‘When we got in just now, I said: “Would you like your bottle?” and he went over to his usual spot on the sofa. Like his seat in the pub.’
‘Aah. And Lydia’s such a girl.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘She does incredibly smelly farts, just like you.’
In the weeks coming up to Christmas, Lawrence is sick quite a bit, screams the place down when Peter takes him to the doctor’s for amoxycillin, and then is suddenly better. His new achievement, going up and down stairs, is augmented by his abnormally high intelligence:
‘Lawrence – can you turn round and come back?’
‘He did! Look!’
‘Amazing!’
Peter’s sister Jessica, mother of two grown-up boys, comes round with some of their old toys.
‘Lawrence, where’s the car?’ (There it is!)
‘Where’s your blue car?’ (There it is!)
‘Put the phone in your other hand.’
‘He did it! He did it!’
Our son is clearly incredibly gifted. We can only hope that, when the time comes, there is a school extraordinary enough to accommodate him. Of course, we’re not competitive. But some people …
My old friend Mandy invites us round for coffee. Lawrence and her son were born in the same week. The idea is that she and I will enjoy some adult company with each other while the children play. But the children are nearly two, which is the age of highest maintenance, and so after an hour we are still trying to finish the one sentence. Also, I have Lydia with me, so the scene is Joyce Grenfell meets Mike Leigh.
‘Well, don’t hit her and she won’t hit you! Anyway, I had this idea for a – can you give it back, please? Give it back! Lawrence, give me back my pen. No. Don’t do that!
‘Now, what toys have you got? Well … why don’t we read Lydia’s first, then – what have I told you about throwing books? Is it too early for a drink? Just sit down there. Not on top of her. (Sigh.) No, there! So are you thinking of going back to BBC Scot—? Right, leave her alone! I’m coming! Well, if you do that, of course it’ll spill. Don’t cry. I’m not shouting. I’M NOT SHOUTING!’
Mandy has invited another woman, Elisabeth, a Swiss – sort of Amazon, tall and blonde – who is clearly very intelligent. In fact, I wonder, after being in her orbit for an hour, whether she might be too intelligent. After all, with toddlers, you do have to reset your coordinates a bit.
She wants her daughter Lena to be bilingual, but poor old Lena’s never fast enough. Her mother barks: ‘Ein, zwei, drei!’ – over and over again.
‘Ein, zwei, drei,’ mumbles Lena, or something like it. (It could be: ‘I’m not dry.’) Elisabeth looks at us. Are we supposed to repeat it too? She’s so scary I almost do. Then she starts on about Lena’s inadequate Gross Motor Skills. Gross Motor Skills, as every mother knows, means stuff like walking, while Fine Motor Skills is picking your nose. And Lena has just turned one. Can you remember when you learned to walk? Did it ever come up at a job interview? Can you actually walk better than someone who learned six months later than you? I stumble home, flattened.
‘Why?’ I ask Peter that night.
‘Not enough to do.’
‘What do you mean?! Looking after a child – or in my case two (I give him a pointed look) – is exhausting! How can you—’
‘Nah, nah. I mean she’s bored, needs stimulation, needs—’
‘To go back to work?’
Maybe he has a point. After many years in the pressured but highly stimulating world of international whatever, poor old Elisabeth is suddenly at home all day with someone whose intellectual capacity is measured by the ability to shout ‘Doggie!’ when catching sight of any animal smaller than a whale. It takes some adjusting to. And then there’s the fact that motherhood is impossible to evaluate. You’ve got no way to measure your progress and therefore no sense of achievement. No sooner have you fed them, changed their nappies or picked all the squashed petits pois out of the carpet, than it’s time to do it again. No one comes in and says: ‘Right, so you’ve done tidying, rocking them to sleep, persuading them to eat a fish finger – you can now do something else.’ You do not move on. The only thing that can be said for the physical drudgery is that it at least makes you too knackered to care whether your child is ‘ahead’.
I escape for a drink with my friend Mark, one of the links with my Former Life. He has no children – yet.
‘That’s nothing,’ he says. ‘My brother-in-law talks to all his children as if they’re the Nobel Prize Committee.’
‘How old are they?’ I ask.
‘Jack’s only five. He can’t even swallow a simple morsel of sea bass in fennel without his father demanding to know its progress. ‘“And where’s it going now, Jack? That’s right! The – oesophagus.”’
‘Ah, poor little thing!’
‘Nah. He’s just as bad. If you ask him a question, he answers, ‘“I think you’ll find …”’
I am reminded of this on a visit to my mother’s, when Lawrence helps me get money out of the cash machine. I hold him up and start reciting the buttons he needs to press: ‘Sev-en … two-o … six …’ I am about to shout ‘eight!’ when Peter points out that the whole of Folkestone can hear. By the way, for thieves reading at home, this is not my actual PIN.
Lydia is five months old, and Lawrence has taught himself to put in her dummy. He has expanded his vocabulary beyond ‘badu’. The most useful word is Mummy, because it means ‘Want it NOW’.
Lydia goes to Maureen’s for a trial day, and Lawrence is furious when she picks her up and he is relegated to second cuddle. ‘So the sibling rivalry problem that we avoided by having them so close together …’
‘Is now her problem.’
‘That’s OK then.’
I’ve started crying after leaving Lawrence at Maureen’s: I don’t know why. Then, the next time I leave Lydia I discover that the older sister of one of the other boys is suddenly being left there as well, on days when she doesn’t feel like going to school. And her mother’s a teacher! This puts Maureen ‘over the limit’. I know she can cope, but I’m angry with her for not telling us, and angry with the other family for taking advantage.
Peter says: ‘It’ll be fine.’
‘Well, I’m not leaving Lydia then. I can’t.’
‘It’ll be fine.’
‘Will you stop saying that? Just say something helpful or fuck off.’
While I’m worrying myself into a frazzle about how to handle it, Kath – my favourite mother there – talks to Maureen on behalf of us both. This is a relief, because I have discovered I am hopeless at this sort of thing. God only knows what I’m going to do when they start school. I express this concern to Peter, who says: ‘It’ll be fine.’
A week before Christmas, Lawrence wobbles off the landing and falls down the stairs. The sound – like someone emptying a sack of potatoes – is terrible. But his head doesn’t hit the tiles at the bottom. I’m too scared to look, but there is only a little red mark. I tell my sister, who berates me for not getting a stairgate.
‘We never had a stairgate.’
‘We lived in a flat.’
My emotions are in tatters. One moment Lawrence is charmingly pushing his trolley round the kitchen, and reversing skilfully. The next thing we know, he is screaming his head off, clinging piteously to Peter when being put in his cot, and hurling his toys out with great force. While being dressed, he head-butts me from behind, so hard that I shout, ‘How dare you?!’
He’s advanced all right: at sixteen months he’s starting on the Terrible Twos. I write in my notebook: Is this the end of the World’s Most Charming Child?
I’ve always been volatile, subject to dreadful swings in the space of moments. But this is crazy. To a cinema fan like me it’s a bit like watching a scene from A Night at the Opera followed by one from Schindler’s List. Then it’s Mad Max, then A Night at the Opera, then Schindler’s List again, over and over
again. I feel as though I’m being pumped full of uppers and downers.
Lawrence has started throwing his head back while being given his dinner. Peter – almost arbitrarily – gives him some baked beans on a spoon, and Lawrence puts them straight into his mouth. He is a genius!
‘D’you think we should have given him the spoon before?’
‘I’m sure we should, but it’s so bloody messy.’
Having put away three spoonfuls, Lawrence is eating the remaining beans individually from the table. ‘Look at those Fine Motor Skills.’
The next time we do it, he throws the beans straight onto the table.
‘So development’s not, like, a linear thing.’
‘It’s more of a spread out, all over the table and floor thing.’
Peter has a brainwave. He takes one spoon and Lawrence the other. That way, for every load that goes onto the table, we get one into his mouth.
‘Darling, you are clever!’
The next time we feed him, he dips the spoon into the rice and chicken, then scrunches the food with his hand as if washing it.
On New Year’s Eve he has a sip of champagne. In January he takes his first proper walk – of three steps – with a very light tread, a bit like a Thunderbirds puppet. We go to Dorset, and we walk hand in hand on the deserted beach, while Peter drags Lydia in the pushchair through the sand. Lawrence is quite a chunk, with golden curls; imagine a piano mover in a Shirley Temple wig. But when we take him out of the bath, hair all wet, he looks like Michael Caine as the sleazy agent in Little Voice.
Now he is displaying a worrying tendency towards some kind of gender confusion. In the bath he tells me:
‘My baby’s asleep.’ But there’s no doll around.
‘Where is it?’ I ask him.
‘In my tummy.’
One morning he gets conjunctivitis and wakes up with his eyes stuck shut. As he was busy wiping snot into them all night, we are not surprised.
Lydia’s gaze follows me round the room. She has movie-star lips and my mother’s slightly flat-ended nose. She’s so beautiful I wonder why the other mothers don’t just spit in my face. Maybe I can cope with ageing, deterioration and death after all. Then she throws her tummy in the air and screams at me, and I think: No, I can’t.
Feeding her is going far better than it even did with Lawrence – her not being in an incubator and my eating properly does help – and I am delighted by the convenience of it. Invited to a wedding by one of Peter’s ex-colleagues, we set off with that ominous spring in the step that almost always precedes a major embarrassment of some sort. The reception is at the Orangery in Holland Park, a narrow conservatory jammed with standing people. I have to find a waiter to get me a chair so I can feed Lydia, while Peter dashes outside every three minutes to retrieve Lawrence, who has gone rather suddenly from being unsteady on his feet to being fast. Outside the reception is an entire park with a hundred directions to run in, and he is evidently planning to try them all. I finally get the chair and sit down with Lydia, bodies pressed around us as on a crowded tube, only to remember that my lovely flowery dress undoes at the back. So to achieve full breast access, I have to unzip the whole thing pretty much to the waist. This is the sight that confronts Peter’s former boss, a tall, boffiny type who I remember from a previous meeting is (a) extremely shy, and (b) somewhat uncomfortable in the presence of women.
Having pushed his way through the crowd, he says: ‘Hello,’ after which there is a dramatic pause before he takes in the fact that I am topless. Unable to retreat easily due to the density of the crowd, and evidently not wanting to seem rude, he hovers on tiptoe, eyes averted, muttering: ‘And are you – er, ah – writing much?’
After Peter has fetched Lawrence for the twenty-fifth time we repair to the sandpit, where, with carefully concealed flutes of champagne, we discover you can take two children under two to a posh, stand-up party – if you’re prepared to compromise. It’s just a matter of choosing which things to compromise on, and it needn’t be the champagne. We go home feeling we’ve coped quite well, even if our clothes are full of sand.
One Sunday we have lunch in Oxford with Antonia, an old swimming friend of mine. I say ‘swimming friend’; I first met her lighting up a cigarette in the changing-rooms, explaining that she’d been dragged there by Iris, a friend who had to exercise in the water because she had only one leg.
‘I hate fucking swimming,’ she muttered between drags. She and Iris were both pushing seventy. They invited me for coffee, and gave me their views on child-rearing. I had none at this point – children, not views. Antonia and her daughter Eleanor, Eleanor’s boyfriend and their daughter Araminta all shared a house, along with a gay, black film-maker, a freelance illustrator and a changing assortment of others.
‘You know why Araminta’s so well behaved?’ said Antonia, puffing away. ‘Because half the time, her parents can’t be bothered with her.’
‘Well, surely … I mean—’
‘The other day, I came in and what d’you think I found? Araminta bawling in her pushchair, on the landing. And where was Eleanor? Upstairs, at her desk!’
‘Oh yes,’ added Iris, though with approval or disapproval I couldn’t tell.
‘I said, “Eleanor, what are you doing?” And she said, “Mother, if you must know, I couldn’t get the buckle undone on the bloody thing, and I had a deadline, so I left her there.” Really!’
‘Oh yes,’ repeated Iris.
‘But you see, this is why Minty’s so well behaved.’
And sure enough, when we arrive at the house, Minty greets us charmingly, and offers to show Lawrence and Lydia her toys. Lydia survives the outing unscathed, but Lawrence trips and snaps part of his front tooth off on the step. He recovers from this far sooner than I do. How did I manage to let that happen? I decide it’s Peter’s fault, for taking half a Sunday off – which he never does – to meet someone from work. When we get home, I help take our minds off it by teaching Lawrence to help me load the dishwasher. Lydia can now put her own dummy back in, so she’s well on her way to independence.
Just before his second birthday Lawrence learns to say: ‘No wannoo …’ – the key phrase of this year, and henceforth our whole relationship.
11 I Do Something Right
With Lawrence at Maureen’s I can concentrate for most of the day on one child. This even leads to brief spells of peace, during which I feel I am ‘getting it right’. One morning I allow myself a little shopping. In the cafe at John Lewis I put my coffee down, and park Lydia’s buggy some distance from the table – so I think – while I get a glass of water. At last, I feel I’ve reached some sort of plateau. Things are going quite well, and—
Suddenly she rises up in her pushchair – like Glenn Close at the end of Fatal Attraction – grabs my coffee and throws it all over herself. As I take it black, it is very hot. I chuck my water over her, then take the water from someone else’s table, marvelling at how quickly, in a crisis, a middle-class person can say, ‘Excuse me, could I possibly take this? Thank you.’
I tear her suit off. The John Lewis first-aid rep – ‘I’m Sue, the First-Aid Rep’ – calls an ambulance and throws more cold water and ice all over her, so that she goes from screaming because she’s covered in boiling hot stuff, to screaming because she’s freezing cold. A towel appears from somewhere. The paramedics rush in with aloe vera gel which they smooth on, then wrap her in a kind of cling-film like 1980s disco wear. They put an oxygen mask on her and wheel her through huge corridors behind the sales floor, with me and the pushchair running behind. The siren wails all the way to UCH. As we jump the lights, I think: Lawrence would have loved this. At the vehicle entrance to A&E, three plastic surgeons are waiting. Maybe business is slow. I have given Lydia her dummy, which is pretty effective; she has stopped screaming and fallen asleep.
‘I’m awfully sorry about this,’ I say. ‘She was screaming.’
‘When did you throw the cold wa
ter on?’ they ask.
‘Er …’
‘How soon after she spilled the coffee?’
‘Twenty seconds? I’m really sorry, I’m not sure.’
They examine her whole front, paying particular attention to her pubic area.
‘Did the coffee get down this far, can you remember?’
‘No. It stopped about there.’
‘Well, she’s lucky. That area scars very badly, but you’ve saved her from being scarred anyway.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Every second before you put water on a burn like this makes a big difference.’
I’ve actually done something right! There should be a kind of tick, the opposite of points, that you can put on your Mothering Licence. Gold stars, maybe. I sit in a cubicle while they put on more aloe vera, fresh cling-film, and a wide bandage in which they cut arm holes to make a kind of vest. They also give me a mini bottle of formula with a disposable teat, as I have run out.
Back home, I tell Peter and Lawrence of our adventure.
‘Well done you!’ says Peter. The sense of having made a difference, a tangibly positive difference, is fantastic. Three days later we go back to have the dressing off. The skin is broken on one part of her tummy, but she is otherwise perfect. Five years on, she still loves to hear the story of Lydia and the Coffee.
The excitement never ends. Mira gives us a potty.
‘It looks brand new,’ I say. ‘Don’t you want it?’
‘My children won’t pee into anything red.’
Lawrence loves it, though more as a toy than an aid to actual toilet training. He associates it with weeing inasmuch as the two occasionally coincide, but as he is always sitting down at the time, the wee does not generally go in, or even near, the target. Mainly he likes to get my old doll, Champagne – a sixties chav in yellow mini-skirt – and put her on it. Then he sits on top of her in a disconcerting suggestion of some kind of 18–30 Holiday party game, shouting: ‘Wee wee!’
Afterwards he says, ‘Aw-right?’ sounding exactly like Maureen’s scaffolder husband, Ron. He also likes to take the pilot out of his Playmobil helicopter, and wipe his nether regions. I am getting nowhere with this ‘training’. The only training going on is his training me to realize my own limitations.
Confessions of a Bad Mother Page 10