Now quite a few milestones seem to be signified by the acquisition of branded objects. There are one or two really well-off kids at Lawrence’s school whose – shall we say . . . values? – may I fear be undermining our simple way of life.
‘We can’t be going skiing every five minutes and driving to school in a Porsche Cayman,’ I say. The children have skied once, in Slovakia with Katarina, where it costs £5 a day for everything. Our car is the same age as Lydia, and when it was last put up on the ramp for its MOT, the mechanic winced.
‘I know,’ says Lawrence. ‘I don’t care. Can I just have a phone? And it’s Cayenne.’
‘The Cayman is actually the hard-top version of the Boxster,’ adds Peter.
‘Whatever,’ I say. ‘I was joking, anyway.’
And anyhow, who wants a car named after a notorious penal colony? You don’t see the Ford Devil’s Island, or the Vauxhall Siberia.
But what you do notice is that everyone, rich or otherwise, nowadays seems to want more things.
Privately, I’m leaning towards giving way on the phones, but when mobiles first came in, and were not yet ubiquitous, I made a bet with a guy I used to work with that I’d wait until the kids were fourteen, and I don’t want to seem weak. Mind you, I said I wasn’t going to get married, have children or move to South London, so any credibility I once had has evaporated.
In the end I decide to deploy Peter’s customary strategy and promise we’ll return to the subject in depth, just as soon as I can really focus on it. I can’t help envying the government, who can play for time on all sorts of problems, knowing they’re bound to be voted out before it all catches up with them. When Peter doesn’t want to do something, he says, in a vaguely positive way:
‘It’s a thought.’
So you go away believing it’s being considered.
Or you do if you’re not married to him.
Ages 11 & 12: The Third Parent
Whereas Lydia isn’t visibly changing yet and is still able to revel unselfconsciously in her alt persona of forest sprite, her brother has been to a paintballing party and come back with a moustache. He’s not quite twelve.
Since I’m fairly sure he didn’t have one yesterday, I’m assuming a mixture of dirt and paint has blown onto his upper lip. I’ve been using that excuse myself since about 1974.
Still, even if technically not a real moustache, it immediately has an effect on his behaviour.
‘Have you done your homework?’ he asks Lydia sternly.
‘He-llo?’ I say. ‘Peter, did you know there’s a third parent in this family?’
‘He’s known for ages,’ says Lawrence.
Peter, disloyally, laughs.
Come to think of it, this is not an entirely new phase. He once told Lydia:
‘If you don’t play sensibly, I’ll throw you in your cot.’
She was two: he was three and a bit.
‘I have to do most of the parenting,’ Lawrence continues, ‘since you don’t do it.’
‘I do do it, except when you won’t let me! Now shove off and leave your sister alone.’
When he does, I notice he now has the beginnings of shoulders and a fashionable, shuffling walk.
It’s this contact with the outside world. You send them off to a birthday party, in this case a simulated gun battle, and they return that bit harder, more confident. And frankly more obstinate. Where I grew up, there were kids who lived mostly outside, from the age of about six. They had homes and families; their mums just didn’t like them messing the place up. My mother came across one of them one evening sitting shivering on the kerb, and asked why he didn’t go home. He said:
‘Can’t: I’m not allowed back in till ten.’
Then you had the other extreme, the ones whose mums didn’t want them mixing with the first lot. Their faces remained soft and their dinner money was to be had easily, right into middle age.
We go out to lunch, and afterwards Lawrence says:
‘Did you notice?’
‘What?’
‘They didn’t offer me the Children’s Menu!’
Later, when we all gather round to argue about whose turn it is to lay the table, Peter says:
‘Nobody warns you how brief their childhood is going to be.’
‘Yes they do,’ I say. ‘They warned us constantly. Pretty much the whole time from when they were born, people have said to us: “Watch out: it goes by so fast.”’
At the weekend, Lawrence calls up the stairs:
‘Lunch is ready, Lydia! Come on, I won’t tell you again!’
Not this again.
‘Hello? Going on at Lydia is my job.’
It appears that as he approaches his twelfth birthday, our older child has not only not moved on from his Third Parent phase but is seeking to widen the distance between him and childhood, as represented by his hardly much younger sister. Maybe it’s also the result of encouraging them to watch the film version of Freaky Friday, though I don’t know how they took it in, as apparently I ruined it by interrupting.
‘I’m just saying it’s a copy of a much earlier book, Vice Versa,’ I pointed out, ‘which is about a father and son swapping lives and was written ages ago.’ (1882, would you believe.)
‘Whatever. Just shut up, OK?’
‘And I like Jamie Lee Curtis, but this really isn’t very good.’
‘It isn’t with you talking all the way through it!’
Vice Versa itself has been adapted many, many times, and you can see why the theme of adult–child role reversal has never lost its appeal. Who doesn’t occasionally want to escape from their prescribed persona, each trapped in their own mould of the social bun tin, to enjoy the freedoms and privileges of the other side?
Of course, when you’re a child you don’t think: ‘Isn’t it nice not having to worry about bills and mortgages and tax, and all the things that manage to be simultaneously incredibly stressful and incredibly dull?’
You just demand more control over your life without the faintest idea what’s coming down the pipe.
When the children introduced the swear jar – the one that helped fund their first games consoles – they were quite little. I know because of the different prices for each word, and how Lydia spelled Bluddy and Bolax on the chart she made. At one point Lawrence had a go, you know, just to test out the words. And without even thinking I found myself automatically becoming the child:
‘So you’re allowed to swear,’ I said.
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s so unfair!’
Bluddy bolax.
You actually do see that in life sometimes, in families where the parents are scared of responsibility and continually ask the children what they should do – which is bad; letting the ruled decide things for themselves leads to a breakdown in the natural order, as the Chinese government will readily confirm.
You won’t catch us allowing democracy to seep in round here – yet. But it is lurking. We’re not helping ourselves, of course, with our weak performances in the leading roles. Peter avoids confrontation wherever possible and when I try to sound authoritative I’m often unconvincing.
‘If you don’t eat your fishcakes, you’ll be in big, fat trouble!’ I blustered at supper the other night.
At which, not surprisingly, both children burst out laughing.
And suddenly I didn’t care whether they finished their dinner or not because I was so grateful for a moment’s respite from the awful burden of anxiety that I’m always criticizing in others but am totally in the grip of myself. I realized, with a jolt, that I operate quite a lot of the time in just two fun-free modes: worrying about them, and telling them off.
If I could have an alternative role I wouldn’t choose Child, but Divorced Dad, so I could stop nagging them to brush their teeth and do their homework, and get to be the Fun One, taking them go-karting, bungee-jumping and to McDonald’s every weekend – because all the boring stuff would be their mother’s job.
‘Hey
kids, Peter’s away! Let’s watch four DVDs! Let’s live on crisps!’
Who doesn’t want to be the Popular One?
Maybe the next few years will bring some opportunities.
‘Hi, I’d like to apply to be the Popular One.’
‘And your kids are . . .?’
‘Um, coming up to twelve and thirteen.’
‘HAH!’
Trespassers Will Be Irritated
After a couple of months’ exhaustive negotiations Peter and I have given way, and both children now have a thick lock of hair hanging over one eye known as a ‘sweep’, i.e. a fringe that leans to one side as if pulled by an unseen string, which is the last word in cool coiffure. It is the Look, as it were, sweeping the nation.
Lydia’s morning ritual is now 20 per cent brushing her hair and 80 per cent staring into the mirror to see if it’s moved. And a forcefield has materialized around her which repels the slightest parental touch. When I lean across to put a bit back in place, she springs back as if I’m wielding a machete.
‘Leave my hair alone!’
‘But you’ve got a bit falling forward. I just want to . . .’
‘Leave it! You’ve got no sense of – hair.’
‘I do,’ I plead feebly. ‘I have hair.’
‘Well, you’ve got no sense of my hair.’
She gives me a warning glare.
The other night I was reading to her – for the first time in ages. It’s such a rarity now, I was trying to make it a quality experience for us both. But she was far more absorbed by her hair, whipping it this way and that.
‘Can you stop flicking your hair around?’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘It’s distracting. You can’t listen and do that at the same time.’
‘I can multitask.’
I waited for the ironic smile, but she kept a straight face.
Lawrence is a bit less combative, though equally preoccupied. The first time I smoothed the dreaded sweep back from his forehead, he batted my hand away. And his latest habit is to fall silent or even vanish in mid-conversation as he rushes to the mirror to push a stray strand into place. Even table tennis – the sport you can play without running – takes twice as long as it used to because he has to stop between each point to put back his hair.
So the hair on both our children is now off limits, like an expanse of countryside closed off by the Ministry of Defence. All I can do is gaze wistfully through the wire, remembering the days when their father and I roamed free among them, brushing and smoothing their golden curls and never imagining they would become so incredibly bossy.
After supper I tell Peter:
‘I’m just worn out with being pushed away all the time.’
And he says,
‘I know, me too. Hey – he’s asleep; let’s go and move his hair.’
The hairdresser takes her position on the front line of this battle in her stride, waiting patiently, scissors poised, as we go tiresomely back and forth:
‘A bit more off the back and sides than before I think.’
‘You’re joking! Last time I was practically shaved!!
Shaved is his term for anything off at all. By his standards James May is shaved.
‘Well fine,’ I say. ‘You look like you’re wearing a Terry Wogan wig.’
‘Who even is that?’
All he needs is a frilly shirt and he could present a 1970s variety show. That, and a new catchphrase, instead of:
‘You make me do everything and never let me do anything.’
‘It’s all part of the development of their autonomy,’ says my mother. ‘The moment a baby first realizes it’s a separate being from its mother is the first stage on this journey . . .’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘When it seeks the breast, and it isn’t presented immediately—’
‘Mm, I know.’
She has her own version of multiple personality disorder, where they’re all therapists. Except she isn’t one.
‘Then when it grabs the food out of your hand . . .’ I say.
‘Oh, yes.’
‘To throw it all over the room . . .’
‘Ha, yes! I remember you saying, “Me do it!”’
She does this in her weird baby voice that I find unsettling, with a sort of scrunched newborn face that I can tell she is also doing, even down the phone.
‘Then they start pushing away the spit-dotted tissue when you try to wipe their face at the school gate.’
Back on safe ground, phew.
And now this with the hair.
When he was about three, I once referred to him as ‘my lovely Lawrence.’ And he said:
‘I’m not your Lawrence. I’m my Lawrence.’
Come to think of it, that was probably the first sign of adolescence.
Too Clever by 0.5
I recently met a woman who said she doesn’t want her children to be cleverer than she is. It certainly made a refreshing change to find someone actively not trying to get their kids into the best school, Oxbridge and whatever comes after that – world domination, or possibly a bottomless void full of giant serpents as on an ancient map. But it was also a bit weird.
What’s she afraid of? You want them to outshine you, don’t you? My dad said he longed to be asked one day, ‘Are you Stephanie Calman’s father?’ and ideally not by a truancy officer.
I do want them to outshine me – but maybe not quite so relentlessly as they are starting to now.
I get what is probably my last opportunity to tell Lawrence something he doesn’t know, in a cafe, while we’re ordering our drinks. As we wait, we notice the latest kind of absurd novelty water on display. This one says on the label in large letters ‘This Water’ and underneath, in smaller type: ‘is made from water and clouds’.
‘Water and clouds?! Do me a favour,’ I say. ‘Look on the back. I bet you it’s got sugar in it.’
It has. My poor twelve-year-old is disillusioned.
‘Do you have to crush my world?’ he says.
Of course, he wasn’t that illusioned in the first place. Following a life-changing moment while watching a Channel 4 documentary about the sandwich business, he has been disturbingly well informed about the hidden evils of processed food, snatching ketchup bottles from the chubby clutches of small children and exclaiming:
‘Twenty-eight per cent sugar: that’s nearly as much as Fanta!’ until they whimper for their mothers. And when I came in the other morning, opened the fridge and said to him, ‘You’ve eaten the last piece of bacon,’ he said, ‘I am the future: I deserve the bacon.’
Having had no further education I’m totally used to not being the cleverest person in the room, so it’s not hard for the children to get the better of me. And since Lawrence demonstrates his superior intellect with a knowingness which can be amusing, I try just to sit back and surrender. For example, when I told him the other morning that I had a big lump behind my ear, he said:
‘Yes, that would be your head.’
I imagine this is what it would have been like to have had a really annoying older brother. On the plus side, it did dispel the brain-tumour-leading-swiftly-to-premature-death scenario I had been dwelling on.
His sister is more direct.
When I tell Lydia, who’s messing about with her food, to Eat Properly, she answers:
‘Tell me why, using five adjectives and two synonyms.’
To be fair, this is partly her reaction to the campaign by the education system to ruin children’s writing with swirls of lexical garnish. You know the kind of thing: I nervously entered the dark, mysterious wood, and looked up anxiously at the tall, old, brown, wooden trees . . . You’ll pass the exam, but it’ll take years to clear away enough of the textual silt to be able to write a sentence that you – or anyone else – might enjoy. Reading English essays these days you have to be like the Princess and the Pea, trying to detect the tiny nuggets of meaning beneath all the layers of padding.
At weekends she
sits in front of the television, aiming her vast reserves of scepticism at the cosmetics companies and exposing their venal motives by jeering when those deeply cleansing fractalides and complex chains of polybibbles come on to flog yet another shampoo:
‘“Because you’re worth it”?!’ she barks. ‘If you’re worth it, how come you need all this expensive crap on your hair?’
We did tell them at an early age about the science behind commercials, i.e. that there almost always isn’t any.
She did a homework not long ago – God knows what subject – which was a letter from Rapunzel to a hairspray manufacturer, complaining that their product had caused her hair to break and the Prince, who was climbing up it, to fall down. I think she was going to take them to court.
People complain about children being taken in by advertising before they can talk, but I think this generation is way more sophisticated than we were.
When Peter and I go to see the film of Lynn Barber’s An Education, we’re taken aback to be reminded of such innocent times. Not only does poor Jenny not guess that her suave new lover is married, her parents don’t either. And it being 1961, and a true story, they really didn’t.
‘Imagine trying that on with Lydia,’ I say. ‘After five minutes she’d have him bang to rights: “Why haven’t we been to your house? You’ve obviously got a wife, duh!” And that would be the end of that.’
‘Thank God,’ says Peter, who doesn’t want her to get a boyfriend, like, ever.
She has only just turned eleven, but takes no crap from boys.
And she and her brother are displaying strategic abilities I’ve never had or even aspired to.
‘Six o’clock,’ I said, the other night. ‘Time for The Simpsons.’
‘But I still haven’t finished my homework.’
‘You’ve done enough,’ I said. ‘Get to the television.’
Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years Page 10