Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years

by Stephanie Calman

  I go upstairs to do a bit of work and when I come back, the two of them are under a blanket on the sofa, watching Mary Poppins.

  The children loved it when they were small, so I thought I knew every line. Still, not having seen it for a good few years, I’m surprised at how crisp and fresh it still seems. I’m also caught off guard by the emotional impact of the ending, one of the great tearjerkers.

  I used to cry only when she leaves; now even the sequence with the fairground horses makes me misty-eyed. I’ve made the mistake of joining them for the last bit, provoking myself to tears without having at least had the benefit of the jollier stuff early on.

  The girls watch, absorbed but dry-eyed, Lydia giving me sideways glances.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say.

  ‘I’ve told you before – you don’t have to hide it!’

  ‘Sorry. OK.’

  Blub.

  Afterwards they say goodbye, and do their routine of a little chant, a hug and a cross between a handshake and a fist bump. When Georgie used to come over regularly after school, it often seemed that they’d added an extra flourish or two, so it got longer and longer. Her mother Maryanne – who had a real job and was much busier than me – would always tell them to hurry up. And I would feel obliged to join in hassling them. But they looked so happy.

  And when they do it now, they’re back in Year Seven again, and have not yet encountered life’s burdens.

  Crumple Zone

  ‘The first time I became aware that my father wasn’t indestructible was when he cried after my mother died,’ says Peter, who was nine at the time.

  And I felt the same shaking of the foundations at six, when my aunt killed herself and I saw my father cry. He was lighting the fire, crumpling the newspaper, then he crumpled too, until his head was almost on the grate. He was never fully at peace again.

  But surely we should be indestructible. I mean, isn’t that our job? I still feel so sad for my father, but, given the choice, who wants crumply parents?

  Lately Lydia and I haven’t been getting on, and I’ve been crying a lot. I don’t know why, except if it’s my old depression coming back, after all these years, I can’t face it. At times I fear she just hates me.

  There’s something else, though. I didn’t get on very well with my mother once Dad died, over twenty years ago, and now it’s happening with my sister as well. Even talking to my friends hasn’t helped. Eventually I confess to Lydia that I feel terrible all the time and am out of ideas.

  ‘Well, that’s a relief,’ she says. ‘I thought it was me.’

  ‘No, no!’

  I’ve been trying to hold in my unwelcome emotions, so as not to look melodramatic and weak, and thus failing to diffuse them. So I’ve ended up inflicting the stress on her. And with Lawrence away, the burden is all the greater. At a time when she’s making crucial decisions about her future, it’s unforgivable. I feel like grabbing everything in her sewing box and stabbing myself with it.

  The issue is still hanging over us when he comes back for the holidays and explains, with a self-assurance that is simultaneously comforting and disconcerting, that I need to stop trying to hold everything in quite so much, or pretending to cope, while taking whatever it is out on them.

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘But I don’t want you thinking I can’t cope.’

  Even though at the moment I can’t.

  ‘We don’t think that,’ says Lydia kindly.

  ‘Because the last thing kids need is to see their parents going to pieces.’

  I loved my dad, but there were times when he’d hit some crisis and pour his heart out a bit too much, such as when he fell for a beautiful Yugoslavian waitress while he was still married to my stepmother.

  A modern child would probably say:

  ‘Eeww! Too Much Information!’ and go back to their phone.

  Now, I feel I must protect my children not only from drama, which I hate, but also neediness.

  ‘We’re talking about sharing a bit of emotion or the occasional problem,’ says Lawrence. ‘Not “going to pieces”.’

  ‘Yeah, but you need to feel safe.’

  ‘We do. So you can gradually show your more . . . vulnerable side, as time goes on. In fact, you need to, to help us grow up.’

  ‘What?’

  Whoa.

  Not only are my assumptions being overturned, which is unsettling enough, but I’m receiving parenting advice from my own kids.

  Then, just when I’m thinking: Ooh they’re so wise, they wander off, leaving their mugs and ice-cream wrappers all over the table and I want to shout at them. So I guess it balances out.

  And I do have an ally. If I ‘weaken’, there’s always Peter to step in. But when does sharing becoming leaning?

  ‘How do I gradually let down my guard, as it were? When?’

  ‘Now is good,’ says Lawrence. ‘Now we’re older.’

  And Lydia agrees.

  He is twenty, and next year she will be too.

  It’s easy to forget that they go on maturing when you’re not looking. Since he’s been living away, I’ve sometimes found myself thinking he’s at the same point as when we last saw him, as if he’s a photograph. We modern parents tend to believe our offspring can’t develop without our constant attention. But of course it’s the other way round.

  When he was about to come home for the first time, I realized he no longer had an Oyster card and texted him:

  Hey, u got no Oyster 4 London.

  But having sent that, I remembered:

  Hang on, u can now use debit card 4 tube etc!

  And he texted back:

  What a time to be alive.

  For a moment I feel as though we’re back in Grenada, setting off to go snorkelling, except that Lawrence is the guy in the boat.

  ‘But how will I know when I’m being – you know – human, normal or whatever, or needy and unable to protect you?’

  He gets up and reaches for his bass.

  ‘Don’t worry, OK? We’ll let you know.’

  ‘But—’

  He kisses the top of my head. I feel about five.

  ‘Ssh, it’s all going to be fine.’

  ‘Oh my God, you know who you sound like . . .?’

  But he is pressing my head to his chest and can’t hear.

  Almost Gone Girl

  Lydia has got into art school. And it’s on the edge of London, so . . .

  ‘This is great! You can live at home! I mean, well done.’

  ‘No way! You let Lawrence move out.’

  ‘Yes, but he’s in Manchester.’

  ‘The facilities are all open till ten every night! I want to be able to work late.’

  This is, let’s not forget, the child who had to be pulled away from her foil and chicken-wire Pegasus at 10.30, was sent to bed, waited till we’d gone to bed, then got up secretly and worked on it till 2 a.m.

  ‘It is in Zone 6, though: bit mad not to live here.’

  ‘This is so unfair.’

  ‘I just crave your gorgeous presence with me at all times.’

  ‘So it’s nothing to do with the money.’

  ‘Of course it’s to do with the money.’

  I try to carry on arguing, but my heart’s not in it.

  ‘You’re right,’ I say. ‘It would be cruel to tear you away from your drawing board every night – not to mention the great social life you’ll be having.’

  Since her friends have left, it’s been pretty quiet round here.

  ‘So I will be moving out?’

  ‘Of course; don’t worry.’

  ‘Don’t leave me with her!’ says Peter.

  I can’t believe we’ve reached this point at last.

  The Way We Live Now

  The world is a different place from when I first got pregnant, twenty-one years ago.

  It’s January 2018. We’re on the plane, coming back from holiday in Tenerife, when the flight attendant asks for our attention.

  I feel my hands tighten
on the armrests. Lawrence and Lydia immediately pick up the tension and look over.

  She says:

  ‘We have a passenger on board with a nut allergy. So we’re kindly requesting that if you’re travelling with any nuts in your hand luggage, you do not open them while on board.’

  In Trafalgar Square, dead white male Admiral Nelson is still on his column, but looking down on pedestrian crossings with green and red LGBT symbols telling you when to cross, where there used to be just single – presumed heterosexual – men.

  ‘Message’, ‘access’ and ‘impact’ have become trans verbs.

  Avocados in multipacks are labelled Eat Now and Eat Later – don’t get them mixed up, now – and chocolate buttons carry a sequence of three pictures that show you how to open the packet, then seal it with a little adhesive square stuck on the side.

  We’re living through an age of unprecedented good health and opportunity among the educated and affluent, with more and more safety measures, yet we’re more anxious than ever.

  I blame reading.

  When we had Lawrence I was given The Baby and Toddler Meal Planner which I never used. Sorry, Mother; fine words puréed no parsnips round these parts. But the one that most demoralized me was the American book What to Expect, with its forbidden foods and drinks, and endless goals; hey, here’s another thing for you to fail at! After a paediatrician diagnosed Lawrence with Developmental Delay at eight months, all the ‘experts’ except Dr Spock were thrown out.

  Then as time went on, these ‘authorities’ continued to pile in and we were told more and more different – and inevitably conflicting – ways to Get It Right. Solutions that came and went included Secrets of the Baby Whisperer: All Your Problems Solved – unlikely, if not impossible; Attachment Parenting – wear the baby on you 24/7 till you no longer exist as a separate entity; and Contented Baby – Miserable Everyone Else. The number of books available in 2018 is too high to count, but here’s one that seems to epitomize the age:

  Dailygreatness – yes, it is one word – is ‘a practical guide for raising conscious kids . . . a tool for personal and family transformation and the ultimate journal for staying conscious and stress free while recording the amazing experience of being a parent.’

  But a lot of the parenting experience is not amazing; it’s exhausting, unrewarding and very boring. So some of us would actually prefer to be a teeny bit less conscious. Plus now, it’s a minefield too.

  Recently I met a woman who told me two things: one, the list of substances banned from packed lunches at her child’s school is now so long – it includes houmous – she’s given up making them; and two, she saw someone in ultra-smart, privileged Kensington Gardens spray a swing with disinfectant before putting her child on it. ‘Nil points for immunology,’ as my mother would have put it.

  Then on the train I sit opposite a well-dressed young mother whose toddler is drinking out of a smart pink box.

  ‘I like the box,’ I say.

  ‘She takes her milk to school in it,’ she says.

  ‘Handy.’

  ‘Actually she’s on cashew milk.’

  ‘Ah, lactose intolerant?’

  And she looks at me blankly.

  ‘Well, it’s not confirmed – yet.’

  Leaving aside the lack of vital calcium, iodine and vitamins D and B12 in pretend milk, what happens at school when the cashew and almond milk brigade clash with the nut allergists? Given the growing numbers of both factions, I can see it taking off as an alternative sport, like cage fighting for the health and safety age. If the action flags, they could bring in the anti-glutenites. I’d pay to see it.

  When I went to that talk on the teenage brain and reconsidered peer pressure, it dawned on me that the people who imitate each other the most are parents.

  Take transport. Four-wheel drives, once the preserve of farmers, white Kenyans and the Queen, are now the default: huge vehicles with enough off-road traction to storm the compound of a mid-level Afghan warlord while sipping a huge container of boiling liquid and texting the violin teacher. They’re just bigger – not safer, but feel as though they are, which is what counts. And of course walking to school has become more risky. Children killed per year by random strangers: between four and five; by vehicles: around fifty.

  Buggies have also become obese.

  The one Peter found in a skip when Lawrence was a baby was like a wire coat-hanger compared with the current fat-tyred, £1,200 mobile child thrones such as the Bugaboo Buffalo – why not try it in ‘Grey Melange’ – or the new iCandy All-Terrain, an ‘ingenious collaboration with iconic brand Land Rover’ for £1,500. You’d no more fold this lot up than you would an actual Land Rover; it’d mean unloading the baby plus all that kit. And anyway, why should you? Baby takes precedence. When a mother and a wheelchair user got into a row on a bus over who was entitled to the space in the middle, it went all the way to the Supreme Court. The wheelchair user won; apparently he really couldn’t get out.

  And why do we all get those padded bags to hold a few spare nappies, a bottle and some wipes? That have to match the buggy. What’s wrong with a normal bag? And why padded? In case Mummy goes mad and has to be dragged away, screaming and babbling, swiping at Daddy and anyone else within range? Maybe women will start matching the buggies themselves: ‘This charming navy stretch onesie features cute gambolling rabbits, and sleeves that do up at the back . . .’ And do we really need a ‘changing table’? Basically a sideboard with a baby on top instead of a dressed ham. And don’t forget to get a food puréeing machine, which is not at all the same as the blender you already have. Oh no, wait: it is.

  Back when we had our two we thought there was a lot of stuff for sale. Among the items my mother thought I’d made up as a joke were a big plastic clip to put over the toilet seat so baby couldn’t climb in and drown, baby dungarees with padded inserts so they didn’t hurt their knees while crawling, and ‘healing beads’ made of amber:

  ‘Rash, temperature, photophobia: it could be meningitis!’

  ‘Here: have a yellow necklace.’

  Not so long ago we treated real fears with real information; as smoking declined, for example, so did the number of cot deaths.

  Now we’re starting to resemble a remote, superstitious culture – Homo Timens – that puts its problems in the hands of witch doctors who take our money and give us magic beads and potions – and also gadgets. Everyone else is getting them, so they must ward off danger, right?

  Our friend Max’s baby monitor came with an extra – a sensor to put under the mattress, which vibrated when the baby was ‘too still’, then sounded an alarm. He said:

  ‘It kept waking the baby with its jiggling, and scaring the hell out of us with the alarm. We dumped it after one night.’

  As I write this, in May 2018, there are twenty-five video baby monitors on johnlewis.com – and that’s not including the purely audio ones. And for twenty-four-hour wraparound worry, there’s the Smart Nursery, an ‘integrated ecosystem’ with ‘unrivalled levels of analytics and interoperability’.

  If you need to watch your baby interoperably while you’re at work, have you forgotten to get a nanny?

  And if you look away, will you be found less attentive than your peers? Guilty of thinking about something else?

  Our friend Angela put her children, born in the eighties, in the garden for naps in their prams.

  ‘Within earshot, though: not down the far end, like my mother’s lot used to do.’

  As probably the last woman to do it at all, she should have her own waxwork in Madame Tussauds. Her children, now parents themselves, wouldn’t dream of doing anything so extreme. I didn’t do it either. Yet those of us with the firmest security measures seem to be those who fear the outside world the most. Isn’t the idea of getting all this stuff to help us worry less?

  When not under twenty-four-hour surveillance, Timens Junior is at the playground, with its super-safe spongy underlay, being helped on and off the apparatus, an
d not a grazed knee in sight. Dad’s the most attentive, hopping from foot to foot with arms outstretched, like a goalie anticipating a ball that never comes.

  ‘Well done, Arya!’ he cheers, as she manages to slide all of a metre unaided, or swing through an angle of four degrees. Next he’s clambering about after her on the climbing frame, an invasive species disturbing the ecosystem like a horse in the canopy of the rainforest.

  And when she’s hungry she won’t get sweets – oh no – but 100 per cent natural ‘fruit paws’ – at £2.50 for a hundred grams with 37.8 per cent sugar, the most expensive way to rot your child’s teeth since slave-grown monosaccharides became all the go five hundred years ago. And this from people who won’t let her have chips.

  He and Arya are meeting Mummy and baby Tyrion for supper, which would be fine if they were Spanish or Italian – because they play sweetly with a wooden spoon while their twenty-five relatives talk incredibly loudly all around them, then doze off adorably on a cushion.

  But they’re not Spanish or Italian; they’re from London, where, by 7 p.m., they become quite tired:

  ‘AAAAARGH!!’

  ‘What is it, Tyrion? Don’t you want your risotto ai porcini?’

  ‘AAARGH!’

  Bang, Bang, BANG! with the spoon. Concerned Daddy gets up and crouches by the highchair, like The Adoration of the Magi.

  ‘Would you like something else instead? Tell Daddy what you’d like.’

  More screaming and banging, greeted by bafflement: what on earth could be making a toddler who’s been up for fifteen hours so distressed?

  What to do?

  Let’s go to the cinema! The children are so intelligent they can follow any storyline, and anyway the babysitter hasn’t been born who could match up to their Ming dynasty-grade domestic requirements. The vital bonding process need not be interrupted.

  Naturally they are sitting just behind us.

  ‘MUMMY? MUMMEEEEE!’

  ‘What is it, darling?’

  ‘WHAT’S THAT MAN DOING?’

  ‘He’s telling the lady that if he doesn’t make holes in all her sheep to let the air out of their tummies, they’ll die.’