‘Put your dirty plate in the sink, will you?’
He said,
‘I already have. We call that “putting it in the sink”.’
Note that the sink is as far it got.
And he’s refusing to share his core skills with us, as in when he found the channel we wanted on our fiendishly clever new TV recorder – sales slogan: ‘You can record anything in the known universe but can’t watch it.’
‘Tell us what you did! I demand to know!’
And he said, over his shoulder:
‘Jog on.’
‘Is that some new phrase they’re all using?’ said Peter, sounding about a hundred and two.
But we will soon be longing for the sunlit uplands of the cheery sarcasm phase.
‘You know how I said he’s not rejecting me as boys are meant to do around puberty?’
‘Because he’s only ten.’
‘Well, he’s doing it now.’
‘What, since yesterday?’
‘Yup.’
He’s arguing back a lot, and with rather a limited repertoire of insults, like bad talk radio. Our worst exchanges bear a dispiriting resemblance to those I had with my mother when I was a teenager. Except he is indeed only ten.
‘Lawrence, would you like some tea?’
‘Mmnh.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I said no.’
‘No thank you.’
‘Whatever.’
In my day kids had the decency to wait until adolescence before becoming obnoxious. Now, no one waits until fourteen or even thirteen; they want to be obnoxious now. What will they have to look forward to?
Little do I know.
It certainly reminds me why we had two children, so that when one’s being hideous you can transfer your affections to the other. Though no stranger to flouncing and door slamming, Lydia is currently being the Good One. She sits at the table drawing ‘Mummy as an Angel’ and Being Nice.
‘Are you all right, Mummy?’ she says, finding me yet again with my head in my hands.
‘Lawrence is just being really rude to me at the moment,’ I say.
‘He’s getting to that stage where he’s starting to have an attitude,’ she says thoughtfully. ‘A bad attitude.’
Then, when we’re discussing arrangements for the end of term, I notice that on the last day, they finish at different times.
‘Oh, look,’ I say, because I don’t think before I speak. ‘Lydia finishes at noon, and you finish at 12.30.’
Lawrence is outraged.
‘So she gets half an hour more holiday than me?!’
Yes, he really says this. Are these the Pettiest Children in Britain? It’s like being the owner of the world’s longest fingernails. You know you’ve wasted your life, but at least you’re famous for something.
Looking back, I think maybe it was a mistake to stop at two. People I’ve known from large families have had their piggy banks raided and food stolen off their plates by older siblings, yet emerged surprisingly unscathed. I’ve even met a one-of-five who missed out on a Christmas stocking one year following a miscount. Yet he doesn’t hold a grudge; if anything he’s more resilient, more able to withstand life’s knocks.
So because fours, fives and sixes are continually shoved aside and lost in the crowd they never expect life to be fair, whereas being one of two, with its futile expectation of equality, affords endless opportunities for disappointment.
Peter once read an interview with a famous novelist who as a child threw himself to the floor and sobbed because his brother had been given a biscuit. And our old friend Alison’s two boys once argued all the way from Watford to Stockton because one had looked out of the other’s window.
Now I can’t think why I specifically wanted two, as my sister and I were awful. We drove our mother to the brink almost every day, constantly on the lookout for infinitesimal signs of favouritism, and waged wars over nothing.
Friends who came to play had to wait as glasses of lemonade, pieces of cake etc., were held up and scrutinized for minuscule discrepancies in volume or size, something that no one else seemed to find necessary. Christmas presents were also exactly the same, with variations only in colour: red for me, blue for her. And bathtime was a minefield, taken up less with washing than interminable manoeuvrings of the chrome soap ‘bridge’ we used as a border control. The wall was tiled and the bath eleven tiles long, so we were each entitled to exactly five and a half tiles of space, minus the width of the soap bridge. All would go well until one of us moved the bridge, either deliberately or accidentally, and Mum would come in to find us angrily pushing and pulling it back and forth by distances of about half an inch, while more and more water got on the floor. It was basically the Middle East with seven-year-olds.
And we used to wonder why she went on dates with such dull men. Who wouldn’t want to dress up and sit in a clean, tidy restaurant where other people cooked and served dinner, to a soundtrack of something other than yelling?
But of course I thought when I had my own children it would be different. We knocked them out fourteen months apart chiefly to prevent those sorts of petty rivalries. It helps a bit that Lawrence can’t remember a time before Lydia, so he never became accustomed to life as the centre of the universe as I did for those three glorious years.
But despite these precautions the two of them currently come home from school every day to fight over the computer, and when told to share it, to battle over the central position on the bench seat.
It makes you want to scream. Humans’ greatest evolutionary achievement is surely the art of negotiation, and at this rate I can’t see how they’re ever going to learn it. If they ever get as far as the world of work, they’ll end up complaining because the person next to them has a smoother swivel chair. Or they’ll turn out like the woman who complained at the swimming pool the other day that I was going round ‘the wrong way’ when I’d simply followed the guy in front of me, and besides, there were only three of us in there.
Peter says they’ll grow out of it, that no phase lasts forever.
‘So? That’s precisely why we’re always struggling to keep up. Because it keeps bloody changing!’
‘Babyhood was exhausting,’ he admits. ‘But that was replaced by the toddler years . . .’
‘Which were also exhausting.’
‘Exactly. And then that phase gave way to the start of school . . .’
‘Exhausting again.’ Although they were at least out for part of the day. ‘So what you’re saying is, all we have to do is sit tight and wait for the next phase of being constantly wrong-footed and worn out. Great.’
I’ve gone off my new theory about adolescence: it’s too tiring.
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Just as we’re finishing dinner, Peter and I have a huge argument and I storm upstairs. I assume the children will take his side, but Lydia rushes up to the bedroom after me and curls up on my pillow, stroking my face. Then Lawrence comes up and rubs my feet. What lovely, supportive children. Nyeah to you, Husband!
‘Thank you so much,’ I say. ‘You are lovely.’
And Lawrence says:
‘I think you should probably see a psychiatrist.’
Oh.
‘Actually I’m fine now, thank you darling. I feel much better.’
You should have seen me before.
‘Seriously, it really is getting worse.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m fine now. Sorry.’
‘Look,’ he says. ‘Relax and breathe slowly. That-a-at’s it. Better?’
‘Much!’
‘That’s a classic relaxation technique,’ I say. ‘Where did you learn it?’
‘School.’
Never mind French and Biology: this is a Major Life Skill. I’ve gone from shaking and growling to being all floppy and compliant. As the two of them go off to bed, I lie there contemplating how much more effective they are in these situations than I am, and how psychologically aware.
The other day in the park they were climbing a tree with some other children, one of whom pushed the other.
‘That boy she pushed was her brother,’ Lawrence explained.
‘Really?’
‘Mm. Sibling rivalry.’
On Saturday evening I run the bath and get out the bath toys. Lawrence is going first. Which toys should I put out? Hmm, there’s the somewhat arthritic wind-up fish . . . the headless My Little Pony bubble bath to which Lydia is still fondly attached . . . I settle on two boats, the plastic teapot – which doubles as a handy, low-tech hair rinser – and a Power Ranger.
Just then the phone rings and Lawrence gets it. He’s been invited to a disco.
A disco?
‘Where?’
‘The Old Football Club.’
‘How much?’
Never mind my child associating with unsuitable characters or how he’s going to get home afterwards, how much are we in for?
‘Ten pounds.’
‘Ten pounds?!’
A bit steep, considering it doesn’t include any tequila slammers.
‘It includes drinks and glow sticks,’ he says, evidently frustrated by my relentless interrogation, i.e. two questions. All right, three.
It suddenly occurs to me that we’re potentially on the brink of a major developmental milestone here. I must delve, but casually, so as not to seem intense.
‘Will there be any girls?’
‘Girls?’
You’d think I’ve asked will there be smallpox.
‘Everything isn’t about girls, Mummy. The idea is to have some drinks and a good time!’
He puts his head on one side, widening his eyes to emphasize how witless I am. He thinks I don’t get this, but I do. He’s in that interim phase when he’s interested in going out, nothing more. So this occasion may yet be a milestone, not just because it’ll be his first grown-up-style social event, but because it marks that peaceful period in his life before he starts trying to measure up to what the opposite sex might expect. And sex is still viewed as both disgusting and tedious, valid only as a topic for jokes. We know he had enough of it in Year Five to put him off for life.
Later, when the children are asleep – or meant to be – we go in and turn out their lights. Lydia is knitting, sewing and Nintendo-ing in a nest of wool and paper, and Lawrence is absorbed in a book on how to draw dragons.
We go into the bathroom, and Peter gestures at the side of the bath.
‘Look,’ he says.
The boats, plastic teapot and Power Ranger are exactly where I left them, dry and unplayed-with.
‘Aaaah!’ I say. ‘The End of an Era.’
‘I know. We can start clearing out this drawer.’
I breathe on the steamed-up mirror.
‘Oh, look . . .’
Fragments of their past drawings reappear, like happy ghosts.
‘We haven’t seen those for ages . . . What?’
Peter has gone quite misty-eyed.
‘It’s just all going by so fast.’
Not this again.
‘Come on, let’s clear out this drawer. You know how you like to do that.’
And we start putting the boats, Power Ranger, headless My Little Pony bubble bath and arthritic wind-up fish in a bag.
‘But what if they haven’t totally finished with them? What if they want to play with them again? For old times’ sake.’
‘You’re right. Let’s just throw out the broken ones and put the rest back in here.’
‘We can check with them in the morning.’
‘Yeah.’
We just need some time to adjust.
Another way to tell what stage children are at is by their virtual vocabulary.
Any mention of ‘puffles’, the round fluffy-looking pets in Club Penguin, and you know they’re between five and eight. After that it’s Tom Nook and red turnips: Animal Crossing, age seven to ten. And now we have cool, urban eleven- and twelve-year-olds dashing away from the television muttering,
‘Sorry, Mum: have to go and harvest my rice.’
When other boys rush upstairs after school to play Call of Duty or Battlefield, with their Realistic Warfare Scenarios, Lawrence joins his sister on Farmville, where the most extreme event is a cygnet turning into a swan.
It’s brought out a side of the children, particularly Lydia, that’s so far remained dormant. The biggest surprise has been not the appeal of ploughing and planting against raking insurgents with machine-gun fire, but going downstairs at 6.45 a.m. to make the tea – as Peter generally does – to find Lawrence already there.
‘Hi Dad! I’m just picking my raspberries,’ he chirps, tapping away.
The various crops on their farms appear onscreen a set number of hours after they’ve ‘sown the seeds’, with a few clicks of the mouse. Looking at the rain coming down outside, I can see it beats real gardening in one obvious respect. But the deadlines are ridiculously precise; on Sunday, after I spent two hours trying to persuade everyone to go to the park, Lydia announced that she couldn’t possibly leave the house at that time as her onions were due.
She’s now to be found up and dressed on schooldays by 7 a.m., way earlier than usual. Meanwhile, the actual pansies I got her for a window box wither unregarded. Naturally I haven’t told my mother, whose allotment the children never quite bonded with as she hoped.
‘They don’t seem to like the chard.’
‘No one likes chard.’
And my attempts to interest them in the Real Vegetable Project are faring no better this year than last. If anything, it’s worse, because the real things don’t even have novelty on their side.
Neither of them took more than a cursory turn with the trowel last summer when Katarina and I put in carrots, two kinds of beans, tomatoes, potatoes and strawberries. I was taken aback by the fierceness of my attachment; I wasn’t very good at bonding with Lawrence and Lydia in the early days but I really adored the courgettes. I kept breaking off other activities to rush upstairs and gaze at their gorgeous burgeoning greenness, retie the beans to their poles and check the anti-carrot-fly fleece hadn’t blown off. It was like having an affair, only without the hotel bills and guilt.
‘And with real tomatoes,’ I tell Lawrence, ‘you get something you can eat!’
I don’t mention that the courgettes suddenly stopped growing for no apparent reason and the carrots only made it to about an inch.
‘It’s not really about that,’ he explains, with exaggerated patience.
‘What is it about, then?’
‘It’s the satisfaction when the crops come up, you know, like when you finish a crossword.’
I’m flattered but don’t know, as I’ve never managed it. I once got stuck on an RS homework word search in which the longest word was ‘miracle’.
‘OK, but with real vegetables not only do you get actual food; this all just does seem a bit too easy. Surely the crops are at least prone to being blighted by pests or dug up by rabbits? I mean, you know, where are the challenges?’
‘It’s not about challenges,’ he says. ‘It’s about having fun.’
He looks at me with the hint of a smile.
‘Fun: you remember that, Mummy.’
Just about, I think, when he’s gone: just about.
Shortly after this, he comes running into the kitchen.
‘It’s finally happened!’
‘What has?’
‘Lydia and I both want to use the phone at the same time!’
Knowing that I’m on the lookout for signs of puberty, he looks up at me knowingly.
I was expecting something more along the lines of a cracked voice and hairy nooks. And excited as we are by all this change, Peter and I are currently mourning those vestiges of childhood like the bath toys, or Lawrence’s cuddly animals, which are even now being demoted onto the floor of his room.
And I’m still hoping that Lydia will wear the dresses we chose together – ‘that you made me choose, Mummy’ – two
summers ago. But I’m losing track of what size she is, because it keeps changing. I can’t seem to grasp that she’s growing.
In September I got her some jeans. The 9–10s all looked huge, so I got Age 8 and was then amazed when they didn’t fit. I was like the out-of-touch relative gasping, ‘Ooh! Haven’t you grown!’ only I live here. Katarina had to take her out to get the right size, plus she threw in a new skirt, leggings, top and beret, in which she looked fabulous – but about fifteen.
I could never have predicted that mere pieces of cloth could cause such appalling trouble.
It started with Peter’s sister’s wedding. Then we had Diane’s. Then there was the tankini. The top was actually quite long, and the strip of visible midriff only minimal, so after a hot, exhausting wrangle in Debenhams, I gave in.
Now, it’s:
‘Why can’t I wear a crop top?’
‘Because they’re tarty.’
‘They’re not!’
‘They ARE.’
She is still ten.
‘Why did you buy it for me then?’
‘It wasn’t a crop top when I bloody bought it! It was a normal vest! You GREW!!’
‘Well, why can’t I wear it, then?’
‘It – is – TARTY!’
‘I’m afraid,’ she says coolly, ‘I know more about Modern Things than you.’
‘I don’t care. You can wear it to bed, that’s all.’
‘Going at this rate, I probably am going to hate you as I get older,’ she says matter-of-factly, as she leaves the room.
In the morning she gets ready for school and among the PE kit and other essentials I see a pair of sunglasses.
‘What d’you need those for? The sun’s not even out.’
She perches them fetchingly on her head, giving me a coy look.
‘OK, you can wear them for today,’ I say.
I’m playing the long game, giving way on the shades so I can keep the crop top at bay for a couple more years. Or possibly months. Time’s not behaving as it used to. The days are getting somehow shorter and things speed up, then slow down again. Sometimes the kids wake up seemingly having grown about a year overnight. One morning after a recent sleepover she came home slathered in eye shadow and looking like Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver.
Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years Page 7