by Lauren Sams
No! I wanted to shout. Don’t leave! This is not what I want to do! I want to do you!
But I didn’t. I smiled and nodded, and stood from my desk to shake Neil’s hand, a gesture both bizarrely personal and nowhere near intimate enough. He paused before taking my hand, but when he did, I felt a surge of his old warmth coming through.
‘Neil, I –’
‘Bye, George.’
He left.
*
Arianna Foster and I were as different as two women could be. I knew this before I met her, in a basic sense, but now that she sat opposite me, entirely composed, wearing head to toe white (WHITE!), I knew for sure. I mean: a mother, wearing white. And absolutely zero tomato sauce stains. How was it possible?
I glanced down at my list of Meredith-approved questions (remembering with a sting the email she’d sent, to which I had replied – of course – no worries!) and tried hard to concentrate. Neil is leaving. Neil is leaving.
Arianna smiled graciously, answering my questions just as her PR firm would have instructed her. The Mona Lisa of the eastern suburbs. Her hair – my god, her hair. It wasn’t blonde. No. That’s far too simple a description. It was golden. It shone as she moved, as if little ripples of sunshine beamed from it. If the rest of this woman wasn’t so damn beautiful, I would have been compelled to stare at her hair all the live long freaking day.
What struck me more than her beauty, though, was her . . . togetherness. Together was something I had not been for a very long time. Arianna looked like she had taken exceptional care of herself – always and without fail. She looked like she had never spent a night trying – unsuccessfully – to get her baby back to sleep. Like she had never felt her boobs erupt with milk, their contents seeping through her bra and top, giving her liquid headlights. Like she had never been so bone-tired that she had all but given up on the idea of looking nice. Her clothes did not bear the stains of last night’s dinner, or in fact, any dinner at all. They were crisp with the recent creases of ironing. They were fashionable, on trend. Looking at her was the way I felt after visiting Ikea – surely if I just had those spice jars and that desk tray, I could achieve great things. I mean, Marie Curie certainly didn’t invent radium or whatever until she had Kondo-ed her desk, right? So if I could just have a little of whatever Arianna’s magic was, I could get shit done.
As it was, my clothes did bear the stains of last night’s dinner. And not even my own. Pip’s dinner – some sort of superfood-charged gluten-free (apparently all babies born after 2007 are gluten-intolerant) spaghetti bolognaise concoction – was splattered on my un-ironed jeans. Luckily, they were very dark (my days of wearing white jeans were decidedly O-V-E-R) so they looked OK to the naked eye. But put them under a microscope and you’d discover a Rorschach test of food stains, spilt milk and general detritus. I tried to remember the last time I had washed them. Did Febreze count as washing? Probably not.
‘So, um . . . tell me how you got the idea . . . for the candles,’ I said, trying to sound as interested as I possibly could. I could hardly imagine anything less captivating than discussing candles – possibly the difference between three- and four-ply toilet paper?
Arianna’s quiet smile broke into a fully-fledged grin. ‘It’s a funny story, actually,’ she said, as she proceeded to tell me a dull, decidedly unfunny story about being bored at home one day (having a rich husband will do that) and thinking, ‘Gee, I like candles. Why don’t I buy some from China, stick my name on them and sell them to other rich women just like me?’
‘Uh-huh, uh-huh,’ I nodded, jotting on my pad. I wasn’t actually taking notes, I just needed to appear interested. On the pad I’d written, ‘YOU ARE AS BORING AS A VANILLA-SCENTED CANDLE.’ I traced over and over the letters until the pen broke into the page below. ‘And, uh . . . what are your other . . . plans? Will the company expand?’
‘Yes! Definitely. We’re launching in Singapore next month –’ more rich housewives ‘– and of course, there’s the subscription service. We are all very excited by that.’
‘Uh-huh, sure, it’s amazing.’
‘It’s the first time anyone has ever done anything like it,’ Arianna added, as if she were talking about walking on the moon or Drake’s Instagram, ie something of actual merit.
‘Right. What’s the thinking?’ My recorder flashed its red light, confirming it was recording. As if it would matter. The PR company – or Meredith, for whom integrity was an optional extra, like a meal on a Jetstar flight – would change everything I’d written and replace it with a slightly more editorial version of a press release (complete with a lengthy and detailed description of what my subject was wearing and had eaten for lunch – compulsory for any interview with a woman these days).
‘One candle, every month, for a year. It’s the perfect gift for the woman – or man! – who has everything.’
‘Except scented candles.’
Arianna beamed and nodded enthusiastically. ‘Right!’
‘Arianna?’
Mona Lisa whipped around to face a young, stocky woman in jeans and a paint-covered t-shirt. The Nanny.
‘Yes, Robyn?’
‘Atticus wants a snack.’
Arianna raised her eyebrows. ‘There’s plenty of seaweed in the kitchen, Robyn.’
‘He’s quite hungry, Arianna. I thought I’d make him a sandwich –’
Her employer shook her head. ‘No. Seaweed or low-sugar fruit. Atticus knows the rules.’
Robyn opened her mouth but Arianna cut her off before she began. ‘Thank you, Robyn, that’ll be all.’
Robyn looked to me with a slightly aghast expression. I looked away. She left.
Arianna shook her head. ‘It’s only her second week. She doesn’t know how to handle Atticus yet. He’s quite a . . . strong-willed little boy.’
I nodded.
‘How old is he?’
‘Nine months.’
I felt my eyebrows rise quite uncontrollably as I thought of some of the crap I let Pippa eat: white bread, sultanas, the end of a ballpoint pen that had found its forever home in the bottom of my bag.
Arianna sighed. ‘It’s exhausting.’
I looked up.
‘Being a mother. It never ends,’ she continued. ‘Do you have children?’
I nodded. ‘Yes. One.’ I smiled involuntarily, the thought of Pippa breaking through the ridiculous monotony of this day.
Arianna sighed and smiled, too. ‘How old? Boy, girl?’
‘Girl. Pippa. Philippa, but only on her birth certificate. Eleven months.’
She stared at me, bug-eyed. ‘You must find it so hard.’
I cleared my throat. ‘Well –’
‘I mean, when I started working again –’ can we please not pretend that putting your name on a bunch of candles made in China is real work? ‘– I just didn’t have the time for Atticus that I used to, you know? The time I wanted to have with him. But then, a career is so important. It’s so nice to have a sense of purpose outside your children, isn’t it?’
Even if that purpose is filling someone’s home with the scent of French pear and wild lily. Yes. Yes, I suppose that would be nice.
What was my purpose, exactly? Ostensibly, it was to edit a magazine, to deliver our readers news and information edited just for them, through the lenses of all the things they held important: politics, health, sport, the odd spaghetti carbonara recipe.
But when was the last time I had actually sat down and read a page of The Weekend, without being interrupted about a client meeting or a brand event or a ‘cross-promotional integrative alignment opportunity’? When was the last time I had read anything at work? My job seemed to consist of putting out fires started by Meredith and spending days perfecting presentations that were over in minutes.
‘So it’s hard,’ she went on. ‘It is just so hard every single day. I don’t know how you do it. Especially with your arm like that,’ she said, gesturing to my broken limb. ‘And with your job,’ she went on, loo
king exhausted by my life. ‘It sounds very demanding. You must have a great nanny.’
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. I pictured Pip with her childcare worker – not educator, not preschool teacher – and the seventeen other kids in her class. I pictured the long days they spent together while I did something that resembled work, without the fabled sense of purpose Arianna had mentioned. I pictured Jase and my mum and Ellie filling in the childcare gaps, the times when I couldn’t pick Pip up on time and had to risk the $10 a minute (!) fine to stay late at work while I asked someone else to take my baby home, feed her a bottle of my expressed milk and put her to bed without me. I pictured her crying at 10 pm as I finished my work at home, white-knuckled at my laptop and whispering to myself, ‘Please go back to sleep, please go back to sleep’ because I knew that if she saw my face, we’d be up for another hour. At least. And I wouldn’t be able to finish my work. And the whole goddamn cycle would start over again, Pippa’s cries chorusing with my own guilty tears.
‘Do you want to talk about that? How hard it can be to combine work and motherhood?’
Arianna nodded with enthusiasm. ‘I do. It’s something I feel really passionate about.’
‘Uh-huh,’ I nodded, encouraging her to go on, thinking that this interview might be salvageable, that Arianna might finally give me something more interesting than the difference between soy wax and paraffin.
To be fair to Arianna, she’d started life in much the same way I had – she’d just been far luckier in the financial stakes. The daughter of a school teacher and a swimming coach, Arianna began life as most Australian kids do – lower middle-class and perfectly happy. The difference between Arianna and most kids was that she was exceptionally beautiful and had parlayed that beauty into a starring role on a hit soap opera, playing the doomed good girl with a heart of gold, Tess Wheeler. She won a couple of Logies, released a pretty bad single and dated a couple of cute pop stars. Then she got a stylist and married a cricketer with a knack for cereal commercials and the rest was Aussie fairytale history. Arianna and her husband, Chris, made headlines last year when they sold their first home, a penthouse apartment with views of the Bridge, for a record price and bought a broken-down but still beautiful six-bedroom mansion. Ten months, hundreds of hours of labour and one exorbitantly expensive mononymous interior designer later, the house was the most beautiful structure I had ever seen. For all her middle-class roots, I had to hand it to her: Arianna was classy as fuck. (Even if I did suspect that Arianna was not the name she was born with.)
‘Well, I just did a shoot with Belle Maman,’ Arianna began, referring to a very popular ‘stylish mother’ website, the kind I outwardly despised but secretly read with guilty pleasure, ‘and Atticus just would not sit still.’ She flushed with embarrassment. ‘It was incredibly frustrating. I’m trying to work, to answer Alexandra’s questions and promote the candles, and Atticus is pulling my hair – I’d just got a blow-dry for the first time in, I don’t know, two weeks – and crying and just generally not being a good boy. So I was embarrassed because, well . . . I was not exactly being a beautiful mother, was I?’
Belle Maman was for mothers of a certain tax bracket, for whom work was a distant memory (unless they were fashion designers or children’s book illustrators, in which case, they were still allowed to have their ‘outlet’). It was dedicated to showing off the latest Kate Spade nappy bag, or $60 Jonathan Adler sippy cups. Ellie loved it because it felt ‘real’ to her. It felt like ‘BS’ to me – nothing about that site was real. It was full of staged, probably Photoshopped portraits of incredibly stylish mothers with their adorable offspring, neither of whom were screaming, crying, wearing day-old tracksuit pants or looking as if they’d escaped a mental asylum earlier that day. The mothers paid lip service to how ‘difficult’ parenting was, while thanking their various support staff as if everybody had access to personal trainers and live-in nannies. They never mentioned the thrill of watching a movie the whole way through, or the depths of misery experienced when attempting to extract snot from an infant’s nose using that weird blue syringe thing. They didn’t talk about the fact that sometimes it took over an hour to put your baby to bed at night, or that most days, you’d be stuck on the lounge for hours as your baby gently drifted off your boob after a feed and fell asleep, leaving you glued in your spot for the foreseeable future, without anyone to bring you a cup of tea or the remote control. They never talked about how the new highlight of your day was when the mail arrived. They never talked about getting to 4 pm and thinking, with barely restrained glee, ‘It’s officially socially acceptable to drink wine now!’ Nope. Nope nope nope. They just talked about Petit Bateau t-shirts and how much they owed to Tizzie (the Madonna of baby-rearing, Tizzie did not require a surname) and how excited they were to have finally found the perfect organic wooden teether for their kid.
I nodded for Arianna to go on. Her shiny hair whipped about, remembering the frustration of that day.
‘I mean, of course, at the end of the day, Atticus is the most important thing in my life. But I do want to make a name for myself – you know, I’d like to be remembered as someone other than Tess Wheeler – and I find it very hard to juggle my career with caring for Atticus.’
‘Is that when you decided to get a nanny?’
Arianna shook her head. ‘Oh no. We hired a nanny right away. It takes a village, as Chris says.’
I stared ahead blankly. Who lived in my village?
‘But I’m very hands-on. We both are. I mean, I could never be the sort of mother who just drops her kid at daycare and goes to work five days a week. What’s the point of having them if someone else is raising them?’
I focused on steadying my breathing. In. Out. In. Out.
I wanted to tell Arianna that daycare was part of the village, that mothers had enough to worry about without being afraid that they were causing their kid lasting emotional damage by being audacious enough to go to work every day. But I couldn’t. Because I felt hot with shame that I was one of those mothers. I did drop my kid at daycare five days a week. I was the mother who saw her kid for an hour in the morning and an hour at night. I was the mother who couldn’t make it to reading circle or playgroup and didn’t know the name of Peppa’s brother because we never had time to watch ABC4Kids.
‘So for me, it’s about balancing the time I do have with Atticus with the effort I need to put into my career. It’s hard, but it’s manageable if you work at it, I find.’ She stopped to twirl a strand of her flaxen hair around her finger, manicured with a neutral pink shade that made her nails look like small, perfect shells. I couldn’t help but notice the enormous diamond in her engagement ring, sparkling at me, taunting me even more. She took on a pensive look and delivered a final clanger.
‘And, you know, I want to say to these women, “Money isn’t everything”.’
Breathe. Breathe, George, breathe.
I looked around. After offering me a selection of tea from her ‘tea cupboard’, Arianna had led me on a tour of her home – built, of course, with a shitload of money. A Brett Whiteley original stared at me from across the room. Nearby was a staircase leading down to the (fully stocked) wine cellar. Off to the side was a discreet doorway (doorknobs = poverty) leading to a soundproof media room, with a screen as big as Pippa’s own bedroom. Expensive Scandinavian furniture was everywhere, sleek and starkly beautiful.
Arianna was right. Money wasn’t everything. But it sure would be nice.
‘Sure. But there are other reasons, besides money, to work.’
‘Of course! Of course. That’s what I’m saying. But you don’t have to spend every day away from your child to earn a decent living. Maybe people should be content to live with a little less.’
I felt my lip begin to tremble. My mouth felt dry. I reached for the glass of coconut water Arianna had drawn from a fresh coconut after we’d finished our tea. I gulped and gulped, trying to focus on simply doing the interview, leaving and going home to see the bab
y I clearly did not care about, according to Arianna.
Where had my confidence gone? There was a time when I would have put this woman squarely in her place. I would have stood up for myself. Now, I couldn’t. I wouldn’t even be able to convince myself.
As Arianna continued to opine on the benefits of minimalism (a bit rich coming from a woman who sold $70 candles), I felt the world begin to collapse a little. There was a tremor, a break. I shouldn’t have had Pip. I should never have done it.
I never wanted to have kids, and now I knew I was right. I was a terrible mother. I had fled to work instead of looking after my own child. I had put my own need to have a title, a job, an office, in front of Pip’s need to have a mum.
In part, I had Pip because I was afraid that if I didn’t, it would be the wrong decision. Maybe, I had thought, I had been wrong about babies. Maybe I could be a mother. Maybe it wouldn’t be as hard or as boring or as life-altering as I thought it would be. Maybe it would be like it was in Kate Hudson movies, where she played the reformed party girl who ended up feeling right at home in the suburbs, marrying the carpenter from Sex and the City and making homemade Play-Doh for her three kids.
Maybe it would be good. Maybe I would love it.
I heard myself ask Arianna a few more questions, barely registering her responses as I started to scrawl again: IT WILL ALL BE WORTH IT. IT WILL ALL BE WORTH IT. IT WILL ALL BE WORTH IT. Arianna’s words were on repeat in my mind. Living with less. Money’s not everything. Five days a week. What’s the point of having kids?
She was right. I was a bad mother. I didn’t love spending every day at home with my kid. I wasn’t built for endless trips to the park and making arrangements for playgroup and reading the same book 700 times an hour. I loved Pip, but I was shit at being her mother. How did Harriet and Jane and Ellie do it? I knew, somewhere, deep down, that it was OK to feel like I wasn’t cut out to stay at home with Pip, but I also knew I should try to change that about myself. I mean, shouldn’t I want to sing nursery rhymes to her? Shouldn’t I want to watch Peppa Pig with her? Nina would. If Nina had had a baby, like she was meant to, she’d be doing all of those things, and probably a whole lot more – I couldn’t even think of more things on account of being such a bad mother. What the hell was wrong with me?