Confessions of a Bad Mother

by Stephanie Calman

  I’M IN LOVE! WHOOPEE! This is AMAZING. Ooooooh. Wowwwww! I wonder if anyone else knows about this? I must tell them. I must tell everyone. I must spread the Good News, so that all personkind can worship this heavenly – uh-oh. OK, I get it now. Stand down the angels and shepherds. Cancel the star in the east.

  ‘Hey, husband!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think I’ve just bonded.’

  ‘There, you see? I told you not to worry.’

  ‘No, no: you don’t understand. I think I’m in love.’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘You’ve served your purpose. Tell you what, though.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve got lovely DNA.’

  It has taken me twelve and a half weeks. Can’t find that in the books either. Can’t find the bit that says: ‘You may bond quickly, like superglue, or you may be the slow-acting kind, where the two parts must be held together for some time until they stick.’

  Weirdly, at around the same time, I am beginning to think it might be nice, now and then, to have a break. I am clear that I love this baby I’ve had for nearly four months, but I’m also rather missing my Self. And the space that used to be around me when I was detached. I wonder if I could – no, I can’t. I feel guilty at even having the thought.

  Nick comes round for supper. He is in his sixties, a journalist and grandfather. We have tremendous confidence in him. He can write you 1,000 words on anything and sound like an expert. And just having an older person in the house, we discover, can be immensely reassuring.

  When he arrives, I am cooking – distractedly – while Peter tries to get Lawrence to go to sleep. The magic he can work, with his forwards-and-backwards swaying, is totally absent tonight. Why do babies go to sleep sometimes when you want them to, then suddenly not? Why do they feed for so long? Is there a pipe going through them, leading to ten other babies all having a drink at the same time? We pace around, pondering these pointless questions, while Lawrence grizzles. Suddenly Nick looks up and says, ‘D’you want a hand?’

  He puts him up against his shoulder, as Peter has just done, sits down and says, ‘Now, stop bothering your parents and go to sleep, will you? There’s a good chap.’ Then he gets out a copy of the Financial Times.

  Lawrence is asleep within seconds. In the kitchen, Peter and I lose concentration on the dinner as we marvel at this mystical event. Is it the upright position? Well, yes, but we did that and it didn’t work. Is it the deep voice? Possibly: babies are supposed not to like shrieks. But then, Peter’s voice is hardly Julian Clary-ish, and I sound like Michael Buerk. Also, there is no one bouncing up and down, jiggling him – that helps. But maybe Lawrence is just at that moment ready to drop off. There is the x-factor, certainly: the mysterious alignment of the planets that causes children suddenly to do what you want. There is one more thing, though: more to do with what Nick isn’t, than what he is. He isn’t Lawrence’s parent, and as such has no huge investment in his going to sleep. He doesn’t – ultimately – care. And that’s where he has the edge.

  This proves that anyone can be parental, not just a mother and clearly not just women. Often not women: I am proof of that. You can be a man, and not related to the infant at all.

  A vision forms in my head … of me, Peter and perhaps a third person – to Help.

  But it’s a crazy idea, and anyhow, we don’t know anyone. I’m not ready to go back to work, and anyhow the whole idea is – when you really think about it – too terrifying. Like many people nowadays, we have family either too spread out geographically, or not in a position to help. And in any case, there aren’t enough of them. The ‘extended family group’ ideal my mother waxes on about is hard to assemble when all you’ve got is a sister each, both with full-time jobs, sixty miles apart. Anyhow, they need their own time. One has finished her family and the other hasn’t begun. They’re doing other things with their lives. Besides, there is a downside to family – well, mine anyway: they have an opinion about everything. A person we pay could give advice but we needn’t have to listen. We’d be in charge!

  ‘We could get an au pair,’ says Peter. ‘I could show her around …’

  ‘Good luck to you,’ I say. ‘Sad old git.’

  Anyhow, I want someone who knows more than me, not less. But who? We ask Claudia.

  ‘I got Bobbie from a magazine,’ she says. ‘Been with us for three years.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ But she’s confident and relaxed.

  ‘I used an agency,’ says Barbara. ‘But they sent someone with an awful boyfriend who banged on the door at night.’

  ‘Hadn’t they checked?’

  ‘They said, “If we’d told you, you might not have given her the job.”’

  ‘!’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Advertise in The Lady,’ says Jane. ‘That’s what all my friends do.’

  ‘Much too scary. And I’d have to interview people.’

  ‘I don’t mind interviewing,’ says Peter, ‘but I still want a personal recommendation.’

  To see what it feels like, we ask my friend Alison to babysit. She has two boys at primary school and works, and is learning to drive, and is currently repainting her flat. She’s like a throwback to an earlier generation, the sort you could imagine welding Spitfires in a hairnet.

  ‘D’you think you could cope with Lawrence while we go to the cinema?’ we ask her.

  ‘Don’t be silly. I thought you’d never ask!’

  She puts him in his car seat on the table, where her boys gaze at him in wonderment.

  ‘Get on with your homework!’ she says.

  ‘Isn’t she amazing?’ we say, as we drive away.

  Discovering we can cope with having a few hours to ourselves, we start asking people we know if they have any great nannies they don’t need any more.

  But the nannies of people we know – if we could afford them, which we can’t – are all fully employed, working for people we know. There is no equivalent of ‘Shea’ – Pat O’Shea – who looked after my sister and me. Shea is great with children despite having had none of her own. Come to think of it, she’d had no previous experience at all before coming to us, but those were less anxious times. She had sound instincts about kids and and her techniques always got results. When I locked myself in the bathroom at three, she offered me a chocolate bar which helped me remember how to work the bolt. And when I flushed her gold watch down the lavatory, she didn’t even shout at me. Hell, the woman could write a book on kids – ten books. She’s perfect! There is one little problem, though; she is now seventy-seven.

  Another month goes by. Wherever we go, we ask for recommendations, but the horizon is bare. I begin to resign myself to a lifetime at home. My career – so important to me, so long fought for – will wither away. Eventually I’ll be someone who used to write once, the glory days of pop star interviews and Fleet Street gossip a speck on the viewfinder of Time … Shit! Look what’s happening to my style! I’ve already gone stale.

  A couple of weeks later I bring Lawrence back to Carol, the quiet-voiced health visitor. She puts him in the scales, congratulates me on his weight gain, and lays him down to measure his length. Then she says, out of nowhere:

  ‘Do you want a childminder? Only I know a really good one, and she’s got a space.’

  ‘God! Are you telepathic as well?!’

  ‘She almost never gets spaces – only really when people move away. And someone has. Here’s her number, if you want to give her a ring.’

  This is typical; the moment you give up on something, along it comes. I take the number back to Peter, holding it carefully in case it explodes in my bag.

  7 I Give My Baby Away

  My mother wags a middle-class finger: ‘Childminder? She’ll put him in front of the TV all day, and smoke.’

  Maureen lives on a respectable council estate of houses with little gardens, gradually going private. No one has written Kelly is a
Slag on any of the walls. No children try to sell us crack or offer to mind our car for a pound. A gate opens into a small yard full of trikes and pedal cars. The house is warm and spotless. In the kitchen, two little boys, aged two at a guess, are playing with a toy garage. We stand there, and I know Peter’s thinking the same as me: I hope she doesn’t ask us anything too difficult. Luckily, Maureen knows the questions as well as the answers; without actually saying, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing, do you?’ she succeeds in imparting the information. This is good because we have no idea what we’re supposed to ask.

  She speaks in soft, measured tones. As someone who babbles, and too loudly, I’ve always been fascinated by people who can command attention by saying relatively little, and without barking. Where children are involved, it’s really impressive.

  The whole atmosphere is cosy, safe and deeply restful – like sinking into a bath. The two boys vroom their cars up and down the gleaming kitchen floor, and we notice another baby of Lawrence’s age, sleeping in a pram. How could anyone look after this lot and be so calm? How could anyone get their house that clean? Maybe she’ll spoil it all by turning out to be insufferably smug. She insists we follow up at least two of her references. She opens a folder full of letters, and gives us a few to read. While we talk, she asks to hold Lawrence, which she does with great tenderness yet a marked lack of fuss. She’s older than me, and far wiser – which at this stage wouldn’t be difficult. She’s only forty-two to my thirty-seven. But her own sons are nearly grown-up. She is, in terms of experience, another generation.

  We say goodbye, put Lawrence back in the pram and walk home.

  ‘Well!’ said Peter. ‘I don’t know what Lawrence thought, but I’d love to stay there all day and play with the toy garage.’

  ‘We can’t,’ I said.

  ‘I know … Pity.’

  ‘No, I mean I can’t do it.’

  ‘What?! I thought you really liked her. Blimey, have I misread the situation completely?’

  ‘It just seems so cruel.’

  ‘What? I thought you wanted a break.’

  ‘I do, but it’s inhumane – what were we thinking of ? We can’t give him away.’

  ‘We’re not Giving Him Away: you’re having a break. You deserve a few hours to yourself.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Well, what about work? You want to go back to writing at some point, don’t you? It’ll enable you to do that.’

  ‘Yeah, I miss my work. No, I don’t: I miss my freedom. Oh, God, that’s really bad.’

  ‘No it isn’t.’

  ‘I love him! But I’d love a break, too. It’s hard, doing this all day and night. But that’s because I’m not a Proper Mother. Proper Mothers can do it. Proper Mothers don’t give their children away.’

  ‘You are a Proper Mother. You’re not Giving Him Away.’

  Poor Peter. As my boyfriend he was spared the ‘I’m Fat’/’No you’re not’ conversation, only to end up with this.

  ‘Look it’s your decision. Whatever you want is fine with me.’ Oh, cheers. That’s the trouble with these men who let you make your own decisions; you can’t blame them when things go wrong.

  ‘I know!’ he says that evening. ‘Let’s ring the references. With any luck they’ll tell us that she beats them and feeds them on nothing but Pop Tarts, and the decision will be made for us.’

  On the list there are two architects, parents of the baby asleep in the pram, and two GPs – the parents of one of the boys playing with the garage. The other one’s parents are teachers.

  ‘Well, we’ve found the catch,’ says Peter. ‘She won’t take us unless we both do exactly the same job.’

  None of them has anything bad to say. We ring the woman who’s moved to Shropshire, who’s created the empty place. ‘My only regret about leaving London,’ she says, ‘is losing Maureen.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Peter asks me.

  People who like looking after children all day long – even their own – are one kind of person. People who prefer to be at work for a full day are another kind. And what do I want? Neither. And both. Too much time at home with the baby, and I’ll go mad. I’m already feeling quite weird from not going out enough. However, not enough time with him and I’ll go mad there as well. Considering most people don’t get their first choice, whatever it is, I’m very lucky. I can write part of the time, and not write part of the time, which is what I’ve always done anyway. Except that now I have an actual reason for not working that hard. Why didn’t I do this before? If I’d saved all that shirking time I could have had five children by now.

  ‘Why don’t we give it a try?’ says Peter reasonably. ‘If we don’t like it – if you’re not happy – we’ll stop. OK?’

  Does he deliberately wait for me to wear myself out before invariably coming up with a solution, or does he just coincidentally always think of it just as I grind to a halt?

  ‘Yeah. I’m tired,’ I say. ‘Pour me a drink, will you?’

  Meanwhile we’re working up to the First Solids, an event which in retrospect occupies an unjustifiably prominent position in the infant CV. Lawrence eats his mashed banana, looking at us as if to say, ‘So?’

  The baby rice is also an anticlimax, in that he eats it. By Boxing Day we’re blasé enough to give him mashed potato and gravy, which he pukes up. I sing ‘Night and Day’, and he laughs – one of the kinder reactions I’ve had to my singing. On the third day of the new year he grasps his bottle.

  ‘He’s a genius!’

  ‘Look at those opposable thumbs.’

  We visit two-year-old Jack, who generously offers Lawrence use of his classic pedal Mercedes.

  ‘Did anyone ever tell you,’ says Jack’s mother Rose, ‘how soon they start to be a source of Light Entertainment?’

  ‘No, I thought you had to wait till they were at least thirty-five.’

  She stirs her casserole. ‘It’s a bit like having Sky.’

  On 15 January I wake at 5.10 a.m., convinced I’m going to be struck down by lightning for consorting with a childminder. We both take Lawrence along for his first half-day, and Maureen asks us to take a picture of them together, which we still have: she’s crouching in the yard with him on her knee, looking up at us as if to say: ‘It’s OK, you’re not bad parents. He’ll be Fine,’ and he’s in his blue and white matching suit and hat, gazing off to the side as if to say, ‘I AM fine. Go on, shove off.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s OK?’

  ‘He’ll be fine.’

  ‘Look, Lawrence: a Wendy house.’

  ‘Actually, we’re not allowed to call it that,’ says Maureen. ‘The Council says it’s sexist.’

  ‘What do you have to call it, then?’

  ‘We have to say Play House.’

  We say goodbye, and leave, feeling extremely brave.

  ‘Wendy house! Wendy house!’

  ‘Come on,’ says Peter. ‘You’re disturbing the neighbours.’

  As we walk down the road, he squeezes my arm and we look at each other. Another milestone! He goes to work, and I get a bus to Oxford Street – not to buy anything, but just to try it ‘naked’.

  Lawrence settles into his routine. At 9 a.m. he goes to Maureen’s, and I wander around town, heady with the excitement of it all, and amazed that it can feel so normal. At 1 p.m. I collect him. As she likes to give all the children lunch before going to the One O’Clock Club, I have to bring some jars or a packet which she can make up. I bring some organic jars to start with, then, when she keeps running out because I never bring enough, some boxes of dried baby food, of dubious constitution. It looks like sawdust, and is probably less organic than what we put in the car. The power trip, though, is quite thrilling. Is it really up to me?

  Whatever I do, however bumbling and disorganized I am, she gives the impression I’m doing fine. Coming from a family in which you’re constantly told how to do even the most basic things, I find this exhilara
ting. In my early twenties I lived for a while in Dubai. My mother was deeply concerned that I’d have to drive on the other side of the road, and was sure there must be a separate manual which I’d have to read first. The feeling, when I turned the key and set off perfectly well on the right, made me wonder whether I’d been brought up just to be a teensy bit too cautious. The remarkable thing about talented people, I realize, is that even when they’re far better than you are at something, they empower you to feel you’re brilliant too. Mr Silverstone had that quality: saying, ‘Well done! ‘ to someone after an elective C-section almost certainly isn’t in the NHS Guidelines; nor is addressing the patient as ‘Commander’ as he did on his ward round. Maureen makes me feel – competent. Life really could run smoothly after all. I could gradually restart work. Peter and I could get a babysitter and go to the cinema. Anything’s possible! I feel a stab of guilt, then more guilt because by my reckoning, I don’t feel guilty enough.

  We soon solve that problem. We’ve just discovered another thing that isn’t in the books, which is that whichever stage you’re anticipating your child is about to move on to, they’re guaranteed to get there first. Today, for example, we are about to find out that Lawrence is now able to turn over by himself. It’s Friday, and Peter has left work early so we can beat the rush-hour traffic to my mother’s. We lie Lawrence on the sofa, move away to put various things in bags, and BLAM! He is lying on the carpet. He is not visibly injured, but crying hard.

  ‘Right!’ says Peter. ‘A&E. Quickly!’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘What do you mean, are you sure?’

  I’m thinking about having to wait around for hours among those coughing, twitching people who live in A&E. I’m feeling guilty, but not for the same reason as he is. He’s thinking, Our Child Could Be Hurt, and I’m thinking, Bang Goes My Weekend.