Last day of holiday. OK I didn’t manage the canoe but we had a lovely time the three of us. Dreaded hearing emergency bad news from Ghana, checking mobile whole time, but the dynamics of the family have changed with ELDEST not there. It makes me enjoy our family time together more than ever. Only 14 days till ELDEST comes home. Might make a banner.
∨ The Secret Diary of a Grumpy Old Woman ∧
September
September 1st
OLDEST is due home tomorrow. I would like to say that the seven weeks has whizzed by, but it emphatically has not – it has dragged. The process of giving her up to the world, which is effectively what this has been, has been hard, slow and reluctant on my part – it feels like she has been prised out of my hands for ever more. But judging by the (infrequent) emails, she has had the time of her life, had a truly amazing time, and of course who would deny their beloved child an experience like that? But now I am dying to see her, dreading a little seeing the mossie bites and the sunburn and the weight loss, all of which are inevitable, and for the last week I have thrown myself into Welcome Home mode – decide to throw a party, blow up balloons and paint banner for front door. Am truly excited. More excited than I can remember feeling for years. Like it’s my fifth birthday party and I am expecting my first bike. I do something I can’t remember doing since I was at university: I put some disco music on really really loud – Tina Turner’s ‘Nutbush City Limits’ to be precise – dance my heart away upstairs, really go for it, work up a sweat. YOUNGEST arrives home unheard and puts her head round the door; she tells me never to do that again. But I think I will.
September 2nd
We drive to Heathrow and it feels like a whole year, never mind seven weeks, has passed since we took her there to see her off to Ghana. We park the car, my stomach feels churned up with excitement, I feel like shouting out at the top of my voice that my daughter is coming home. At the arrivals hall in Terminal 4 there is the usual crowd gathered – some drivers with signs for their clients, and some young parents with a baby holding a sign saying ‘welcome home, Grandma!’ presumably for someone who’s just become a grandmother. I start crying and I don’t even know them. There are dozens of people just like us, looking for loved ones coming off planes from all over the world.
And out she comes with her trolley, looking a bit overwhelmed with all the crowd staring, but knowing that we are looking at her and seeing a grown-up woman, not a girl, knowing that that’s what we’re thinking, which we are. She is indeed blotchy with mossie bites, brown, bedraggled and a lot skinnier, but beaming – and to think that I wished her home so often – she is happy happy happy, and naturally I burst into tears. We get in the car and I can’t help but overwhelm her with questions: ‘OK so you got off the plane, then what?’ type questions. She’ll tell us in her own time.
At last I can stop reading the dreadful Foreign News pages of the Guardian and can luxuriate in the trusty Daily Mail. Can’t stop smiling.
September 3rd
Saw something really extraordinary this morning by the bird table. A spotty bird with a long beak was picking up a snail shell and breaking it on the patio – slapping it down on to the stonework like a woman beating washing – then eating the snail inside. I had assumed that all the broken snail shells on the floor were result of GOM clumsily stepping with big trainers on snails when putting out bread for birds. But no, amazingly the bird – whatever it is – is clever enough to pick them up and shake the snails out. Like someone using those fancy metal pliers in posh restaurant eating escargots. Surely this is evidence that birds are truly intelligent. Think I might put GOM’s binoculars in kitchen for serious bird-spotting.
September 4th
The beginning of term looms, and suddenly there is a stack of things to do to prepare for YOUNGEST’s new school year. It’s more of a backlog than a new stack to be precise, because I should have been busy with this pile of tasks way back in July. I know that because although it is early September the shops have been emptied of school shoes, green opaque tights, white ankle socks, rulers and protractor sets. Because organised mothers do these tasks immediately after the summer term finishes, whereas the rest of us are so worn out after a whole school year, we stuff it all in the spare room and bask in the joy of not having to get two kids to school, the kitchen tidied, three beds made and a dog walked before 7.40 and then resume school duties in early September.
Stay-at-home mothers, or worse the kind of mothers who have given up their high-powered job in the City to look after their children and are endlessly featured in the Daily Mail-type mothers, have got to the shops well before me. They did all these dreary tasks the moment the school broke up, probably badgered the school secretary for the autumn kit list even before it was sent out to parents. Because stay-at-home mothers are perfect. But the ones that have given up a high-powered job are easily the worst. Like ex-smokers, they can’t stop talking about their brilliantly clever decision to put their family first, to live life to the full and play Junior Scrabble all afternoon – better still they opt to educate their children at home. Can’t they just shut up about it all? I imagine they do feel they did the right thing, well OK, but most of us don’t frankly have the choice. We’ve got mortgages, we’ve got careers that it took us a lifetime to achieve and frankly we don’t want to spend all day buffing up the toaster or sorting out the family photos and teaching our children algebra (or whatever they do in maths today). We like to get out of the house, and put some nice clothes on and a pair of heels and have a coffee with someone at work we like – we want to do all this as well as be great mothers. So what’s wrong with that? Sadly, having both still seems as elusive as ever and at this time of year the madness of it all is at its most apparent.
Buying a pair of school shoes is a bad task at the best of times, but factor in a teenage daughter and it’s one of the lowest points of the calendar year. I pick out the black sensible ones – I don’t mean the clompy lace-ups or the Start Rite ones, I’m not that stupid – but obviously the days when I could basically impose my own choice of shoes on my daughters are long gone…Now it’s a battle of wills. Who is able to stand off for longest. YOUNGEST is determined to have a pair with heels that will make her swagger along and the boys watch her cute little bum. Because we are entering the snogging-on-the-corner-by-the-newsagents-before-you-go-into-school sort of era. There are no doors to slam at the shoe shop, but if there were then YOUNGEST would slam at least a couple during the process. Of course she holds the trump card, which is that she says she doesn’t care if she goes back to school in the old sloppy, scuffed, ruined ones from last term, nor does she care how long it takes to trudge round all the shops – she has all the time in the world, relatively. My patience with shops is very short indeed, my attention span even shorter. So she knows that sooner or later I will give in, it will just be a matter of who cracks first. We come out of the fourth shop unable to agree on anything like a compromise. Needless to say, by shop six it’s me that cracks. We buy a pair of shoes with heels that in my view are far too high.
Came home and spent half an hour in the kitchen putting all the glasses in size order – wineglasses, tumblers, small tumblers – all in fabulous neat rows facing front of cupboard. Annoyed that some rows had odd numbers, but all in all it made me feel better. Kept opening the cupboard door to admire my work. Pathetic. Felt my life in better more organised shape as a result.
September 6th
YOUNGEST goes back to school. Stupidly I agreed to her taking in packed lunches this term, on the condition that she has to do them all herself – plan them and prepare them the night before. The first day it’s all neatly wrapped in silver foil, in Tupperware and by the front door as agreed the night before. I wonder how long it will last? Stay-at-home mothers again don’t allow such things, no matter how much their children plead, their children remain on school dinners. Only working mothers with guilt give in to such nonsense and make a rod for their own backs. YOUNGEST goes back to school in tro
phy new high-heeled shoes and guess what, comes home, kicks them off and announces everyone is into flatties, why didn’t I make her buy a pair of them? And they hurt and can she have some more plasters to take to school with her?
Jocasta sends me an email reminding me that my performance review is later this month. Will make sure I am at work 15 minutes earlier for next couple of weeks, might send her an email on Sunday night, show off that I often work at home at weekends. Which I don’t.
September 7th
The programme for evening classes comes through the door like it always does at this time of year. With the usual offerings…Bookkeeping for Beginners, Accountancy and Computer Skills for the Afraid, and a new one, eBay for Beginners. So that’s how people get the hang of it. They take a course in it. Wouldn’t just going shopping be a whole lot easier? However, one class does catch my eye since I have a big belly and I like dancing, so I sign up to Belly Dancing sample night.
September 9th
Packed lunch regime already slipping. She left it till last minute this morning and I had to do it. There’s a surprise.
Belly dancing night. I seem to be the only one trying it out, and everyone else is a regular. The regulars including ‘Miss’ are warming up, doing amazing stretches and bendy things on mats to music that sounds like you should be ordering a lamb pasanda. Makes me want a lamb pasanda, which is not really the idea. Miss gives me a mat and I try to join in their bendy bits and fail. She claps her hands and the group get changed. They put on some floaty skirts with jangly bits around the hip and one lady pulls out a full costume, a marvellous swirly purple job and a veil or two. They are all big women, and I feel I might have hit on something really good for me – something expressive and fun and a bit sexy for the woman who is a size 16 and over. Something akin to dancing upstairs to Tina Turner when you think no one is looking, but doing it legitimately. Miss says it’s free expression tonight. She puts on a piece of music and says we all have to concentrate on a life force travelling up from our middle to third toe, up the back of our ankle, through our groin and up to our left nipple. ‘Let yourselves go.’ Far from learning how to shake my booty big time, or the equivalent of pole dancing for the plump, it’s all very moody, everyone goes into their own individual trance, some of them with their veils on, circling and skipping round the assembly hall a bit like a lot of grown-ups doing music and movement but not in their vests like we did when I was little. Miss says to relax and enjoy it. Most of them have their eyes closed, and I pretend to close mine but have a sneaky look at them and try to look like I am fully relaxed and expressing myself to the music. Some of them are really going for it, especially I imagine when their energy line gets to the groin. Which seems to be happening for everyone except me.
After about five minutes of doing the whirling dervishes Miss claps her hands and then asks everyone pretty much how it was for them. Did they feel the energy? What sort of feelings came up? Did they feel mischievous, or closed or youthful? They compare notes and experiences and I pretend to look at the floor and fiddle in my bag. She reads out what they were supposed to feel. Talks about the yin and yang and the elements involved – fire, water and so on – and off they go again with music number two. This goes on for a good hour and a half.
Miss asks me if I want to sign up for a course often and I make my excuses and leave. Alas, it felt as though they were all having a group orgy and I was trying to get myself into the zone but failing miserably, a bit like trying to have an orgasm when you realise you’ve left the immersion on or a baked potato in the oven. Far from making me more relaxed I came home more tense than ever.
September 12th
I persuade ELDEST to come on a amper day with me – a girly treat before she goes away to university next week. I wouldn’t exactly say she was enthusiastic but interestingly, she would never have agreed to it so readily before the Ghana experience – she’d have pulled a face and said ‘not really’ and I would have lost my nerve and not pushed it – but this time she said OK in a way that meant, yes – really OK – and we go along to the local golf club hotel and get kitted out in the white towelling dressing gowns and the silly free slippers that trip you up as you walk. Maybe we’ll turn into those mothers and daughters who shop together on a Saturday and link arms. That might be taking things too far.
The idea of a pamper day is obviously to relax, but I have lost the ability to relax. Even when I go out of my way to try and relax, it doesn’t happen – in fact, especially if I go out of my way to relax it doesn’t happen. For a start, the other women on the pamper day are annoying. They got there ten minutes before us, probably know the drill inside out and have bagsied all the sunloungers – which gets me all wound up straight away – and they keep their towels and their silly magazines on them even while they’re having lunch. Which I think should be disallowed or illegal. I mean, why should you keep a sunlounger for the day, in your possession? Either you are using it to lie on or you’re not. I sit and seethe about it, consider suggesting to the management that each sunbed should have a little disc on it, like disabled parking badges, so that you put the time on that you vacate your sunbed to go to the loo, or to the sauna, or to have your nails painted, and if the time vacated exceeds 30 minutes then your possessions should be folded neatly on the floor and the sunbed vacated for other pampees. Marvellous system. The very model of democracy. I don’t say anything, don’t make a fuss or a scene, about it, and unusually let it lie. I am trying to impress ELDEST daughter after all.
The women doing the pampering are like hairdressers only worse, they will insist on trying to talk to you all the time. I don’t want to talk to them. At all. With their candles and silly whale music and the twigs that have been curled in reception.
She covers me from head to toe in oil – I’m like a basted turkey and feel about as attractive. The daft music comes on that’s supposed to get you in the relaxation zone, but just gets you more wound up and irritable. Then she does something ridiculously pretentious like put a warm pebble on my forehead and it’s all I can do not to laugh but that would offend her. So I pretend it’s done the trick and pretend to be very very relaxed indeed.
Which is hard since she’s seeing bits of me normally hidden from the outside world. With good reason. Instead of relaxing, I worry for her. Poor girl’s prodding and poking my nooks and crannies. You’d have to be cut out for it.
Despite all the grump going on in my head about the pamper day experience, ELDEST and I had a lovely time. I was very careful not to ask too many questions about her personal life, like it said in the Daily Mail article about empty nesters, and little bits of information started to trickle out as the article said they would…That she would miss her little sister – a bit – when she went away to university, and that next summer she wants to go to Africa to do what effectively sounds like modern missionary work. Am simultaneously proud and dismayed. The eight-week gap experience was merely the beginning. I have to make my life my own from now on. It’s not going to be easy.
September 13th
Jocasta calls me in for the dreaded Annual Performance Review. Dreaded not because I think she will sack me or demote me, but just because the whole thing is such a farce. She hands over the set of objectives, targets and achievements that we jointly agreed on last year. I find myself glaring at her coathanger on the back of her office door. Might sneak in one of my size 18 ones to replace her size 14 when she is out and that way Robin will see it and think she is really a size 18. Neat idea I think. I do my prepared speech about what I feel I have achieved and she looks a bit bored – swear I saw one of her nostrils start to flare – and she winds it up in about 15 minutes. No idea what contribution she makes at all, no idea what the point of it was, except to tick some boxes…See now I’m starting to talk like everyone else in the silly Office Language…At the end of it I ask if she could consider please a pay rise, not unreasonably, but she looks a bit taken aback – hello? – and says she can see no justification for it whatso
ever, unless – and it looked like she was clutching at straws – I feel like becoming the Departmental Fast Response Officer, which is office speak for first aid person, which Head Office now insist on. I find myself agreeing to it. Me, first aid, I can’t even watch Animal Hospital with both eyes open.
September 16th
There’s a quality of light about autumn, a slight change in the angle of the sun which casts a familiar light over the place – the condensation starts, little messages go on the kitchen calendar that say dreary things like get boiler serviced, or clean gutters above kitchen, service lawnmower and other such delights, things that mean inevitably the long long winter is on its way.
You have your first fire. Eat your first crumpet. Write your first Christmas list. Because I am so old and because I have been there, done that, got the T-shirt, it feels like only five minutes ago I was doing the same things last year. The seasons come round so fast, and I recognise the smell of bonfires, the colours of the leaves, the early-morning mists, and know that this means autumn. Time goes so slowly when you’re young, drags and moves like treacle, and now time simply runs so fast like lightning. Where did all the time go, and how did I get to be this middle-aged? Suddenly there isn’t that much of my life left, and I can’t shake off the feeling that I am still trying to get things right, get the balance of things right, get the hang of making proper gravy and being able to hold a decent conversation about the Pre-Raphaelites.
Go for glorious walk on the coast and bump into some lovely ramblers who are listening to a curlew. They show me the curlew and point out its amazing song. Now I can show off about curlews to my heart’s content. Better – even – than showing off about the Pre-Raphaelites!
The Secret Diary of a Grumpy Old Woman Page 12