Crazy, Busy, Guilty

by Lauren Sams

  He nodded slowly, the smirk dissolved.

  I raised my eyebrows suggestively – suggesting he vacate my office. Neil took the hint.

  •Don’t check your emails in the morning! Set aside an hour a day to respond to emails, and don’t look at your inbox outside of this time.

  •Meditate as soon as you wake up: a clear mind is the best way to start the day.

  •Don’t just sit on the couch when you get home – TV drains your energy and productivity. Instead, schedule a walk with a friend or go to a yoga class.

  I wondered if anyone else reacted to these time management tips with anything more than an overwhelming sense of defeat. I couldn’t do any of these things. And yet I kept reading. I was particularly fixated on reading interviews with successful women who had kids. How did they do it? There must be some secret, something I didn’t know about. I was determined to figure it out.

  There were secrets, it turned out, but most of them involved nannies or husbands, neither of which I had. Several mentioned wine, which was more promising. But mostly the tips were exhausting. The women all got up early and went to bed late. They were organised to the point of military precision. They shopped online and had little alerts set up for when they needed more toilet paper or milk. They cut up vegetables and laid out school uniforms and even put bread in the toaster, ready for the next morning’s breakfast, the night before. They had back-up plans for their back-up plans.

  It was bamboozling just reading about these women, let alone trying to put their tips into practice. Why didn’t any of the articles just say: Do less. Pick a few things you don’t like and stop doing them. Imagine! Nope, don’t like going for a run, not gonna do it. Nope, not into meditating, that’s out.

  The whole point of these articles seemed to be to reassure the reader that as long as you still did all the motherly things that were expected (read bedtime stories, cut veggies, mend school clothes), you were allowed to have a career as well. But you couldn’t be a sub-par mum and have a job. After all, if you worked full-time, you were already a sub-par mother.

  I closed my browser and opened the window. Fresh air blew in and I felt the sun on my face. What was Pip doing right now? Was she outside in this loveliness? I hoped so. I closed my eyes and repeated the words I’d been telling myself for the past few days: it’ll all be worth it.

  *

  ‘Where’s my beautiful girl at?’

  Shit.

  Jase’s voice echoed through our tiny apartment, instantly waking his beautiful girl.

  I gritted my teeth and vowed to at least try not to be too passive-aggressive about it. To his credit, Jase was helping out. Not much, but I had to remind myself that as much as parenting had been thrust on me, it had basically been dumped on Jase’s head like an 80-tonne piano dropped from the top of Centrepoint.

  ‘Shh!’ I whispered redundantly as Pippa’s cries filled the apartment.

  How long had she slept? I checked my phone. Thirty-five minutes. Great.

  ‘Sorry, did I wake her?’ Jase asked, just as redundantly. I nodded, glaring at him. ‘Sorry, George.’ He had the good grace to look sheepish, at least. ‘I brought coffee!’ He held up two Campos cups and my eyes widened like saucers. ‘And . . . doughnuts!’ A paper bag appeared, stained greasily by the yeasty confections inside.

  ‘My hero,’ I deadpanned. ‘Come inside, I’ll go get her.’

  In the dark of our bedroom, Pippa was, miraculously, still neatly wrapped in her adorable pastel yellow sleeping bag, munching on her fingers and staring up at me like, ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ I gave her a smile and she returned it.

  There she was – my little lady. Sometimes, through the fog of sleeplessness and busyness, I forgot that I was meant to be enjoying all this. How many times had someone – my mum, usually – told me ‘they’re only little once’? At first I had mentally followed that up with, ‘And thank god for that, because I couldn’t handle her being this needy and helpless twice’, but now I could see that the days really did fly by. These little moments when I could hold my head above water long enough to really see Pip smile at me were like nature’s version of inspirational Instagram quotes.

  I de-swaddled Pip and carried her downstairs. Jase had flung himself onto the lounge. Gosh, he must be so exhausted with all of his zero commitments.

  ‘How come you’re here so early? I didn’t expect you until after lunch.’

  ‘I had an early ride this morning. Figured I’d kill two birds.’

  Jase and I had dated for a year. We broke up for the same old reasons everyone does – I had agreed to carry my best friend’s baby without telling him. Typical. Then I found out I was – whoops! – pregnant. I don’t think Jase ever really bargained on me keeping the baby – in a lot of ways, I hadn’t either – but when I told him I was going through with it, to his credit he was totally fine with it. Until he decided we should get married and I had to talk him down off the ledge.

  ‘Here you go,’ he said, handing me a coffee. We had reached a decent place now, Jase and I. We could stand to be in the same room. We got along. And though I knew that Jase was, deep down, kind of lazy about everything except his precious bloody cycling, I wished he could see that I needed more help with Pip. He’d be dining out on this token effort for months. No matter that he had never – not once – woken in the middle of the night to feed Pip, or puréed mountains of fruit or wiped shit from a wall (often things I had done all in the one half-hour). He’d brought doughnuts and coffee? What a guy.

  I took the coffee, snatched a doughnut and sat down, cradling Pip with one arm. I unclipped my maternity bra and let an eggplant-shaped, vaguely eggplant-coloured boob flop out. I’m not exaggerating, it flopped. One minute it wasn’t there, the next second – flop! – it was. It was about as sexy as Margie and Tony Abbott’s wedding night.

  ‘I shouldn’t be eating these,’ he said, brushing away doughnut crumbs as he picked up a second. A smear of jam clung to his top lip. ‘Gotta get down to eighty-five kay-gees for the ride next weekend,’ he said. ‘I’m at eighty-seven now, so I think I can do it, but it’s going to be tough.’

  I paused for a second to remember that Jase’s life hadn’t been entirely re-calibrated like mine had. He still had space and time and energy to devote to something outside Pip. I didn’t. He had a part to play in Pip’s life, of course, but the expectations were so vastly different. All Jase had to do was show up occasionally. I felt the gulf between us stretch further.

  ‘Where’s the ride?’

  ‘Wollongong. Saskia’s coming, actually. It’s our, uh . . . our first weekend away together.’

  ‘Oh yeah? That sounds nice.’

  Saskia was Jase’s girlfriend. He had wanted us to meet months ago, but so far I’d been able to dodge that particular event. I didn’t know when would be a good time to meet the girlfriend of the father of my baby, but I imagined it should be sometime after my episiotomy stitches had dissolved.

  ‘Yeah. She’s really great, George.’ I almost breathed a sigh of relief when he didn’t follow it up with that old chestnut, ‘I think you’d really like her.’

  ‘That’s good, Jase,’ I said, trying to keep my voice light, matter-of-fact, normal. ‘That’s good to hear.’

  ‘Thanks George, that’s nice of you. I think she’s going to be . . . part of my life.’

  I nodded.

  He went on. ‘So, you know, at some stage –’ I raised my eyebrows, daring him to continue. I knew what he was going to say. ‘. . . I guess I’d like to introduce her to Pippa. If that’s OK with you,’ he added hastily.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Sure. Someday. Not yet.’

  God, I couldn’t believe him. Pippa was barely on solids and Jase wanted her to have a stepmother.

  He nodded quickly. ‘Sure. Just, uh, let me know when you’re ready. Anyway, how’s our girl?’

  I pushed my lips out and breathed loudly. ‘Well . . . I’m not sure if I’m any closer to figuring out the instruct
ions, but . . . she’s fine. We’re fine,’ I lied.

  Jase did not like hearing uncomfortable truths any more than I liked telling them. I wasn’t fine, but I wasn’t about to admit that. How could I complain about the rush rush rush of my life with a baby when Nina couldn’t have one? How could I properly explain the madness of working and parenting without seeming ungrateful and selfish? I bottled up the broken sleep and the gravel rash nipples and the persistent ache in my lower back. I already felt bad enough for not loving motherhood the way I was supposed to, there was no way I was actually going to confess to it.

  Life had become a blur of near-missed deadlines. I ran to the train station every night, leaving just enough time to sprint from the office to the platform. Meredith did not like people leaving ‘early’. And Meredith’s definition of ‘early’ was ‘before 7 pm’. I fed Pip her dinner as I cradled a tumbler of wine, careful not to gulp it down too quickly. When I had finally finished the dinner-bath-bed routine I would tidy the house and pay bills and answer the seventeen text messages that Meredith would have sent, and then about twenty minutes after that I would realise I’d forgotten to have dinner, so I’d pull out a packet of chips and pour myself another glass of wine and fall asleep in front of Real Housewives. But nobody else needed to know that. I’d gotten pretty good at pretending that this mothering caper was no biggie. I knew exactly which boxes to tick on the Edinburgh test to make sure I didn’t end up medicated or in therapy. I didn’t have time for either.

  Jase smiled and nodded, taking a stab at an understanding facial expression. What I would have really liked to hear was, ‘Anything I can do to help?’ But he didn’t say that.

  ‘That’s great, George. I guess it helps that you have a lot of help.’

  I couldn’t help it. My mouth fell open like a hinge. ‘What?’

  ‘Well, you have me, Nina, your mum. Ellie. I mean, she’s like, the world’s best wife. It’s harder for Claire, you know? Being a stay-at-home mum. She does everything herself.’ Claire was Jase’s sister-in-law, and yes, a stay-at-home mum. But she was also married to the father of her child, so I highly doubted she ‘did everything herself’. Maybe everything between the hours of 9 am and 5 pm. Maybe.

  I laughed. ‘Mmm, but Ellie’s not my wife,’ I snapped, trying to make it sound like a joke. ‘Ouch!’ Pippa bit her gummy mouth down on my left nipple. I pulled my boob back and she looked up at me, as if to say, ‘What the hell?’

  ‘You OK?’ Jase asked, and I swear he had one eye on his phone.

  ‘Mmm. Fine. Anyway, what I mean is, Ellie’s not my wife. Nobody is my wife. So I don’t know if I’d say I have “a lot of help”. I mean . . . I do everything around here.’

  Jase looked at me, took a breath and presumably decided against saying anything more. Good move.

  I felt Pippa detach and I folded my boob up and clipped my bra closed. I’d always had such a love–hate relationship with my boobs – they always felt unnecessarily big, never right for spaghetti straps or halter-neck tops or (god forbid) anything strapless (the main reason I’d never agreed to be a bridesmaid). But now they were . . . flat. Empty. Still big, but without shape. Like a bean bag without the filling. Instead of rounding at the top and finishing in neat, bouncy spheres, they began – and continued – in planes that went straight down, towards my ankles. Of course, they were still massive, thanks to a rather large and constant influx of milk, but it was an uncomfortable size, not in any way sexy. And throughout the day they alternated between feeling rock-hard and jelly-soft, thanks to the ebb and flow of milk. It made me want to write an obituary for them, or at the very least, some sort of commemorative haiku.

  Too big, too bouncy,

  No more of that now. Gone forever

  Lest we forget.

  Or maybe:

  Deflated balloons

  You fed a child, thank you,

  But what of bikinis?

  ‘Do you want to have a hold?’ I asked Jase, motioning towards Pippa. He nodded eagerly.

  ‘Yes, please! Come here, baby girl.’ Jase sat down next to me on the orange sofa he’d despised when we lived together and delicately took Pippa from me, still careful not to let her head drop back, even though she’d been holding it up by herself for months now. I took for granted all the little details I knew about Pip. I hadn’t worried about her neck for ages.

  Pippa settled in to Jase’s embrace and I felt the now-familiar tug of hormonally-charged love. It pulled at me every time I saw her with someone else. It was like I needed that bit of distance to remind myself of everything I felt for her.

  Jase peered down at her, his eyes passing over her features slowly, as if he was looking for something.

  ‘Whose eyelashes do you think she has?’ he asked quietly, almost reverently, as Pippa’s lashes fluttered with the onset of sleep.

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t given it much thought, to be honest.’

  ‘I think she has mine. Don’t you think they look a bit like mine?’ He closed his eyes and leaned towards me, showing me the ancestral eyelashes.

  ‘I guess,’ I said, slowly. ‘They’re both very . . . fair?’

  ‘That’s what I mean.’ He smiled and continued to assess Pip. ‘She looks so peaceful when she’s asleep. Like nothing would ever wake her.’

  ‘Except you, twenty minutes ago. You’ve got to be quieter when you come in, Jase.’

  He frowned. ‘Sorry. I thought you said nothing wakes her.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  I had heard – from Ellie, font of maternal wisdom that she is – that babies were capable of sleeping through jackhammers drilling and helicopters taking off, but not mine. Pip could be woken by a cotton ball touching a piece of felt three rooms over. Seven months of having a kid had trained me in the art of cat burglary, if nothing else.

  Jase offered me a wry smile. ‘Sorry, George. Won’t happen again. But you seem like you’re doing really well. Are you?’ His tone was kind. I could have told him, right then, that being a single mother was not the endless love-in I had so naively imagined it would be. I could have told him that sometimes I cried in the shower, where I knew nobody would see or hear me. I could have told him that exactly once I had allowed myself to wonder if I had made a huge mistake.

  But I didn’t.

  ‘I am. I’m doing really well.’ Lies. ‘I’m just . . . tired.’ True. Very true. ‘Would you mind if I . . . if I had a nap?’

  He shook his head. ‘No! Not at all. We’ll just hang out here. You just tell me what I need to do and I’ll do it. No problem at all. I do need to go pick Saskia up from work at some point, but . . .’

  It was too late. I was already asleep.

  *

  By the following week, Meredith had forgotten all about Celeste and her aura. She was waging a new battle.

  ‘All of these covers have to go,’ she said, walking into my office and pulling a pile of mock covers from my desk. She threw them all in the bin.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said, trying to keep my voice level. Those covers – six of them, to be exact – had required weeks of negotiating. They’d all been retouched. Designed. The cover stories had been written. It was like setting $100,000 on fire.

  ‘Morning,’ she said. ‘So – the covers. I hate them. Get rid of them.’

  ‘What’s wrong with the stories as they are?’

  ‘It’s not the stories, it’s the covers. They’re too . . .’ Meredith threw her hands in the air. ‘I don’t know. I don’t like them, though. They don’t fit with the rebrand.’

  Meredith didn’t like a lot of things about this magazine she had created. She didn’t like Celeste’s aura. She didn’t like the fashion team using the in-house photographer, even though we were meant to, to cut down on costs. She didn’t like her assistant, Bea, wearing culottes. She didn’t like the length of our profiles and had sat with me, red-penning thousands of words away. She didn’t like anyone over forty on the cover but she didn’t want anyone under tw
enty-five, either. She didn’t like the tone of our social media accounts but couldn’t quite put her finger on why. Every sixteen minutes or so, she’d rush into my office in a flap, teetering on her stacked heels, informing me of a new problem that had to be dealt with ‘right away’. Yesterday, it had been the horoscopes. Scorpio and Capricorn were ‘too negative’. Sixteen minutes later, there was a new crisis. I had learnt to take Meredith’s ‘emergencies’ with a grain of salt, considering there was sure to be a new one within the half-hour. But throwing out six covers? That was an emergency.

  ‘Ohhhhhhh-kayyyyy,’ I said, as she sat down opposite me. ‘There are six covers here. We’ve spent a lot of money on these. We have the stories. We’ve retouched them all. A lot of them are already laid out. And if you throw out this week’s, what are we going to replace it with?’

  Meredith shrugged and shook her head. ‘I don’t know. You’ll figure it out. Have you got any ideas?’

  I didn’t, as it happened, because I had assumed – wrongly, naively – that the next six covers were locked in. And I’d been too busy coming up with ideas for the million and seven new things Meredith wanted to launch immediately, if not sooner. And when I wasn’t coming up with those ideas, I was putting out the tiny but dangerous fires she created approximately every sixteen minutes. So, no: no ideas.

  ‘Uh, no, I don’t, not off the top of my head, but . . . let’s see. How about Freya Knight?’

  Meredith stared at me blankly. ‘Who?’

  ‘Freya Knight? She’s, uh, a news anchor at ABC. She might be good. She did that speech recently about refugee women and FGM?’

  Still blank.

  ‘So she’s quite topical. It could be good to explore that further. I mean . . . we’d have to pull it together quite quickly, but –’

  Meredith see-sawed her head. ‘Mmm. I’m lukewarm. Who else?’

  ‘OK. Right. What about a man? We haven’t run a man for a while. How about that chef who’s doing all the root-to-stalk stuff? He’s cool.’ I couldn’t remember his name, but Neil had mentioned this chef guy in one of our daily stand-up meetings. I mined my brain for more information.