Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years

by Stephanie Calman

  Grimsdale = skipping cheerfully through the rain whittling a willow wand; Calman = sitting in a warm, dry room watching Family Guy.

  Pret à Shouter

  Like Lawrence’s pet stick insects, Lydia sheds her outer layers with impunity. When she’s finished with something, or grows out of it, she simply sloughs it off. To find anything, you have to count through the layers till you get to the day she last wore it, and below that are things she hasn’t worn for years. Dig all the way down and you may find babygros.

  ‘That could be a TV show,’ says Peter. ‘A group of children have to perform various tasks, such as putting away their football kit or picking up their dirty clothes. Then each week the father sends one of them to their room, points at them and shouts: “You’re Tired!”’

  My father was actually quite like Alan Sugar when he lost his temper – scarier, actually, since what began as a growl would rise in pitch almost to a scream. And one of the worst battlegrounds, which led to absolutely massive rows, was what we were supposed to wear.

  My mother didn’t mind, and in any case she never took us anywhere formal. As I say, we had so little family that there were no weddings or anniversary parties – well, one during my entire childhood – so it never came up.

  But then my father and stepmother came back from holiday married, and his new in-laws Had Standards. Before a visit to her parents, they would demand we brush our hair and put on dresses. And we would refuse. Christmas was a particular flashpoint.

  ‘It’s just this bloody ONCE!’ Dad would shout. And my stepmother would complain that we were ‘badly brought up’.

  It just made no sense to us, putting on different clothes to eat lunch. Now, when I think of all the rules we could have mutinied over, it seems so trivial, a typical protest of the disenfranchised.

  But now I’m on the receiving end, because Lydia’s doing it as well!

  Given that Peter and I are frankly much better parents than mine ever were, this is NOT BLOODY FAIR. And now we are coming up to a major test.

  My friend Diane is getting married.

  We’ve already been through the hell of buying Lydia a dress. In fact it’s a year since Lydia and I had the row in BHS – that’s how I know it’s Peter’s sister’s first wedding anniversary. Or perhaps I should say first-second, since she’s on number two. Second timers probably have a separate anniversary gift chart by now, where having been given a load of mostly pointless stuff the first time round, you start getting rid of it all: first anniversary, chuck out something made of paper; second: something cotton – the decree nisi perhaps, followed by your ex-mother-in-law’s dreadful curtains.

  Anyhow, my old friend Diane is getting married – for the first time, in a beautiful old building with a proper sit-down lunch and an entertainer for the children – and only a short drive from where we live. It will be literally stress free.

  Peter gets Lawrence into the hand-me-down suit again. The trousers are still too long; height-wise he’s a Calman and short for his age, so everything is. I quickly take them up, leaving a nice neat outline interrupted only by a big lump of folded fabric halfway down his calves. But he puts them on happily without a peep.

  ‘He takes after me,’ says Peter.

  ‘Shut up. We’re going to be late.’

  I can’t stand being late.

  I turn my attention to Lydia, who’s still in her pyjamas.

  ‘OK, Lydsy, time to put on your lovely mauve dress.’

  ‘I’m not wearing THAT!’

  ‘What? You chose it!’

  ‘I wanted the other one.’

  Excuse me?

  ‘You are joking.’

  ‘I want to wear the circle top.’

  Oh no.

  No, no, no, NO.

  This cannot be happening.

  It’s like a horror film where they’ve failed to lock the cellar door.

  When we were away one weekend, I spotted a shop selling good second-hand clothes for kids, where I picked up, along with two T-shirts for £2 each, a rather groovy black top with pink and white circles on it: a nod towards Sixties pastiche, but with some naff drawstring ties at the hem. Thinking I had a good five years to cut those off, make it a bit more Austin Powers, maybe get her to team it with a mini skirt and white boots, I stuffed it into the back of her wardrobe. I did not hide it, bury it, or remove it to a safe place to be destroyed in a controlled explosion. So yes: Oh, Mea Culpa, goddess of motherhood, it is my bloody fault.

  ‘It’s way too big – and old – for you,’ I told her, ‘but you can grow into it.’

  I then watched in horror as she got home, put it on and has refused to be separated from it for the past four weeks. Quite often she sleeps in it, paired with decorated tracksuit bottoms passed on by some careless older girl. You know who you are.

  ‘Why can’t I wear it?’ she says, as the clock ticks on and the wedding guests gather and sip their first glasses of champagne.

  It hangs right off one shoulder, and – with her hair all straggly because she currently refuses to let me brush, clip or tie it – she looks like an unemployed lap dancer.

  ‘You are absolutely not wearing that top.’

  ‘FINE.’

  Staring at me, her jaw set, she starts putting on her jeans.

  I get no help from Peter, who is completely ready and downstairs with Lawrence, smugly reading a car magazine.

  This kind of immovable pig-headedness can be an invaluable attribute – at times, in certain walks of life – for instance if you’re Winston Churchill in 1940, trying to convince your fellow politicians not to make peace with a genocidal psychopath murdering his way across Europe. But coming from an eight-year-old, it is exhausting and debilitating.

  I cannot go on.

  I’m going to scream at her until she feels really fucking sorry, then hurl myself into the traffic.

  I am At The End.

  ‘Everything all right up there?’ calls Peter.

  I’m going to kill him as well.

  But what’s this? An impeccably timed text from our friend Federico, who is coming for dinner tomorrow with his Brazilian girlfriend.

  See you at eight. We have news!

  Taking a wild guess, could he be getting married too . . .?

  O – M – G . . .

  ‘Hey, Lydia! If you put on the mauve dress for Diane’s wedding, now, this minute, so we’re not incredibly, unforgivably late and she never speaks to me again – you can have a new one for Fed’s. OK?’

  ‘Really? Oh thank you, Mummy!’

  She immediately puts it on and even lets me brush her hair.

  Yet I feel not triumphant, merely worn out, and though she has put the bloody thing on, ineffective. I’m also in for at least another thirty quid on a second dress.

  But the mauve garment is in position. The circle top has been stood down. And we can, finally, leave for the wedding.

  The event is beautiful, and Diane’s son Jack – who isn’t yet ten – makes a moving speech that has every parent in the room thinking: I bet my child couldn’t do that. Or maybe that’s just me.

  The following evening Federico comes over. He and Lucia are indeed engaged, and we’re all invited!

  And the wedding is this winter, in Brazil.

  But by then, no doubt, we’ll be facing challenges as yet unimagined.

  Ages 8 & 9: The Brace Position

  In my family, we had no strategies to deal with stress. Losing his temper was my father’s default response to just about any provocation and so reflexive I assumed it was inevitable. Hungry? Got a parking fine? Getting divorced again? Why not lose your temper?! It was only years later I began to wonder how other people had discovered another way.

  Lawrence has to have a brace. The orthodontist has identified a hereditary underbite on Peter’s side, which may become a problem when his jaw stops growing, sometime after the age of sixteen. It could mean some quite scary surgery. But sixteen is seven years away, so far in the future we can’t i
magine it. And for the moment, luckily, all the brace has to do is redirect a single tooth that’s growing outwards, as if trying to get away. But he’s much younger than the usual age for these things, and it feels quite daunting.

  Peter rings me from McDonald’s, our traditional venue for post-dentist treats, to say he can’t eat, speak or swallow with it in.

  ‘I don’t know how we’re going to do this,’ he admits, in an unprecedented surrender to defeat.

  But though Peter makes ‘What a nightmare!’ faces at me when they come in, Lawrence himself says nothing. In fact, he settles down calmly with a comic. As someone who at twelve dumped my prescription glasses with one eye blacked out – so my lazy-eye was never fixed – I am in awe. It looks horrendously uncomfortable.

  ‘You are being so good,’ I say. ‘You can’t eat or speak, and you’re not even in a bad mood!’

  And he takes the brace out and says:

  ‘But Mummy: being in a bad mood doesn’t do anything.’

  Oh.

  My.

  God.

  With this apparently casual remark our nine-year-old has reversed one of the core beliefs of my upbringing. Is this child in Year Four – not even at secondary school – more mature than my dad?

  ‘Basically,’ says Peter, ‘most people are more mature than your dad.’

  True.

  ‘But he’s nine: I can’t believe it.’

  Our child already understands that there’s no point trying to blame anyone, because this temporary torture isn’t being inflicted on him: it’s for his benefit.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he adds. ‘Because I can take it out for meals. See?’

  ‘Well done,’ I say. ‘I’m just so proud of you.’

  ‘He takes after me,’ says Peter. ‘Now he can teach you how to be more positive as well.’

  ‘Thank you: that is kind.’

  Lawrence has lost ten teeth so far; Lydia has her eighth wobbler on the go. This week he brought home a certificate that says his handwriting is now neat enough to be done in ink. And they’ve both been on their own to the shop at the end of the road. Each stage of development is a great achievement!

  I wonder what the next one will be?

  Whenever it’s my turn to walk Lawrence to school, we talk pretty much the whole twenty-five minutes from our front door to theirs. Today he tells me about his gang.

  ‘It’s called the Black Tigers. Or we might change it to the Black Panthers.’

  ‘Actually,’ I say, ‘I’d stick to Tigers.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We-ell . . .’

  I feel I had better nip this in the bud. Cultural Appropriation isn’t yet a Thing, but there may be those who take exception to a clutch of fresh-faced white kids naming themselves after the militant yet socially ambitious black activists of the 1960s.

  ‘Once upon a time in America’ – I actually do say this – ‘the white people were very cruel and unfair to the black people – well it’s not that great now, but anyway. Some brave black men – and I think some women – got together and . . .’

  He stops, to push the toe of his newly polished shoe into a puddle. Poor kid; he only wants to know the difference between a tiger and a panther – possibly not even that – and I’m giving him the history of the civil rights movement as it might be explained on CBBC. I pause. To my relief, he seems not to notice. Let’s just hope the junior Black Panthers go the way of Candida, the 1970s women’s magazine that was going to name itself after the medical term for thrush.

  ‘We all control different things. I control the wind.’

  I refrain from asking if this is in tribute to his prodigious bouts of farting.

  ‘And do the others control fire and water and so on?’

  ‘Yes!’

  He seems to have it covered. I back off.

  Then as we get near the school gate, he stops and turns round.

  ‘It’s OK. You can go now.’

  Eh?

  But I always walk him to the door.

  ‘Oh. Well, OK. Are you sure?’

  ‘I am nine.’

  He looks at me resolutely.

  ‘Yes. Of course. Well, bye!’

  I walk back, feeling the loose end of an incomplete manoeuvre, as if I’ve left the car half out of a parking space or put on only one shoe.

  That night I come into Lydia’s room to see if she’s persisting with Black Beauty as I’m hoping, or has reverted to the incredibly dull fairy books she’s currently addicted to, a few lines of which make you long to be rescued by a brain haemorrhage. I peer over the bed and what is she reading? Easy Living. I know girls like to read a few years above their age; at sixteen we bought Cosmopolitan. But this is ridiculous.

  ‘Hi, Mummy. Nice jackets, don’t you think?’

  Whoa!

  She’s eight.

  She’s also been experimenting with mascara. I say ‘experimenting’, but while the popular perception of little girls with make-up on is always of smeared lipstick and bright red circles of rouge like clowns in drag, she appeared in front of me the other day with her lashes just a little darker, and her lips subtly pink. It’s unsettling.

  I go down and tell Peter that ingesting this magazine makes our daughter prematurely susceptible to the pernicious influence of mass media and their unachievable standards for women, and that if I’m concerned, the least he can do is be worried as well.

  ‘At least she’s reading,’ he says, without looking up. ‘That’s a good thing, right?’

  Mm, passive-aggressive: my favourite!

  No, he’s right.

  Non-school, fun reading is vital if they’re to survive the unimaginative British education system and not end up hating books forever. And if it happens to contain headlines like ‘Is that Freckle Cancer?’ then so be it. The school reading scheme is so deadly it makes my reading book at this age, The Pancake, seem a classic of suspense.

  On the other hand, each year – no, each week pretty much – they not only learn something, but advance in far more important ways which are of vital significance to them, some of which we parents don’t even notice.

  So when Lydia says she can’t move up to Year Three in September we don’t realize she’s devastated.

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Because I haven’t finished writing out the instructions for How to Use a Magnifying Glass!’

  ‘What? Don’t be ridiculous.’

  Then I remember when the head of my primary school said that if I didn’t finish New Maths One, I wouldn’t get into secondary school. I didn’t know I already had a place. My mother simply brushed my fears aside. But I only stopped worrying when I got to the new school and discovered that no one else had finished New Maths One either. In fact, most of them had never even heard of it.

  And now here I am, doing exactly what my mother did: failing to sympathize, and invalidating the child’s version of events so they feel even more helpless and wretched.

  I hate myself.

  Nonetheless, it does sound a bit unlikely.

  ‘Daddy and I have been to the Moving Up Evening, and your name is definitely there. We saw it, honestly.’

  ‘NO I CAN’T!’ she cries. ‘They won’t let me!!’

  She bangs her head onto her folded arms. Her despondency is total – though not enough to make her actually do the task.

  This is the moment where I should remember my irrational headmistress, and my own despair, and talk to the school. But I’m a parent now and have moved up to the place where I cannot fully see or hear her pain.

  And, in a sense, Lydia doesn’t need the instructions for How to Use a Magnifying Glass, because that’s the thing about being small: everything is already much bigger.

  The summer holiday is already a vast unbroken plain of time stretching into infinity. It’s going to be hard enough without this hanging over us.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ says Peter. ‘She’ll have forgotten about it by the end of the week.’

  Sure enough, he
is right.

  I will put it out of my mind but remain at the worry stop, for there is always another one on the way.

  On a main road two streets from where we live, a man with ginger hair has attempted to abduct three eleven-year-olds on their way home from school, Or, to be precise, he has tried to pick up one of them and run off with her, but been fought off by her and the other two.

  So both good news there, and bad.

  Bad: it’s not the first time this has happened in our area. Good: thanks to the courage of the children involved, he failed and was arrested not long afterwards at the station, waiting for his getaway train:

  ‘Any distinctive characteristics?’

  ‘Apart from the bright orange hair . . .?’

  And an IQ that inspired him to put his escape in the hands of Southern Rail.

  Being one of the nearest, Lydia’s school writes to the parents advising all children to stay inside the playground until they’re collected, something they do already. In fact, because the outside space at the front is so small, they never come out until their parent is identified and matched up with them.

  So I write back, pointing out that their advice doesn’t address the issue of walking home, i.e. The Issue. But I do wonder afterwards if they’re only really concerned with their end of it. Lydia will want to walk by herself well before Year Six. We live very close after all. And saying, ‘Stay in’ or ‘Don’t go anywhere alone’ is not the solution.

  I also tell the school I’ve explained to both children what they should do if this happens to them.

  ‘So,’ I say, ‘you’re walking back from school or whatever . . .’

  ‘But you and Daddy take us,’ says Lydia.

  ‘Yes, I know, but in future. Or if you’re going to the shop. A guy comes up behind you, or leans out of a car. What do you do?’

  ‘Go into a shop?’

  ‘Good! Even before that? If he’s trying to grab you, make as loud a noise as you can, and attack him back.’

  Some may think this unrealistic for an eight- and a nine-year-old, but I don’t want to instil the idea that they’re powerless. A few years back, I saw a policeman on Oprah telling women that ‘The last thing they expect is for you to fight back,’ and when asked, ‘But what if he threatens to kill me?’ he said that most criminals are also liars, and murder ‘almost never happens’ as a result.