Confessions of a Bad Mother

by Stephanie Calman

  ‘He’ll do it when he’s ready,’ says Maureen.

  ‘Children in Africa don’t need toilet training,’ says my mother in Horizon mode. ‘They learn to do it all naturally.’

  ‘Yes, but then they don’t need to be toilet trained because they all die of Aids.’

  ‘I’m just trying to be helpful.’ Grandparents should have a phrase emblazoned on them like a council motto: Working to undermine you.

  There’s one thing I have trained Lawrence to do. When he hears a car hooting in the traffic, he says, ‘Shit.’

  Suddenly he starts speaking in sentences, like the Starship Enterprise going into warp drive.

  ‘Do that again and you’re in trouble,’ he tells his teddy.

  Lydia, ten months, is crawling, but of course we don’t make a big deal of it because we’ve seen it all before. We make up for this by stopping dead in our tracks when she smiles her dazzling smile. Caught in the headlights Peter becomes completely useless.

  ‘You’ll forget to go to work if you’re not careful.’

  ‘Shut up: I love her now, not you.’ The Calman pedantry is showing up already. When Lawrence tells me: ‘I saw a mixer lorry,’ I say: ‘Was it up the road?’ He says: ‘No: down the road.’

  He does a pooh in the bath which is a talking point for days. It’s not one of the Development Milestones as laid out in the little red book, but he feels a sense of achievement which we feel it would be churlish to undermine.

  To train them to have the same taste as us – or at least not primary-coloured, kiddie taste – we take them to the Ken Adam exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery. There are video clips, drawings and stills from his best-known film sets, including You Only Live Twice and Dr Strangelove.

  ‘Look, Lawrence: a spaceship!’

  ‘A space chip: I eat it.’

  ‘How long before we can show them a James Bond?’ says Peter.

  ‘How long before we can all go to the cinema together?’

  There’s another pressing issue. I’m scared that if I leave it too long, I’ll forget how to work. Or how to be Out There. I want to be Out. I want to go somewhere, be someone again, a Person. I want to go on the tube and have coffee in a paper cup. I ring up a nice script-editor at the BBC, where they are interested in an idea of mine. He invites me to come and see him and the producer. Peter now has our friend Alison working for him, and they offer to mind Lydia while I have my meeting. I wheel Lydia in, to admiring glances, but also realize I am quite nervous. I get back on the tube.

  In BBC reception a rather attractive man gives me a big, ‘Are you free tonight?’ sort of smile. He looks a bit familiar, but I can’t place him. I get to my meeting, but it starts late. Then, when the producer does appear, there are building works and we can’t hear what we’re saying. He makes a few calls to find another office, then we set off. When we get there, he gossips and chats with the nice script-editor, but no one mentions my actual script. Eventually they get round to it. It is 4.30 and Maureen shuts down at 5.30. She never works late. I’ve got twenty-five minutes to get all the way back down the Westway and through King’s Cross in the rush hour. If I grab Lydia and drive like a maniac I might, just might, not be late.

  ‘So how’s the pilot coming along, then?’

  Mustn’t be late for Maureen, mustn’t be late for Maureen.

  ‘Hm? Oh, fine. Fine.’

  He tells me to do another draft. Sick with anxiety, I get to Peter and run along the corridors pushing Lydia like a rickshaw driver in the war escaping the Japanese. I reach Maureen with two minutes to spare, and resolve not to have another meeting for a long time, possibly never. It wasn’t just the rushing; I realize I hated the feeling of being so far away. Still, I’ve remembered the name of the attractive man in reception.

  ‘How was the meeting?’ says Peter.

  ‘Hopeless. But Gary Lineker smiled at me.’

  ‘So the day wasn’t entirely wasted.’

  I decide to forget about having a career. On Sunday we go for a walk with Julia and her four children on Hampstead Heath, and Lawrence falls face-first into a huge clump of nettles. He is screaming, and in shock. We calm him, and hold him, and all the children gather dock leaves. But what really seems to help is shouting at the Sharp Plants.

  ‘You’re very naughty!’ I tell them. ‘Now just – Go Away!’

  We have been looking for a babysitter, and think we have found one.

  Sharon is a cheerful teenager who lives nearby and is instinctively good with kids, possibly because she’s so much nearer their age. Also, being seventeen she doesn’t collapse with exhaustion halfway through the day. Even better than that, she knows Maureen and is therefore part of the network of those women who allow the likes of me to swan about going on the radio and writing books. There are a few exceptions: those literary females who manage to create great works while being full-time mothers. Possibly they type with their nipples. But if it weren’t for the Maureens and Sharons of the Western world, far fewer books, magazines, radio and TV shows would be produced. Which may indeed be no loss. But more women like me would also end up on street corners waving empty vodka bottles at strangers.

  Maureen takes her summer holiday in June, throwing into disarray the working mothers of the two older boys who are now at school. It doesn’t affect us – yet. In fact, it’s to our advantage.

  ‘Hey, let’s go on holiday at the same time!’

  ‘While it’s cheaper, and there aren’t millions of other families taking up all the—’

  ‘Food.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  We book ten days in Menorca, in a resort that looks like a newly built suburb, surrounded by nothing. Sharon’s uncomplicated approach is ideal for a baby and newly qualified toddler and a nearly two year old. We have a wild and crazy idea.

  ‘Would you like to come on holiday with us?’

  And thank God she says yes, as Lawrence – a keen walker – spends pretty much the whole ten days escaping across the hotel grounds and having to be brought back before he reaches the lifts. That leaves Peter and me to take turns swimming and minding Lydia, who sits in the shade in her pushchair sporting a 1920s-looking hat that covers everything except her enormous cheeks. The pool is nice, but the alienating ambience of the complex and the sudden dashes across the lawn to grab Lawrence put me in mind of The Prisoner. This feeling is compounded when we leave Sharon to babysit and find there is nowhere to go.

  ‘Next time,’ I say, ‘I’ll find a place with a town.’

  ‘Or indeed anything.’

  But this suits Sharon, who – even though she babysits happily for us at home – gets sulky when we try to leave her alone with the kids. The nearest we get to a romantic night out is to leave them in their room with a pizza one evening while we enjoy the fried buffet alone. But even then our spirits are dampened somewhat by her asking what time we’ll be back.

  ‘I think what we’ve learned here,’ says Peter, ‘is to possibly leave the foreign travel alone for a few years.’

  ‘Say, till they’re at college.’

  ‘By which time we’ll have no money left anyway.’

  ‘And be too old and knackered.’

  ‘Still, it’s good to give things a try.’

  ‘Mmm, though next time when the brochure says “Children’s Play Area”, it would be useful to find out if there’s anything more than one swing.’

  From no excitement on holiday, we return to plenty. And it’s all going on outside our house. First we have children chucking silver packets into the front garden – something clearly more mood-enhancing than chewing gum. When I go out to remonstrate, they sneer at me. Then a police car hits another car just outside. Then we have to evacuate when – this is shortly after the Brixton and Soho bombings – a suspect package is found on our wall (it turns out to contain stolen car radios). Then one Sunday morning at 5 a.m. I get up to feed Lydia and see a man in the back garden, making for the house. When
he sees me he runs off, but I am shaking. That’s followed by a ‘joy-riding’ incident in which thieves in a stolen red car drive into our car with such force that they push it part-way through our neighbour’s front garden. The back axle is nearly off, and we almost lose it altogether. In the space of a few weeks, we dial 999 four times, the fourth one being caused by a cat knocking over a log outside the back door. I don’t want to go to sleep at night in case I have to get up and defend my family.

  ‘Most of it’s kids from the hostel,’ says one of the policemen we are now seeing regularly.

  ‘Hostel …?’

  ‘Yeah. But you’ll find the problem’s mostly at weekends. Sunday nights they usually go back in.’

  We decide to sell. A week before her first birthday, Lydia is making her way methodically up the stairs. Unfortunately, I am in the kitchen thinking Peter is minding her, and he is in the sitting room thinking the same. We both hear the dreadful sound of her tumbling down, down, down to the tiles. He reaches her first and picks her up. She is all stiff, and apparently unconscious.

  ‘Omigod! What shall we do? What shall we do???!!!’

  ‘She’s coming round!’

  She opens her eyes, takes a deep breath and cries – those long, desperate cries that make you want to rip your guts out and hurl them into the street. I can see now why the Japanese invented hara-kiri. When you feel this bad, eviscerating yourself can only brighten your day.

  After this first weird fainting fit, she has several more. The doctor offers me a referral to a paediatrician some time hence.

  ‘When would that be?’

  ‘Ooh, six to eight weeks. They’ll write to you.’

  ‘I’d really like to see someone a bit sooner. I want to know what it is.’

  ‘Well, I shouldn’t think it’s epilepsy.’

  ‘Yes, but we don’t know. What about Great Ormond Street? Could I take her there?’

  ‘Ooh, no. Tertiary referrals only.’

  ‘What about private? Peter’s got insurance from work.’ ‘Oh, we don’t want to get into all that, do we?’

  Somehow, I find myself leaving with nothing except this vague offer of an appointment sometime in the next decade. But when I get home, I ring Liz and Andrew, the other parents who use Maureen, and both – though not in our area – GPs.

  ‘Of course you can go to Great Ormond Street,’ says Andrew. ‘You just ring up their private bit, and get the name of a paediatrician. Then go back – to another GP this time – and ask for a referral letter.’

  ‘And—?’

  ‘That’s it. They should see Lydia in two or three days.’

  Three days later we are sitting in a private consulting room, with a Dr Douek. Lydia plays with the toys.

  ‘Sorry she isn’t fainting for you,’ I say.

  ‘That’s all right. Can you describe what happens?’

  ‘If she cries very hard, or falls down and bangs her head – she shuts her eyes and goes stiff. Then she flops, sort of faints. Then she wakes up and continues crying, as if it hadn’t happened.’

  ‘And how long is she out for?’

  ‘Not long. Twenty seconds? Less maybe. It’s all because she fell down the stairs when we weren’t looking. I just feel so terrible.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘I can tell you exactly what that is. ‘They’re called Reflex Anoxic Seizures.’

  The relief is incredible. Although he’s sure it’s that and not epilepsy, he books an EEG, and gives me the name of a support group. The EEG is normal, the woman who runs the support group (called Stars) is fantastic, and although Lydia goes on fainting on and off for the next three years or so, it does nothing to hinder her ambition to climb trees, balance on the tops of bunk beds and hurl herself off the climbing frame. But I continue to feel guilty and always feel I have to ‘confess’ about the stairs.

  Our house is on the market. Although I focus on the big garden, rather than the Johannesburg-style crime levels, no one wants to buy it. Also, we don’t agree about where we should go. I think we should stay north, where our friends are, and Peter thinks we should go south, where we can still have a garden and be near his sister. I stand firm until we have coffee with a friend of his from work who lives in Dulwich. We see the park, the trees and ooh, a pergola. I concede I just might consider moving there. But it will mean leaving Maureen, which is unimaginable. Jump-started into planning by the thought of looking after them myself full-time – a prospect too terrifying to contemplate – I start ringing nurseries in the area. None takes kids in nappies. I get frantic, and snap at Lawrence more than usual.

  ‘You’re bad,’ he tells me.

  I get worse. I switch Thomas the Tank Engine off for dinner, and he screams for twenty minutes. We get a temporary respite when we manage to get some food into him, but then Peter accidentally turns to answer the phone at the moment Lawrence offers him a biscuit, and the tantrum resumes. Sharon is there to babysit, and even her magic touch is neutralized. She takes him upstairs to get undressed and he kicks her. Having shouted at him plenty, I remain in the kitchen, trembling with frustration and rage. A few nights later, I make Lydia cry by washing her hair, and he tells me off for that, too.

  Still no interest in the house. Sharon tells us she’s got a full-time nannying job. As Maureen never works after 5.30, and Sharon is the only other person the children know, our babysitting has just gone up the spout. The main purpose of going out in the evenings is so we can go to the cinema, and Peter can’t see a film that starts after seven because he can’t stay awake. This has nothing to do with having children; he’s always been like that. When we first met, he quickly became known amongst my friends – in a rather Native American sounding way – as The One Who Falls Asleep. Many dinner parties have ground to a halt while I, then the host and finally all the other guests stop talking to observe him nodding forward with his mouth open like one of those dogs people used to put in the backs of cars. It’s a 6.30 movie or nothing, therefore, and Sharon’s new job doesn’t finish till half-seven. I can feel myself starting to panic.

  ‘I might be able to get to you around eight,’ she says, ruminatively. ‘But then again, I might be too tired.’ She’s looking at an eleven-hour day, which even at her age I’d say is pushing it. Honestly! These middle-class types have no consideration. I plunge into gloom until she reveals that though the mother works long hours in a bank or somewhere, the father of the children in question works at home.

  ‘What?! So what’s with the 7.30? He can stop anytime!’ I work at home and I’ll stop for anything: to gaze at the cloud formations, straighten my paper-clips or fall into a happy trance picking my nose.

  ‘Yeah, but he don’t,’ Sharon points out.

  ‘Yes, but he could.’

  ‘But he don’t.’

  This is getting us nowhere. I decide to go and talk to him. We have mutual friends; it’ll be fine.

  ‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ says Peter.

  ‘I’m only going to ask.’

  I get there, and the conversation goes like this:

  ‘I was wondering if you would consider releasing Sharon an hour early on some days.’

  ‘No. You see, she replaces my wife, not me.’

  ‘I’m sorry? I don’t quite—’

  ‘I don’t look after the children, my wife does.’

  ‘So – um …’

  ‘Sorry, no can do. Sharon will be here until 7.30, when she comes home.’

  Even though I’ve got nowhere, we part on friendly terms. I get home and the phone rings. It is Sharon. She says: ‘I’m really angry that you spoke to him when I asked you not to!’ She puts the phone down and that is that.

  ‘We’ve got no one now. We’ll never go out again!’

  ‘We can stay in,’ he says. ‘You can cook.’

  ‘Oh, cheers.’

  ‘You love cooking.’ This is true, but I’m hoping he’s forgotten.

  ‘I’m trapped!
Help! Help!’

  ‘We’ll find another babysitter.’

  ‘Where???!’

  ‘You found Sharon. You’ll find someone else.’

  ‘I won’t. I won’t!’ I yank the cork out of a bottle. ‘And we’re stuck in this scary house. We’ll probably all be killed.’

  ‘No, we won’t. We’re going to move to Dulwich and then we’ll be too far away for Sharon anyway.’

  ‘I’m not moving to fucking south London. You bastard! First you charm me into getting married! Then you trick me into getting a mortgage. Then you make me have children. Now you’re trying to force me to live – Down There.’

  ‘You left Bloomsbury.’

  ‘More fool me.’

  ‘We can have a big garden. It’ll be nice.’

  ‘Yeah, in SE 300.’

  ‘My sister lives there. You like her.’

  ‘What about my friends? I can’t walk to Soho. There’s not even a tube. I’ll never see Claire or Tilly or Claudia again. My life is ruined. I hate you!’

  ‘It’ll be fine.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, you know what? We don’t need a babysitter now anyway, because I’m leaving.’

  ‘There, you see? Problem solved.’

  12 To A&E by Double Buggy

  Finally we have a firm offer on the house. Desperate not to lose the buyer, I exchange contracts. We haven’t found anywhere else to live.

  Peter says: ‘I trust you completely.’

  ‘Well, at least that way you’ll always have someone to blame.’

  Weeks go by. Every Monday and Tuesday I ring fifty estate agents. Everything is too big and expensive, or too small, or has no garden, or has had all the storage ripped out to install ‘en suites’. One has been feng shui’d and had the front door turned eleven degrees to the left, or the south, or towards Shanghai, but anyhow it doesn’t matter because it’s hideous and reeks of dogs.

  ‘That’s it,’ I tell Peter finally. ‘There are no four-bedroomed houses with gardens in south London. There just aren’t.’