Confessions of a Bad Mother

by Stephanie Calman

  But all that was, of course, only a way of avoiding looking at the really scary part. Although the actual birth counts for a very brief part of one’s life, there was the most enormous emphasis on it – and not just from me. People gathered eagerly to tell me stories of pre-eclampsia, epidurals that worked only on one side, or too late, or not at all, thirty-six-hour labours that ended in emergency Caesareans, and postnatal incontinence. A friend of a friend was stitched up so badly that her sex life was finished. Another tore nearly all the way round so she thought she was going to rip in half. ‘I knew it wasn’t going well,’ she said, ‘when the consultant called, “Hey everybody – come and look at THIS!”’ And there were triumphant natural ones, marvellous events in baths that were all over in time for Newsnight. But I knew there was no way of my achieving that. As someone who cried at a smear test, I knew it was an impossibility. And anyway, there was the loss of dignity. I just couldn’t see what was beautiful and moving about expelling a live creature – covered in blood and slime – from the most private part of you. And in front of other people! Were they really asking me to believe that I could withstand an entirely new person springing out of my body? I mean, I’d seen something similar in Alien, and it looked like a hell of a way to spend a Friday night. So what if I knew all these people who’d done it? I knew someone who’d gone down the Amazon with hallucinating, axe-wielding Yanomami Indians and I didn’t want to do that either.

  In any case, whatever the method of delivery, I had a problem with the very concept of conception itself. To me this too lacked credibility. To start with, two cells being the start of a wholly unique individual was frankly stretching it. Two cells. Asexual reproduction made far more sense. Take the hydra, from third year biology. A dull green plant that didn’t get out much, it would get so far in life, then grow a baby hydra on the side of its body. The baby then detached itself and went off to live an independent life as a totally separate, dull green plant. That I could relate to. It didn’t need weaning or nurturing, or any of that. It didn’t have to split the mummy hydra half open to get out, and there was nothing in the book about the mummy hydra missing its freedom and getting depressed.

  Still, I carried on gathering intelligence, even if it was almost entirely useless. I felt like an impostor, trying to choose a religion when I didn’t even believe in God. But it was something to do. It felt objective and practical. If I woke up one morning feeling maternal, I’d have all the information at my fingertips. Or wherever. Maybe it was like becoming a priest; the Call could come at any time.

  Sometimes, when you can’t decide about something, Life decides for you. While visiting friends in Australia, Peter and I were in a car accident. When we came back, I was too feeble to manage on my own so the decision to move in together was made for us. We both mitigated our fear of commitment by pretending it was temporary.

  ‘Just until I get stronger.’

  ‘Of course, of course.’

  ‘I won’t bring too much stuff.’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Just my computer.’

  ‘You’ve got to work.’

  ‘And a few clothes and books. And maybe my mixer.’

  ‘Mixer?’

  ‘In case I feel like doing any baking.’

  The domestic suffocation I’d been avoiding turned out to be a mirage. My God, I thought, as we lay on the sofa eating chocolate and watching Thunderbirds: I’ve been running away from this? My logic, that if I didn’t live with someone they couldn’t leave me, was possibly a teensy bit flawed. On that basis, you’d never eat a nice meal or watch a sunset or go to a film because at some point it had to end. Life has to end, you jerk! Don’t you think you’ve wasted enough of it already?

  Then we went to see some friends who’d just had a baby. They lived in a teeny-weeny house opposite a glue factory; you bumped your head on everything, and there was this smell. While they were opening the wine, the moment came when they said – as people do – ‘Would you like to hold him?’

  And I thought: No, because when I hold babies they always cry. But Peter stepped forward and took him with great confidence, and smiled at him and put him upright against his shoulder, and he stopped crying and went all relaxed and sweet.

  ‘Aren’t you lovely?’ he said to it. I didn’t say anything. I thought of saying, ‘How do you know what to do?’ or, ‘If you could be the woman and I could be the man, we might be able to sort something out,’ but instead I just stood there trying to look normal.

  I liked the way he looked holding the baby, but when I tried to imagine us with another person – someone who didn’t exist yet – it was beyond me.

  I mean, how was it decided what sort of child you would have? DNA, yes yes, but I only had to look at my own parents to see that could go wrong. If DNA was logical, I’d be tall, poetic and intellectual like my mother, instead of short, hairy-legged and moody like my dad. What if we had a child and didn’t – relate to it? I’d read about normal, average couples who mysteriously produced maths geniuses. What if we had a lawyer? Or imagine a child who liked football – all mud, crowds and shouting – or worse, cricket? Quieter crowds and less mud, perhaps, but totally incomprehensible. We couldn’t spend fifteen years in the pavilion.

  The only children I had to go on were the ones I’d already met, and they hadn’t so far engendered waves of maternal joy so much as the desire to be somewhere tidier and quieter. I had no sense of giving rise to a fresh being, a unique individual. I didn’t see them as anything to do with me – or their perfectly normal father-in-waiting. I sort of imagined you picked them out from what was already there, like those sofa shops where they have a set choice of fabrics and styles: ‘I suppose I’ll have the loud, snotty one in the pink and white.’

  I had no wish to pick them up, or wipe their noses or, God forbid, look after them for any length of time. If their parents left the room for two seconds, I panicked. The command I most dreaded after, ‘Pop your things off and open your knees,’ was, ‘I can hear the baby crying; can you just finish giving x his lunch?’

  So when I tried to imagine my own, I was sure I’d feel the same way. What could possibly motivate me to pick up a spoon and go near any of that stuff ? The stickiness, the sliminess of it, made me want to gag. Anyhow, as I wouldn’t know how to get on with the actual child in the first place, I was doomed. I should just give up and Get on with My Life.

  Then, one night, Peter took me to meet an Italian couple he knew. Their house was festooned with ornaments, pictures in curly, gold frames and tiny tables with just one thing on them. Very unchild-friendly.

  We were introduced to Ilaria, their two-year-old daughter, and as she opened her mouth and said: ‘Ciao, Stephanie!’ my insides turned to mush.

  There was charisma, even star quality, as if Elizabeth Taylor had come into the room. She was more gorgeous than the Ferrari Dino! I couldn’t look away.

  We put on our coats and went for a pizza. It was evening, and there were no other children there. Ilaria sat down, ate her Margarita and – here was where I lost all restraint in my admiration – drank out of a glass. I gazed helplessly at her until it was time to leave.

  All I could think, all the way home, was: How can I get one of those?

  Clearly, there was a problem. Though I may look and sound as though I could be from Italy, I’ve never even lived there. Therefore having Italian children would have meant probably moving there or at least sleeping with an Italian man, which would have confused the issue – literally, since Peter was a half-Welsh Yorkshireman. Should I dump him and go on a mission to Rome? A bad idea, as I had a dodgy track record in this area. This dated back to a school trip to Pompeii, when I attempted to have sex in a Fiat. It was a Cinquecento – tiny even by Italian standards – and the guy was tall; for us to engage conclusively would have meant his legs sticking out the window, which might have caught the attention of the Latin teachers. So even though I had nothing actually against Italian men – and
loved their cars, even the small ones – I knew the case for geographical engineering was weak. And even if it hadn’t been, I just didn’t see myself moving to a country where they served meat without vegetables and changed governments once a week.

  But there was yet another obstacle. Even if I could find a way of having an Italian child in Britain, with a half-Welsh Yorkshireman, I didn’t like the accessories. Being marketed very efficiently, the props were high profile. If you didn’t ski, there was no reason to know what ski-sticks looked like. But baby gear you couldn’t avoid. Even if the nearest you got to children was getting a lift back from a party in someone else’s car, you’d never forget how long it took them to unhook the special seats.

  ‘Hang on a sec, I’ll just do the back for you … Nigel, could you grab the thing, and pull it down? I can’t reach.’

  ‘Just unclip the thing under the other thing.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘No, no, the other thing—’

  ‘Ow!’

  It was easier to reconfigure the interior of a 747. And because of their ubiquity, I was convinced that you had to order children with certain things, as from a set menu. And they were all things I didn’t like, for example puppet shows, and clowns, and teddy wallpaper, and group singing, particularly with clapping, and birthday napkins with smiley faces on them, and those slimy party bags that feel like condoms, and snot. I didn’t like cot bumpers or child seats that make your perfectly nice car suddenly look like a Wendy house, or cups that you could tip upside-down but which didn’t go with anything because for some reason they had to be orange. Nor could I stand to see grown women putting their purses in bags which were quilted and covered with rabbits. What, they were no longer allowed anything smart? And why couldn’t they have corners? Suddenly their world was a padded cell? When I saw them pushing those prams with the matching changing bags I wanted to scream. Other people appeared to have all this paraphernalia, and more amazingly, to like it. And some, to my horror, even downgraded themselves as well. How could women refer to themselves – with a simpering smile – as ‘Just a mum!’ as if that meant they ought to have their credit cards taken away and no longer be allowed to vote.

  My encounter with Ilaria had changed me, but it only served to plunge me deeper into my dilemma. I was afraid that if I wasn’t vigilant, whatever had happened to my parents would happen to me. They had got married and divorced, so I’d better not get married. They had split up and made me commute between them, so I shouldn’t have children because they would end up torn in two. If my parents, who weren’t actually mad or cruel or negligent, produced someone as hopeless as me, then my children would have to be total head-cases. It was a kind of formula: marriage + children = emotional melt-down. So I had cleverly protected myself from it by always making sure I ended up single, lonely and miserable. As formulas go, it was crap. Even after meeting Peter and wrecking the ‘single’ part of it, I clung to the other part by picking an argument whenever he mentioned marriage. I was so blinkered I hadn’t even worked out that if I did marry someone stable, I could counteract the effect – or that marrying the right man might make me happier. And I certainly never thought that motherhood itself might bring me any pleasure. As for the outlandish possibility that I might bring something good to the equation – it just never occurred to me.

  Clearly, then, motherhood was a faraway place of which I knew nothing. The destination and the journey were too hazardous. I would have to remain behind at Base Camp, in charge of something easy, like tidying the maps. When the real explorers came in, I’d be relieved to be out of the blizzard, but perpetually ever so slightly angry with myself for having given into my fears. Oh, and there was one more thing. I’d always supported the principle of breastfeeding, but of the breasts themselves I was proprietorial. I really didn’t want people sucking them unless I was 100 per cent totally in the mood.

  2 The Thin Blue Line

  Finally, curiosity gets the better of me. Despite the inhospitable mental conditions – can my body actually grow a real, live BABY ? There’s only one way to find out.

  ‘With all this talk about will we, won’t we, let’s not forget to have sex!’

  ‘Ha-ha!’

  I miss a period, and when it seems unlikely that I’ll be having the next one, Peter and I go to the Margaret Pyke Centre, central London’s home of family planning, to have a test.

  ‘Let’s get one from the chemist,’ he says at first.

  ‘I don’t trust them.’ I just don’t accept that you can establish something so massive, so Life and Death major, using a product bought in a shop. If there’s a nurse in the room, I’ll be more inclined to believe it.

  The Margaret Pyke has just relocated to trendy Charlotte Street, amongst the wine bars, but I rather miss the old building, in the last seedy bit of Soho, behind the apocalyptic-looking Soho Women’s Hospital; I liked going for my condoms to a place surrounded by used needles and retired prostitutes in slippers. To warn of the follies of unprotected sex, they had only to point out of the window.

  A senior nurse takes my sample and we sit in suspense, the atmosphere strangely like that of a quiz show. And the winner is …

  ‘You’re pregnant,’ she says with a smile. We must look stunned because she adds: ‘And – you’re happy about that?’

  Oh, yes. With the idea of having a baby I’m ecstatic. But then, communism looked good on paper. If there is an actual person inside me, who is going to get bigger, it’s going to have to Come Out. And I can’t do it.

  ‘We have a teensy bit of a problem,’ I tell Peter. ‘I can’t do Natural Birth. In fact, I can’t do Birth at all.’

  ‘I’d have it for you, you know.’

  He would too. He is that rare thing, a man who knows no medical fear. When his dodgy kidney was removed, he asked if he could watch. And he still has things done to his teeth – thanks to a cycling accident when he was eighteen – that make Marathon Man look like Winnie the Pooh.

  ‘It’s so unfair,’ I say. ‘You’re the brave one.’ He puts his hands on my shoulders.

  ‘I’ll back you totally,’ he says, ‘and do anything you want, except grow a beard and be in an active birth video.’

  ‘If only I was the man.’

  ‘Well, you are half-man.’

  ‘What, you mean I hate chatting on the phone and can read maps?’

  ‘No, that hormone thing.’

  ‘Oh, testosterone.’ It’s true, I do have too much of it; it goes with having polycystic ovaries and a hairy upper lip. If it wasn’t for electrolysis I’d look like Tom Selleck. In fact, since my hair’s been going grey I’ve dreaded being stranded on a desert island, because without my hair dye and tweezers, I’d be unrecognizable. If it took them more than three months to rescue me, I’d look like Einstein. On the upside, though, if I ever become a war correspondent and get taken hostage, I could just wait for the transformation, and – disguised as a poor holy man – escape.

  Peter points at me in what he thinks is an amusing way.

  ‘You have got one orifice in your body that would probably be big enough.’

  ‘My mouth? Oh, fuck off.’

  The baby’ll just have to stay in. Maybe I can make it hang on until, say, it’s ready to go to work, and then we can negotiate it out, like a mad gunman. Except then it’ll be a lot bigger. But at least I’ll be able to reason with it. Perhaps, as with moving a piano, I can say, ‘Can you twist to the left a bit?’ and, ‘Watch that corner on the landing, that’s my perineum.’ Or if all else fails: ‘Here’s a scalpel – can you cut off your shoulders?’

  What am I going to do?

  I could start smoking again, I suppose. But even a very small baby will be too big for me. Besides, managing to give up fags was one of my few triumphs; I don’t want to go through that eat-loads-of-crap-and-put-on-a-stone thing again.

  What other options do I have? Well, let me see. If I were a man – a man who isn’t Peter – would I be q
ueuing up to do this?

  ‘Men dash off to do things like climb mountains and freeze to death in the Antarctic because they can’t have babies,’ my mother’s always said, and I used to think: Oh, blah. But now I’m beginning to see she has a point. If you’d had a third-degree tear like my friend Harriet, you wouldn’t need to go up a mountain. You could say, I have touched the fucking void, mate. In fact, my void is a bloody sight bigger than it used to be, thank you very much. Given the choice, I’d rather crawl across the Andes with a broken leg than tear my – I can’t even say it – naughty bits. Can you believe I used to write about sex in Cosmopolitan? I’ve led a double life, only the other way round from most people. Usually it’s, ‘Vicar was secret cross-dresser’ or ‘Head- master’s wife posed nude in magazine.’ With me it’s ‘Fearless sex writer was secret prude.’ I did the first ‘What Women Really Want In Bed’ piece for GQ, but I can’t say the c-word. Unless it’s ‘Can you not press so hard, please?’

  I’ve got to focus. I’ve set a bomb ticking inside me, which cannot be defused. Or, as Cecil Parkinson memorably put it, ‘You cannot put the toothpaste back in the tube.’ You can bet if he could have got pregnant he would have stayed in a lot more. Use the barrier method, Cecil: shut the front door.

  ‘As far as I can see,’ says Peter, ‘it’s very like buying a car.’

  ‘If you’re not going to say anything useful, could you shut up?’

  ‘You study all the specifications, and then you make your choice … So, Ms Calman, what can I interest you in? We have the Sport Pack, with hard suspension, which keeps you in touch with every twist, turn and bump of the road. A Real Driving Experience. Or there’s the Super Comfort Fully-Automatic model with cruise control, air suspension and a choice of six entertainment sources which lets you glide along in style and peace, ensuring that you arrive at parenthood relaxed and refreshed, ready to get on with the next phase of your life.’