Bumped into Happy Family Yummy Mummy next door. They’re not moving house, they’re divorcing.
July 3rd
It is a known fact that nothing gets done properly in our house unless I do it. Not homework, not cleaning, not ironing, not chores, not wiping work surfaces, not errands, messages…No one else remembers to clean the swing bin in the bathroom or empty the recycle container of old newspapers or clear up after themselves properly. GOM will do things his way, which is code for not properly. He will clear up in the kitchen, often to his favourite Del Shannon track, splashing the water all over the floor and doing a lot of putting in to soak, but the floor will not be swept, and the kitchen table not wiped. How much longer would it take him to do that? Trouble is when I complain about it I sound just like – you know who – my mother, or a bossy form captain or the teacher from hell. I can hear myself practically saying, how many times have I asked him to do that nicely. Properly. But I just sound like a headmistress. What’s a girl to do, except give him plenty of what my mother would have called ‘Little Jobs’ to occupy him usefully, tasks which surely a man of his age is supposed to do, like washing the car and mending the plate rack, bleeding radiators, or mending a stopcock. But even this sort of thing takes a lot of chivvying to get done, a lot of ‘when are you going to do it?’
July 5th
Still no holiday booked and so I took action. Asked YOUNGEST what she would really like to do with me and Dad – now that ELDEST isn’t coming with us and we can’t persuade any of her friends to come away with us. She barely looked up from Big Brother, which she is depressingly glued to, but said she wouldn’t mind doing something exciting like Melanie’s Mum and dad do, like mountaineering or canoeing: ‘It’s so boring going on holiday with you and Dad otherwise.’
July 6th
Look into ELDEST’s room and feel sick with fear. She will only be living at home full time for another two weeks, then she’s off to the other side of the world, somewhere so foreign, so alien, they don’t even get Neighbours, enough said…In two weeks she begins her big adventure and then the biggest adventure of all, goes to university. I can’t think where her childhood went, it just flew by in a big blurry flash, and now she is about to leave. And I could sob and sob and sob my heart out and then sob some more but she wouldn’t understand for a second, why should she, how could she?
At the moment her room is a mess, it smells of perfume, and sweaty feet and drinking chocolate. Her bed’s not made, the bin’s overflowing, and her hair straighteners have been left on by accident, there are some of her sister’s trousers under the bed, rancid milk in cereal bowls and piles of Heat magazines. I gaze at it, taking it all in, knowing that when she is gone the room will be pristine tidy, bed made, bin emptied, cupboards sorted because I shall want to spend time in here, and shall prepare her room and her house for her return visits, whenever and however frequent they are. I shall be left walking the dog and sending her tragic emails about the cat and her sister’s gerbil, and telling her news from our neighbours about what Jessica down the road is doing in Australia, and about the article I saw in the Courant about one of her school friends getting married on a beach in the Dominican Republic.
I look back at all those days of her childhood that I spent out at the office, all those weeks when she was tiny, into Rosie and Jim, into nursery rhymes, coming home from school with her projects, I always had emails to check, faxes to send, calls to make.
‘Why can’t you come in to school on Wednesdays like Jake’s mum?’ she’d ask. ‘Because Mummy has to go to work.’ But the truth is Mummy didn’t have to go to work, Mummy chose to go to work, to spend days at conferences and working late. Coming home with spreadsheets and what for. Now she is grown up and soon she’ll be gone. Little Rabbit, her favourite soft toy, is still here, battered and old and still smelling of her childhood, when I could have had all of her I wanted, when she held my hand as we walked down the street, before I started to irritate her, and soon she will be gone, and it is too late and there is no going back. Need to get a grip.
The thing is my generation felt we should have careers, we went to grammar school, we were the first generation of women to be liberated, equal, the world was spread out in front of us, we were encouraged to go far, to excel, to be brilliant, to contribute. Not for us the role models of today like Coleen McLoughlin or Posh Spice, our heroes were Germaine Greer, Joan Baez, Laura Ashley, Mary Quant, women who did something with their lives, had something to say. We had talks about Albert Schweitzer in assembly, we had morals instilled into us. We went to university, we did well, we did really well, and when we became mothers we were expected to manage both at once. We didn’t feel we had the choice to be stay-at-home mothers. We were told we could have everything. So we tried to have everything, and look where it got us – into a stressed-out mess mostly. Then inevitably our salaries were pivotal to the family budget and we got mortgages, so what financial choice did we have in the end?
Now things have turned upside-down again, stay-at-home mothers seem to have the upper hand, standing around outside the school gates in their Yummy Mummy tracksuits, ready to go straight to the gym. In a sense they did what our mothers did: married men who would provide for them, and stayed at home, did lunch with their friends, did whatever the equivalent is of coffee mornings, probably joined a book club, did their hair, had time to be at home to make tea for the kids. To make matters worse for the working mothers, in my experience these stay-at-home mothers are the ones that cut corners, buy ready meals and shop in M & S, and ironically it’s the working mothers racked with guilt that sweat over some home-made risotto or cheese souffles, otherwise they feel more of a failure than before. If that were possible!
July 19th
The night before ELDEST goes off to Ghana we get the map out, she shows where she’s going and it hits home – she is going to the other side of the world without us, and it will be the first of many times I have no doubt; how on earth do people manage whose children emigrate to Australia? Now when I meet such women I’ll talk to them knowing a little of their agony, the agony of not seeing enough of their kids. Even when their kids are 30 or 40 or 50, and I don’t suppose it ever gets easier.
July 20th
We drive ELDEST to Heathrow; I feel sick. She has the largest rucksack I have ever seen, poor love is going to have to carry it – she’s on her first long-haul flight without us, not even any of the others in the party are there to travel with – she’s on a different flight from them. It feels like I might never see her again – and the enormity of it all in my mind and in my heart is so much bigger and rawer than I had anticipated…I manage to keep up a front until we get to the bit where you say goodbye and they go into security, the bit that’s partitioned off so you can’t see them for long. She hugs Dad, she hugs me, and I say I love her so much and cry. There are other people crying too – it’s like it says in that wonderful film Love Actually, it’s here you can see love up close. People saying goodbye – and here hopefully in two months’ time where we will say hello again, to a girl who will have changed, inevitably, a girl who will probably be blotchy red with sunburn, mossie bites and probably skinnier, more mature, more grown up. I look forward to it already…but I look at her as she walks away knowing that the girl is now gone for ever, and a young woman will return. Actually I think GOM cries a bit too. Feel like hanging about on the edge of the airport perimeter with all those mad plane spotters to see the plane go off, catch a last glimpse of her being part of my world, but that would be both stupid and prolonging the agony. I can visualise her excitement, think of myself at her age and think how excited I would have been to get on a plane without my parents, without the world knowing who I was, incognito, with my life in front of me, my exams done, my childhood over.
Can’t even pull myself together. Come home and decide not to change her bed. When GOM is snoring I will be able to use it as a refuge and like a lovesick girlfriend think I will sleep in it and smell her smell, feel lik
e I am near her again. Need to pull myself together. Spend the rest of the day moping like lovesick teenager. I wonder whether I could log on and get weather forecast for Ghana; Google name of village on her itinerary and nothing comes up. Maybe I could call National Geographic, or the meteorological office to keep an eye on any major weather disasters or fronts that might be on the way, text her in time to get out of the area; buy myself time once or twice a week on a satellite dish that floats over the region where she’ll be teaching to keep check. As if I was Jack Bauer in 24. Well, it might be possible.
July 21st
Haven’t heard from her.
My mother calls round with a load of forms and letters from the building society saying she can’t understand what she has to do with them, if anything, can I help. My father used to do all this for her, now guess what, I have to. You lose one child and in effect gain another.
July 22nd
View YOUNGEST with new eyes. Try to savour her presence knowing that when she goes it will be even worse, being the last one gone and then the nest will be well and truly empty, which will be doubly hard. But in some ways ELDEST going brings YOUNGEST and me closer together, and GOM and me too. We are all coming to terms with the same thing and we subconsciously savour one another the more because of it. But I still wish she was here and not in Ghana.
July 23rd
Torture myself looking at some photos of ELDEST and of the four of us together. It makes me think of my father’s disappearance act. By which I mean him dying. I remember I went into the room where he died downstairs soon after they took him away in the big blue van, the one all polished and clean that you know has got dead bodies in once you’ve seen one, looking under the bed the next day as though he was just hiding under it, not dead at all. Silly. Stupid. But how can someone as wonderful, as important, as significant to me have disappeared into thin air? Get a grip, I know rationally it’s not the same, obviously, please God it isn’t, but I feel like I am trying to come to terms with something similar. Know that when I look at the stars over the next eight weeks I will think of her, think of whether she will be looking at the same stars that night, or whether they look different where she is, like I look at the stars with my father dead and wonder if he is among them, which naturally he is, because I look up at them and think of him, which amounts to the same thing.
July 24th
At last a text from ELDEST saying ‘Hey! Having great time. Village is cool. X’
A kiss – I don’t remember a text of hers ever having a kiss on the end.
Saw The Constant Gardener about a woman murdered in deepest Africa. Wish I hadn’t – it was like watching Titanic on a cruise ship. Life is cheap in the third world. My daughter’s is very precious indeed. Am getting melodramatic. Don’t care. Shall if I want to.
Came home to find email from ELDEST’s best friend to say she had a text saying she is having a wonderful time and was dancing to reggae on the beach on Saturday. Will have to stop worrying, I can’t worry about her for eight weeks solid, although it feels like if I do carry on worrying and am constantly vigilant, that in some way the worrying will help to keep her safe, which is obviously nonsense. But I shall try to scale down the worry a little.
July 25th
My birthday. Without her. But she left a card. Cling to it like a stupid woman who should know better. Keep it in my bag – and will do for months.
July 26th
I never read the foreign news or international pages in the paper – as I have got older I’ve got much worse at this – read all the girly bits like the gossip, and the telly pages, perhaps fuel my anxiety with a national disaster or personal tragedy story, something with photos, easy to read. But since Ghana has come on to my radar I am reading the foreign pages every day, mostly looking for articles about Africa. People at work look impressed.
July 27th
Dog has developed big lump on her gums. No choice but to go to the vet’s. To my dismay vet says dog has got serious dental work to be done, as in crowns, fillings, root canal work, and I must clean and floss her teeth daily from now on. I think I looked appalled, shocked and revolted all at the same time. If you think I am going to floss a dog’s teeth even once, never mind every day, you have another think coming. I’m already having to shave off my mother’s corn, which is bad enough, so I am sure as hell not flossing the dog’s teeth. He says he will send a quote for the dental work, would I be after the porcelain with gold, or just the metal ones? I think you know the answer.
July 28th
The letter arrives with quote for dog’s dental work and it comes to nearly £500. Don’t think I am going to tell YOUNGEST. I wouldn’t even spend that on my own teeth. The world has gone mad.
Go to shoe shop to buy summer sandals at lunchtime to cheer myself up. Women like buying shoes – it is a given known fact. Well, they like shoes that’s true. But shoe shops are a special sort of hell. I am now simply incapable of wearing very high heels, not only do they give me backache, but because I’m getting a bit beefy, a bit bigger all over, I look like Les Dawson. The whole world is in stilettos. People walk around in absurd gold things for evening that if I wore them I would simply have to hold on to something or someone all evening; try to go to the loo and I would need crutches or a calliper, and the dance floor would be out of the question. I look like a bad transvestite in heels, or a giant poodle. They simply make me look ridiculous. These days the omnipresent, omnipotent Trinny and Susannah makes us all wear high heels at all times; even to fill the car up with petrol, even with a pair of jeans, now you have to wear heels – it is compulsory, it is the law.
The girl takes ages to even come over, despite my pushy sarky expression (which obviously means in fact that rather than rushing to my aid, she makes me suffer, comes to me last after everyone else). ‘Can you get me this in a size 7 ‘A?’ I say. ‘We don’t do half-sizes, madam.’ She says the word ‘madam’ with a bit of attitude. ‘Then in 7 and 8 please.’ I know she is going to be ages and ages and ages, probably nip out once she’s gone through that silly swing door and go and have her Cornish pasty, text some friends, nip out to the bank and then come back and still say she hasn’t got any in my size. Cow. Either that or she’s going to linger about while I try them on and lie to me about how good they look to get me to buy the ones that will make me look most ridiculous.
When she does eventually come back with them they all look absurd and are either ridiculously uncomfortable or make me look like a district nurse. What is a woman to do? Hasn’t cheered me up at all. I throw them all down in a childish fit of temper and go back to work without shoes. Having wasted a good 40 minutes.
July 30th
ELDEST has been away only 10 days, still 33 to go. Missing her badly.
August 1st
The thing about gardening is that it seems like a great idea until you get out in the garden and start gardening, and then it seems like a lousy stupid idea. I get home and it’s a gorgeous evening, and think there would be nothing nicer than getting the wheelbarrow out and the secateurs and the kneely thing someone bought me for my birthday, and off I go, creating little piles of weeds and clumps of soil, and a large wheelbarrow full of branches, and then my back starts to get a bit sore and my knees get a bit stiff, and I realise that I have only weeded and tidied about a 400th of the whole garden and I am cream-crackered. Picking things up off the kitchen floor when I drop them is at my age tedious enough, but at least accidental; this is self-imposed inconvenience and discomfort. Suddenly it feels spookily like housework but outdoors, with the added complication of where to put all the stuff once you’ve weeded it and trimmed it back and yanked it out of the soil? You sure as hell can’t put it in the dustbin, dustmen being what they are, and to go to the tip you are going to have to put it in bags and get soil in your car, great. It’s like having a good spring clean in the house and having to bag up all the dirt you collect and find a home for it.
I like my garden, yes, but the truth is that I like sit
ting in my garden, I like lolling in it on the (very) rare occasions it is warm enough to do so, and so gardening itself is perhaps not really as enjoyable as I think it is. I could do with zenning the whole thing, taking a weapon of mass destruction to the lawn, borders, everything, until nothing green is left, then gravel it, with some neat huge stone pebbles in a row and some concrete lolling areas and the ubiquitous water feature. Zero maintenance, zero faff, zero grump…It might look a touch like the local crematorium, or a high-security exercise block, but I would be able to loll every minute the sun was out. Perhaps I am losing it.
August 2nd
I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to get into the Suma catalogue. My friend Sarah and the other women in her street of a striped-jumper-and-organic-cauliflower disposition swear by it, have a kind of street co-operative whereby they all order in bulk and then distribute it, which is both marvellously cheap and environmentally friendly. They all buy organic couscous or Mexican bean soup, and ecologically sound loo cleaner, and Suma deliver to the door. So, sucked in to this heady solution to having one or two things ticked off the list, along I go. They only do orders in vast numbers, which means people have to group together to pour over the catalogue and tick it all off on tragic order forms together. There are precious few photos of what you’re buying. Someone acts as head girl and then divides it all up in their garage – so the process takes a good evening.
The Secret Diary of a Grumpy Old Woman Page 10