Why Mummy Swears

by Gill Sims

  Our good intentions lasted right up until we were in the pub and actually at the bar, when Hannah pointed out the financial prudence of buying wine by the bottle rather than the glass, and thus we began our inexorable slide down that slippery slope.

  Hannah was hacked off because she is stressing out about wedding plans, with only a month to go, and feels Charlie is not helping enough and her mother is trying to help too much (due to Mrs P discovering Pinterest, I was completely barred from offering any assistance whatsoever, as apparently Hannah could not cope with two people bombarding her with emails filled with adorable wedding favours and quirky table arrangements).

  ‘I mean, I just asked him to choose which shade of pink he thought we should go for in the peonies and he said he didn’t give a fuck,’ wailed Hannah. ‘And meantime, Mummy is on the phone saying she has ordered a glass cutter off Amazon and is going make vases for the tables out of old wine bottles and candlesticks out of gin bottles, and also she’s seen another thing to make lanterns out of those big catering tins of instant coffee and she’s got Marjorie from the old folks home to save her all their coffee tins and she’s having a bash at that. It’s going to look like some sort of alcoholics’ convention in a scrapyard if I let her have her way! How does she even know about Pinterest? Someone must have tipped her off. Usually she doesn’t venture further into the internet than John Lewis and Lakeland.’

  I murmured something non-committal, as it was possibly me who had suggested to Mrs P that she have a little browse on Pinterest for interesting ideas for the wedding.

  Katie was in a huff with Tim because ‘He’s just such an insensitive bastard sometimes, he thinks because he goes out to work while I am at home with the girls that therefore I should be waiting on him hand and foot. He doesn’t realise how much hard work two small children are, and how much time they take up, even with Lily at school. And it’s not like I’m even asking him to do much. I just want a bit of fucking respect.’

  ‘Bastard!’ we shouted. ‘Inconsiderate bastard!’

  ‘Nuvver bottle!’ bellowed Katie.

  Unfortunately, I decided to switch to gin, so when Hannah asked how I was and what was going on with me, instead of a blasé, ‘Oh, you know, not much!’ brushing things under the carpet British comment, I burst into tears.

  ‘Oh my God, Ellen! What’s wrong?’ wailed Sam, patting my shoulder ineffectually.

  I sobbed it all out – Simon sleeping in the spare room, how angry he is at me, how angry I am at him. How I finally feel like I’ve got a job where I am seen as an actual person, instead of as a parent, where people listen to my opinions and no one makes jokes about ‘baby brain’, or insidiously puts me down for being a mother, but how many lies I have told, and how hard it is to keep up with everything, and how, generally, things seemed to have turned to shit and I had no idea how to put things right.

  ‘And don’t tell me just to talk to him,’ I wept. ‘He doesn’t listen. And it’s not that easy. And don’t tell me to just tell everyone at work about the kids either. I don’t want to tell them. Then they’ll just snipe at me like they do with Lydia, and I just want to be a person!’

  ‘You probably have to talk to someone at some point, though?’ volunteered Katie. ‘You can’t just pretend none of this is happening.’

  ‘Of course I can,’ I sniffed. ‘I’m British!’

  ‘Even so,’ said Hannah. ‘This is all a bit fucked up, sweetie. You need to sort it out. Simon loves you, I know he does. You’re just having a bit of a rough patch.’

  ‘But there are so many rough patches. Marriage seems to be just trying to remind myself why I married him in the first place. It shouldn’t be this hard!’

  ‘It is, though,’ said Hannah wisely. ‘But do you remember why you married him? And do you still love him?’

  ‘I think so. But I don’t know if he loves me anymore!’

  JUNE

  Thursday, 1 June

  Strawberries and cream-gate rumbles on. Or rather it doesn’t, as exasperated by all the lazy fuckers with their pathetic excuses about why they couldn’t possibly help, I sent a curt email round this morning announcing that it would be cancelled due to a lack of volunteers. I can’t do everything, and something has to give, and in the grand scheme of things the PTA was the least of my worries. Also, I failed to see why Sam and I should miss Jane and Sophie’s last Sports Day and Katie should miss Lily’s first Sports Day while we slaved serving up strawberries and cream to a bunch of idle arseholes to raise money for their children. So I said, ‘Enough! No more! Stick your strawberries and cream where the sun doesn’t shine!’ (Also, I must confess, given the whole PTA sex parties thing, I did wonder if any event that featured whipped cream so heavily was entirely sending the right message.)

  As soon as I had sent the email, pingpingpingping went my inbox! A combination of handwringing regret from parents that had received the cancellation email, but apparently had not received the preceding eleventy billion emails pleading for help, because of course they would have volunteered had they only known, and angry parents complaining that they felt I was very unreasonable not to simply run the whole thing myself, as they were looking forward to their strawberries and cream and now Sports Day was spoiled. I ignored the lot of them. It felt marvellous. I was beginning to suspect that Fiona Montague and Lucy Atkinson’s Mummy had been so attached to their clipboard when they were PTAing because they could use them as potential weapons to beat people around the head with, and not because they were just über-efficient.

  Friday, 2 June – Sports Day

  After binning off the PTA, and making increasingly spurious excuses (a funeral – I must keep note of what aging relations I have killed off so I don’t repeat myself) and fobbing off Lydia’s increasingly suspicious questions (FUCKING Kiki, and her endless bombardment of messages) so I could be there to give Jane my full and undivided attention, cheering her on, making more of those #happymemories, I turned up at Sports Day and merrily cried, ‘Hello, darling, I’ve come for your last Sports Day!’

  Jane just grumbled, ‘I dunno why. I hate Sports Day. Sports Day is stupid and boring! Don’t do anything embarrassing now you’re here. In fact, why don’t you just go and watch Peter and pretend you’re nothing to do with me? I wish Juliette was here, she was cool!’

  FFS! And after all the trouble I went to be there for her. RUDE!

  Saturday, 10 June

  I was bidden to lunch with Jessica and Natalia today (one doesn’t get invited to lunch by Jessica, one is simply told where and when you are expected. It never seems to occur to her that people might have other plans. As far as she is concerned, if she has decided she wants to see you, she will see you).

  I realised over lunch that I’d never actually managed to hold an entire conversation with Natalia before, one or the other of my precious moppets always intervening to witter utter shite at the poor woman or hurl some or other sticky substance over expensive-looking items of her clothing. I remarked on this, and she smiled wryly.

  ‘Yes, I know!’ she said. ‘That’s why I thought it might be nice for us to have lunch without the children …’

  ‘My children are perfectly civilised,’ sniffed Jessica. ‘In fact, did I tell you that Persephone has passed her Grade Eight piano with distinction and Gulliver is entering the National Poetry Competition? Not a children’s competition, the actual National Poetry Competition, and everyone says he has a very good chance of winning!’

  I did know all of this, because Mum likes to phone me once a week and tell me how much better everyone else’s lives are than mine – ‘And Cathy Evans’s daughter has just got her second PhD, and Tom, you know, Tom Henderson, sweetie, yes, you do know Tom Henderson, Eleanor Henderson’s younger boy, no, darling, I’m sure you are thinking of someone else, of course he didn’t have sweaty palms or wandering hands, anyway Tom has just got a marvellous promotion and he’s bought an Aston Martin, and Felicity Moore’s granddaughter is off to Oxford! And what about dear Peter an
d Jane? Have they stopped biting yet? Of course, Persephone is doing awfully well, isn’t she!’

  We chatted politely about this and that, Jessica boasted some more about her perfect children, I contented myself with thinking that my darlings might not be child prodigies but at least they had the emotional resilience not to have a complete breakdown at the revelation that Santa Claus did not exist, and also they had a sense of humour (a fairly fucked-up, dark sense of humour), which was more than the sainted Persephone and Gulliver had, and Natalia made vaguely interested noises, but I suspected she was as bored as I was by Jessica’s gushings, especially when she interrupted Jessica holding forth on Gulliver’s really quite groundbreaking use of iambic pentameter to suggest another bottle of wine. I warmed to Natalia.

  By the time Natalia ordered a third bottle of wine (why had I had reservations about this nice lady? Why? It was now astonishingly clear that she was a very kindred spirit) and even Jessica was looking a little glazed, having exceeded her usual two-glass limit, I found my tongue was somewhat loosened when Natalia asked me how work was going and I confessed I might have done a bit of a Bad Thing.

  After a rather garbled explanation (‘Who is Lydia? Why does Alan hate children? Which one is James?’), I finally managed to get through to them exactly the pickle I was now in.

  Jessica was as sympathetic as one would expect. ‘For God’s sake, Ellen. Do you purposely go about trying to fuck things up and make your life more complicated? Why on earth would you do something like that?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to. I certainly didn’t mean it to get so out of hand. I just wanted people to look at me as something more than a fucking mother, to see that I was still a person, that having children didn’t mean that I could no longer function as an adult –’

  ‘Well, you’re not exactly selling your ability to “function as an adult”, are you, embroiling yourself in a ridiculous web of lies,’ said Jessica tartly.

  ‘Shut up, Jessica! I just wanted them to see that I could do my job perfectly well, before they all started chuntering about me taking time off for the kids’ stuff. They never stop moaning about poor Lydia, and she probably actually works harder than the rest of them, but because they see her as a mother first, they assume she is not pulling her weight and is putting her family first, and I was tired of that, I just wanted to be more than a mother. Is that so wrong?’

  ‘But you are a mother,’ objected Jessica.

  ‘I know I’m a mother! I know! But why does that then have to impact on every single part of my life? As long as I get the job done, it shouldn’t matter at work, but it does! And no one makes the same jibes about fathers, bloody James and Joe and Ed, and fucking Simon and Neil don’t get treated differently because they’re fathers, do they? It’s only women who do, and I was sick of it, and I just wanted to get away from it all for a bit. And now it has all got a little out of hand.’

  ‘She’s right,’ said Natalia. ‘Mothers are treated differently to fathers. I see it all the time. It’s part of the reason I decided I didn’t want children. Women are passed over for promotion or managed out of the door – it’s not right, I don’t condone it, but there’s no point pretending it doesn’t happen.’

  ‘It doesn’t happen to me!’ said Jessica indignantly.

  ‘Then,’ said Natalia, ‘you are either one of the very lucky ones, or you choose not to see it happening to you. Because Ellen is quite right, it does happen. I’m not saying that lying about having children is the answer, obviously, but I can see why Ellen would feel like that. I mean, I didn’t want children anyway. I am not maternal – they are sticky and often smell, and I don’t like sticky, smelly things – but I also didn’t want that change in how society would treat me, I didn’t want to become that second-class citizen. I shouldn’t have had to consider that, but I did, and it’s still the case. Women are treated differently and men aren’t when they become parents. It’s shit. And unfortunately, it’s not even just the men who perpetuate it. Women in senior positions are often as bad, and the media feeds it too – certain tabloids are very keen on publishing articles by female columnists ranting about how working mothers do nothing but order their food shopping online and go home early.’

  ‘So what do I do?’ I said plaintively.

  ‘I think you will have to come clean,’ said Natalia. ‘You haven’t technically done anything wrong, especially if, as you say, your boss knows you do have children. Really, it is no different to people pretending they had a marvellous weekend and shagged a supermodel when in reality they sat at home in their pants, masturbating.’

  ‘Eurgh,’ I said, at the image of my colleagues that that put in my head.

  ‘Also,’ said Natalia, who was annoyingly wise despite the three bottles of wine, ‘it’s not very fair on this Lydia, is it? You letting her take all the heat for being the only mother in the office, while you are doing exactly the same thing as her, only under the cover of a web of quite unnecessarily complex lies.’

  ‘I know, I know. But what will I say? What about my idea that I have adopted some orphans?’

  ‘I don’t think more lies are going to be the answer,’ said Natalia gently. ‘Just tell them the truth.’

  The truth. Can I tell them the truth after all the lies I have spun? Maybe I should just look for another job. But I love my job. I don’t want another job. Oh fuck my life, what have I done?

  I couldn’t quite face telling them that I thought Simon might be on the point of leaving me as well, because Jessica might actually have spontaneously combusted with joy at yet another opportunity to tell me how I had fucked my life up, and how much better she would have managed it all.

  Friday, 16 June

  Today, I think it is safe to say, was one of those days when every time you think it can’t get any worse, it does.

  It started as a fabulous day. We had completed another big project and had brought it in bang on deadline, to the client’s delight. Everyone had that almost end-of-term feeling, of a massive weight being lifted from our shoulders. Ed even attempted a high five with James, before coming to himself and retreating to his office. There were grand plans for a massive piss-up after work, which I was rather looking forward to as an opportunity to just forget all the shit at home for a few hours, and everything was quite, quite splendid, right up until about 4.30 p.m., when Lydia told us that she wouldn’t be able to come for drinks because her nanny had just called to say she needed to go home early, because the nanny wasn’t feeling well, and also that she wouldn’t be in until lunchtime on Monday, because she was going to her children’s Sports Day. James and Alan sighed rather, and tutted, and Alan made his usual martyred request for some piece of unimportant information from Lydia that he could not continue life without.

  When Lydia said she had already emailed Alan everything he needed, he snarled, ‘Well, thank you so much, Lydia. I suppose I should be grateful you can occasionally take the time to do your job in between all your little jaunts. It’s really very kind of you. I hope it didn’t distract you from the really important stuff, like making cupcakes for the bake sale.’

  ‘What do you mean, Alan?’ asked Lydia quietly.

  ‘Oh, I just mean, we’d all love to play the motherhood card and swan off early and come in late because our children are so much more important than our little job.’

  ‘Don’t be a dick, Alan!’ I said. ‘It’s hot, we’re all wanting to bugger off to the pub, but we can’t go yet. Don’t take it out on Lydia!’

  ‘I’m not being a dick,’ said Alan crossly. ‘I’m just pointing something out. We have to pick up Lydia’s slack while she’s playing happy families, that’s all I’m saying. Doesn’t it piss you off, Ellen?’

  ‘What slack?’ said Lydia furiously. ‘Tell me, please, exactly what slack you have to pick up for me? I get everything done, and more, I have never once been late for a project deadline, which is more than you can say. Sometimes, yes, I don’t get it all done in the office, sometimes I go home and put my
kids to bed and then work to midnight so I can get it all done, because it is the twenty-first fucking century and technology lets us do that. We don’t have to be chained to the office from nine to five to achieve things, and I am sick of you lot whispering behind my back and implying I am somehow not up to the job. I have not taken one single hour off more than I am entitled to, I allocate my fucking annual leave extremely carefully so I can still be there for my children, and Ellen is right, you are being a dick!’

  ‘How am I being a dick?’ said Alan in outrage. ‘How? I was just pointing out that it must be nice to just piss off whenever you like. I don’t see that that’s being a dick. I’d love to do what you do, that’s all I’m saying!’

  ‘What I do?’ said Lydia. ‘What, basically work twenty-four hours a day?’

  ‘Well,’ said Alan primly, ‘no one made you have children. Why did you bother if you find it so hard?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Alan,’ I said. ‘Give her a break!’

  ‘Give her a BREAK?’ said Alan indignantly. ‘And who gives us a break? People like Ellen and me?’

  ‘I don’t think we really need a break. I mean, Lydia works really hard!’ I put in quickly.

  ‘Well, I certainly don’t think Ellen needs a break,’ said Lydia nastily. ‘She’s had plenty of afternoons off at the “dentist” and for her “women’s troubles”, and you’ve never given her the same grief. And no one has said a word about the time she’s spending in work on PTA emails and messages about Sports Days.’

  ‘Eh?’ said Alan. ‘Why would you be doing that?’ he said to me.

  ‘It’s for HER kids!’ said Lydia triumphantly. ‘I was talking to Gabrielle from HR, and she asked me how we were getting on, with both of us trying to juggle work and family. Ellen has two children and a husband.’