Confessions of a Bad Mother

by Stephanie Calman

‘I don’t understand it. He has been brushing. They both have, and she’s fine. Lydia, stop skipping.’

  ‘Well, nonetheless …’

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’ In the periphery of my vision I can see a needle. In my anxiety to disprove neglect, I completely ignore Lawrence. I don’t care what he’s feeling, only what Dennis thinks of me. His hand moves towards the needle.

  ‘Shall we put that side to sleep?’ I wish I could. Now I have to reassure my poor little boy by hiding my fear of needles. I must try to remember not to widen my eyes when he picks it up and brandishes it in the air. Breathe slowly. Keep focusing on him, not the hypo … So far, so good …

  ‘Oooh!’ says Lydia. ‘What a big needle!’

  ‘Lydia, go out to reception and get one of those books you were looking at.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Go on!’

  ‘No!’

  Luckily, this has slightly diverted Lawrence’s attention and the needle is now in. But it stays in, of course, for ages. He groans.

  ‘Try not to move,’ says Dennis. Time slows down. He has had that needle in his cheek forever. After about a century it comes out.

  ‘Well done!’ I say. ‘The worst is over.’

  But when he attempts to do the filling, Dennis discovers the area is not numb. He has to do the whole thing again.

  ‘I don’t like to give them too much …’ he muses. But on the other hand, my child seems to have the constitution of a mammoth. He ends up with virtually an adult dose. And even then, he is so resistant that Dennis can’t manage the second filling at all.

  ‘It’s starting to wear off. I don’t think I’d better attempt the second one. We’ll do it when you come back.’

  ‘Come back?’ The filling is temporary. We have to do it all again. I take him to the toy shop and buy him a glow-in-the-dark set of Geomag for £10.99. He has already has a non-glow-in-the-dark set that lives under the bed, and after one play, this one joins it there.

  When we come back, again Lawrence needs not one, but two, long stabs with the needle. Throughout it all he is incredibly quiet, sweet and good. Despite this, I berate him for not doing his teeth properly. Not surprisingly, he wants some kind of compensation for being stabbed and picked on, all in the one day.

  ‘Ice cream?!’ I splutter. ‘You’ve just had a filling!!’ So, feeling even worse, I buy him the Mousetrap game for £22.99. He and Lydia open it all over the floor and immediately lose several of the pieces. But I feel ever so slightly better.

  22 Sex in the Ad Break of Friends

  Now that Lydia and Lawrence are showing an interest in the subject – examining each other in the bath, giggling, etc. – it seems the right time to share with them the Great Wonder of the Miracle of Life. I have planned how it will go. There’ll be no cutesy stuff, but it won’t just be dry science either. They’ll sit at my knee, their little faces gazing up in wonderment, as I – like David Attenborough – impart this Great Truth.

  ‘Gosh!’ they will gasp.

  And: ‘Wow!’

  Possibly followed by: ‘Urgh!’

  But that’s fine, because I am expecting it. I am Not Embarrassed, and everything is under control.

  When’s the Right Time? Some people are still shirking the issue when their kids are pushing puberty. A bit late; you don’t want to leave it until they know more than you. So I decide to go for the point where they’re old enough to understand the basics, but not too old to think that willies and so on are inherently fascinating. I shall not shirk! For once, I am going to copy my mother.

  I was five when she began her comprehensive rundown of the Facts of Life. This was in the Sixties, when a lot of kids believed that babies came from the huge bottles of coloured liquid that stood in the windows of chemists’. God knows why; it was just accepted in many quarters, like having Dream Topping instead of cream, and wearing a vest. Looking back, quite a few of the parents probably believed it as well. Mum would have none of it. Having drawn the pictures for various public health leaflets with titles like You and Your Breasts she was fearless and tireless. She gave us the full itinerary of the sperm – including the fate of stragglers, diversions and blocked fallopian tubes, and the entire life cycle of the ovum, from ovulation through menstruation in all its glory, to conception and beyond. From erections and secretions she did not flinch. The only problem was getting her to stop. By eleven I was running from the room, begging: ‘Can I do my maths homework now? Please?’

  It was like Star Wars; just when you thought you’d heard the last of it, along came yet another bit of the story you were sure you didn’t need. On the other hand, it served me well at secondary school. Friends came round eagerly, knowing that my mum would answer all the questions theirs wouldn’t. She also let me read The ABZ of Love, with its shall we say – generously illustrated entry on ‘erection’. While bunking off games, a few of us would gather in the cloakroom to discuss it all – very useful, as at fourteen, the range of experience was wide. One girl was in a grown-up relationship – ‘last night we did 69’ said one of her notes passed along the back row in Latin, while another was a strict Catholic whose mother described sex as, ‘something terrible you have to do when you get married’. She’d obviously got it mixed up with ironing. Relying on the biology syllabus was not recommended; thanks to the poor quality of early photocopying, in the mock O level the male and female reproductive systems looked the same. One of my friends labelled the male one as the female, so you can’t assume anything. During my period not long ago, I tried to explain to Lydia about ovaries; I told her: ‘You’ve got all your eggs already, in two little boxes in your tummy,’ to which she replied: ‘Are there chicks in there?’

  So I am primed. But as usual, events get ahead of me.

  Watching Friends one night, I become aware of the patter of tiny hands and knees. They have snuck in and are arranging themselves, like decorative bolsters, along the back of the sofa. Peter is out, so I grab the chance to curry favour.

  ‘I’m going to be really nice and let you watch for a bit, OK?’

  They ignore me. They are already deep into Rachel’s intention to say goodbye to Barry the Dentist.

  It’s an old episode. Once upon a time, in the past, Rachel was going to marry Barry, but she called it off. Now she’s been seeing him again, but he’s about to marry her friend Mindy and she does, like, have a conscience y’know. So she goes to his surgery to say she can’t see him any more. And they end up having sex in the chair. The sex itself being just implied – this is network after all, not HBO – the children initially only have Rachel’s encoded references to go on.

  When Phoebe and Monica ask: ‘So, did you go see Barry?’ she says: ‘Ye-es …’

  ‘How did he take it?’ says Monica. And Rachel answers (Big Laugh here): ‘… Quite well!’

  Then Monica says, ‘You have dental floss in your hair.’ (Another Big Laugh.) This of course goes right over their heads. However, her confession grips them immediately.

  ‘They had sex in the dental chair! They had sex in the dental chair!’ they chant, bouncing the poor old sofa to hell. And I suddenly realize that they have no idea what ‘sex’ actually is. For all they know it could be root canal work. There’s going to be no David Attenborough Moment. I have to tell them now.

  ‘Kids, shall I tell you what sex is?’

  ‘Sssh!’

  ‘Mummy, move! I can’t see!’

  I bide my time and wait for the break.

  I must focus. I’ve got approximately two minutes. The Friends bumper comes up.

  ‘OK, listen. Sex is when a man and a lady love each other and do lots of kissing, and the man puts his willy into the lady’s noo-noo.’ They are hysterical at the idea, not least because it’s only recently that they’ve started becoming helpless at the word noo-noo, although we’ve used it for ages.

  With about fifteen seconds left I don’t go into more detail, but do add, having se
en them eyeing each other speculatively: ‘Only grown-ups are allowed to do it.’

  Friends comes back on. In the rush to describe the whole procedure, I have forgotten to mention it can make a baby.

  23 Party Bag

  Lawrence is about to be seven. People say you should avoid having an August baby, but they’re wrong. Because their birthday always falls in the holidays, you never have to have a party with thirty kids. Or twenty. Or even ten. In fact, because almost the whole class is away at this time, numbers are extremely low. This year, we are taking Lawrence and two friends to the zoo. With Lydia that makes four. And the timing is perfect, because this very month, Komodo Dragons have arrived – ‘launched’, if that’s the right word, by David Attenborough. Attenborough is Lawrence’s hero. He is getting three entire series of his programmes for a birthday present, adding up to about 4,000 hours of viewing. I figure if we put the first disc on now, he’ll be switching off about March.

  When we get to the zoo, it turns out that launched is exactly the right word, as, a week before our arrival, one of the Dragons leaps off a wall and ends up in hospital.

  That leaves one other, which when we visit has understandably succumbed to agoraphobia, and a much smaller – presumably infant – example, which loiters disconsolately among the municipal, Ground Force-style landscaping.

  But it’s fine because there are birds – Lawrence’s favourite – and the aquarium, which is still ‘undeveloped’, i.e. the animals haven’t been replaced by corporatesponsored video screens. It is exactly as it was when I last came thirty years ago. And the children get a firsthand idea of what it’s like to actually live underwater, since the rain is coming through the ceiling. Afterwards, we have lunch out. It’s not expensive, yet, with the entrance tickets and snacks, we seem to have spent £200. We go back on the tube, exhausted. But at least we’ve saved the £200 we would otherwise have spent on an entertainer and a church hall. And we have managed to tire them out by accidentally booking a restaurant nowhere near the zoo.

  Two months later, Lydia is six. Her party will be making palaces out of cardboard boxes with me and Katarina, so she is allowed only five guests because – and this is an important point – ‘you can’t make palaces with more than six’.

  Unfortunately, in the run-up to her birthday I lose the list, and because my memory doesn’t extend to six names, tell one of the mothers who’s trying to lift share that the child she wants to share with hasn’t been invited, so not to mention it. But she has been. The confusion spreads until – none of the other five wanting to say the wrong thing – the poor woman wonders why every time she suggests a lift share they all change the subject. On the day, I find the list at the bottom of a huge pile of papers, and manage not to upset any six year olds – just. But to be fair to me, I have a lot on my plate – literally.

  We are supposed to be decorating the sitting room as the underwater kingdom of the Sea-Fairy Queen, the autocratic mermaid I invented at the seaside. But a week before, our DVD club accidentally sends us The Belstone Fox, a rather dark 1973 film starring Eric Porter – and Dennis Waterman, on horseback – which opens with a family of foxes being battered to death with spades. One cub survives (‘Tag’) and is rescued, to be brought up with the very hounds being trained to exterminate it on the hunt. At the end, Tag manages to get most of the hounds killed by leading them onto the railway track, and Eric Porter dies in a cave. Lydia loves it, and skips about telling anyone within a three-mile radius incomprehensible chunks of the plot. And she doesn’t want the underwater kingdom any more, she wants this. Peter has also bought her a cuddly fox from Ikea from which she is now inseparable, so this is partly his fault. I phone him.

  ‘Forget the Sea-Fairy Queen; we’ve got to do a country landscape with fox and hounds.’

  ‘But I’ve just got all this green netting.’

  ‘She doesn’t want it.’

  ‘Well, can’t you persuade her?’

  ‘Hey, here’s an idea! If you don’t want her to become obsessed with foxes, don’t take her to Ikea and buy her a bloody great big one.’

  ‘You didn’t complain at the time.’

  ‘I forgot.’

  I too am disappointed. I’ve been looking forward to suspending the green netting below the ceiling and hanging twirly green crepe paper from it for seaweed. I was going to put little boats on it, and stick a couple of Barbies up there, swimming, with their legs hanging down so when you look up it’s like those underwater shots in Jaws. I really wanted – oh, never mind. Lydia is only interested in the fox story, and won’t go anywhere without ‘Tag’. It has to sit on the table while she eats her cereal, where it attracts abuse from Lawrence and becomes spattered with Weetabix and Pritt Stick.

  ‘Do you like The Belstone Fox, Mummy?’

  ‘Yes, it’s very good.’

  ‘I’m going to have it on my cake!’

  ‘Ah. Right …’

  I ring my friend Judith, who rashly once mentioned that she is a serious cake decorator.

  ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Er – fine. You know Lydia’s birthday?’

  ‘How’s the underwater scene going?’

  ‘We-ell … I give her the outline of The Belstone Fox, leaving out the bit where Eric Porter dies in the cave.

  ‘What’s this got to do with it?’

  ‘She wants the whole thing on top of her cake.’

  ‘What?!’

  ‘You haven’t got any tips, have you?’ If she lived nearer, I’d pop round and get a quick masterclass, but she’s on the other side of London, so all I can do is moan.

  ‘Actually,’ she says after some thought, ‘I’m not doing anything tonight. I’ll make you one.’

  ‘What?!’

  ‘A fox in sugar paste. How big d’you want it? Roughly.’

  The next day I get two trains and a bus to meet her outside Hamley’s, where she is waiting with a plastic box. I open it and, sure enough, inside is an amazingly accurate representation of a fox. I carry it home carefully, like Mike Hammer with the plutonium in Kiss Me Deadly, and in the remaining hour before school ends, make a cub.

  The image in my head is surprisingly hard to translate into marzipan. The head and body don’t want to stick together, and to get the orangey-brown right I have to use a lot of black, red and yellow colouring which end up all over the kitchen counter and my hands. Also, it won’t stand up. So I lie it down on the white icing. It looks like a turd with a tail, but I figure if I position it near the other one it’ll get the benefit of the doubt. Anyhow, Lydia will definitely appreciate that I’ve opened every single shoebox in the attic to find my old dolls’ house garden spade to lean against the Matchmaker fence.

  ‘Look! That’s the spade the farmers use to beat the foxes to death!’

  ‘Oh, thank you so much, Mummy!’

  The Matchmaker fence is the pièce de résistance. It takes me about an hour the night before, snapping off lengths that aren’t quite the same, eating them and snapping off some more, followed by dabbing very, very small amounts of chocolate icing on the ends and holding them together, and then when that doesn’t work, getting involved with golden syrup. In the end I manage only one section of two-bar fence, which is grabbed off the cake and eaten by another child before anyone sees it properly. But Lydia loves her cake, so I can die happy.

  We just have to do a few games first. My mother did wonderful games. She even always had a spare prize tucked behind the record player for the little brother or sister who’d burst into tears because they hadn’t won, usually because they hadn’t actually played. So I’m buoyed along by a warm current of nostalgia. I’ll do Pass the Parcel because it means the children sitting down for a while, I can remember how to play it, and I like wrapping things. I dig out the set of pencils someone gave Lydia last year and surround myself with the Arts section of the Sunday paper. As I go along I read the odd paragraph, then, with time ticking on a bit too briskly, I just slap the p
ages on and stuff the pleasingly fat, finished item behind the kettle. Several hours later, I discover the downside of using the Books section, when the game stops abruptly, despite the strains of Beat It continuing to throb through the walls. Now I think of it, I do vaguely remember the name Pol Pot flashing past, but didn’t think much of it. I gather up the discarded pages more efficiently than usual.

  ‘Why are there skulls on the wrapping paper?’ asks one of the girls.

  ‘Er, just shove it in the bag would you?’

  The brother of one of them, who’s seeing an educational psychologist, thinks it’s ‘cool’.

  We send the kids away with their cardboard palaces, and their parents are all nice enough to look grateful for going-home presents which are basically decorated litter.

  24 Nature v Nurture: Pink Blizzards and the Great Escape

  Something rather serious has happened, something that won’t surprise anyone with children older than ours; it’s just shocked me, that’s all. Lydia has recently turned six. Lawrence is still seven. And their father has announced that he is taking Lawrence to see the Great Escape exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, and not Lydia. What are she and I doing instead? Going to John Lewis to buy Velcro.

  I know what this means. It’s the beginning of Lydia’s becoming a girl. In his eyes, she has joined the ranks of people who wear pink and mince about in tutus and – evidently from his decision re this weekend’s outing – are not interested in the Second World War. So let me just say that as a female who has sat through more documentaries on Colditz, the SOE and Churchill than the entire male population of NATO, I feel a little shortchanged. I mean, surely one of the rewards for long service in front of flickering Lancaster bombers and chaps giving Jerry a blasting should be the chance to climb through Tom, Dick and Harry and buy a medal in the museum shop afterwards. And if Lydia wants to come too, who is he to stop her? But she doesn’t. And I feel a bit sad.

  Up until now we’ve been comrades, a gang of four, sharing the same interests. Well, more or less. Peter can’t watch a subtitled film without moaning about it, and doesn’t know the difference between Katherine Mansfield and Jayne Mansfield. (He was impressed that a busty film star had managed to write short stories and knew H. G. Wells.) And I’ve forgotten the names of the five father and son Formula One racing drivers I memorized for the wedding. But on the whole, we all paddle the same canoe. We all built towers together and helicopter landing pads when they were little; they both still make dens behind the sofa – which is unisex– to use a word from my youth, but there is an overall bias towards the masculine. Lydia has grown up with boys’ toys – not because we despise all things feminine, but because Peter, Lawrence and I all like them and we were here first. When she came along we already had the toy garage from Peter’s nephews, hundreds of cars, Scalextric (my wedding present to him) and, thanks to various neighbours, a plastic castle and Sherwood Forest set, plus double our combined weight in Lego. And with most of the junior videos – Bob the Builder, Fireman Sam, Thomas, etc. – being so blokeish, the household bias was male. But this is mitigated by Lawrence’s nurturing side; dressing-up clothes are much used by both, and the dolls’ beds two Christmases ago were more popular with Lawrence. He went through a phase of parenting a teddy called John Calman, followed by a tortoise and an elephant, ‘both eight years old, Mummy: they’re twins.’