Confessions of a Bad Mother

by Stephanie Calman

  But Lawrence has, I reckon, more room for manoeuvre. Ever since I had Lydia, I’ve been amazed by how society’s ancient attitude to females periodically breaks through: ‘A girl? Ooh, no thank you. I prefer boys. Boys are simpler. Girls are spiteful. You know where you are with boys.’ And so on, from people you can’t somehow imagine saying, ‘Oh, your husband’s black: they’re stupid and lazy.’

  At the park, Peter and I watch Lydia climb trees in a tiara, and give ourselves credit for producing a truly modern daughter.

  Still, I watch for the signs of coyness and excess pink that everyone tells me are coming, even though she is by no means as ‘girly’ as most of her friends. My own dolls’ house, made out of hardboard forty years ago and in need of extensive refurbishment, provokes not so much as a peep of curiosity. It sits on a shelf in the spare room, with its long-untouched beds, cooker, piano, clock and six-keyed typewriter made by ten-year-old me out of clay. Remembering my own longing for a Sindy when I was given a chemistry set, I come home intermittently with a doll, fairy, or glittery bracelet. The jewellery is fallen upon hungrily, but the dolls are generally found at the bottom of toy pile-ups, limbs twisted and faces horribly tattooed with pen, like a Friday night in A&E.

  So I think that my daughter isn’t interested in dolls, but I am wrong.

  Around her fifth birthday, the blizzard of pink starts falling upon us. We watch helplessly, like extras in a CGI blockbuster, as it drifts through the windows and transforms the landscape. We know we’re powerless to resist. But that’s fine, because I know she can be both: gorgeous and dynamic; model and detective. I get her a Barbie stamper set – ‘it encourages drawing’ – and an air stewardess Sindy, though I call her ‘Travel Sindy’, to make her sound like an explorer. We have our first shopping day together, buy her a dress and pink glittery tights and have lunch and feel like best friends. Then we come home and all watch Die Another Day together, and Lydia wants to be Jinx, the sexy and fearless CIA operative played by Halle Berry. So that’s OK. I am so relaxed about the whole thing I even let her have the fluffy unicorn she wants from the pointless shop at the end of the road. Then I begin to notice signs.

  She fidgets through Master and Commander – our favourite film of 2003. Sailors, cannons, cellos – what’s not to like? She wants, and gets, a My Little Pony, then another – from someone at school who doesn’t know we’ve told her the ‘different’ ones are pictures of the same one in different colours, and that ‘Collect the entire range’ is in fact Korean for ‘There is only one’. She adores The Lion King more than ever, and still refers frequently to Kiara, which was briefly amusing because at first her father and I thought she was a new girl at school. They say you should watch what your children watch, and they’re right. Prolonged viewing of films in which Life’s Great Themes are explored by animated wildlife is inspiring her to blab snippets of platitudinous sentiment suited to a low-grade sales course.

  After a battle to get her to do her teeth one night she skips away, gushing: ‘Thanks, Mum! I’ll always believe in you!’

  And at bedtime she adds: ‘I love you more than Life Itself.’ And when I look a touch sceptical, admits: ‘I got that from Robin Hood.’

  And I defend my scepticism, as I suspect that what looks on the outside like concern for the Diversity of Life and our fellow creatures – though mainly those called Kiara – is actually part of a wider trend towards cutesiness. When she gets something in her eye a bit of vinegary chip if you must know – I say: ‘Try and cry it out.’

  Lawrence advises: ‘Think of something sad.’

  And Lydia says: ‘I’m thinking of a pencil that hasn’t been sharpened.’

  ‘No!’ he says: ‘DYING!’

  I think that illustrates the difference between the sexes as well as anything.

  And while I am discussing with Peter a Woman’s Right Not to Spend Her Saturday Buying Velcro While the Menfolk Crawl Through Tunnels and Buy Medals at the Imperial War Museum, Lydia is packing her ballet kit for classes she doesn’t have.

  I have, as usual, brought this on myself.

  Strike one! I have got her an Angelina Ballerina book, even though it contains one of my least favourite literary phenomena, clothed mice. Strike two! A boy at school – I know your game, sonny – gives her an Angelina backpack. Strike three! I allow Katarina to get her a ballet outfit for her sixth birthday.

  And yet – with my head up my arse in the time-honoured parental manner – I am hoping the Ballet Thing might go away. It’s not so much ballet I object to as the culture that surrounds it. I’m sure that the other mothers sign their girls up because they Look Sweet – not a crime in itself, admittedly, but then they don’t take their sons to football because they like the strip. I don’t want her to aspire to be decorative. I want my daughter to stand apart, to plough her own furrow, rev her own – speedboat. So I talk her into doing karate. I’ve told her it’s like ballet, but with more jumping. And after six weeks of it, she seems content.

  But when we return from our Velcro expedition, she leans the Angelina backpack against the wall by the door and says meekly: ‘I’ll keep it here in case you decide to let me do ballet.’

  And so I go into the kitchen and stab myself with a fork. Naturally, I’m a hypocrite. Of course I did ballet when I was that age. I was forever gazing through the window of Annello & Davide at the pointe shoes, and was never without my copy of Ballet Shoes, which I regarded as a sort of life manual, the way people these days look upon Atkins or The Purpose-Driven Life.

  But what about Lydia? What about her wishes? She wants to do ballet, so shouldn’t I just give in? Ah, but! She also wants to be a lion cub, a baby eagle, and intermittently – a Dalmatian. And while I’ve given her milk in a saucer on several occasions, I object to dragging her up the road on a string.

  And while all this has been swirling round in my head, the fog clears a little, and a brief exchange with her makes me realize what I really want out of all this.

  However she evolves, I just want to be part of it. And learning that I’ve already missed one key stage of her development as a woman has made me not want to miss out – on anything. Shortly after not going to The Great Escape, I get them Smarties as a treat.

  ‘Hey, Lydia,’ I say. ‘If you lick the red one and put it on your lips, it makes lipstick!’ And she says: ‘I know.’

  Somehow she has managed to experience this without me. But with whom? Where? When? Making lipstick with a red Smartie is a special moment in a girl’s life, and she has done it with someone else. In the back of my head it feels like the wobbling glass of water in Jurassic Park, a warning of the time when she will escape my influence altogether.

  But until then, I shall face the pink blizzard. Or at least keep my head up. I might even let her have the ballet lessons, on condition she keeps up the karate or, if she goes off that, boxing.

  Or maybe I’ll just buy her a gun. A pink one, of course.

  25 0800: How’s My Mothering?

  The continual changes of behaviour – the children’s, and therefore ours – are beginning to take their toll. The childcare books that were around when they were babies have given way to child-management manuals, with chatty titles like How to Talk So Your Child Will Listen and Listen So Your Child Will Talk. Some, like that one, actually do make some sense. But they tend to assume a progressive scenario, where the correct application of behaviour modifying strategies, and the increasing age of the children, combine to create an ever more harmonious domestic scene. What they don’t describe is the sensation of going backwards, and how a civilized meal for four can descend in minutes into a trailer for The Jerry Springer Show.

  In the horrible West Country pub, still arguing over Lydia’s chips, or lack of them, I ponder how quickly we can change from civilized people – us talking, the children drawing – into monsters. And I think about how tired I am of it all. Tired of Peter pretending to be so bloody reasonable all the time. Tired of children whose
needs I’m supposed to put first. All the time! I’m not a mother, I’m a servant. All that stuff they leave on the floor. I am SICK SICK SICK of it! Even when I began to actually want children, I never counted among my ambitions ‘to get a job as a slave’. Hey, Gloria Steinem!

  Remember when you couldn’t understand why you felt such solidarity with black women? Then you realized it was because you all belonged to the Female Underclass. I’m with you, baby! I’m there! Right now I am so identified with those Filipina maids locked up by mad, rich employers who take their passports away – if you spoke to me I’d answer in Tagalog. The kids roam the house, discarding clothes, swords, wands, marbles, toast and Lego, and I follow, almost permanently on my knees. Bending and picking, bending and picking; I’m like an extra in Gone With The Wind.

  And at the same time, I feel this:

  Somehow I’ve been allowed to become a parent, and I still can’t believe I’ve got away with it. Look, here I am crossing the road with them. Here I am, driving them down the motorway to my mother’s. They are in my charge. I can take them anywhere. I can take them to the park. On my own. Really, is no one going to stop me? It doesn’t seem possible. I’ve got the Crown Jewels here. Me. And I just know something bad’s going to happen.

  ‘Come back!’

  ‘Get down!’

  ‘That tree’s way too high for you!’

  ‘If you jump on there, you’ll fall down and hurt yourself.’

  ‘Don’t climb up the outside of the stairs! You’ll fall on the tiles and crack your head open!’

  ‘Hold my hand when we cross the road! Don’t pull away!’

  ‘The drivers can’t see you! Don’t you realize?!!’

  ‘If you run across that road without holding my hand you’ll get hit by a car …’

  I can’t let go of their hands or they’ll jump in front of a car. Lorries have magnets that will drag them under the wheels. I can’t let them out of the swings enclosure because they’ll run off and not come back. A centrifugal force will propel them away from me and they’ll be gone forever, like the beads of a necklace spilled down a drain. I’ve got to anchor them somehow. I should be the centre of their orbit, but I have no gravitational pull. This is how you end up being over-protective. This is how you end up with them still living at home at forty-five in cardigans, watching every episode ever made of Blake’s Seven. It’s not cruelty: it’s fear. I lie awake seeing terrible things: snuff movies that wait for the hours of deepest darkness and switch themselves on in my head.

  In the park once, we saw a man with a baby in a pushchair. He was OK-looking but a bit wet, the sort of man we’ll probably encourage Lydia to go out with on the grounds that he won’t insist on sex. He was being so nice to this kid: ‘Look at those ducks! They’re swimming, aren’t they? Oh! Would you like your hood pulled back a little bit? That’s better!’

  My two were whining for food. I offered them apples, which they didn’t want, and then they saw the chocolate biscuits I was saving for later. I handed over the biscuits and growled at them for dropping the wrappers on the ground. Then I growled at them for getting chocolate on their fleeces. Then I growled at them to be quieter: there are other people trying to enjoy the ducks, you know! Next to this guy and his baby we were like those families you hope won’t come near you on holiday, who just shout, consume and exist in their own ecosystem of crap. I was sure he’d decided I was called Britney and had a tattoo.

  As they moved off towards the swings Lydia said, ‘Why has that baby got that thing on its face?’ It was a drip. The poor little thing had a tube in its nose, with a huge-looking piece of tape to hold it in place. It was ill. No wonder its dad was being so nice. My children were perfect and I was growling at them. If they’d had something wrong with them, perhaps I’d have been nice too. But since they weren’t dying or anything I could afford to growl. And then I felt terrible.

  While I’ve been thinking this, Peter has persuaded Lawrence to give up some of his chips in return for advance ownership of the chocolate that comes with the coffee. Lydia’s not entirely happy with this arrangement, not surprisingly since there’ll only be one chocolate because I’m not having coffee; I’m killing my husband and going back to London instead. Peter orders them ice creams, and finishes up with the Deluxe Special, the line that comes just before they shove you in the attic and turn the key.

  ‘Look, why don’t you go off and relax? I’ll handle this.’

  ‘Why don’t you fuck off?’

  I go out to the car and half read the paper. And it occurs to me that the period we’re always looking ahead to, the Calm Time, when life stops being so volatile, is something we’ve just imagined. When they were babies we looked forward to their walking and talking, but that presented a new set of challenges, such as falling downstairs and answering back. When they were toddlers we looked forward to their feeding themselves, and learning to read, but that provoked new challenges such as eating ve-ry slow-ly and whining at us when we turned out the light. At each stage we’ve envisaged a plateau, a resting place where, after a steep climb, the landscape flattens and opens out. And I realize that like the person who thinks that getting married is the solution, rather than merely the opportunity to fight with the same person each day instead of different ones, we have fundamentally misunderstood the whole thing.

  What we have to look forward to are just a variety of ever-changing scenarios which we are unable to control or predict. Round the corner we almost certainly have some form of best friend, she-loves-me-she-loves-me-not soap operas for Lydia, and being shoved by larger boys with stubble, on or off the pitch for Lawrence. Then there’ll be voices breaking, and meticulously planned parties to which the cool people may not come. And after that, hushed phone calls, doors slamming – ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘NOTHING!’ – and me and Peter fighting over who drives across town to collect them at 2 a.m., to be followed by driving lessons at £245 an hour. And beyond that, I can see worry: worry about their going to Burma in their gap year and falling in love with a dissident and going to jail; worry about their staying here and lying on their beds smoking dope for the rest of their lives; worry about their settling down too young; worry about their not settling down at all; worry about their not fulfilling their dreams, not being happy, not being well or getting run over on a road somewhere because at thirty-two they still forget to look both ways and look again. Worry about how they will cope with life when we’re gone. Now I’m worrying about dying early and leaving them orphaned. If I let my mind roam, I can think of at least ten ways I could die tomorrow, without even leaving the house.

  There is no Calm Time and never will be. This is a truly terrifying thought. I close my paper and ponder the immensity of it. Behind the trees, the sun is dropping. Peter and the children are coming towards me, laughing. They have charmed two more chocolates out of the waitress. Peter bends down and kisses me through the window.

  ‘Hello, darling!’

  He gets them into their seats and they each take a book out of the pocket as we drive off.

  ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’

  ‘Yeah …’

  And I know there aren’t two people in the whole world I would rather have my life wrecked by.

  Epilogue

  I’m on my way out one evening, and Lawrence calls out from his position in front of the TV: ‘Good luck, Mummy! If you get in any trouble, you know our phone number.’