by Poppy Dolan
I laugh, with relief and disbelief in equal measure. ‘Why are you sorry? Or have you been secretly writing a blog about your hidden life that I don’t know about? Desperate Dad, Pissed-off Parent…’
Ted snorts through his nose. ‘No. But I’m sorry I wasn’t paying proper attention. For quite a while now, it seems. It’s funny, though, to hear you talk about loneliness into that iPad back there. Because I think, maybe… at times I’ve felt lonely, since we’ve had Cherry.’
‘Really?’ I ask in a small voice.
He waves his hands over his pint. ‘I love her. I never want to go back to a time before she came. She is almost everything to me. But the two of you, you have this crazy-close bond. Right from day one. She only wants you to soothe her to sleep. Only you to feed her, give her a bath. Sometimes I feel like the spare part. I suggest stuff to mix it up, but then feel like I’m just making it worse. For the first few months I felt like’ – he looks up at the ceiling – ‘a bit of a sham of a dad. And… I don’t know, I can’t put this stuff into words that easily… so I think I get why you didn’t tell me how you were feeling.’
A mouthful of cider almost goes down the wrong way. ‘You felt like a sham, too?’
‘All the time. And you just seemed so in sync with Cherry, to know exactly what she needed and have this amazing patience and skill in being her mum. So I figured, if I couldn’t help you with the parenting bit so much, I should be…’ He shrugs. ‘The provider. A few times you sort of said you weren’t sure about going back to work full time. So I set myself this goal.’ He takes a drink. ‘To earn enough, and fast, where you could stay home full time, if you wanted. So…’
‘You started working more, and harder, to get promoted?’
He nods.
‘And I felt you were getting further away by obsessing about work, when really you were doing it to be closer to us.’
Ted looks right into my eyes, creases forming above his cheeks. ‘Yes. But it was a bit of a dickish move, in hindsight. I can’t expect a better bond with the chunk if I’m just not there.’
I cover his hand with mine. ‘Hey. Come on. We’ve both been a couple of dicks.’
A relaxed smile spreads over his whole face.
I swallow. ‘So, what do we do about Hong Kong?’
‘It’s clearly off the table.’
I slap my palm to my forehead. ‘The press stuff ruined it, didn’t it? I knew it! Oh god, I’m sorry. I mean, I really didn’t want to go but I didn’t want you to get fired!’ My voice squeaks at the end.
‘Hey, hey! I didn’t get fired. Actually, they kind of loved the attention. Digital Asset Management doesn’t often make the headlines and they got some good website traffic out of it. I think it gave me’ – he cringes as he does the air quotes with his fingers – ‘“cool points”. But right from when we fell out about the job, it hit me like a punch to the guts that I’d gone in the wrong direction. So I went out there really to see how I could politely turn it down and still work at the company. And maybe speak to HR about a better work–life balance. Reading all your blog posts from my hotel room only made me realise more and more how much had been going on under my nose that I’d missed through living for my emails. So I needed time to sort a few things.’
‘Oh.’ I gulp some more cider.
‘They’ve said they don’t want to lose me. And they’re happy for us to have a trial run at four days a week. I’ll drop some direct reports, which is more than fine by me. But…’ He rips the corner off a beer mat.
‘But?’
‘It obviously means a fifth less money, at the end of the day. So it has to be something we’re both cool about. Holidays won’t be as fancy. You wouldn’t have the option of giving up work completely—’
‘I don’t want that!’ I blurt the words before I’ve even thought them.
Ted frowns. ‘You don’t?’
‘No. No, God, no! I think I said that because I was absolutely bricking it about going back to my old role with my confidence like a damp doily. But I want to work. Some kind of work, at least. I’m not one hundred per cent what kind, but I need to use my brain again and I want to get paid.’
‘Well, that’s a fucking relief.’ Ted puts both hands behind his head.
‘I nearly had a First-Time Mum book deal.’
‘You did?’
‘Well, I had the chance at trying for one, maybe. If I was lucky. Not sure how that will go now.’ I rip an edge off my own beer mat and add it to Ted’s, making a tiny pile. ‘But Sarah came to see me, last Sunday, and just talking about the spin we used to pull made me really miss that part of my life. That part of my brain. I don’t know if going back to the office is the answer, though.’
Ted shuffles his stool round to my side of the table so we’re next to each other. ‘I don’t think we have to sort that now. Shall we just park ourselves here and promise to actually talk like grown-ups from now on, yeah?’ His arm slots easily around my shoulders as he pulls me in. Hugo Boss. Oh, I have missed this.
I shut my eyes and just breathe.
‘Oh, hey, it’s YOU!’ A slightly too-loud voice startles me from what was the best moment of my year.
When my eyes flick open, I see Long Haired Ginger teen, from the pub quiz.
‘Oh, hey,’ I force, as I can feel Ted’s muscles tightening beneath me. As if braced for some other bonkers revelation in the Stevie experience. Had I joined a cult with this guy? Made him Cherry’s legal guardian?
The teen nods, his waterfall of red hair echoing the action. ‘Mummy Pig and the workhouse, yeah?’
Ted mutters, ‘Oh, come on.’
I decide to dredge up a little more of old-school Stevie. I plaster on a mega-watt smile. ‘Great to see you again! But we’re kind of in the middle of something here, so if you could—’
Social niceties, however obvious, do not hold water with an eighteen year old. Ginger Guy pulls up a spare stool without asking and joins us. ‘Saw you online. Man! Look, I shouldn’t ask this but I have this blog – about anime – and I really want to get it off the ground. Do you do any consulting work?’
Just as I’m working up a direct response to close down this extra strand of crazy, Ted clears his throat and chimes in, ‘Maybe. But you couldn’t afford her, mate. She’s national news. She’s First-Time Mum.’
Epilogue
The British weather has given ParentFest a dose of its finest: a morning of elephant-grey skies and showers, so that we all felt crap and like giving up as gazebos and hog roasts were erected in the drizzly damp. But, just as we were on the ropes, a needle of sunshine poked through, followed by another and another until – bam! – we had a warm day perfect for mooching and drinking and relaxing, albeit with a few wet bums from the hay bales and a little bit of mud splattered up the ankles. But that, as Nelle kept reminding us as we took tickets at the entrance gate, only ‘added to the authenticity’.
Ted’s new four-day week gave me the focus and headspace I needed to really help Nelle properly as the festival came together. I even took baby steps in setting up phone interviews with local newspapers as the event’s official PR spokesperson, and thinking more outside the box about getting in touch with food magazines and music ones too, plus some parenting glossies, whose readers would totally get why we were launching a new kind of festival. With some of the PR hitting home, some clever ad placements by Nelle’s company, Will forcing the mum-mums to get on board as local ‘influencers’ at the school gates, we were sold out. And it felt awesome.
I’m not sure ‘awesome’ is quite how Ted would describe his new Cherry Fridays. Possibly ‘awesome’ with a caveat of ‘knackering but also’ or ‘bedtime is’. But he is loving it. He has decided she’s just going to have to get used to him putting her to bed and doing the bath more and more, and he’s going to dig deep and find more patience for her loud protests when she voices her opinion. Opinionated: that’s my girl. He might not always do this less-than-full-time week but for now it has really bro
ught them closer together, and it has loosened the tight feeling around my ribcage that I sometimes felt when he’d go off to work on a Monday morning. I am not in this domestic lark entirely alone any more.
And he’s loved getting behind ParentFest in his own way too, putting Nelle in touch with someone to maximise her search engine optimisation and doing some serious manly bonding with Will over which retail partners to invite to show their wares. Will had called all his favourite suppliers of cookware, artisanal produce and needlessly lush, personalised stationary from his time at Selfridges. Just the kind of thing that slightly sloshed parents happily treat themselves to. The two men also almost bought a time-share in the world’s most overpriced indoor barbecue together, before I shut that nonsense down. And today, on the big day, Ted’s ripping tickets and fixing wristbands alongside me. Cherry is in her ‘eagle’s nest’ as we like to call it – a second-hand baby carrier that gets worn in the backpack position, so she can peer out from over Ted’s shoulder like the imperious overlord she is. She is inspecting every face that passes by our table and is in busybody heaven. She has only been the tiniest bit sick twice down Ted’s back. (I’ve now ripped up a spare muslin to tie around his neck. We are the MacGyvers of parenting.)
When our shift on entrance duty is over, we can start to enjoy the day proper. Ted insisted he didn’t want to drop Cherry in the kids’ enclosure, as safe and secure as it was, because he didn’t want her to miss out, and my chest went fluttery at the words. ‘But,’ he added, ‘next year, when she’ll be walking? I’m shoving her in there with ankle weights.’ It’s so rewarding that our parenting styles are now completely in tune with each other.
I’m looking forward to cutting loose today – there’s been a lot of intense graft from Nelle’s clan to get the day together in such a short time, with Will and I doing our bit to be useful and hopefully not just get in the way. I want to raise a glass with my mates and my family to all that’s got us here. I’ve had a handful of hard stares as families pass through the ticket checkpoint – some people are just never going to change their perception of me as First-Time Mum from what the newspaper put out there. And I have to live with that. The exposure helped make this day a big financial boost for Nelle’s family company and – weirdly, ever so weirdly – it helped Ted and me sort ourselves out. And my mum is apparently dining out on the story over in San Jose. Cheers, Mum. With just 45 minutes left to go before we can venture in towards fancy bratwurst and fruity-smelling beers and a neck rub from the Massage Angels. I can deal with whatever grumps pass my table before then.
Grumps, yes. Perfect blow dries and Von Trap children? Eh, not so much. Chloe and her poster-family are marching towards us. She’s got a half-smile ready to go, so I’m not sure if she’s going to choose blanking me or some snide little dig to make her mark. That’s fine. The acceptance of the mum-mums is no longer an issue. I’m winging it and I’m proud.
Her beefy and equally blond husband stalks past, the children obediently following in his Italian loafer footprints, but Chloe is slower to hand over her batch of tickets. In fact, as I go to take them off her with a poo-eating smile, she doesn’t release them to me.
‘Tickets?’ I say brightly.
‘I just want to say…’ she mumbles, so I have to lean forward, catching a whiff of her expensive botanical shampoo. God, it smells impossibly good. ‘I’ve wanted to say’ – she breaks off eye contact and instead stares at her fancy wellies – ‘I love your blog. It means so much to me. And I should have said that, when all the stuff was going on in the papers, but I didn’t want to meddle…’
My eyes are aching slightly, they are so wide. What?! Empress Queen of the mum-mums read my blog?!
‘You actually…’ she continues, ‘messaged me a few times? BBootsMum? My bluebell boots, you see.’ She lifts one dainty foot and I find myself gawping.
‘But – but – you always seemed like you couldn’t stand me!’ I say, before the PR in me has time to swallow the words back down and smooth everything along.
Her face gives a wince of what looks like genuine pain. ‘Oh god, Terry is always saying I can be such a cold fish. But I get so shy, I never know what to say with new people. I tried talking to you a few times, out and about, and always bottled it. Like at that lovely craft thing, I just got all tongue-tied. At the café, too. And the school mums are always expecting me to turn up looking smart and the kids all matching and sometimes the exhaustion of getting us out of the house all neat and pressed just kills my social energies, you know?’
I can’t help my laugh. But at us both. ‘I do know. I do. Well, BBootsMum, it is so lovely to finally meet you. “IRL.” Come and find me later and we can really talk, yes?’
She smiles sweetly and almost bounds away. I guess Will was right. Not all mum-mums are intrinsically bad.
Man, this would make a good blog post – we’re all for embracing the chaos in our parenting lives but that shouldn’t mean we should judge the glossy, either. They could be having just as crap a day as us, and they have to work in a thirty-minute blow dry in the midst of it. Maybe I’ll draft something next Friday, from my working spot in the local Costa. I’m not posting anything new right now, because I’m actually in talks with a big parenting forum about doing a regular blog through them. The advantage is they manage all the back-end stuff – how the advertising works, plus any troll-like comments – so I can get a steady payment and just let my opinions fly. Sounds good right now. There’s still time for me to think through if or how I’d go back to my day job and I’m not putting myself under pressure to make any huge decisions too soon – rushing into things has not exactly played out well for me in the past. Officially, I need to talk to my bosses when Cherry is about nine months old, so just taking things a few weeks at a time for now is working for us. Any new steps forward are going to be family ones. Maybe we won’t get where we’re going all that fast or efficiently, but we’ll get there together.
Someone squeezes me round the waist. ‘Alright, Stew, I’m letting you off early for good behaviour.’
Nelle’s face is slightly shiny with sun cream and perspiration but happiness is glowing from every pore. She’s actually without her customary sling and wee Joe today – his grandparents have taken him into the kids’ enclosure and are happy sitting in there with a cup of tea, far from ‘the noise’, as they have termed our music selection.
‘Really? Are you sure?’
She folds her arms. ‘Don’t you have a hot date to meet?’
Ted holds up his hand but she pokes him in the ribs so he’s forced to cave. ‘No, actually hot. Like “literary agent hot”.’
‘Mean.’ Ted sticks out his lower lip. It’s actually rather adorable.
I check my phone for the hundredth time this morning. Francesca had said she’d be arriving around about now and I suppose me ripping her ticket like an amateur usherette might not be the most professional image to project. Plus, I could do with quickly sorting my hair in the Portaloos first.
She was brilliant when I got in touch the week after Ted returned, explaining that I needed more time than I originally projected to get the material to her (I had been ever so slightly manically overzealous in promising just a few weeks) because I needed some family time. And I also said I completely understood if the recent coverage had put her off. I think her instant reply was something like, ‘Are you mad?!’ Apparently her publisher mate had been hounding her for any news of my sample since the paper coverage broke and my ‘five minutes of fame’ kicked into gear.
Since then, I have worked on some chapters I’m really happy with – scrap that, I’m damn proud of them – and she’s sent some notes back that all make sense. So she’s coming today so we can meet in person (while her kid goes nuts on the bouncy castle and her other half dives deep into some paella), and make sure we’re the right fit to work together. It feels like a teenage first date and a job interview all in one. So, yes, my palms are like wet wipes right now. But not as hygienic.
Nelle gently shoves me towards the field. ‘Go. Be free, get a book deal. Just dedicate the whole thing to me, yeah?’
I pull her into a massive hug. ‘I do owe it to you,’ I say right in her ear. ‘And Will. And the creep who tracked down my IP address. But he’s not going in the acknowledgments. And Ted and Cherry, too, of course.’ I pull back and tickle the toes of my hefty love as they dangle out of the carrier. Ted smiles down at me. ‘We’re all in this together. That’s the one thing I know for certain.’
Acknowledgements
Thank-you to all at Canelo for supporting me in writing another book that’s very close to my heart. You guys are THE BEST. And biggest thanks to my editor, Louise: attentive, intuitive, wise. I hope I haven’t spoilt anything for you…
I have been so lucky in my life to know and love and learn from some extraordinary mums. Firstly and most importantly, my own. She makes Mary Poppins look like a trainee babysitter. She is all things kind, patient, giving, fun and creative and I only aspire to be the kind of mother she has been to me. (FYI my dad is also a smasher.)
To the very special mum mates who’ve helped me find and keep my sanity again in a post-baby world: Emma D, Sarah, Vicki, Emma S and Vanessa. Thank you for listening to every mad panic and whine, and for reminding me that things look better if you just stop, breathe and laugh about them.
To the bloggers whose honesty gave me strength in my most weepy, self-doubting times with a newborn: The Unmumsy Mum and Like Real Life. You do good work. Please never stop.
The health visitors in this book are very much modelled on the lovely ones I’ve met during my time as a mum and I’ll never forget the time one patient lady really did give me a Penguin biscuit and a safe space to cry without judgement. That meant so much to me then, and still does now.
To the Whisky Soc.: thanks for the memories, and the owls. But, seriously, no more owls. Please.
Thanks to my other half for the child-free weekend hours to write and for being the best dad I could imagine. The biggest stretch for my imagination in writing this book was inventing a husband who didn’t pick up on feelings and talk them through in that moment. Also one who never cooked the dinner or set off the dishwasher. Though Ted’s dumping of shoes and bags and coats is ALL you.