Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years

by Stephanie Calman

  They’ve been saying for years that ‘puberty starts earlier and earlier these days’. But that’s not it at all. In fact, now, after twenty years, looking at the whole picture, I think this – the striving for autonomy, the battling over trivia – is normality. And coming out the other side of it – if we make it that far – is the transformation.

  To return, then, to the summer holidays of 2006, and the endless quest for something to do.

  It is the time of the annual Hand-Wringing Festival, when simple newspaper folk publish surveys be-moaning the Loss of Proper Childhoods, due to the demise of traditional games. Children don’t play board games or hopscotch any more; tree climbing and den building have died out, and we’re all going to hell in an Xbox.

  Actually, they may have a point.

  First it was Club Penguin. Then Animal Crossing. Now they’re fighting fire and ice monsters, who all have different powers, with warriors who each have certain attributes and so on – though all the various creatures seem to do when attacked is jump into the air and back down again.

  This strikes me as supremely unexciting, but Lawrence and Lydia are both hooked. Geomag, Sylvanians, Her Little Ponies – all the old favourites lie abandoned on the floor. Negotiating the number of hours allowed on it starts before breakfast. When friends come to play, their eyes light up and they too gather round the screen.

  ‘What’s the point of having friends to play if you don’t play?’ I say.

  ‘We are playing. We’re playing Adventure Quest!’

  Is that it? Is their childhood over already?

  At pick-up time, the school playground usually rings to the squeals of Lydia and her classmates as they play Bulldog, running past whoever’s It to touch the playground wall. Will it now fall silent? At home I want to fight my way through piles of cushions to the upturned sofa, the children’s presence given away by the trail of cheese-triangle wrappers leading to the blanket-covered entrance of their den, where only last month a visiting Barbie lay under a tent of fleece having a baby, directed by the most brutally unsympathetic midwives.

  ‘Push! That’s it! Right, back to work.’

  And I almost tear up with nostalgia when I delve under the stairs looking for the picnic blanket and find Lawrence’s longbow.

  On our most recent visit to my mum’s, in a village which boasts a real, live Village Green, he made a bow out of a curved stick and a length of string. It looked completely harmless but was in fact able to fire the lethally sharp twigs he’d whittled clear across the green, narrowly missing the heads of two mesmerized small boys who’d come out to watch. One landed in a neighbour’s garden, just as her dog stopped barking.

  Meanwhile, Lydia sat on the grass with another neighbour’s kids, collecting leaves and weaving them into little bowers while my mother and I watched them in a trance of parental – and grandparental – ecstasy. They played out there right up to suppertime, pausing only to come in and moan at us for letting them miss The Simpsons.

  I am so grief-stricken for their younger selves I even start to miss Ludo, Snakes and Ladders and Monopoly: really quite boring games – and in the case of Monopoly potentially endless as well, culminating, every time, in Lawrence getting Park Lane and Mayfair and his father and me each owing him £50,000 in rent and pleading with him and Lydia to please, please go and watch some TV.

  After four weeks of Adventure Quest I pull myself together and try to think what Mary Poppins would do.

  I harangue them about the enfeeblement of their constitutions until they agree to get dressed and leave the house – to walk, rollerblade, stand outside for half an hour picking their noses – anything that involves actual bodily contact with fresh air. Or that gets me to shut up. We walk briskly round the park, and gradually the air clears.

  When we come back in I steer them firmly past the computer and towards the stairs.

  ‘You can do anything you like,’ I say, ‘apart from go on the computer.’

  I issue Peter my Standard Warning Look – Do Not Give Way On This Or I Will Hurt You – and steel myself. I can stand it if they burst into tears; I don’t even care any more if they hate me; I just wish they would go back to being our adorable children who used to make dens. But they don’t burst into tears and they don’t say they hate me. And after about ten seconds, Lawrence says,

  ‘Can we make a den?’

  When I come back an hour later they’re sitting on the floor in his room under two chairs and a duvet, and Lydia is reading to him from a book of stories I bought at a jumble sale for 10p.

  So my message to parents – and the compilers of surveys – is this: today, Adventure Quest; tomorrow, two chairs and a duvet. But don’t go and spoil their fun with your mealy-mouthed, modern caution. As Lawrence said when he made the bow and I warned him not to shoot anyone in the eye:

  ‘Stop complaining. You wanted us to play outside, didn’t you?’

  Guerrillas in the Mist

  Peter’s from Sheffield, on the edge of the Peak District National Park. He grew up with some of Britain’s most beautiful landscape at the end of his road, while my view was of a pub and its customers coming out to pee in the neighbouring doorways, including ours. And whereas I grew closer to my father at the National Film Theatre, he bonded with his on Kinder Scout: formative experiences we have carried with us, beyond their deaths and throughout our lives.

  ‘I’m going to take Lawrence to climb Mount Snowdon,’ he announces one day. ‘It’s a proper mountain. And, unlike the others, it’s really picturesque. And you can do it in a day.’

  He is only eight though.

  ‘A tiny bit young?’ I say.

  ‘I used to go fell-walking with my father: it’ll be great!’

  ‘I thought you had to be dragged along because you’d rather have been sitting in your room, playing with your cars.’

  ‘Er, but I loved it when I got there and got into it. You just can’t appreciate the character-building qualities of a long uphill walk in dense cloud.’

  ‘Clearly. Well, have a wonderful time.’

  It’s an unspoken covenant of the marriage that I’m head of all things artsy-fartsy-crafty-wafty, while he’s in charge of activities likely to result in falls from steep rocks.

  When Peter’s stepmother died and the Sheffield house had to be sold, we had a magical ten days there, which included a walk up the escarpment known as Stanage Edge, Derbyshire’s answer to Uluru. And the children, who were five and six at the time, got up onto the rock plateau at the top and ran about.

  And every time they neared the edge, I thought I was going to throw up or faint. So I did the only thing I could do that wouldn’t provoke a row with Peter or spoil their fun; I turned round and forced myself to look the other way. My mother has on her wall the picture Lawrence drew of them as stick figures on what looks like a pile of huge boulders in mid-air. Which is pretty much as I remember it.

  Peter plans the assault on the north face with military precision. He requisitions maps and over-trousers, prepares a rucksack of ham and cheese rolls to keep low blood sugar at bay, and plots the scenic route, the other side from the mountain railway.

  The going is good and the ham rolls do their work, but as they near the summit, low cloud appears and engulfs them in wet mist.

  And on the way down Peter takes a wrong turn.

  And because the only way to reconnect with the right track is to go up – then down, he has to confess.

  Team morale plummets.

  Lawrence lies down in the wet heather, unable to go on.

  ‘I just want to go home.’

  But there is nothing Peter can do.

  ‘I’m really sorry. I’ve made a mistake.’

  And Lawrence accepts it.

  Like Joe Simpson up the Andes with his smashed leg in Touching the Void, he pulls himself up and resumes the bid for base camp – a B&B at Betws-y-Coed.

  They can see the ghostly shapes of other climbers in the mist, and tantalizingly, the sound of the m
ountain railway just a few metres away. But the summit is cloaked in cloud, obscuring the little terminus. And besides, he hasn’t even admitted to Lawrence that there is a train, which is clearly audible.

  Now its existence has been revealed, but even if they could reach it, it would take them down the wrong side, six miles from where they’ve left the car. And anyway you can’t get on if you haven’t booked.

  Because of his mistake, the only possible route left to them – that they can actually see – is one that gets progressively steeper. Eventually they are at a gap with a twenty-foot or so drop that Lawrence is too small to cross. Some of the ghostly shapes materialize beside them, and Peter hands Lawrence to another climber across the gap.

  After what seems a long time, they end up at the car park, and ultimately a pub tikka masala and a Simpsons comic. So, at the tender age of eight, Lawrence learns the value of not losing your nerve when things go wrong, and has no urge to learn it again. At least not up a Welsh mountain in the mist.

  And only when they’re safely back home does Peter confess to me just how steep it was, and how sheer the drops.

  ‘Jesus. I am so glad I didn’t know that.’

  ‘But what the experience really showed,’ he says, ‘is, when it came to a crisis, Lawrence’s attitude was extremely positive.’

  ‘Because it was that or stay there and die in the heather.’

  ‘Well, that’s putting a different spin on it.’

  Spin’s the word all right. Though I know Lawrence behaved well and am pleased, I don’t want to let Peter get away with all this crap about how marvellous it was getting lost and taking my eight-year-old down a series of lethal drops when they couldn’t bloody see.

  ‘It was certainly a golden opportunity for him to learn his father isn’t perfect.’

  ‘Exactly! A key moment.’

  How does he do that?

  Still, if going up, then down, then up again, then down a mountain isn’t a metaphor for growing up, I don’t know what is.

  ‘Well done, Lawrence,’ I say. ‘Were you scared?’

  ‘Not really,’ he says. ‘Only when Daddy looked down and I saw his face.’

  Then Peter takes Lydia. She nips up the 1,085 metres on just a bowl of Rice Krispies and a boiled egg, and at the summit, gazing across the perfectly clear sky towards Ireland, begins her passionate affair with the outdoors. Her after-treat is not a curry and a comic in a nice cosy pub, but a visit to the local stables for a pony ride.

  For her, this is just the beginning.

  At Lawrence’s school Open Day there’s a sign inviting visitors to have a go in a kayak. Her face lights up.

  She borrows a swimming costume from somewhere and goes in.

  ‘Hang on – when did she learn to dive?’

  ‘No idea.’

  The teacher says,

  ‘Good! Right, now flip the kayak all the way over and back up again.’

  And she does – just like that. When she springs up, she is soaking wet and elated.

  The teacher is also the expedition leader on Lawrence’s next school trip: canoeing on the river Wye. And she invites Lydia to join them on the spot.

  The trip is intriguingly subtitled: ‘An Introduction to Moving Water. Bring your own marshmallows.’

  Lydia swings into action, and marks out five days in her diary: three days of camping and paddling preceded by two of packing. And before she’s even left she passes a milestone of her own: her bag contains all the thick socks, fleeces, sleeping bags, hot chocolate sachets and pasta specified on the kit list, and no more than one cuddly toy.

  As usual Peter scoops up all the credit. Whenever anyone asks, ‘What’re you doing at half-term?’ he says:

  ‘Well, the kids are kayaking down the River Wye. They take after my father, of course.’

  And the image you have is of the solitary explorer, steadfastly paddling through deserted waters with just a tin cup and a bedroll, and a lone eagle wheeling overhead, as opposed to fully risk-assessed, safety-checked children smothered in lifejackets and helmets, in a group supervised by two completely trained adults with enough kit for an invasion.

  Peter’s strategy of claiming the credit for his long-departed father is clever because it appears not to favour him, but the former parent – who can’t be smug because he’s dead. Claiming credit for your children’s achievements – while appearing not to – is now even more popular than skiing.

  But he and I are also facing a step into the unknown.

  This is the first time they’ve ever both been away at the same time, without either of us.

  ‘We’re off the leash,’ he says. ‘We can do literally anything.’

  We wave them off in their minibus and drive to the South Downs, where we completely let ourselves go: poached eggs with extra toast and two coffees each, then a walk, then a two-hour lunch followed by slow browse round the bookshops of Lewes, topped off by a fabulous dinner and comatose slumber in a big fat B&B bed, all made by someone else.

  At breakfast the next morning, he says:

  ‘You do realize this is the future?’

  ‘What, fabulous dinners and big fat beds all made by other people . . .?’

  No, I know what he means.

  ‘Just the two of us.’

  Gulp.

  I’ve only just got used to being four.

  I used to think the future would wait its turn, not happen while you’re still grappling with the present.

  Then the expedition leader rings to tell us that Lawrence is not well.

  ‘He’s in his tent with a tummy upset.’

  Peter puts his hand over the phone.

  I assume he’s going to say: He’s such a Calman. But he looks quite concerned.

  ‘What’ll we do? Drive to Wales and get him, or . . .’

  I consider the time it’ll take from Sussex – at least five hours. And there’s another tea room I want to try.

  Down the line from the Wye Valley, Lawrence sounds very small yet not entirely desperate to come home.

  ‘He’s with the school – and Lydia. He’s quite safe, and maybe he’ll feel a bit humiliated if we take him away. I think we should leave him, but get an update later today.’

  To my surprise, the person suggesting this is me.

  By the evening we’ve heard nothing and as they’re due home the next day we decide to relax.

  ‘Maybe,’ says Peter, ‘your desire for a child-free weekend is simply stronger than your separation anxiety.’

  ‘Well, I do love a tea room.’

  Perhaps when the time comes for them to move out, this selfishness of mine will be an asset.

  But maybe it’s easier to be the ‘strong’ one if the other shows their anxiety first.

  When we get back, the expedition leader sends us a letter congratulating Lydia on having completed two nine-mile runs in a kayak, ‘seal launched’ into the river down a chute, run some ‘grade two rapids’, built a fire and – the most mysterious process of all – put up and packed away her own tent.

  ‘And,’ says Lydia, ‘the teacher brought along her dog!’

  I tell my mother, a lifelong nature-lover and former youth hosteller. She is mystified.

  ‘You and your sister were never at all interested in all that.’

  ‘I know! Weird, isn’t it?’

  She loved the natural world and would almost certainly have carried on strolling about Scotland in shorts and thick socks had she not gone to London and met my father, for whom nature was seen ideally through a window over tea and hot buttered toast.

  ‘And guess what? Jon and Lucy have invited her to something called Hippy Camp.’ They’re the parents of Milo, Lawrence’s friend since the age of two.

  ‘Is that its actual title?’

  ‘It’s near Totnes, so you never know. It’s inspired by Rudolf Steiner.’

  ‘Well, he was a bit of crank, letting children paint only in pastel colours and planting by the phases of the moon and so on. But – you
know, pretty harmless.’

  Unlike me, when she has an opinion about this kind of thing, it’s backed up by having read the original text.

  When Lydia hears that she’s going to a soggy field in the West Country for a week of bushcraft, storytelling and making dreamcatchers, she’s ecstatic. She’s even fascinated by the prospect of alternative lavatory facilities.

  ‘What are earth loos? Never mind! I can’t wait!’

  There’s also a Healing Tent. Before I can compose my regretful refusal, Lucy texts:

  You’d HATE it.

  ‘She knows me better than you do,’ I tell Peter, who actually suggests I join them. He sends me the highlights:

  Bushcraft

  Eurythmics in the Chi tent

  Swordwork for the over-15s

  Willow sculpture for adults

  Talk on living buildings

  Zipwire in the indigo village

  Teepee time (for little ones)

  Felt headbands for 7–12s

  Labyrinth creation

  Chi healing in the teen yurt.

  Beads, tie-dye, sandals, Crocs n ponchos r the Look. Also, long grey hair n no bras. He adds: Fantastic curries made by Jon on the fire – the only part of it he knows I will look upon with envy.

  Lydia is in her element – in the elements. After two days Lawrence gets a chest infection from the constant rain and damp and, after a failed attempt to dry out in a launderette in Totnes, is brought home early with suspected swine flu. When I take him to the GP, we’re told to get out before he infects anyone, take Tamiflu and stay in for at least ten days. I ask my ex-nurse friend J what to do.

  ‘Oh, if he was infectious it’s too late to worry about it now.’

  So we go to the library and take out a load of DVDs.

  Meanwhile Lydia darts through the drizzle from horse care to weaving to archery, pausing only to wolf down a biodynamically grown falafel burger.

  You can see the dominant characteristics as clearly as if their DNA was actually visible – like that moment in The Matrix when Neo learns that the girl in the red dress is only lines of code: