The Night my Bum Dropped

by Gretel Killeen

  I’m familiar with Tadpole’s line of reasoning. Last week she couldn’t believe that her all-girl private school spent so much time telling the pupils to be ‘individuals’, yet gave her a detention for coming to class wearing black nail polish.

  I’ve actually always been fascinated by the way Tadpole sees the world. When she was five I asked her to practise her reading and she said, ‘No, you read to me and I’ll tell you if you’re right.’ At six I remember her asking why lots of girls have the name Sky but no girl is ever called Dirt.

  I would appreciate Tadpole’s perspective on my current conundrum but I decide to wait for a more conducive moment as I hear her splash her face in the bathroom and complain that ‘the water’s too wet’.

  I resolve to ask my son’s opinion first.

  Living with Frog is similar, I should imagine, to living with the Dalai Lama (if the Dalai Lama surfed, freelanced as a DJ and called his sister ‘a fat shit’). I first became aware of his state of being when he was about five. He found a bird that couldn’t fly, healed it by gently rubbing its tummy, and then watched the bird fly away. I remember then I was amazed, as I’d never really had the healing knack. I recall I often used to find injured birds when I was growing up but they always seemed to die as soon as I tried to heal them, even if they were suffering from something minor, like a crooked claw or a scratched beak.

  (I’m also not good with pets. When I was a kid and it was my turn to take the class pet home, the pet would always die. My mother used to try to make me feel better by telling me that all pets, even puppies, only live for a week. But my brothers used to call me a murderer.)

  Of course, Frog isn’t completely spiritual. When he was seven I asked his opinion on an outfit I planned to wear to a work function.

  ‘Do you think I look weird in it?’ I asked.

  ‘No, not if you’re going as Miss Piggy,’ he replied.

  From the ages of eight to twelve he used to routinely hop out of the shower, wrap himself in a towel and pop into my room. For years I thought he was doing this to pay a kind of ritualistic homage to me, so it came as somewhat of a surprise the day I realised that he was actually just drying his feet on my bedroom carpet.

  And then we had the five years of teenage grunts, during which the only real communication Frog made was the constant request that we have Tadpole DNA-tested in the hope of discovering she was ‘an alien intruder planted in our family by evil extraterrestrial forces and therefore destined to be arrested some time very soon and imprisoned far, far away’.

  Now that I think about it, maybe I have credited Frog with more godlike greatness than is actually warranted. For Christmas last year he gave Tadpole and me one pair of socks to share! And he bought them on eBay … and put them on my credit card.

  But then again maybe I quashed Frog’s potential greatness by raising him the way that I did. Maybe I shouldn’t have fed him red meat (or black meat, as it turned out). Every meal I’ve ever cooked for my children – meat, vegetables or both – has been served with love, but essentially it has also been served overcooked and inedible. When my kids see a sign outside a cafe that says ‘home-cooked meals’, they think it means the meals will be burnt. Once, we went to a restaurant and the meat was served medium-rare, so when my children saw the thin line of pink on the inside of the steak they refused to eat it on the grounds that there must be something wrong with it.

  Maybe I also shouldn’t have encouraged Frog to play rugby. Well, maybe it was okay to encourage him to play a sport, but maybe not to send him off to every game with the instruction to ‘try not to get tackled’. Frog thought I uttered this in order to keep him safe, but my motives were actually more selfish than that – I just didn’t want to have to spend the entire following week trying to get grass stains out of his costume.

  Maybe I also shouldn’t have referred to his rugby uniform as a ‘costume’.

  Maybe I also shouldn’t have referred to ‘training’ as rehearsal.

  Maybe I shouldn’t be letting him go and study overseas because I need him here right now.

  I go for a walk and I try to ring him from my mobile phone to ask him what I should do about fixing the ache in my heart. It’s a very bad line. I get in the bit about ‘Hello – how are you?’, then the line drops out, so I ring back and he says, ‘Hello.’ Then the line drops out again. So I try to call once more but then my mobile battery goes flat, so I find a public phone and ring Frog back. When he says ‘Hello’, I’m suddenly very self-conscious about the triviality or the importance of what I have to say after making such an effort to call, so I decide to begin the conversation by chatting about someone else. I tell Frog that Aunty Peg has had a laser operation on her piles. Then the line drops out again and I ring back once more. This time Frog asks me how I am and I tell him I have to find work and I want to fix the ache in my heart before I get a new job. And he says, ‘Yes, I’ve been eating a lot of fruit.’

  Throughout the latter part of the conversation a stranger has been persistently bashing on the phone-booth door. I know another ‘former famous person’ who under similar circumstances once hissed, ‘Good heavens! Don’t you know who I am!’ But I can’t say this to the phone basher because I’m scared that he won’t have a clue who I am, which is a pity, because apparently neither do I.

  Tadpole

  It’s ironic, of course, that I can’t really confer with my son about the ache in my heart because I suspect that his imminent departure overseas may have contributed to the fact that I have an ache in my heart. Perhaps even more ironic is the fact that this outcome leaves me with no choice but to ask my daughter for her advice on my life even though she’s a teenager and I often get the distinct feeling that she wishes I were dead.

  It’s not that Tadpole has particularly sociopathic, matricidal or homicidal tendencies. It is simply that she is an adolescent and adolescents, it would appear, are highly programmed to insure, above and beyond all else in the universe, the continuation of their species – i.e. themselves. Having said this, an adolescent girl often perceives her mother as her arch nemesis, whose sole purpose it is to prevent the teenager from actually being herself. And therein lies the problem.

  I’m not suggesting that Tadpole is literally going to kill me any time soon, because that would be ridiculous. Admittedly she certainly has the strength, the determination, the will and the brain power to devise innumerable ways to take me from this mortal coil, but she’s also bright enough to know that if I weren’t here, she’d have to do her own washing, cooking and cleaning – and what’s more, she’d have no pocket money.

  No, what I’m suggesting is that Tadpole is possibly already killing me, but she’s smart enough to do it slowly by ignoring me, rolling her eyes and negating my existence. Essentially, I guess she’s killing me by slowly breaking my heart. I guess she’d say the same about me.

  I don’t mean to harp on the subject of mother–daughter relationships, but I’m thinking of making a horror movie about a teenage daughter with her mother as the terrified victim. The film should be quite cheap to make, although the daughter character will need a lot of outfits, even if the story is told all in one day. But other than the costumes, the movie needs no sets or props, just a lot of yelled dialogue coupled with prolonged silences, and one door on strong hinges so it can be repeatedly slammed.

  This Too Will Pass

  It hasn’t always been like this and I’m reassured by female elders, and the police, that this time will pass. Problem is that I don’t know when this time will pass and I need Tadpole to urgently pass some time with me now.

  I’m actually not convinced that now is the time to ask anything of Tadpole. In fact, I think she’ll be quite shocked at the content of my question, as the only things I’ve really asked her of late are, ‘What time will you be coming home?’ and, ‘Is there a bottom half to the dress that you’ve perhaps forgotten to put on?’

  I’m scared. When she was little Tadpole announced that she had a life motto
and it was, ‘How can a bird that’s born to fly sit in a cage and sing?’ More recently she told me that her new personal saying is, ‘Dress like a goddess, sit like a lady and walk like everyone else can fuck off.’

  I guess I knew in advance that Tadpole could be a difficult teenager. The signs were there at an early age. When she was three she refused to go to a party unless she was allowed to drive.

  When she was four, a friend arrived armed with a late birthday present, which Tadpole then proceeded to open at the dinner table.

  ‘Tadpole,’ I said. ‘You can’t open that until you’ve finished eating your dinner.’

  Tadpole continued to unwrap the gift.

  ‘Tadpole, please stop opening the present and just quickly finish eating your dinner first.’

  Tadpole continued to ignore me, finished opening the present and embraced its contents, a brand-new doll.

  ‘Tadpole, put that down and finish your dinner or you will never ever be allowed to play with that doll ever, ever again.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ she replied. ‘That’s what you say now, but one day you will forget.’

  And then she left her doll on the table and went to her room. Within a moment she poked her head back round the door. I thought she was going to apologise but instead she said, ‘I actually don’t like that doll anyway. It’s white with blonde hair and doesn’t look like me. I’d prefer a doll that was black.’

  At the age of four we flew back from a trip to Japan and Tadpole spent the entire flight in the cockpit. When she returned I asked whether it was amazing and she replied, ‘Well, it wasn’t all that interesting, but the captain was incredibly handsome.’

  When she was five I was Tadpole’s best friend and she wanted to marry me.

  A month later Tadpole was to perform in her very first school concert. The concert was to celebrate all the cultures of the world, and Tadpole’s job was to represent Italy. For weeks she practised her lines in Italian while I made her a traditional Florentine costume. But on the actual day she refused to wear the outfit and instead stood in front of the entire school and said, ‘Ciao da Italia,’ while dressed as an astronaut.

  I remember one particular night Tadpole refused to get in the bath after dinner ‘because everyone knows that you shouldn’t go in the water when you’ve only just eaten’.

  After school one Thursday Tadpole informed me that she now had 101 boyfriends. The following day she announced she had two.

  ‘What happened to all the others?’ I asked.

  ‘I got rid of them,’ she replied, ‘because they wouldn’t do what I told them to.’

  As a five-year-old she played rugby union in an otherwise ‘all-boy’ team because she liked the idea of having twenty-five boys chasing after her. She called tackles ‘cuddles’ and whenever she had a chance to run with the ball she’d stop to wave at her fans.

  I don’t know whether Tadpole learnt anything in those days. One year her school report suggested that she talked too much in class. I was reading the comments to her out loud until I was suddenly interrupted.

  ‘Who wrote that stuff?’ Tadpole asked aghast.

  ‘Your teacher,’ I said.

  ‘Well, ignore them because she’s lying.’

  Years later, after Tadpole had her first sex education class at school, she came to me with two wine glasses of red cordial and suggested we ‘have a drink together’. Then she said that she’d like to know two things. One, whether she could please buy a new pencil case for all of her ‘feminine hygiene products’, and two, whether I thought Frog had PMT.

  As she got older Tadpole never did her homework and instead spent most of her time singing and dancing about the house. She wrote her first song at the age of four, ‘We are the Rhythm Family’, and insisted on punctuating the end of each verse with a little fart.

  She gave me a card for her ninth birthday and it said Happy Giving Birth Day. Shortly after she sent me a text message that said, ‘I love u umberleverbly much.’ But then when her adolescence started she gave me an IOU for my fortieth birthday.

  Going to be Difficult

  It was always going to be difficult to steer Tadpole through adolescence. I mean, we’re talking about someone who announced that she was sick to death of being treated like a child when she was about six. When she was approximately eight, she said to me, ‘Don’t you just want to be pushed against a wall and kissed?’ When she was ten she wrote a school poem on the subject of dreams and her opening line was, ‘In my dreams I am loved by lots of people, I am what they call a prostitute.’

  She has only ever been grounded once in her life. It was a desperate measure taken by an exhausted me, in response to a crime I can’t even recall. But I do remember that she was eleven and she was to be grounded for just one afternoon, and she thought it was so cool to be given such a teenage punishment that she dressed up like a homie and breakdanced in the kitchen. This made me feel like I’d accidentally given her a reward, so I never grounded her again.

  N.B. For those who are about to enter the teenage parenting years I would just like to warn you that if having a baby is like passing a camel through the eye of a needle and then looking after it for the rest of your life, then raising an adolescent is like passing a camel halfway out your ear and then realising that it’s stuck.

  Walking on Eggs

  ‘Why are you staring at me, Mum?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Why not? Don’t you love me?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course I do.’

  ‘You’re only saying that because I asked you to.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘So does that mean you won’t do things I ask you to do?’

  ‘Well, that depends what you’re asking me to do.’

  ‘You’re supposed to love me unconditionally, Mum.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘So if I borrowed your new shoes without asking and accidentally broke the heel, would you still love me?’

  ‘Yes … did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, that’s a relief.’

  ‘And would you love me if I didn’t quite tell you the truth?’

  ‘I guess I ultimately would.’

  ‘That’s good, ’cause I did accidentally break the heel of your shoe.’

  ‘You what!!!’

  ‘Oh, WHATEVER!!!’

  N.B. ‘Whatever’ is the rudest word in a teenager’s vocabulary.

  In one normal day Tadpole will cover the entire gamut of emotions before she’s even hopped out of bed. On one momentous occasion she actually phoned me to ask me into her room so she could teach me how to wake her up without making her angry. ‘I want you to open my door softly, tippy-toe in wearing no shoes, just socks, and gently pat my forehead while you whisper, “Time to wake up, my magnificent child.” ’

  When she got to the breakfast table one morning Tadpole announced that she’d decided to become a chef, ‘because I just really hate the food that you make’. And then she spent the thirty-three minutes remaining before heading off to school just staring at an onion.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked ever so gently.

  ‘I’m trying to make myself cry.’

  There wasn’t a particular incident when I can clearly say, ‘Ah, yes, that’s the moment when the hormonal devil took temporary possession of my daughter.’ The change was more subtle more sinister, more incremental, and is probably most clearly seen through the progression of the text messages she sent me over the two-month period just before and after she turned thirteen:

  ‘I love ewe more than the world can imagine and ewe can do anything.’

  ‘I love ewe unberleverbly much.’

  ‘I love ewe more than the heart can hold.’

  ‘Oh i miss u i love u and i want to hug ewe good night mum il cya tomoz mwa.’

  ‘I love ewe so much im about to burst love Tadple.’

  ‘Ewe r wonderful and I hope everything is great and remember im always here 4 ewe.’

  �
�I am in pain.’

  ‘i still miss ewe heaps i love u bi.’

  ‘No mum u pick me up at 2.30 ealry mummy dear.’

  ‘Mum this sucks.’

  ‘Not going well.’

  ‘How can I grow up to be a normal person with you as a role model?’ (She sent me this one after I asked her to put a load of washing in the dryer.)

  ‘If you want to come into my room send me an email first.’

  Getting Along a Bit Better Lately

  Things have recently become a lot better between us. I’m not sure if this is because, as Tadpole suggests, I have finally ironed out my problems … if Tadpole’s hormonal tsunami has subsided … or if she wants me to buy her a new car.

  I go into Tadpole’s room to check on the homework situation and find her standing in her underwear practising her high kicks in my most precious pair of boots. I don’t reprimand her or cause conflict in any way because I am already planning to ask for Tadpole’s help with my ‘emptiness in the heart’ problem and I figure that we’ll have a more constructive conversation if she isn’t pretending that I am invisible and is actually talking to me.

  I have tried to approach Tadpole several times in the past few days because my problem needs to be solved so that I can get on with finding a job. But the mood just hasn’t been right. Sometimes I think we can sense when each other is needy and get kind of repulsed by that weakness. Sometimes I think she can feel when I have something on my mind. Sometimes I suspect that she cannot allow anyone to have more attention than herself. Sometimes I suspect that she suspects the same of me. (I rang her from a war zone once to tell her about the mines, the AIDS victims and the child trafficking, and she replied, ‘I’ve had a bruise on my knee for two days.’) So, as I prepare to ask about the ache, she quickly begins to sob so effusively and for such a long period that I fear she might, at exactly the same time, both drown and die of dehydration.