Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years

by Stephanie Calman

  She removes the skin, stuffs it, and mounts it on a little podium made from part of a wooden board inscribed ‘Hola from Spain’ that someone brought back from Barcelona with a gift pack of chorizo. She also gives it a bit of branch to lean against that fell off our largely fruitless pear tree, from which it stares out alertly through new glass eyes. When the tail falls off it’s propped up behind it, with – the final touch – a mothball tucked discreetly beneath like a little orange poo.

  It immediately becomes our most popular visitor attraction, and, more usefully, distracts us from dwelling on how much we spent on the two-volume book on anatomy.

  Ages 12 to 14: Monsterosa Deliciosa

  So: I’ve become convinced that adolescence is not a sudden meteor shower but a process that begins in childhood. Still, there are stages. And of those, it’s the ones after puberty we find the most challenging, with good reason. In the past there’s been great emphasis on bodily changes – hands up if you remember The Curse – but the Modern Parent knows there are issues of far greater import.

  The children are far better informed about their bodies than I was, they talk to each other more, menstruation is on the National Curriculum, there is the indispensable PSHE, and everything else – fortunately and unfortunately – is online. Though we don’t realize the significance of it yet, Lawrence and Lydia have been born just in time for their first information about sex not to come from porn. Lawrence’s school sex video – and that episode of Friends – are, in a way, the best things ever to have happened to them on that front.

  This leaves us free to worry about all the other stuff. For instance, your child is listening to some music you don’t recognize, and you say:

  ‘What the bloody hell is that?’

  Or, being a Modern Parent, you don’t say that, but nod knowingly. Still they can see the blank look in your eyes. And anyway, your liking it slightly spoils it.

  Or you come in and they’re laughing at something on their phone, and when you ask if you can have a look, quickly close it and say:

  ‘It’s not important.’

  It’s those seemingly smaller changes that can be the most painful, like when they come back from an adventure weekend, or a stay with friends, and you rush to hug them. And they take a step back.

  Then there’s the extreme self-consciousness you get at this stage; suddenly, everything you say is lame, stupid and wrong, and you just wish you could say the right thing, the cool thing, just once.

  For your dear, sweet child, so trusting and mild – well, ours never were, but anyway – has gone. And in her place is a genius who knows everything. She is in effect from the future, while you, like the Renaissance Church confronted by Galileo, dwell in the past. You’ve gone from being the Oracle to the Village Idiot. If any of this sounds at all exaggerated, imagine you’re in a Jane Austen story, life going along much as it always has, with the carriages and the whist parties, and fatal attacks of pneumonia caused by wet hems – when in chapter twelve you innocently open a panelled door and find yourself in Bladerunner.

  Did you ever try to get in with the cool crowd at school and fail? Well, that’s about to be your life all over again. And to make it really humiliating, the cool kids are just that – kids. Thirty-or-whatever years younger than you. You’ve got a whole life behind you, with achievements, experience and knowledge; they haven’t even taken their GCSEs. But you know nothing. Oh, and if you’re reading this and thinking, ‘Actually, no, this doesn’t apply to me: you see I was in the cool crowd’ – shut up. No one cares.

  Terry Wogan – one of the most famous and well-loved broadcasters we’ve ever had in this country – was once asked in an interview:

  ‘Your children must be very proud to have such a successful dad. What do they say, when you come on?’

  And he answered:

  ‘They say, “Not you again!” and switch off.’

  This is now your life.

  Meanwhile, your teenagers want to be appreciated, need desperately to be praised, but throw it back in your face. But you must persist. This, I admit, is not easy.

  Sample dialogue:

  ‘Is that your Art GCSE project?’

  (Mumble)

  ‘It looks really good.’

  ‘What? It’s total crap. Anyone can see that!’

  In fact, what they mean by ‘It’s total crap’ is actually:

  ‘Thank you, I’m really grateful for the compliment but for reasons that are unclear even to me I am unable to express this.’

  One way round this seems to be to copy Michael Caine.

  In his famous screen acting masterclass, the star of five decades shows actors how to underplay it. Unlike stage acting, where people in the back row have to be able to see you’re sad or scared or angry or whatever, acting on film is minimal.

  And transitioning from being the parent of children to the parent of teenagers is much the same. For example, when Lawrence or Lydia came out at home time with a picture, we used to say:

  ‘OH WOW! WHAT A LOVELY PICTURE! LET’S PUT IT RIGHT UP HERE ON THE WALL WHERE WE CAN ALL SEE IT! HEY EVERYONE, COME AND LOOK AT THIS!’

  And they would be very pleased.

  Now, when they do something impressive, such as passing an exam or sewing a top or starting a band, we must not sound Too Pleased. Nor must we hug them and cover them with proud, delighted kisses.

  ‘Oh, that’s good: well done!’ is about right, though on second thoughts I might lose the ‘!’.

  Similarly, when they say, just as the front door swings shut:

  ‘I’m off to drift around the streets till I’m sucked into the maw of the city’s swirling, lethal underworld – bye!’ I try to aim for something like:

  ‘OK, see you later.’

  Obviously not all teenagers are the same. Ours will tolerate a smile or pat on the back – may even welcome it. But some will shrug you off and downplay their achievement so much it sounds as though it’s no achievement – in fact, they’re not even in a band at all; it’s another of your pathetic parental fantasies. Or they are, but they’re going to give it up because you’re being So Embarrassing.

  It’s a pretty big adjustment.

  I’m terrible at underplaying, so when I do try to tone it down I often fail, especially if I look at them; Lydia hates being looked at. Like the man in The Great Escape who gets caught out by the Gestapo officer saying, ‘Good luck’, I just can’t dissemble. I’d be shaking his hand and saying, ‘We’re in disguise, isn’t it great? Those Nazi fuckers are so thick!’ before realizing where I’d gone wrong.

  Peter’s friends Philip and Emma say it’s all about sounding casual. Their four – now in their twenties – were always a bit more amenable when being driven somewhere.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Because,’ says Peter, ‘when you’re driving and they’re behind you, you’re not looking them in the eye.’

  ‘What if they’re in the front?’

  OK, you’re looking at the road, obviously.

  ‘So maybe we should try to create similar conditions.’

  ‘What, sit or stand in front of them and start a conversation, then gaze into a non-existent rear-view mirror, as if in the car.’

  ‘Well, sort of.’

  Sigh.

  I think they simply don’t like it when we’re too eager.

  I’m working on reducing my eagerness to an acceptable level when I notice Lydia’s reaction to displays of emotion over events that have nothing to do with us, for example in the news.

  If it’s an abused animal story, I must sympathize – discreetly – but if I gasp at, say, pictures of children who’ve lost their parents in a tsunami, she hates it.

  And I’m just thinking, how unreasonable – when I remember I felt exactly the same about my mother, abruptly sitting up in her seat and exclaiming, ‘Ohhh!’ at the TV during the civil war in the Lebanon or when there was another killing in Northern Ireland. Sometimes she’d fling her hand across her mouth, as if in a silent
film. It was so melodramatic.

  So maybe my twelve-year-old’s ‘bizarre’ behaviour suddenly makes a bit more sense.

  And today, I have an excellent opportunity to get it right. Well, to try.

  She’s going to the park to meet a boy.

  Don’t overreact. Don’t overreact. Don’t overreact.

  ‘Will you be back for lunch?’

  ‘Yes: I’m meeting him from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.’

  ‘That’s very – precise.’

  When she comes back, I just about manage to look unbothered. But Lawrence plunges right in.

  ‘How was it?’

  And she says:

  ‘Fine.’

  And he says:

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Nothing. Just chatted.’

  ‘Just chatted? Anything else?’

  ‘No. What would we do?’

  ‘I don’t know. What do kids your age do these days?’

  He’s right: he is the Third Parent after all.

  There are several pretty girls in his class, and he’s been walking one of them to school. I only know because I happened to glance out of the window at 8.20 a.m. as he was going up the road. Or should I say walking with? She’s not a poodle.

  Don’t make a thing of it.

  ‘You may get snapped up by one of them,’ I said naively at the start of term.

  ‘Mum,’ he replied, ‘I’ll be the one doing the snapping.’

  Sometimes it’s hard to keep in mind that they’re changing internally. One can make too much of the outward signs.

  One day I come in and Peter intercepts me in the hall.

  ‘Sssh!’ he whispers. ‘They’re both reading How to Train Your Dragon books, while discussing the lesbian oral sex fantasy in Black Swan.’

  Aaaaah.

  Then, I’m working upstairs in my study when I hear an adult male voice in the hall. Peter is out for the day, and anyhow it sounds nothing like him.

  I hold my breath, heart thumping, and listen.

  This is the problem with working at home; people think the house is empty. And there’s only one thing worse than coming home to find you’ve been burgled; it’s being burgled while you’re in.

  I pick up my phone and put one finger on the 9.

  Please don’t let him come up here . . .

  Then, as I’m about to start dialling, I hear:

  ‘Mu-um!’

  It can’t be.

  It is.

  I go down to the kitchen to find Lawrence in his school blazer.

  ‘Oh my God!’ I say. ‘It’s you!’

  ‘So it would appear.’

  ‘But – your voice! It’s so – deep. I didn’t recognize you.’

  He puts a piece of bread in the toaster. Has he not even noticed?

  ‘I suppose I thought, you know, you’d go all squeaky first, like the burger guy in The Simpsons.’

  ‘Seemingly not.’

  I look at him afresh.

  He has big shoulders and the beginnings of a moustache. In fact, he has changed completely. I mean, I knew about the shoulders, but that, with the Voice and the Height – and the Stubble – he has gone from being the second smallest boy in the class, a child convinced he would never grow, to – a not entirely hideous young man.

  And he is still only thirteen.

  When he gets in, Peter’s not astonished at all.

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I did grow five inches the year I turned fourteen.’

  ‘Still, though.’

  Dark facial hair does run in my family – as I can attest – but not height. We regard people who grow taller almost as supernatural phenomena, like those houseplants that get out of hand and take over a whole room. The people next door to Peter’s aunty had a Monsterosa Deliciosa – or Swiss cheese plant – that grew right up one wall, across the ceiling, which was a good ten feet high at least, then down the other side. God knows what they fed it.

  Peter was the same. He puts it down to spaghetti and tuna, which had just come to Sheffield. And he took full advantage of his transformation.

  ‘In the summer of 1969 I was fourteen, and the same height I am now (five foot eleven). My dad was working on the island of St Vincent, inspecting their education system. I went to visit him, and as an unaccompanied minor I had a dedicated air hostess who escorted me onto the plane at Heathrow. At JFK, where I had to change planes, she left me to amuse myself for an hour. So I put on my sunglasses, took out my cigarettes and went to the bar and had a beer.’

  And this was New York, where the minimum drinking age was, and still is, twenty-one.

  So when does a boy become a man?

  My father was bar mitzvah’d at thirteen; from that point you’re allowed to help lead religious services and are accountable for your actions. All in all, not a bad idea. But he never kept it up. My mother is a passionate atheist and we grew up secular, immune to the effect of our religious primary schools; we were unplagued by institutional bullshit but in the family, very short of rituals. So I quite fancy the idea of a coming-of-age celebration.

  ‘Hey,’ I say to Lawrence. ‘Why don’t we have a party? We could call it “Not the Calman-Grimsdale Bar Mitzvah”. What d’you think? You could come for the first hour, then go off with your friends. It’d be fun! Yeah? What d’you think?’

  ‘That is literally a Really, Really Terrible Idea.’

  He butters his toast and takes his homework into the other room.

  About a week later we have a row and I shout:

  ‘Go to your room!’

  And he looks down at me, and says:

  ‘No.’

  ‘So,’ I say to Peter. ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘It’ll be fine.’

  ‘Well, I’m really glad we had this talk.’

  Shortly after this, Lawrence and I have a day out together. A temporary lake has been put on the roof of the Hayward Gallery where you can have a short boat ride, and afterwards we go for lunch in the old film theatre cafe on the South Bank, where my father used to take me after we’d been to see Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals and early black and white animations.

  I order a beer for me and a Coke for Lawrence, and when the waitress returns, she gives him the beer.

  ‘Oh my God . . .!’ I say.

  ‘Wow,’ he says.

  She shrugs, swaps the drinks and ambles off.

  We go out onto the Embankment and have a look at the bookstalls – briefly, because Lawrence is bored and if you force them it only puts them off – then go to another cafe for a hot chocolate.

  ‘Check the price and I’ll give you the money,’ I say, because I think that if I don’t give him the exact money he’ll get ripped off, because when Lydia was eight she was cheated out of £5 by an ice-cream van person and I had to go back and demand it, even though I know that: (a) this happened not to him but his sister; and (b) he is no longer eight.

  He comes back with the chocolate.

  ‘How much was it?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What do you mean, nothing?’

  ‘I mean it was free.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘She said I was cute.’

  I look over, and the pretty serving girl is still smiling in his direction.

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  I gaze at him, trying to process this.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Use that power wisely, boy, that’s all.’

  I don’t think he has any idea yet what I mean.

  As I’m not allowed a ‘Not-the-Calman-Grimsdale-Bar-Mitzvah’ party, and as the hot chocolate example – ‘basically a story about how cute I am’ – Lawrence vetoes as Too Embarrassing, I tell everyone I know about the beer. In the absence of a cultural rite of passage witnessed by the whole community it will have to do.

  But life is lying in wait for us with an actual rite of passage that isn’t very cute at all.

  Lawrence and his friend J come back from the park with two girls we’ve never seen befo
re. They fail my first test, by going straight past us into the garden without saying hello. As Miss Clavel puts it so succinctly in Madeline, in the middle of the night: something is not right.

  The girls don’t stay long, and after they and J have left, Lawrence comes and sits with us at the patio table and puts his head on his folded arms. Hmm, the boy lacks energy. In fact, he doesn’t look at all well.

  Peter and I go into a quick huddle in the kitchen, and as usual, handle the issue by arguing with each other.

  ‘He’s drunk, isn’t he? Those girls have given them alcohol!’

  So much for that talk I had with him two years ago about trust.

  ‘Well let’s not Make a Thing of It.’

  ‘All right then – what do you want to do?’

  ‘Let’s just . . .’

  ‘So you’ve no idea.’

  While we’re dithering, he sleeps it off: problem solved.

  But no . . .

  The next day, an anonymous young female rings the landline and asks for him. He’s still at school, so I tell her that, and ask who’s calling, and she says her name in a way that sounds as though she doesn’t see why she should tell me.

  I tell Lawrence.

  ‘Where did you meet them, by the way?’

  ‘At the park.’

  ‘They’re not from your school, though, are they?’

  They turn out to be Year Nines from one of the girls’ private schools – which I find shocking; you’d think that drunk or sober, they’d have at least been taught not to come into someone’s house without saying hello.

  The day after that, Lawrence tells us that the girls went round to J’s house to invite him to go drinking with them again in the park, only it was 2.30 a.m. He not unreasonably said no, and they put a note through his door expressing their disappointment by calling him a Very Bad Word.

  ‘Right, that’s it!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m going to talk to J’s mother.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘It’s appalling the way they’ve behaved, especially to J, who’s a lovely boy and just – doesn’t deserve it.’

  J’s mother is a kind and sensible person who, in common with me, likes the odd drink or three, and is about as far from being a puritan as it is possible to get.