by Gill Sims
‘Ellen, I will hang up if you can’t conduct a civilised conversation like a normal adult.’
‘Oh, all right!’ I grumbled. I honestly don’t know what it is about Jessica. She is my only sister and I love her, I honestly do, but I don’t really like her very much. She always rubs me up the wrong way, usually by being so bloody superior, and then I find myself just fighting the urge to kick her in the shins, or push her over in a muddy puddle and laugh at her. Our ability to still squabble like children at the ages of forty-two and forty-five does not give me much hope that the magical day will ever dawn when Peter and Jane will stop fighting and be friends and get on without one or the other trying to brutally murder their sibling. And anyway, Jessica’s children are monsters of hot-housed over-achievement and will doubtless be running the country before they are out of their teens, if Jessica has anything to do with it. (I still cringe, though, every time I remember that I have a niece and nephew called Persephone and Gulliver, but Jessica is immensely smug that nobody else she knows, not even any of the children of the other NCT mummies from either of her pregnancies, has the same names as her offspring, and in fact since records began neither ‘Persephone’ nor ‘Gulliver’ has ever appeared on a list of ‘Most Popular’ names. She was mildly less smug when after a brief googling I was able to inform her they did both appear on a list of the Most Pretentious Middle-Class Children’s Names. That was a very good day …)
However, the mystery of why Daddy wanted to see us all was no closer to being solved, so Jessica announced she would book a table for lunch (hopefully not at a restaurant that doesn’t serve chips. I took Peter to a chip-free restaurant once and it ended very badly).
Friday, 7 October
Aaaarrrrgghhhh! It’s Fuck It All Friday. I have been trying to get ready for starting my new job next week, including booking childcare and batch-cooking nutritious meals for the freezer so my babies won’t have to live on ready meals and get diabetes and scurvy, I have failed to nail the capsule wardrobe, but I have bought a lot of ‘quirky’ trousers that I am really not at all sure I can pull off, and a very corporate-looking handbag that frankly scares me with its grown-upness, and all I want is a glass of wine in peace, yet the children clamour constantly to be fed. All those baby books, all those parenting manuals with their wise words, and their fucking routines and their ‘helpful tips’ – do you know what they omit to tell you? That your children will want dinner every single bastarding night, even though they don’t actually like any food ever, because they are picky little twats.
Oh, I had such high hopes once. My children weren’t going to be picky eaters! If you had a picky eater, it was simply because you had made a rod for your own back, entirely through your lazy, underachieving ways. My children, I was so smugly sure, would be enthusiastic gourmands, yumming down delicious exotica from the four corners of the earth. Oh, yes.
Jane had other ideas, though. Jane hated everything. Except chocolate. She liked chocolate. I would spend hours lovingly cooking, pureeing and freezing, only for Jane to spit out whatever delightful concoction I had created for her and scream like I was feeding her ground glass. Eventually, regarding my freezer full of special Tupperware trays filled with Annabel Bloody Karmel specials that Jane wouldn’t touch, I had a brainwave! Clearly, I could save myself a lot of bother – and wasted food – by finding out what she liked by giving her a selection of bought baby food, and then once we knew what she enjoyed, I could simply cook that for her! Off I went to Sainsbury’s and came home with every variety of Ella’s Kitchen pouches and Baby Organix jars available (to ease the middle-class guilt at feeding my precious first-born moppet on jars of baby food). Jane liked most things out of jars (she was particularly fond of a revolting-looking ‘steak and spinach’ concoction that was a sort of greenish black sludge and looked exactly the same coming out the other end as it did going in). It turned out she just didn’t like anything I cooked for her. Jar of vegetable lasagne? ‘Yummers!’ said Jane (well, she didn’t actually, obviously. She couldn’t talk). Homemade vegetable lasagne? ‘Bleurgh!’ said Jane. And so it went on.
I had bought a sodding TRAVEL BLENDER so I could puree tasty things for Jane on the move. A TRAVEL BLENDER? What sort of fuckwit has a travel blender? Jane continued to only want her jars of mush until she was old enough to eat chips and chicken nuggets, at which point she would happily have subsisted on nothing else (with a healthy dose of refined sugar and E numbers, obviously).
I was in despair. I trailed to the health visitor each week to bewail Jane’s intractability (and intractable she was – if you could manage to get a spoonful of something into her mouth, she would sit for hours refusing to swallow it. I was highly amused the night Simon came home and found Jane sitting with a mouthful of something green and slimy, and said, ‘This is ridiculous, Ellen, I’ll get her to swallow it!’ and held her nose. I could have warned him what would happen next of course, but it was funnier to see her spray the green goo all over him!), only to be brightly told that she would ‘Eat when she was hungry’ and ‘No child has ever starved themselves to death’.
Maybe not, I thought darkly, BUT WHAT IF SHE WAS THE FIRST?
Peter was not as bad, being basically ravenous from birth (his indignation the one and only time I tried him with a dummy was hilarious – he was outraged that he was expected to go to the effort of sucking on something that would not provide him with food), and he did consent to eat my pots of mush, which was just as well, because I don’t think I could have afforded enough jars to spoon into his constantly gaping maw (although there was an unfortunate incident with butternut squash when he filled his nappy just as I drove onto a motorway, and by the time I was able to stop and change him his bum had been stained bright orange – he looked like a baby baboon for days), but again, come toddlerdom, he decided chippies and cakey were sufficient to sustain him.
And now, they just push the food around their plates while loftily informing me that I KNOW they don’t like such and such. They could have happily eaten whatever it was every single day of their bloody lives, but I am supposed to telepathically infer their likes and wants on any given night. And then, of course, if one of them likes it, the other won’t – Peter loves shepherd’s pie, but Jane hates it, and Jane loves macaroni cheese and Peter claims it is toxic, even though he will happily eat pasta with butter and grated cheese and seriously WHAT IS THE FUCKING DIFFERENCE?
Then there is Simon, who turns his nose up at most of the things the children will eat and claims they are ‘boring’, and sniffs at chicken as also being ‘boring’, and sighs and says he just fancies something ‘tasty’, by which he means something out of my nice Ottolenghi cookbook, which is all very well, and the food IS delicious and the recipes very reliable, but Yotam Ottolenghi quite clearly has at least one person, possibly more, to do his washing-up for him, as his recipes tend to call for All the Pots. Simon, being a man, does not understand while I rail so furiously against this, because for him, ALL cooking involves using All the Pots. And All the Knives, All the Spoons, All the Spatulas and All of Anything Else in the Kitchen!
Basically, the only thing anyone can agree on to eat in this house is lasagne. Bastarding lasagne. Which also uses All the Pots. I used to like lasagne. It used to be a lovely treat. When someone else was making it. But now – now the very word strikes Doom and Rage into my soul. I think the thing that makes me crossest about lasagne is the fact that however much I point out that it is actually quite a faff, Simon labours under the impression that it is a simple and easy meal to make. I once even went to the lengths of making him make it himself. I talked him through each step of the process, of course, after I lost the will to live as he bleated for the eleventy billionth time that he couldn’t find the chopped tomatoes (on the SAME SHELF in the SAME CUPBOARD as they are always are) and did I think he should add some cumin to the sauce (NO), and for the white sauce, should he use a spoon or a whisk, and what temperature did the oven need to be on at? I suspect he was hoping t
o annoy me into doing it myself, but I held strong and made him do it, under supervision, only to have him say smugly as we sat down to eat, ‘I don’t know why you make such a fuss about lasagne, darling. It was a piece of piss! Oh, and you’ll clear up the kitchen, won’t you? I mean, fair’s fair, I cooked.’ Sometimes I really think I must be some sort of saint, blessed with a truly extraordinary amount of patience. It is the only explanation for why I haven’t yet run amok and killed anyone.
Still, as it is FIAF, at least I can feed the cherubs pizza, claiming that it is a treat for them, and not suffer from a guilty conscience about being a terrible Jeremy Kyle-style mother. Everyone knows that anything goes on FIAF – though I am wondering now why I spent so much time this week on lovingly cooking stews and soups and tagines so the little darlings could enjoy a nutritious and balanced diet even though they were being abandoned by their mother for the evil world of commerce, when I am 99 per cent sure they probably won’t eat any of it. Oh well, maybe it will go some way to easing my own maternal guilt at sacrificing the fruit of my loins upon the altar of my career. I wonder if men feel like this about working full-time? I must ask Sam, as I suspect Simon most certainly does not.
Sunday, 9 October
I was RIGHT! Take that, Jessica. I said Daddy wanted to introduce us to his latest popsy, and indeed he did. Apart from a mild amount of glee at being righter than Jessica, though, this is a most distressing turn of events.
We arrived at the restaurant (thank God for online menus, so I at least was able to assure Peter in advance that there were chips, and promise him that I wouldn’t make him eat any vegetables) to find Daddy already sitting at the table, with a very pretty woman with dark hair. Very pretty, and VERY FUCKING YOUNG! Well, I say ‘young’, I don’t mean illegally young, obviously; she was about my age, which is very fucking young for my father.
Daddy looked like the cat who’d got the cream as he smugly announced, ‘Everyone, I’d like you to meet my wife, Natalia. Natalia, this is my younger daughter Ellen, and her husband Simon, and my grandchildren, Peter and Jane – Peter, darling, what are you doing?’
‘I’m dabbing, Grandpa, OBVS!’ said Peter scathingly. ‘Don’t you know what dabbing is?’
‘You look like you’re having some kind of a fit.’ said Daddy in horror. ‘Please stop it now and say hello to Natalia.’
Peter dabbed again.
‘Hello, Natalia,’ I managed to say faintly.
‘Hello, Natalia, hello, Ralph!’ bellowed Simon, going for the age-old British tradition of covering up social discomfort by being incredibly hearty and ignoring the elephant in the room. Not that Natalia was an elephant. She was annoyingly slim.
‘Hello, Ellen, Simon, children! I’m so pleased to meet you.’ said Natalia. Oh God, she was foreign. Daddy had finally gone and done it once and for all. His new wife was far younger than him, gorgeous and foreign. He had got himself a mail-order bride! Oh, Daddy!
‘Sit next to me, Ellen,’ said Natalia politely, as I tried to surreptitiously text Jessica with the news.
Jane eyed Natalia beadily. ‘I like your eyeliner,’ she said. ‘Mummy can’t do flicky eyeliner like that, you know.’
‘Oh,’ said Natalia. ‘Thank you.’
‘You could have a YouTube channel giving make-up tips,’ said Jane. ‘With eyeliner like that, I bet you’d be really good at it. Are you on Instagram?’
‘Errr, yes,’ said a somewhat nonplussed Natalia.
‘Lucky you,’ sighed Jane. ‘I would offer to follow you, but I can’t because Mummy won’t let me have an account. Does that seem fair to you?’ she demanded. ‘Do you think it’s right that I have to wait till I’m thirteen when ALL MY FRIENDS have their own accounts already?’
‘I … I don’t know.’
‘It’s not fair!’ said Jane firmly. ‘It’s very unfair.’
‘Enough, Jane!’ I said. ‘We’ve only just met Natalia. The last thing she wants to hear about is you going on about your lack of a bloody Instagram account!’
‘Well!’ said Jane indignantly. ‘That’s not very nice, is it? I mean, Natalia is my step-granny now, so I thought it only right she knows what you make me go through, how UNFAIR you are. Maybe I will go and live with Natalia and Grandpa, and then we’ll see how you like that!’
Natalia turned pale.
‘Don’t worry, don’t worry, of course she’s not going to come and live with you,’ I assured her. ‘Do you have children?’
‘No!’ said Natalia, and I swear she mouthed the words ‘Thank fuck’ as she looked at Peter, who was now having an argument with Simon about why he needed to order a drink in a plastic bottle so he could demonstrate his prowess at the bottle-flip challenge to his cousins.
‘Can I get you a drink, Madam?’ asked the waiter.
‘A glass of wine,’ I gasped. ‘A LARGE glass of wine!’
‘So, Natalia,’ said Jane. ‘About your YouTube channel. I could help you present it. I have been practising making vlogs, and I really think I am very good at it.’
‘So, Daddy, when did this happen?’ I asked, trying to smile brightly and look like I was totally fine about having a new stepmother the same fucking age as me!
‘Oh, about three weeks ago.’ said Daddy airily.
‘And you didn’t think to invite us?’
‘We didn’t want to wait. We eloped!’ chortled Daddy. Oh holy fuck, I thought. Definitely a mail-order bride! Why? Why does he have to do this? Oh FML, I wonder if he got a pre-nup? What about the remnants of my inheritance? Will it now be squandered on faux leopardskin and hair bleach for Natalia after she shags Daddy (MY DADDY) into an early grave? (In fairness, she had neither bleached hair nor was she wearing leopardskin, but I wasn’t about to let that interfere with my preconceived stereotypes about mail-order brides.)
‘Where are you from, Natalia?’ I enquired.
‘Russia,’ replied Natalia. Ha! See. Definitely mail-order.
Jessica arrived at that moment, and Peter managed to knock over his lemonade as he leapt up to dab enthusiastically at Persephone and Gulliver, while demanding if either of them had a bottle about their person.
‘Dabbing isn’t allowed at our school,’ sniffed Gulliver primly.
‘Auntie Jessica, is that a water bottle in your bag?’ demanded Peter.
Jessica, clearly so stunned by the fact that Natalia was younger than her, absent-mindedly passed a half-empty Evian bottle to Peter, as I shouted ‘NOOOOOO!’
Peter hurled the bottle at the table, sending cutlery, wine glasses and flowers flying.
Simon and I, accustomed to Peter’s attempts at the bottle-flip challenge, had managed to leap clear, but Natalia ended up drenched in my red wine.
‘Well,’ said Simon. ‘Welcome to the family!’
‘I have a new job!’ I said brightly.
Monday, 10 October
The First Day. The most important thing is obviously that I found the toilets, and they are not unisex, so that is a huge weight off my mind. The second thing to note is that I have the wrong sort of shoes. My ballet flats are far too mumsy and I need quirky trainers, stat.
Ed showed me around and introduced me, and I tried to remember everyone’s names. It was all a bit of a blur, but there is definitely an Alan and a James and a Lydia and a Joe, I’m just not sure who is who (well, I know which one is Lydia, obviously), so I will have to work on that over the next few days. There are also some interesting shirts and the aforementioned quirky trainers. I am feeling very let down by Pinterest now, as I was obviously browsing the wrong ‘Cool Work Clothes’ boards.
There is no hotdesking, which I am slightly disappointed by, as I have always quite fancied hotdesking, even though I am not entirely sure of the point of it, as I wasn’t really paying attention in Management WankSpeak 101. I think I am sitting next to Alan. Or it could be James. Ed seems to mainly hide in his office and try to avoid people. I think this is admirable in a boss, and if I am ever important enough to have my own office I wil
l definitely do the same. There are no biscuits in the kitchen, and everyone seems terribly healthy – there was a lot of avocado eaten at lunchtime. The toilets have nice loo roll, though, so I think it could all work out. I can always hide biscuits in my desk, especially if there is no hotdesking for me to forget them and leave them behind.
I am bloody knackered tonight, though, after the scramble to get the kids out the door to breakfast club (and that was with Simon helping. God knows how we’ll manage on the mornings when there is only one of us available to do it), and then the dash home to pick them up, hurl dinner down them and do homework, and actually attempt to have a conversation with them before shooing them into bed at a decent hour.
Tuesday, 11 October
FML. So as if the new job and having to spend all day pretending I am a proper person, not hysterically talking about otters to fill lulls in the conversation and hiding my biscuit-eating under my desk (it is definitely Alan I sit next to. He spent some time this morning explaining to me about ‘bulletproof coffee’ and his clean-eating and cross-fit regime, and sniffed most suspiciously when I rammed in a Mint Club at 11 o’clock. Also, bulletproof coffee sounds like the most disgusting drink I have ever heard of, and that’s even taking into account Simon’s sister, who used to put her husband’s jizz into smoothies), this whole PTA thing is also starting to bite.
Shortly after my Mint Club – while Alan was still complaining he was sure he could smell mint Aeros (fool, Mint Clubs are far superior) – Perfect Lucy Atkinson’s Perfect Mummy sent an extremely detailed series of emails. At that point I was sitting at my desk trying to look as though I was concentrating very hard on something very important so no one would talk to me and I wouldn’t have to make more polite chit-chat with my face aching from smiling constantly so people think I am friendly and approachable, since I don’t have an office to hide in, like Ed, the lucky bastard, who doesn’t even pretend to be friendly and has informed me that there is no need to speak to him unless it is unavoidable and that an email will do perfectly well, which suits me fine. The emails covered the dos and don’ts for all the forthcoming PTA events, and other helpful tips, starting with the sodding Halloween Disco: