STEPHANIE CALMAN
M A C M I L L A N
First published 2005 by Macmillan
This electronic edition published 2008 by Pan Books
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Copyright © Stephanie Calman 2005
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This book is rated `PG’
Having children is a bit like assembling a shelf unit from a flatpack: you start off looking at the picture, sure you can do it perfectly. Then you get all the bits out and realize it’s a bit more complicated than you thought. You start in with the screws and dowels, and quite soon you’re overwhelmed. Getting tireder and more confused, you succumb to anxiety, anger and then panic. Finally, you shove it together, hide the bits you’ve left out, and just hope it doesn’t collapse when there’s anyone nearby.
This book is not a manual.
Contents
Prologue
1 Mother’s Block
2 The Thin Blue Line
3 Babies Do Come Out of Mummy’s Tummy
4 How Many Breastfeeding Women Does It Take to Change a Lightbulb?
5 Chain Gang
6 Baby à la Carte
7 I Give My Baby Away
8 Two’s a Crowd
9 Unfaithful to Lawrence
10 The Swingometer
11 I Do Something Right
12 To A&E by Double Buggy
13 Oi-U and Non Oi-U
14 Sex with Thomas the Tank Engine (& Friends)
15 The Worst Mother in the World
16 I Am Not Alone
17 Just Press ‘Start’
18 The Cheeseless Tunnel: Why Parents Are Stupider Than Rats
19 A Little Light Bedtime Reading
20 Don’t Say Butt, Say Bum
21 Stabbed and Picked On
22 Sex in the Ad Break of Friends
23 Party Bag
24 Nature v Nurture: Pink Blizzards and the Great Escape
25 0800: How’s My Mothering?
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Mark Lucas, who steered me to George Morley, whose notes made me laugh.
You can’t make a baby alone, even these days. And as the whole point of Bad Mothers Club is to ease the load, I would like to express my deep and lasting appreciation to those who did it for me:
Marie Thomas
Liz Irwin
Deborah Phillips
Anthony Silverstone
Dr Anne Szarewski
Dr Sarah Tunkel & Dr Penny Noble at the Fetal Medicine Centre
Tammy Whyte
Alison Salmon
Tilly Vosburgh
Claudia Stumpfl
Maggie Hamand
Angela Roche
Rose Prince
Nicholas Faith
Ruby Azhar
Katherine Shonfield
Joan Maker
Jessica Chappell
Joe Moran
Sally Craddock
Mary Banham
Pat O’Shea
Dr Edward Douek
Katarina
Wendy
Clare Tompkins
Nicky Oldfield
University College Hospital Neo-Natal Unit
Margaret Pyke Centre
Lucy Lindsay
Betsy Tobin
Amanda Brown
Judith Apter
Vida Adamoli
Sarah Litvinoff
Dr Dora Waitt
Anne O’Donovan, the original ‘BM’
Jay Murphy, who helped show the way
For www.badmothersclub.com:
Sam Blagg
Jay Nagley
Toni Morden
Becky Hill
Tony Slack
Kathryn Lamb
Jo Hage
Julia Porter
My mother, Pat McNeill, who said: ‘Actually, I think you’re doing really well.’
My sister, Claire Calman, who said – on more than one occasion: ‘Would you like me to come round…?’
And…
My husband, Peter Grimsdale, who said: ‘It’ll be fine.’ And – it hurts me to say this – he was right.
Prologue
We’re in a pub in the West Country and Lydia has no chips. Lawrence’s scampi has arrived with plenty, her fishcake with none. I know he can’t possibly finish that huge pile, and I hate waste.
‘Lawrence, can you give Lydia some of your chips?’
‘No! Why should I?’
‘Because she hasn’t got any, and you’ve got loads.’
‘It’s not fair!’
Peter and I start to turn into badly dramatized versions of my parents.
‘Why don’t we just get some more chips?’ (my father).
‘Because he’s got loads already, and is going to fill up on those and not eat his scampi as it is!’ (my mother)
Being a female, I am engaged in the pointless process of distinguishing one fat-soaked component of the meal from another, to create a fictional nutritional hierarchy. Even as the meal degenerates into chaos, I notice that when it comes to the differences between the sexes, this is Confessions of a Bad Mother one of the most intriguing. Women use even the most rudimentary knowledge of food chemistry to at least attempt to care for their families by regulating their diets, whereas men tend to throw themselves down whichever route leads – they think – to an easy life. But the tactic that lends peace to the dinner table now, is often the cause of trouble later – of the ‘Daddy always lets us have chips’ variety – frequently when Daddy is not around. This is called writing cheques your wife has to cash, and is one of the reasons women often want to hit their husbands with pans.
‘Well, none of us can come up to your exacting standards,’ says Peter, leaving the relatively constricting field of my parenting deficiencies for the wide-open prairie of my failed personality in general.
I ask my daughter: ‘Lydia, would you like some of my potato instead?’
‘No!’
‘Lawrence, give Lydia some of your chips.’
‘NO!!’
‘Right …’ I say this decisively, but fail to back it up with any kind of action, or even the rest of the sentence. Peter is now refusing to be either of my parents, and has cast himself as The Reasonable One.
‘Can’t we just have our meal?’ he moans desperately, the innocent Red Cross worker caught between warring rebel factions.
This makes me want to punch him really hard.
‘If you won�
�t give Lydia any of your chips, you’re not having any pudding.’
‘Da-ddy …!’
‘This is ridiculous.’
I take five of Lawrence’s chips and put them on Lydia’s plate.
‘Thank you, Mummy,’ says Lydia in her lion-cub voice.
‘She took my chips!’
‘Well done,’ says Peter. ‘Happy now?’
‘I’ll tell you what’d be great. If you’d just once back me up.’
‘I’ll never be able to do what you want, that’s pretty clear.’
‘You shit …’
‘Mummy said shit!’
‘Daddy! Mummy said s-h-one-t!’
‘Brilliant!’ says Peter. ‘Well done.’
I want to hit him, and get out of this awful place with its purple carpet and pathetic attempt to be a brasserie by putting a copy of the Mail on Sunday on the bar. I want to scream at him, push him through the window and go back to the junction where I left my life, the manageable one. And even if it wasn’t always manageable, it didn’t keep suddenly getting away from me like this. I should never have become a parent. It’s impossible. In the magazines, parenting looks like a cruise. When you get there, it’s a tiny rowing boat, in a storm. And some bastard’s not put in any oars.
1 Mother’s Block
I wasn’t going to have children. I was too frightened to have them, and I was sure I was physically and emotionally incapable of looking after them. Following the terrifying assault of birth, it would be one long, ever-repeating loop between the A&E department and the washing machine. And anyway, I wasn’t the Maternal Type.
Whatever I was, it didn’t appear to be a Type. I loved cartoons and comic strips, children’s books and toys. I still had my Sindy, and her BOAC flight bag, on the shelf beside my desk. And I was intensely nostalgic about childhood games, especially ‘Orphanages’, when my sister and I placed our dolls in far corners of the flat, often with an arm or leg sticking out to indicate injury, then went round rescuing them with our pram. We often turned the bedroom into a dormitory, and by the age of about ten I was fantasizing in vivid detail about finding an abandoned baby in a phone box, which I would bring up to universal acclaim.
I loved the idea of fostering, adoption and rescue; it was just actual babies I didn’t like. As a child I hated them coming round to play, resented the attention they got from my mother, and was infuriated by the implicit order of precedence that meant they were allowed to mess up my toys. As I got older, with the need for ready cash, I’d take any job so long as it didn’t involve children. In my entire adolescence I babysat once, and that ended with the children playing football in the kitchen and my calling the seven year old a racist. (Well, he was.)
Yet, as I grew up, I failed to acquire the necessary credentials to qualify as a proper child-hater. I lived in a swamp of magazines, books and clothes. My home contained no porcelain lampstands, white carpets or thin, wobbly vases perched on stands. My surfaces weren’t concrete or glass or slate. I failed art O level with the lowest grade possible and didn’t even want to do architecture, interior design or any of the professions traditionally associated with extreme neatness. Anally, I just wasn’t retentive enough.
I wanted to want children; I didn’t enjoy feeling abnormal. I longed to join in, to see what all the fuss was about. I wanted to ‘get it’. I had nurturing impulses, but they were all towards adults. I’d go to a meeting with a magazine editor, and end up addressing her relationship issues. I could stand at a bus stop while old people had a good moan to me about the Poll Tax, the dangers of loose paving stones or the rising cost of tinned salmon. Some people did aerobics for a hobby, or collected models of old buses. I had listening. I felt all warm and open, letting the shoals of problems wash over me. But uterine stirrings there were none. Maybe I just wasn’t ready. One of these days I was bound to become the Maternal Type. I just had to be patient.
Nothing happened. I had relationships, as you do. I got involved with a very decent man who wanted us to marry and have a child. But we weren’t right together. Meanwhile, without meaning to, I started drifting towards the children’s departments of shops. In Marks & Spencer, I would slow down on the way to the food or cosmetics, and linger by the tiny, little socks. Then, when I thought no one was looking, I’d hold them, still on the rails, and cry.
I knew I was trespassing. I must have looked like those men in the lingerie department who don’t quite seem to be shopping for their wives. After all, these were not the actions of an infertile woman, prevented from receiving the Greatest Gift of All by a curse of nature; the only thing stopping me from getting pregnant, was – as far as I knew – myself.
Then at twenty-seven I was diagnosed with polycystic ovaries, a well-known cause of infertility and in my case, something conveniently medical to hide behind. At least now I needn’t mention my abnormal lack of maternal instinct. I could plead Biology. But the chances of any man in my life wanting to have children – if I did meet one I could stick with – were likely to increase with age. And even if he didn’t want to, I would be supposed to start pressing for it. Any year now, wasn’t panic supposed to set in? I would stand out even more as a freak.
One by one, my friends crossed the Great Divide. My friends’ babies didn’t mind me, and were even rather cute. But they didn’t make me gasp inwardly, as I had at the Ferrari Museum: ‘Dear God, Please, please, PLEASE let me have that 1964 Dino 246, I’ll never ask for anything ever again, EVER!!’ And I didn’t have to be removed from a baby by security guards for holding on too long and stroking its beautiful bonnet.
I passed my thirtieth birthday and saw Youth rolling away from me, as if down a hill. My father died. By now, I was surely supposed to feel something. As my friends’ babies got bigger and began to move around the room unaided, it got worse. I knew I should be asking questions, but what? Was it about their food? Their pooh? When was the right moment to ask, ‘And is he walking yet?’ But if you were sitting there in the same room as them, having coffee, it was bloody obvious! ‘Does he – er, enjoy crawling?’ Was that it? It was worse than being abroad. When I went to China, I spoke no Mandarin, but had something in common with the giggling girls who approached me in the street; a mutual desire to connect. But on my home planet, I was an alien. Out with my friends for the evening, away from the visual cues, I kept off the subject, knowing I’d get it wrong.
Birth stories, oddly enough, I could listen to. They were a bit like really bad holidays, hilarious in their awfulness after the event, or car accidents; being squeamish has never stopped me from slowing down to look.
But I didn’t want to give up my career – or what passed for one. I pottered along, writing articles and not making much money. It may not have been much of a career, but it was mine. My parents had friends who had become mothers and also worked, mainly by not doing the housework for thirty years. That I could sign up to. But I had trouble enough getting down to work as it was, and was sure children would ruin what little focus I had. And when I visited homes with small children, the constant interruptions meant a ten-minute anecdote could take an hour, because every five minutes a two year old would force the conversation to a halt. ‘Mummeee!’ And not even for anything important! ‘I want a biscuit!’ What, now? Couldn’t they wait? Then I’d reboot myself, and it would happen again. And again. And again. I was at a loss to comprehend the inability of small children to be self-sufficient for more than thirty seconds at a time. Couldn’t they just go away? And the mothers not only tolerated these outrages, but seemed not to mind! How could they let themselves be annexed by these tiny invaders, without even putting up a fight? Did they lose the will to be separate, to exist in their own right? It was as if they no longer had an outline, just a blur where their boundaries used to be.
And evenings weren’t even sacred. I went to dinner at Rob and Cecily’s. They both worked long hours and would, you’d think, have enjoyed some time together at the end of the day. There was another coup
le there I knew, Alex and Tim. I never thought it was possible to feel so much solidarity with gay men. We all sat with frozen smiles as six-year-old Hannah ran round and round, bashing the furniture and shouting. Rob and Cecily kept throwing each other nervous glances, as if waiting for the real parents to come in. Or did they believe some mysterious form of anti-gravity would magically waft her upstairs? Eight o’clock passed, and nine. ‘Invited’ to go to bed, she returned with all her bedding, which she dumped on the floor. By ten she was literally hurling herself against the walls. When she was finally carted off, Rob said: ‘If you think that’s bad, you should see her brother.’
I made a mental note to come back in ten years, the great benefit of teenagers being that they never want to be with the grown-ups.
Then I met Peter, and we were compatible in one major respect: our fear of being impulsive. We had lunch, then two years later, dinner. It was about the right pace – if you couldn’t hear your biological clock.
But I still couldn’t come down firmly against motherhood. I had a double fear: fear of having children and fear of not having them. What if I got to fifty and felt bereft? That might be even worse! Maybe it was like skiing: if so many people were that keen, there must be something in it.
I decided to do some research. I was used to becoming an instant expert on subjects I had no previous knowledge of, so I’d just take the same approach. Researching was like revising for an exam; you spewed all the information into the article and for a very short period became an expert. My sister Claire, who worked for Best magazine, could remember everything she’d ever edited or written about: wine, Norway, mohair … You could dial her up and say: ‘What’s that chemical in chocolate that makes you feel lovely?’ And she’d answer straight away: ‘Phenylethylamine.’
Could this work with motherhood? Did people investigate all the cots, drinking cups and bouncy walkers and by the time they gave birth, be somehow – qualified? If I began the research, would it lessen my anxiety and confusion? I didn’t know, but there were two clear advantages. If I did decide to have kids, I’d at least know more than I knew now. And if I didn’t, I’d have made my decision on an informed basis. Either way, it would give me the illusion of control, which always helps. When dealing with an issue completely driven by hormones and emotions, what better strategy than to try and blind yourself with science? I would follow the advice I’d got on a screenwriting course: when plagued by writer’s block, go out and do research. There was no reason why it shouldn’t work for mother’s block as well.
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