Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years

by Stephanie Calman

  ‘Oh, nothing. Just – Duke Ellington died.’

  ‘Who?’

  But now, the poor old teenagers really have got their work cut out.

  ‘Portia and I are so close! We tell each other everything – and she’s always borrowing my stuff’ – for which read: ‘Teenagers find me just fascinating, and did I mention I’m a size 8?’

  Yeah, you did.

  Listen, lady: just because she sometimes nicks your jumpers and leaves them at parties – where they get vodka and several types of ash trodden into them – doesn’t mean you’re her bestie. Person up, and make your own friends.

  When the kids were younger, Peter and I once went to a smart country hotel for a night, with a private hot-tub outside our room; not really my thing, sitting in a large bowl of water without my flannel, but quite romantic with a glass of champagne. And as we gazed up at the stars, he said:

  ‘You know what I’m thinking? The kids would have loved this.’

  Sometimes I just don’t know how the teenagers of today will manage.

  Still, Lawrence is rising to the challenge:

  ‘Why do you just assume I’m not going to lock the door?’

  ‘I don’t, I’m just –’

  ‘Why do you just assume I’m going to take drugs?’

  Actually I never have assumed that: he just throws it in for good measure.

  And:

  ‘Why do you assume I’m more likely to be killed on the way home from a party at 1 a.m. than at midnight?’

  I don’t believe this either; I just like to know when to start worrying.

  His other technique is to remind me that much of what I know or have to say is irrelevant since the world – at some indeterminate recent point roughly coincidental with the coming of the internet – has become a Completely Different Place.

  Take relationships.

  A lovely young woman we know in her twenties has been telling me that she really wants to meet someone, but that the idea of going on Tinder makes her ‘blood run cold’. And I see her point: this unnatural selection is anathema to those of us who came of age choosing a mate the civilized way, by taking a single drunken look at them across a smoke-filled room.

  ‘This emphasis on choosing people based purely on looks,’ I say. ‘From a tiny image on a phone that you glance at for five seconds. It doesn’t get you anywhere. I mean, people are still people.’

  And Lawrence says:

  ‘What does that even mean?’

  ‘That they don’t change. Relationships are much the same as they always were.’

  He gives me his ultra-weary look, like someone at the post office being asked for the tenth time that day if they have passport forms, next to a huge sign saying: ‘We do not have passport forms’.

  ‘They’re so not.’

  ‘They really are.’

  And so on.

  At his age I had to listen to older people all the time, telling me what was what. Now it’s our turn to say what’s what, they get all their information from bloody Reddit.

  I trudge wearily into the other room and put on the TV, feeling like a junior minister on Newsnight who finds that not only do they not know anything about their own portfolio, whatever they say makes things worse because their actual purpose is in fact not to run a department, but to be publicly humiliated simultaneously on all media. Luckily, for a bit of light relief there’s a ten-part documentary series just beginning on the Vietnam War.

  Peter says this is definitely part of The Process. Even in his family, where everyone was very sane and polite, he still had to break out and do things his own way.

  ‘My father was relatively normal but I still found him irritating,’ he says.

  He died just before we met, but sounds like a jolly good sort.

  ‘Yes, but sometimes he was just so – you know, cautious. Like when I was buying my first flat, and he said, “Whatever you do, make sure it’s a new one, because old buildings need so much maintenance.” And I just wanted to say: “Oh, for God’s sake!”’

  ‘Well, my parents weren’t normal at all,’ I say, ‘and I quite often wanted to kill them.’

  In my family the adults left home first. My father moved out when I was five. My mother waited, somewhat grudgingly, till my sister and I had finished school. In the months before she left, she would snarl at me that she couldn’t wait to get away, out of horrible London and off to the country. To be fair, I think it was London she hated more than me, though I was horrible – and I would scream:

  ‘WELL FUCKING GO THEN!’

  I hadn’t even considered trivial details like how we would pay the rent; all I wanted was for her to leave so my sister and I could have the place to ourselves. Even when she gave me the sitting room so I no longer had to share a bedroom, I don’t think my behaviour improved.

  The usual thing to do in that situation was – and is – to run off to your dad’s. It’s the compensation you get for having divorced parents: a choice of house to argue in. But my father had a terrible temper, triggered by hunger, insomnia, deadlines, lateness – I had to be in by ten thirty – and my stepmother. They both always wanted their own way but had no negotiation skills. They were like a fringe production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf with a bonus: they could do it without being drunk. Plus, he never liked my boyfriends.

  ‘The court says you have to stay with your father every Friday night to Sunday night till you’re sixteen,’ reiterated my mother, who didn’t want me staying in the flat alone, but also didn’t want to give up her child-free weekends – a much under-publicized upside of divorce. She lived part-time in Kent with her boyfriend, a man who didn’t blow up all the time like Dad, but saved up his anger for long, tight-lipped silences followed by the occasional rampage when he would pull up her flowers.

  ‘So you have to go.’

  ‘FUCKING MAKE ME!’

  Peter finds all this quite uplifting.

  ‘Compared with your lot,’ he says, ‘we’re really not doing badly at all.’

  After a final row at my father’s I walked out, and life became much calmer. Living at home the whole week I could at last enjoy civilized evenings at the pub without having to leave at ten, and sometimes a lock-in or an all-nighter with mates. One of them had an open house policy endorsed by his parents, ageing hippies who smoked quite a lot of dope themselves and never bothered us. And apart from a couple of druggies who were always too out of it to hold a conversation or otherwise participate properly, we were pretty moderate in our appetites. I did once share a bed with two of the lads, an actor and a musician. But after a promising start self-consciousness set in, and we couldn’t work out how to have sex with three of us, so we gave up and went to sleep.

  Still, I’d always thought I was the Worst Teenager Ever, until I heard about Peter’s friends. For such a polite, house-trained individual, he had a pretty wild peer group. Nowadays, kids seem to be either properly criminal or ridiculously well behaved. But until about thirty years ago there was a rich seam of misbehaviour in between.

  He had two friends who prised the badges off the cars of all their prep school teachers, then were caught trying to hide the evidence by burying them. Another friend set fire to his classroom when he was ten. At his mildly progressive boarding school a sixteen-year-old girl who got As for everything pushed the head of Chemistry into the swimming pool – in front of his own wife and kids. All of them went on to have careers and become parents themselves.

  There was also the father of one of his friends, who, as a youth in the 1930s, climbed into a parked country bus and let off the brake, whereupon it rolled down a hill and into the river. He was expelled and given a police caution, before later becoming a museum curator and highly respected expert on the Renaissance.

  Peter’s school had outdoor provision for some pupils to keep pets, but strictly of the small fluffy variety. One day a new boy arrived for the sixth form with a piglet, which he hid among the hamsters and rabbits, where it became a celebr
ity yet somehow remained incognito until half-term, when he was asked to remove it. But his parents lived abroad and anyway he had no transport. Eventually he persuaded one of the day girls to take it; her parents had a place with a paddock. He made the arrangements, and all went well until one Saturday afternoon, when those working quietly in the library were disturbed by the most dreadful, blood-curdling squeals.

  It was the piglet, being enticed into the boot of a minicab.

  Sadly its fate is not known. Nowadays, the parents would probably drop everything to come and get it. In fact, I can definitely imagine Lydia ringing from some far-flung animal refuge to ask if we can drive a hundred miles to pick up her and a traumatized goat. Perhaps we modern parents would do well to consider an updated equivalent of ‘paddle your own canoe’: Uber your own piglet.

  But we’re not Pushover Parents. Over the years we’ve said No to – among other things: party bags, bouncy castles, crop tops, a puppy, a kitten, a rabbit, scooters, a trampoline, a radio-controlled Dalek, cycling on public roads, premature phones, navel piercings and a llama.

  Still – to us – Lawrence and Lydia and their friends seem incredibly good. Most of them barely ever step out of line. Yet surely it’s in the human spirit to rebel; there must be an evolutionary advantage to not doing as you’re told. Look at the escapers from Colditz, or the World Trade Center and Grenfell Tower: you want to be one of those who ignore the commands and get out; more crucially, in future you want your kids to be. They need to be.

  My father used to tell me that Jews survive ‘because of our stubbornness’, and I agree. In me, though, it’s a bit diluted, because he married my mother, who isn’t Jewish, and is morally brave but when faced with a superior physical force – such as bullying neighbours or a tall hedge – tends to back down. So I’m stroppy only when not scared, which isn’t much use. I’d love kids in general to have the courage and initiative, but without the bolshiness and yelling. Sometimes they’re so angry with you they stop making sense. The daughter of a friend of Peter’s, in the middle of a huge screaming match when she was about fourteen, suddenly accused him of being a ‘wrinkled old penis’. Not having, being.

  But must we really go through this? You don’t hear gazelles, bats or hippopotamuses screaming at each other before they go off and build their own burrows or whatever. Even octopuses, who it’s now known squirt water at people they don’t like, at least refrain from slamming doors and shouting, ‘Thanks for ruining my life!’

  And the blackbirds, blue tits and so on who live in our garden, one minute they’re building their nests, then you hear a bit of cheeping – then that’s it: gone without a single twig thrown. You never even see them fledge, let alone have to listen to:

  ‘Tidy this bloody nest! There’s feathers and bits of half-eaten worm everywhere.’

  Followed by:

  ‘I’m fledging anyway. You’re such a vulture, swooping down on me all the time.’

  ‘Shut your beak, you bloody cuckoo.’

  ‘I can’t believe you just called me that.’

  And so on.

  And when they do reach the next stage, I really want to get it right. I’m aiming to be somewhere between those people who disappear for the weekend leaving their sixteen-year-olds to live on popcorn and ketamine, and the woman I heard about recently who has her son’s food delivered to him at his halls of residence by Ocado. I mean, why not cut out the middle man and just take it yourself? Bring the condoms while you’re at it. Oh no, wait: he won’t be able to have sex BECAUSE YOU’RE THERE.

  Then, when they move out, having supported but never suffocated them, I’ll be the adored, indispensable mother, who gets thanked tearfully in their Oscar or Nobel speeches, whom they still turn to for Advice on Life.

  Except I won’t be, because they hate that. As Lawrence said to me recently:

  ‘Can we just chat for once, without you giving me Talks on Life?’

  And Lydia just runs away the minute she senses the threat of a DMC.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Deep and Meaningful Conversation.’

  What the hell am I meant to do with all this stuff I’ve learned?

  At least when they do go, I’m fairly certain I won’t be doing what my grandmother did, namely fall against the door clutching her chest and cry at my aunt, who was finally leaving to get married:

  ‘You’ve killed me!’

  My aunt was thirty-seven.

  Peter says:

  ‘We just need to be like my sister.’

  She’s always done everything right, been supportive but detached, loving but not clingy. She’s never criticized her sons’ choices, always welcomed them back when they came home for a while, and not once tried to make them feel bad for moving away.

  Now her first grandchild has just been born in Sydney, eleven thousand miles away.

  So that’s what you get for doing everything right.

  But is all this stress and conflict really new? I know childhood was only invented once they were let out of the mills and mines, but adolescence has always been with us.

  ‘Mum, I don’t want to be a pagan any more. There’s this guy talking about loving your neighbour and not casting the first stone unless ye be free of sin, and other, like, really cool stuff. And worshipping only one god.’

  ‘It’s the Jews again – don’t tell me. Isn’t one religion enough for those people? You have one religion, with lots of gods.’

  ‘I hate stupid pantheism. It’s rubbish.’

  ‘What?! Get one of the slaves to come in here and whack you round the head with a strigil, by Jupiter – and all the others, too numerous to list here.’

  ‘Mum, can I be a Roundhead?’

  ‘No. Put on your two-foot lace collar and fluff your hair out a bit more: it’s not nearly wide enough.’

  ‘I know where the priest hole is . . . I-know-where-the-priest-hole-is . . .’

  ‘Right, that’s it. I’ll give you a priest hole . . .’

  ‘Good night, Mother and Father. God bless the Queen and Prince Albert. Please will you reconsider my wish to go to school?’

  ‘No. Education’s for boys. Get back to your attic.’

  ‘Mum, I don’t want to be Jewish any more. I’ve been eating hot dogs garnished with prawns, and I’m pregnant by an unemployed pig farmer called Horst who I’ve been secretly living with in a derelict Viking longboat off the M62.’

  ‘Well, then get out: you’re dead to us. But have this twelve-course snack before you go.’

  ‘Mum, can I be a suicide bomber?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?! All my friends are.’

  ‘Still no.’

  ‘Thanks for ruining my life!’

  (Slam)

  I’m sure the single-celled organism that first divided itself was sent to bed early for not toeing the line. Come to think of it, Eve must have been a teenager. You can tell, because decent parents have always blamed the snake.

  But without her, where would we be?

  Regime Change

  ‘You go.’

  ‘No, you.’

  ‘I don’t want them to see me.’

  ‘Oh, honestly . . .’

  Lawrence is having some friends round for his sixteenth birthday. And having supplied a case of Beck’s and some pizzas, we’re upstairs in the bedroom, Staying Out of the Way. And I want another gin and tonic while we watch Dexter.

  When we mentioned this proposed celebration to other parents we were regaled with cautionary tales, each more awful than the last.

  The party scene has changed. We hear of fifty – a hundred – gatecrashers; kids with alcohol poisoning found in gardens; the son of the deputy head turning up at the rugby pavilion with a bottle of vodka – and he was only in Year Nine. Several have even made the papers; parties held while parents were away which have ended with eggs and flour thrown at soft furnishings, TVs ripped off walls, doors kicked off hinges and bird baths thrown through windows. And not just round here.
A woman rang a radio phone-in programme about it – from Western Australia. There’s always a neighbour who says: ‘And in such a Nice Area too.’

  ‘So . . .’ I say to Lawrence, ‘how will you – you know, control the numbers?’

  ‘Firstly, it’s a small get-together of about a dozen people, not a rave.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘And second, by not being a complete idiot and putting it on Facebook.’

  ‘Ah. Right.’

  Peter peers over the banisters and inches down a few steps, like an explorer encountering the territorial markings of a hitherto uncontacted tribe: a discarded fake-fur coat, a pair of muddy black suede platforms and a half-drunk can of something called Venom.

  The kitchen is deserted, scattered with half-eaten snacks and blazing with light, like the Titanic in its final hour.

  He returns with my gin.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘They’re all in the garden.’

  ‘What about the pond?’

  My Mother Image Bank shows me Rolling Stone Brian Jones, floating face down in his own pool in 1969.

  ‘They’re fine. Lawrence is out there.’

  As Lawrence himself has lately taken to pointing out:

  ‘I’m not completely incompetent: look, here I am putting one foot in front of the other. See?’

  So he can probably manage to entertain his friends for a few hours without wrecking the place.

  ‘And it will be tidied after my guests have gone. So you don’t need to have PTSD because someone’s left the tzatziki out – OK, Mother?’

  Eventually, all is quiet. Then sometime during the night we hear smashing glass – then humming, and a kind of muffled thumping.

  Yet the next day all the mess has gone.

  ‘My God,’ says Peter. ‘The kitchen is actually cleaner than it was.’

  ‘They’ve even mopped the floor!’

  ‘I think that noise was bottles going into the recycling.’

  ‘And the humming and thumping?’

  ‘Vacuuming. No wonder you didn’t recognize it.’

  We make coffee, gazing in awe at our spotless surroundings.