35 Xenomorph

  36 Play ‘Beetroot’ for Me

  37 Pier Group

  38 Saw, Starring Lauren Bacall

  39 Exit Group

  40 Ages 18 to 20: Toys R No Longer Us

  41 Proceed to Checkout

  42 Photo Finish

  43 Planned Obsolescence

  44 A Sense of Direction

  45 The Long Goodbye

  46 Crumple Zone

  47 Almost Gone Girl

  48 The Way We Live Now

  49 Light at the End of the Tunnel

  50 Life Skills

  51 Coda

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  My daughter Lydia and I are in the formal wear department of BHS, buying her a dress.

  My husband Peter’s sister has found the last available sane heterosexual man in London and is getting married again. It’s going to be a small event – no bridesmaids or best man or anything – but we’re all going to dress properly. Peter’s wearing a suit, and Lawrence has been given one by an older boy up the road. I’ve got a beautiful raspberry-coloured skirt from Reiss. So that just leaves Lydia. And BHS is the place for affordable wedding gear. Lydia isn’t actually mad keen on dresses, but this is a wedding. You dress up. Right?

  I immediately spot a dress in a lovely plum colour; you could cut out the label and say it’s Monsoon.

  ‘Isn’t that lovely?’

  Silence.

  ‘Lydia, that’s definitely one to try on.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Just try it on.’

  ‘NO!’

  ‘For God’s sake! Just choose that one!’

  ‘NO!!’

  Coming from a very minimal family, I’ve been starved of weddings – though not of divorces – and am very much looking forward to this one. In fact, the shortage of family weddings was a reason I decided to have one myself, which raised the number in my life up till then to two. And I’m damned if the issue of that happy union is going to fuck up number three. But she is mutinous.

  ‘If you don’t choose that dress I’m going to go home without you.’

  Not really an option, but these are desperate times.

  ‘I’m going to go home without YOU!’

  We go on like this for what is probably only a few minutes – but feels like hours – until she grudgingly settles on a mid-length mauve number. It’s not quite as classy as the plum but perfectly fine, with a little matching flower on the bodice and a bolero of embroidered net. Mission accomplished.

  But we walk to the tube station in silence. We have the dress, yet there’s no sense of achievement, or even relief – just a dull numbness. I’m like the Soviet Air Defence officer in the 1980s who saved the world when the ‘Incoming Missile’ signal lit up, by not pressing the red button. I get no parade, no outward sign of anything having been achieved. I’m just: not dead.

  This overreaction to choosing clothes, for a wedding – which is meant to be A HAPPY OCCASION, FOR FUCK’S SAKE – has thrown me right off balance. When we get home I make some tea, but I feel utterly demoralized. Is it possible that our child has reached that stage which I know is coming, but is a good few years off? Not yet – surely it can’t be!

  She seems to be in the early stages of adolescence.

  And she is seven.

  Ages 7 & 8: The Sticking Point

  The summer holidays arrive and we go to the coast. The kids and I are walking alongside the low beach wall, and from nowhere, like a squall, a row starts up. Lawrence has somehow got a stick, and Lydia wants it.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ I say, ‘just get another stick.’

  But no: they must both have that stick.

  He gets up onto the wall, and she follows. He holds the stick out of her reach; she goes after it. They end up fighting each other along the narrow concrete ledge, like Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) but with more whining.

  Then they both fall off.

  You wouldn’t believe a seven- and an eight-year-old could make that much noise. People driving past slow down to look, and a nearby builder briefly puts down his drill.

  After a whole morning trying to entertain them, I have totally had it.

  ‘STOP BLOODY FIGHTING! WHY WERE YOU FIGHTING? NO WONDER YOU FELL OFF THE BLOODY WALL! WHAT D’YOU EXPECT?!’

  ‘We-he-he werehhhhnt fi-hi-hi-ghting,’ Lydia gasps between sobs, while Lawrence just lies on the ground, screaming.

  I pick them up, look for injuries – can see none – fish around in the linty pockets of my non-attractive seaside coat, and find a chocolate-covered mint, slightly bent. And because I’m a parent, not a laboratory rat – and therefore don’t learn from experience – I bring out the one mint before making sure there’s a second.

  There isn’t a second.

  And so they continue crying all the way to the sweet shop, where I buy them a tube of Smarties each because, whatever happens in life sugar will always be there for them, and take nothing in return but their health.

  As a parent, I assume they fight in order just to ruin my day. However, David Attenborough says that young animals such as lion cubs attack each other as practice, for when they’ll have to struggle for survival against predators. So it apparently has a purpose apart from to drive me off my head.

  Not that I get this at the time.

  And whether I take them to A&E, spend the rest of the day giving them treats or merely shout at them and cruelly force them to share a single bent mint will ultimately make no difference. They are developing in the way they need to. But, as I say, I don’t know this yet. And if I did, it probably wouldn’t help.

  Mentally wrung out, I march them back and hand them over to Peter.

  ‘I thought we were going to take turns,’ he says.

  ‘We have. I have. Your turn now.’

  Still, tomorrow is another day.

  Unfortunately.

  Again they’re fidgety and bored, so we get in the car to go down the coast a bit for a change of scene. They say
the next town but one is lovely.

  Maybe it’s like the next-door queue in the supermarket or other people’s marriages: better because you’re never in it. Whatever it’s like, it can’t be worse than France last summer, when we drove for an hour to a chateau with a ‘play area’ which was literally a slide on a square of boiling-hot gravel. But, setting off for anywhere with children and any kind of expectations is probably an exercise in futility; most kids, most of the time, just want to play undisturbed with their building blocks or cars, or at a push some wet sand, and you generally don’t need to go anywhere – apart from to those hangars of sensory assault by primary colours known as soft play centres, which they absolutely LOVE, and which for some reason I almost never go to without a raging hangover, or maybe I just acquire one while I’m there without even getting to be drunk first.

  We leave late, and Lawrence is already getting low blood sugar. He and I have that sort of metabolism where we have to eat six times a day, and Lydia and Peter have the other kind. Where Lawrence’s typical breakfast is bacon, eggs, toast and sausages, Lydia has half a mango and Peter just an apple because he ate in September.

  Then, just as I realize Lawrence really has to eat soon – no, now – because he is getting psychopathic, we hit the main road, and a traffic jam. The other seaside town is only forty minutes away, but it’s already taken us half an hour and we’ve only gone a mile up the road.

  ‘Right, we have to find food! It’s nearly lunchtime,’ I say, resenting the fact that I’m always the one to have to point it out, and annoyed with myself because the only thing in my bag is a chocolate wafer which is technically Lydia’s, because Lawrence had his yesterday. And anyway it’s completely the wrong thing. Lydia agrees to share it, but it only restores Lawrence’s sugar levels for about four seconds before he’s writhing in agony on the back seat.

  We turn off the main road and go another way.

  ‘This is taking ages,’ says Lydia.

  ‘Who wanted to go to the seaside anyway?’ says Lawrence.

  ‘I did – so we wouldn’t be cooped up in the house, getting on each other’s nerves!’

  ‘Well, it was a stupid idea.’

  ‘I want to go home.’

  Peter says, ‘Come on, it’ll be lovely! We’re nearly there.’

  ‘There’s a shop,’ I say. ‘Let’s get something there.’

  But he drives past.

  ‘It’s almost lunchtime. I thought you said we were going for lunch.’

  ‘I meant, to get something to keep him going. He can’t last. Don’t you understand?’

  Then I spot a sweet little thatched tea room up ahead.

  ‘That looks perfect. There – no – what are you doing?’

  ‘Going to the sea,’ he says through gritted teeth. ‘Isn’t that what you wanted?’

  He keeps on going, past the tea room, to the end of the road, where it almost reaches the sea but ends in one of those compulsory car parks like at the Needles in the Isle of Wight, so you can’t even get out and have a glimpse without paying £3. We can’t see the sea at all. No wonder these places get vandalized. I feel quite strongly like getting out and smashing up a bus shelter myself.

  ‘Surely,’ I say, in my supposedly-patient-but-actually-quite-angry voice, ‘we should have lunch, because everyone is hungry – except you of course – then come back here when we’ve eaten.’

  ‘You wanted to look at the sea, so that’s what we’re doing. All right?’

  ‘Why can’t we just go home?’ says Lawrence, using his last molecule of blood glucose to grimace horribly.

  ‘Right, there’s a pub,’ Peter says. It has a sign outside advertising Two Meals for the Price of One! and karaoke.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I say. ‘What was wrong with that tea room you drove past for some bizarre reason? You’re always saying you don’t want them eating junk food. Well, that’s exactly what you’ll get in there!’

  ‘Right!’

  He’s now in his Basil Fawlty persona. He pulls out again, speeds up and just as I say:

  ‘There’s a speed camera!’ I see a flash.

  ‘Happy now?’

  ‘Why the hell didn’t you SLOW DOWN?’

  Snorting at each other like bulls, we pull up outside the tea room, hoping to God it’s open. It is. A friendly-looking man waves us in, and then disappears into the kitchen, to be replaced by a sullen woman in a stained top. We go through a door and the sweet little thatched cottage turns into a freezing empty barn with an actual layer of dust on the table. We sit down and feel our bones contracting in shock.

  ‘My God, it’s colder in here than outside,’ says Lawrence.

  We huddle together in our seats.

  ‘Could we have some menus?’ I ask the woman.

  ‘Yes, I’m just coming,’ she replies, with an almost audible ‘tch’.

  ‘And could you possibly put the fire on?’

  There is a coal-effect gas fire, concealed behind a screen.

  ‘I will – in a minute!’

  She switches on the fire, carefully keeping the screen in place to make sure none of the heat seeps out.

  We open the menus. Not only is there no sign of the cream teas or snack meals listed outside on the jolly-looking blackboard, everything is absurdly expensive.

  ‘Good choice,’ says Peter. ‘Thank God we didn’t go to the place with two meals for the price of one.’

  The main courses are at London prices. And even the ‘Light Lunches’ start at £9. We’re not even in a town; we’re in the middle of nowhere, for heaven’s sake.

  ‘Soup,’ I say. ‘They have soup!’

  It’s vegetable. By some miracle, both the children agree to have it, with a tomato and mozzarella salad for Lawrence as a chaser. Still, I’m envisaging the row when Lydia discovers a molecule of parsley and refuses to touch a drop.

  A breakthrough: warm, crusty rolls arrive, which we swallow almost before they hit the plates. The soup is delicious. I contemplate ordering another round, but at £4.50 for about a cupful it’s not really on.

  ‘What’s for pudding?’ asks Lawrence.

  ‘Er, we’ll have that somewhere else,’ Peter and I say simultaneously, the only thing we agree on being our desire to get away.

  ‘Everything all right for you?’ growls the woman.

  ‘Lovely, thank you!’

  We jump into the car and drive to Chichester. The sea is not mentioned again, and deploying only the minimum of communication we get out and have a round of hot chocolates in a Maison Blanc. The children also have a giant marshmallow each. While they sip their chocolates Peter and I read the papers in silence, waiting for the marriage to thaw out.

  In a fleeting burst of maturity, I pay the exorbitant bill without letting him see it and restore some sensation of control.

  As we’re leaving, Lydia says:

  ‘Mummy, if you do get a divorce, bagsy I live with you.’

  And on that heart-warming note, we head home.

  I’ve been assuming that it was just being on holiday that put everyone in a shit mood and that when they get back to their toys and their friends and their routine, the children will revert to their usual charming selves. The episode with Lydia in BHS was surely a one-off that will recede with time.

  But then something else happens that really rattles me.

  Lawrence starts answering back, throwing polite requests and totally normal questions back in my face, and generally not being very pleasant.

  One evening, out of the blue, this happens:

  ‘Lawrence,’ I say, ‘could you hang your blazer up?’

  And he says:

  ‘Why? You’re nearest.’

  Then, after supper, as he’s sliding off to the TV, I ask:

  ‘Could you please put your plate by the sink?’

  And get in return:

  ‘Why should I? You put it there.’

  I’ve not even asked him to wash up. What the hell is happening here? Who is this horrib
le child?

  ‘Excuse me?’ I say. ‘I put it there because I just made and served your bloody dinner! PUT YOUR PLATE UP NOW!’

  When he’s gone to bed I say to Peter:

  ‘What the fuck’s going on?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure it’ll blow over.’

  ‘Well, thanks for your input.’

  He does come up with one useful idea though.

  At bedtime, Lawrence has been saying he’s not tired – as kids do – and Peter says:

  ‘Why don’t we try letting him read till a bit later?’

  ‘OK. And he can turn his own light off.’

  It seems a tiny thing, but it does the trick. Lawrence goes to bed more readily and his manners improve.

  So, if we’ve just proved the equation rudeness + more freedom = nicer behaviour, then it’s Good News: we’ve found a strategy. Less Good News: this is absolutely the definition of adolescence, which was meant to be at least four years away.

  ‘But!’ says Peter, ‘we’ve found a strategy.’

  ‘And – but – BUT’ I say, ‘if this is what I think it is, we’re looking at ten more years.’

  Aristotle said: ‘Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man’ – or, to be more accurate, the quite annoying young adult. So maybe adolescence really does begin then; it’s just taken us 2,300 years to notice.

  Then I come across something a friend told me years ago: that the end of childhood comes at the age of seven. Up until then, you believe a golden pony really could come cantering round the corner, and after that age, you know it won’t. What they should have added was: after that you begin to shout at your parents for no reason. And we’re the ones still waiting for that golden pony.

  We cling to the belief that our children are sweet, innocent creatures. We know that one day they will wake up horribly changed, a mutant snarling and spitting beast, but believe that day is comfortably far off.

  So, instead of paying attention to the signs, which start long before that, we believe in a kind of reverse creation myth: after eleven or twelve years of ‘normality’ comes a catastrophe like the meteor that destroyed the dinosaurs – and our hitherto nice children metamorphose into Teenagers.

  And we’re not only unprepared but amazed, indignant even, that this outrage should be perpetrated on us. We’ve fed and clothed them, woken up in the night, taken them to soft play centres, sung ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ and suffered for them in all sorts of ways. And now we’re being punished!