I Don't Know How She Does It

by Allison Pearson

  I say fine, but we will need more resources.

  “Can’t increase the head count, Katie,” says Rod. “You just gotta get out there and kick the fucking tires, kid.”

  28

  What the Mother Saw

  SO I RUSH HOME FROM WORK and when I get through the door I call out, but there’s no reply. There are squeals coming from the sitting room and my first thought is pain—they’re in pain—and my heart flubs over and I go in and there’s Paula on the sofa with Emily and Ben, all snuggled up together with Toy Story on the TV and giggling uncontrollably.

  “What’s so funny?” I say, but they’re laughing too much to answer. Emily’s laughing so much she’s crying. And seeing the way they are, so snug and happy there, I suddenly think, You’re paying for this, Kate. You’re literally paying for this. For another woman to sit on your sofa and cuddle your children.

  So I ask Paula if she hasn’t got something better to be getting on with, and I hate the sound of my voice: priggish, pious, lady of the bloody manor. And they all look at me, eyes widening in amazement, and then they start giggling again. Can’t help it. Giggling at the silly lady who’s come in and tried to stop the fun. As though you could turn fun off just like that.

  Sometimes I think Paula’s too close to them; it’s not healthy. Mostly, I’d do anything for her to stay. A teacher at Emily’s school told me she’s known mothers who sack the child minder every six months, so the children don’t get too attached. I mean, how selfish can you get? Denying them a familiar loving presence just because you want it to be you and it can’t be you.

  Of course, I sometimes find myself worrying that she doesn’t talk to the children as I would talk to them. When I was a kid, I used to say dinner for lunch and tea for dinner, but now I’ve joined the professional classes I teach my kids lunch and dinner, and then Paula comes along and teaches them dinner and tea. I can’t complain, can I? Richard corrects them. “Loo,” he says firmly, as Emily demands once again to go to the toilet, but to be honest I feel more comfortable with the common words myself. I know Paula lets them watch quite a bit of TV, but in other ways I can see she’s much better than I would be—consistent, more patient. After a weekend with them, I’m screaming to be let out of the house, but with Paula it’s steady as she goes. Never raises her voice. A lot that’s good in their characters comes from her.

  When I went in to school for a meeting with the teacher the other night, the headmistress took me aside and said that if Emily was going to have any hope of getting into Piper Place she would need—how to put this?—more of the right kind of stimulation at home. Children with mothers who didn’t go out to work were being taken on regular visits to museums; they had a broader perspective. Even if they ate Alphabetti Spaghetti, it was always in sodding Latin. Whereas homes with both parents out at work? “Well, there can be a tendency to rely on the te-le-vis-i-on,” said Miss Acland, getting five syllables out of the dreaded word. “Emily,” she said, “seems to have a quite remarkable knowledge of Walt Disney videos.”

  This was her way of telling me Paula wasn’t good enough.

  “Emily,” continued Miss Acland, “will need to show a wide range of interests to secure a place at a good secondary school. Competition in London is very fierce, as you know, Mrs. Shattock. I suggest an instrument—not the violin, too common now; perhaps the clarinet, which has plenty of personality—and you could consider one of the more unusual sports.” Rugby for girls, she believed, was gaining in popularity.

  “Emily needs a CV at the age of six?”

  Maybe I should have tried to keep the incredulity out of my voice.

  “Well, Mrs. Shattock, in certain home situations where neither parent is present, these kinds of things can, shall we say, slip. Did you learn an instrument yourself as a child?”

  “No, but my father sang a lot to us.”

  “Oh,” she said, the kind of Oh that kind of woman holds in a pooper-scooper.

  Hideous money-grubbing education witch.

  In her last job, the one before us, Paula worked for a family in Hampstead. Julia, the mother, said the kids weren’t allowed to watch TV.

  “And Julia worked in telly, making all this crap for Channel 5,” Paula told me one day, laughing loudly at the memory. “And it’s like her kids weren’t allowed telly because it’s evil!” At the weekends, Julia and her husband Mike stayed in bed while the kids were downstairs watching videos. Paula found this out because Adam, the youngest, told her one Monday when she caused a row by trying to switch the TV off. When I think of that story, I can feel myself redden. Aren’t I guilty of the same double standard? I tell Paula that Ben must have water not juice and then, at the weekend, if he asks me for apple juice, I give in quickly to buy myself some peace and quiet. And because I see him so little, I want our times together to be happy. So I want my nanny to be a better mother than I would ever be: I expect her to love my two like they’re her own, and then, when I come home and find her loving them like her own, they’re suddenly My Children and to be loved by nobody except me.

  As I unload the dishwasher and start to wash by hand all the plates that aren’t properly clean, I can see Paula looking at me from the other end of the kitchen. She’s brushing Emily’s hair and really looking at me. I wish I knew what she thought. She said to me once that she would never have a nanny if she had kids of her own; she knew too much about what went on—the girls who suck up to the mums and then, as soon as they’re out the door, it’s on the mobile calling their mates.

  Emily lets out a cry as the brush snags on a tangle. “Hush now,” Paula chides, “princesses have to have their hair brushed a hundred times every night, don’t they, Mummy?” She looks across the room, seeking an act of conciliation and consent.

  No, I don’t want to know. If I knew what she really thought, it would probably kill me. Still, a part of me wishes I knew what she thought.

  PART FOUR

  29

  The Supermarket Shop

  EMILY’S BIRTHDAY ALWAYS MEANS the start of summer for me. When my waters broke six years ago and I took a cab to the hospital, there were people sitting at café tables on the pavements and spilling into the street and it felt as though the whole city was in carnival for the arrival of my child.

  The day before her party, I do the supermarket shop with Ben. Do the supermarket shop. Who could imagine that such a small sentence could contain so much pain: an Oresteia of suffering.

  First off, I try to liberate one of the extra-wide trolleys, which is in coitus with the trolley outside the store; I pull and push with one hand, holding on to runaway toddler with the other.

  An aviary on wheels, the extra-wide trolley is roughly as maneuverable as the Isle of Wight. I try to persuade Ben to sit in the baby seat. He declines, preferring to ride in the cargo hold where he can eject any purchase he disapproves of. In desperation, I crack open a box of Mini Milks and give him two; while both his hands are full of lolly, I slip him into the seat and snap the clips (bad, bad, bribing mother). Now all that remains is to track down the thirty-seven items on my list. After I threw the radio at him this morning, Richard said he thought the whole birthday thing was perhaps stressing me out a little. Why didn’t I take a break and he’d do the supermarket shop? Impossible, I said, he would buy all the wrong things.

  “But there’s a list, Kate,” he reasoned, in his man-in-a-white-coat voice. “How could I possibly go wrong?”

  What every woman knows and no man can ever grasp is that even if he brings home everything on the list, he will still not have got the right things. Why? Because the woman truly believes that if she had gone to the supermarket she would have made better choices: a plumper chicken from a more luxuriantly pastured region of France, a yummier yogurt, the exact salad leaf she has yearned for and whose precise name had, until the epiphany in front of the Healthy Eating cabinet, eluded her. Men make lists to order the world, to tie it down; for women, lists are the start of something, the coordinates by which we p
lot our journey to freedom. Don’t get me wrong here: I’m not claiming that any of this is fair. When a woman buys an item not on the list which turns out to be inedible, this is called “an experiment”; when a man does the same thing, it is “a waste of money.”

  3:31 P.M. Join the checkout queue. Am sure I have forgotten something vital. What?

  3:39 P.M. Oh, great. Ben has a dirty nappy. As I’m wondering how long I can hang in here and defy the astounded nostrils of nearby customers, my son puts his hand, the one holding what’s left of the second Mini Milk, down his shorts. When he withdraws the hand it is marbled with ice cream and excrement. I want to faint with misery. Instead, holding the boy aloft like a grenade with the pin out, I sprint the length of the store to the baby-changing facility.

  4:01 P.M. Rejoin queue. Sixteen minutes. Estimate Ben has now eaten at least one-twelfth of the party food. As he munches happily, I grab a magazine from the rack by the till and try to lower my blood pressure by reading my horoscope.

  Jupiter is now transiting your ninth house, which is truly one of the most beneficial things it can do for you. Your consciousness is lifted and your perspective grows. You find yourself imbued with loving feelings towards everyone—even children who have been impossible to control. The most positive effect of this moment is that your rage level sinks to an all-time low. The trick will be to hold on to this feeling of serenity once the euphoria wears off.

  “Excuse me, madam?”

  I look up, expecting that it’s my turn to put items on the conveyor belt. Instead, the checkout girl informs me that I have been queuing in a regular aisle through which the Isle of Wight cannot pass. “Sorry, madam. If you could just move to one of the designated wider aisles.”

  “Sorry? Sorry doesn’t exactly cover it, does it?” For five seconds I go very quiet, then drive my fist into a twelve-pack of Hula Hoops. The bang brings a security guard vaulting over the barrier. Ben bursts into tears, as does every other child in the immediate area. Am imbued with loving feelings towards everyone.

  4:39 P.M. The checkout person is so slow she may as well be underwater. Even worse, she is helpful and friendly.

  “You know if you buy another one of those you get one free?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Fromage frais. Doncha want one free?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Having a party, are ya?”

  No, I am buying eighty mini sausages, twenty-four Barbie chocolate rolls and a bumper bag of Iced Gems for my own consumption because I am a deranged bulimic. “My daughter. She’s six tomorrow.”

  “Ah, lovely. Gotta reward card?”

  “No, I—”

  “You want one with this lot, doncha? Save yourself a bit, love.”

  “Actually, I haven’t got time to—”

  “Cash back?”

  “No, really, I just have to go—”

  “Inshee lovely.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Your little gel. Inshee lovely!”

  “He. He’s a boy.”

  “Oh, wouldn’t know it with all them curls. You wanna tell your mum to getcha ’aircut, little man.”

  Why can’t supermarkets designate a Working Mother Aisle where you can be served by surly superefficient androids? Or French people. The French would be perfect.

  9:43 P.M. Everything is under control. Both children are in bed. Pass the Parcel took a mere one hour and forty-five minutes to assemble. Debra warned me that you’re not allowed to have just one gift in the middle like we used to have when we were little. These days, there has to be a present in each layer in an attempt to convince kids that life is fair. Why? Life is not fair; life is layers of wrapping with one broken squeaker in the middle.

  Next door, Richard is filling party bags in front of the TV. In theory, I disapprove of the escalation of gifts that kids expect to take home: like the arms race, it can only lead to mutually assured ruination. In practice, I am too cowardly to hand over the balloon and piece of cake I feel would be more than sufficient. The Muffia would take out a contract on me.

  Unfortunately, the supermarket was unable to swap the pink-iced birthday cake I had ordered for a yellow one at short notice. Pink used to be Emily’s favorite color, then it became yellow. When I ordered the cake, pink was once more in the ascendant, but yellow made an overnight comeback while I was away last week. Never mind. I have bought a Victoria sponge and will now ice it myself in a wobbly but loving manner: the mother’s touch that means so much. Oh, shit, where is the icing sugar?

  11:12 P.M. I finally find the box wedged at the back of a cupboard under a weeping bottle of soy sauce. A year past its sell-by date, the icing sugar comes out of the packet in one piece. It looks a lot like one of those Apollo moon rocks my dad cooked up thirty years ago. Or fifty pounds’ worth of crack cocaine. Luckily it is not the latter, otherwise would consume entire piece by myself and lie down on kitchen floor awaiting merciful instant death.

  Should be just enough to cover the cake, anyway. It takes eight minutes to pound the icing rock to dust. Careful not to add too much warm water, then eke in the teeniest drop of yellow coloring. This produces a shade of pale lemon: a bit mimsy, a bit—how can I put this?—a bit head-boy’s-mother’s-dress at prep-school speech day. Need something cheerier for a birthday: egg-yolk yellow, Van Gogh yellow. Emboldened, I add a couple of drops more. The color is now both watery and intense like a rank urine specimen. I add a further two drops and stir furiously.

  I am tearfully contemplating the contents of the basin when Rich comes into the kitchen talking about some documentary on child development. “Do you know that babies identify their gender roles from three months? Probably why Ben spends all day sitting on the potty reading the sports pages. Like father, like—Christ, Kate, what’s that?”

  Rich has spotted the icing. The icing is now a color which, if you were being kind, could be described as Safari Yellow. It is disturbingly reminiscent of one of Ben’s more challenging nappies.

  Richard laughs, that unforgivable liberated laugh that escapes when you’re just so fantastically grateful someone else has screwed up, not you. “Don’t worry, honey,” he says. “Let’s work the problem. We have icing the color of dung, so we will make—a cow cake! Got any white chocolate buttons?”

  SUNDAY, 7:19 P.M. The party went pretty well, if you discount Joshua Mayhew throwing up in the hall and the moment when I brought in the cake and started the singing.

  “Happy birthday, dear Emily, happy birthday to you!”

  “But, Mummy, I don’t want brown icing,” she wailed.

  “It’s not brown, darling, it’s yellow.”

  “I don’t want yellow. I want pink.”

  When all eighteen guests have departed, I set about clearing up the debris: juice cartons like collapsed lungs, Barbie paper plates, twenty-six untouched egg sandwiches (there to make the parents feel better; no self-respecting child would even nibble anything so free of additives). Earlier today, I sent an e-mail to Jack Abelhammer suggesting that, under the circumstances, it might be better if I handed over his fund to a colleague. My feelings for him—it started as a minor crush and now I feel as though I’m lying under a steamroller—have made our professional relationship hard to handle. The tone of my message was friendly but firm. For a couple of hours afterwards, I felt the steady glow of having acted responsibly: the brightest bulb in the maternal firmament. Since then, though, the bulb has blown. Either that, or I have tripped over the lead and unplugged myself from the mains—no juice, no flow of energy, certainly no current affairs. Have already checked my Inbox five times for his reply. Come on, Kate, grow up; stop acting like a lovesick teenager.

  In my self-denial, I have so far eaten two chocolate Barbie rolls and a bowl of Twiglets and poured a half-bottle of gin into the homemade lemonade I bought at Marks & Spencer and decanted into a pink jug to pass off as my own.

  It’s a hot night: viscous, thirsty for rain. The fan I dug out from under the stairs is no use; it sits
on the kitchen table, sluggishly stirring the soupy air. There was an attempt at thunder earlier, just as we were leaving the swimming baths around four, but it was more like a ripping of brown paper than the full-throated roar we need to scare off the heat. Christ, the heat! And the smell! I am out in the garden scraping the rug over which Joshua Mayhew threw up. The oatmeal vomit is studded with pastel minarets of Iced Gems.

  I did notice Josh looking pale and clammy during Pass the Parcel and managed to get him out into the hall, but as I was struggling with the front door he deposited his birthday tea on the runner. When his mother turned up, she shrieked, “What has happened to poor little Joshey?”

  I managed to suppress the obvious reply: What has happened is that little Joshey has carpet-bombed five hundred pounds’ worth of Uzbekistan kelim. If it had been the contents of my child’s stomach, I would have been down on my knees proffering a checkbook. But Imogen Mayhew, a person so wholesome her entire being seems to have been woven from chamomile, just demanded to know if Joshua had been allowed to have “excess sugar.”

  I laughed a tinkly hostess laugh and said that sugar was a traditional staple of birthday parties, but Imogen did not join in the laughter. She left with a look which suggested I can expect imminent litigation against my Nigella fairy cakes. Then, as soon as she was out of the door, I had another encounter with Angela Brunt, who was kneeling by the coats and scraping strawberry Frube off Davina’s green velvet. “Have you got Emily in anywhere yet, Kate?”

  “No.”

  “Well, Davina has a guaranteed place at Morton’s, but her second interview at Piper Place is on Thursday and that’s the one we’re holding out for because it opens the door to so many other things, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, doesn’t it.”

  After washing my hands to try and remove the smell of vomit, I go into the sitting room where Richard has crashed out on the sofa, a Sunday Review section tented over his face. Every time he breathes out, he inflates the breasts of Madonna, whose picture is on the cover above a feature entitled FROM VIRGIN TO BLESSED MOTHER. Perhaps I should call Madonna for a mum-to-mum chat about how to sponge vomit from a kelim? Presumably at her daughter’s parties she has a designated sick-wrangler. How much do I hate the celebrity Having-It-All Mother who boasts about how fulfilled she is when you just know she has a fleet of substitute mothers doing it all for her?