‘Sylvia thinks Rory and Robbie are such good boys. She says they’re just like their father. What if I have a daughter just like me?’
‘I hope you do! And of course she thinks Myron’s kids are good. They sit there like a pair of blobs. Only time they ever become animated is when they see food and flap their hands like a pair of fruit bats.’
According to Ralph, Myron was a monumental, personified sleeping pill, and his kids were quarter doses. Only Tammy was redeemable. ‘She once had lots of spunk because she put out for the student body at her high school,’ he’d said.
‘But what if I end up mothering my daughter just like Sylvia mothered me? Hell, the potential’s there. You’ve noticed I keep getting lost.’
‘Sure. But Ruthie, it doesn’t take much to bring you back.’
Ralph’s observation quelled my fears. And just over one year later, I gave birth to Hannah Clare Gold. A gorgeous, dark-haired, blue-eyed little dynamo (Norma nicknamed her the Mighty Atom), Hannah was on all twos by ten months and outran Rory and Robbie put together. Hannah was pure mischief. And when she was about seventeen months old, I had a feeling I was pregnant again. So, early one morning, I dropped her at Greta’s place, and took a urine sample to our new GP, Dr Royland Froche.
‘I’m sorry, Ruth, it’s negative,’ he said after testing it.
‘Can you please test it again? I’m sure I’m pregnant, I’ve got all the symptoms.’
‘Ruth, Ruth, Ruth. The mind can be so, so, so cruel.’
I started crying, not just out of disappointment, but because he’d made me feel foolish. Dr Froche got up out of his big, important chair, stood behind me and gently massaged my shoulders as he slowly and sympathetically explained the phenomenon of phantom pregnancy. He then sat back down and wrote me a referral to a psychologist, ‘Just in case you feel the need to talk about it.’ Then strangely, he gave me back my urine sample—he just handed me the resealed widdle bottle, deferentially, like it contained liquid gold, and washed his hands in the little porcelain basin behind his desk.
I noticed a translucent lunch box sitting on the adjacent benchtop. It held some red and green shapes—probably an apple for morning tea and maybe the makings of a salad for lunch: some loose lettuce leaves, a tomato, a small cucumber, all of which he would probably rinse in the basin before eating them. And I guess he wouldn’t want to wash these things in a basin where he’d just tipped someone’s pee (especially if it wasn’t his own).
I left his office with my urine sample in a paper bag in one hand, and the referral in the other. I despondently went down the one flight of stairs to street level and ducked into the chemist to buy some Disprin (I felt a headache coming on).
‘Do you do pregnancy tests here?’ I asked the pharmacist, as I was about to pay for my Disprin.
‘We do.’ She dug around in the cupboard for a specimen collection container.
I told her I didn’t need to do wee and I handed her my bottled sample.
Was I preggers? Oui! There was liquid Gold in there. Ha!
She tossed my emptied container into her bin; I tossed my referral into the street bin. I never went back to Dr Royland Froche, but I was tempted to ring him seven months later to tell him I’d just given birth to a six and a half pound apparition. We named our son Jake Benjamin. And we nicknamed him ‘Casper’.
Now two years later, with life mostly revolving around the children, Reuben and I occasionally got together with other young families on Saturday afternoons. When the weather was good, we’d meet at a park that had play equipment. On one of these afternoons, Rachel (one of the mothers) said that in her effective parenting books, all the authors stressed the need for children’s socialisation. Even though I didn’t actually give it a name, I’d assumed that’s what we were doing when we got together.
Over the years, the extended family Sundays had petered out—not that I would have gone back just because I had kids—so I had little to do with my cousins or their children. But we saw Iris fairly regularly. She had got married (to Joel) and they had a little girl, Leah (Hannah and Casper loved their cousin, who was a fireball like her mother). And from time to time, we saw Myron, Tammy and their boys. On these occasions, though, my kids weren’t being socialised as much as anaesthetised—in every picture of the four children, Hannah and Casper are yawning. And when your two-year-old comes to you after half an hour and says, ‘Can we go home, Mummy? I’m so bored,’ ... well, these things are pretty telling.
Anyway, according to Rachel, this wasn’t enough. She knew of other mothers who were big on the idea of socialisation, so she organised a weekly playgroup and decided I needed to be part of it seeing Hannah was not yet at kindy.
There were six women in this playgroup; each of us had two children around the same ages. Being the organiser, Rachel held the first one at her place. The children were left to their own devices, playing where the toys were stored—either in the corner of the family room, or a bedroom, and we mothers sat in the family room. The kids got a variety of cut up fruit and cheese cubes for morning tea, and we had cheese and crackers, coffee and cake. My kids had fun, but for me, it was like a slow death. The women talked about creative ways to clean the S-bend, how to organise your fridge perfectly, how to arrange flowers you’ve bought from the fruit market to look like they were from a florist, the best way to iron and fold fitted sheets … Fuck.
‘Your kids are being socialised; you’re being colonised. Get the hell out!’ was Ralph’s advice.
I couldn’t bring myself to leave, though. It was bad enough that I didn’t read books on how to parent—‘Really? You don’t refer to any parenting books?’ Charmaine, one of the mothers from the group had asked me, incredulously—but to deny my children this additional socialising opportunity would brand me as a truly shitty mother. The mirror had been hinting at it: ‘What kind of a mother are you?’ (Just like Sylvia, it framed its criticisms as questions.) And then, one particular get-together confirmed what the mirror had been implying. It also made me wonder if Hannah’s last incarnation was as a member of a foul, uncontacted primitive tribe.
I tried to keep my home clean, inasmuch as you can when you have young children, but the other women in the group were inordinately house-proud. And they were the perfect homemakers. Rose, a well-bred, tall, slim blonde woman was the most extreme. She was the consummate mommy, who made every other mother look like a slob. At Rose’s, we drank filtered Colombian coffee, and nibbled on her low-fat, homemade chocolate muffins, which were just out of the oven. The toys at Rose’s place were housed in a designated corner of her children’s bedrooms. Just the corner. Rose allowed no overflow. And Rose’s children were as perfect as her muffins. Four-year-old Thomas (not Tom) and two-year-old Annabel were exceptionally and nauseatingly well behaved, and were rarely seen with a hair out of place. Rose herself was the paragon of political correctness. Annabel carried around two dolls: Mamie, a chubby African American, and Mimi, an equally chubby Caucasian doll. Annabel and her dolls were dressed in matching outfits that Rose had meticulously hand-stitched. And there were no noonies or diddly-doos in that household (although hearing ‘vulva’ and ‘scrotum’ from the mouths of a four-year-old and a two-year-old just seems wrong). But despite any differences between Rose and the rest of us in the group, our main connection to her was borne of her ability to discuss current affairs. And with a Masters of Social Policy, Rose’s idea of current affairs involved exchanges about who in the community was currently having an affair with whom. Rose was an incurable gossip.
On what was about to turn into a truly rubbish morning at Rose’s place, we sipped our coffee and pecked at our muffins (I was careful not to drop any crumbs on her pristine, neatly pressed tablecloth). Our idle chatter was interrupted by Thomas’ shrill scream.
‘Muuumeeeeeee, come quick!’
The six of us were up in a flash, bolting for the source, fearing that something terrible had happened to one of the children. The scream had come from Annabel’s bedro
om, where we found them all standing around her open cupboard with stupefied looks on their faces. As we peered into it, the other mothers gasped in horror. I didn’t have my glasses on, but it looked to me like an amputated leg of Annabel’s African American doll was standing upright in the cupboard with its shoe still on.
Big bloody deal! I thought all of them were overreacting. Hannah occasionally dismembered her dolls, but so what? I didn’t see it as a macabre sign of things to come, but Rose’s response was melodramatic.
‘Who did this?’ she seethed through gritted teeth, apparently not willing to accept that Annabel herself might have ripped off her black doll’s leg. She was only two; I’m sure it wasn’t a racially motivated act.
The older children pointed to Hannah. Oh, just great. I quickly moved towards the cupboard with the intention of reconnecting Mamie’s leg to the rest of her body. As I got closer, though, I suddenly understood everyone’s reaction. It was not the doll’s leg. It was an adult sized turd poking out of one of Annabel’s shoes. Oh, dear God. Oh, Hannah.
My daughter had been toilet trained for two years now, so it wasn’t as if she didn’t know what she was doing. She was also still at the age where she didn’t yet care what the neighbours thought. I, on the other hand, was mortified. Yet, perversely, at the same time, I felt a certain amount of pride in the fact that she’d managed to position her load so appropriately. It landed squarely and cleanly in the shoe, not on it or next to it, and not horizontally or at an awkward angle. It was perfectly upright, which should have fulfilled the requirements of Rose’s ideal conditions. So, in a manner of speaking, Hannah had adapted well to her environment. Could a mother wish for more from her child? Then again, what kind of mother was I that my daughter would do this in the first place?
As I stood momentarily riveted to the spot, Rose dashed out and came back with a roll of toilet paper. I apologised profusely as I reached for the roll.
‘Don’t worry about it. I’ve got this,’ she said, reproachfully.
With one hand, she removed the shoe from the cupboard, and held the toilet paper-enshrouded turd in place with the other hand. I told Hannah off and asked her why she did this. With eyes downcast, she wouldn’t answer me. I felt humiliated and wanted to go home and grill her, but I was buggered if I was going to leave first and have them all talk about my daughter and me. And I knew they would, because Hannah might have ‘debriefed’, so to speak, but we certainly didn’t.
After Rose disposed of the turd (and the shoes), we all went back to the table and engaged in polite chitchat. It seemed that Rose’s sensibilities couldn’t handle what had happened, as she steered the conversation back to what we were discussing before this event, and no one dared challenge her by raising it. The rest of the chocolate muffins remained untouched.
For the next half hour, I felt increasingly crushed under the weight of the elephant in the room. Even so, I didn’t leave until just after the others, once again apologising to Rose, who, once again told me not to worry about it. As soon as we got into the car, I asked Hannah why she did it. Her answer was simple.
‘Because I needed to poo.’
‘You know that you do poo in the toilet. Why would you think it’s okay to do it in Annabel’s cupboard, in Annabel’s shoe?’
‘Because Thomas said to.’
And there it was. Rose’s perfect, unabbreviated Thomas was destined to live out his imperfections through others, somehow getting them to act out his scatological thoughts, feelings and impulses—hopefully, not always literally—so that he could appear as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Still, Thomas might have told Hannah to do it, but hers was an inspired act. I know this because Hannah was no pushover. She never did what I asked of her (apple, tree and all that). Suddenly, I didn’t feel so bad anymore. I decided I no longer wanted to be part of this group where I sat there weekly and weakly, sweating over a few crumbs on a tablecloth. Having your child shit in a shoe cupboard (that was not even her own) put everything into perspective.
When someone talks to you about everyone else, guaranteed they’ll talk about you to everyone else. No doubt, Rose-the-social-policy-maker’s idea of current affairs would now expand to include this state of affairs. I realised it would take a scandal of gargantuan proportions to overshadow it in the eyes of this mothers’ group (and the rest of the community). It was just a matter of time. Meanwhile, I joined another playgroup.
I still didn’t feel as if I fitted in all that well, but at least they weren’t anal-retentive. And if Hannah decided that, once again, she didn’t want to be anal-retentive, I knew it wouldn’t be a major issue. They had all heard about Hannah’s caper—of course—thought it was a lark and said that it couldn’t have happened at a ‘nicer’ person’s place.
Reuben also thought the incident was funny; Ralph thought it was hysterical.
‘Hmm ... kind of gives a whole new meaning to footstool, doesn’t it?’
Ralph adored my kids and they were enamoured of their ‘Unca Raff’. He was godfather to both of them. He had nieces and nephews but didn’t feel much of a connection with any of them. Ralph was upset that george had children (he and Stella had adopted two boys, Cameron and Justin, from Bolivia).
‘It might make him a better person, more mellow, at least,’ I said.
‘Did having children make Albie a better person?’
‘This is different. george had to jump through hoops to get them.’
Ralph didn’t buy it. He’d been reading a lot about the nature versus nurture debate and felt the need to share his findings. I understood bits of it, but mostly, it was all Greek to me.
‘You know ... Σε ψυχολογικό επίπεδο σχετίζεται με το αν η κληρονομικότητα ή το περιβάλλον περισσότερες επιπτώσεις στην ανθρώπινη ψυχολογική ανάπτυξη. At least they’ll have a chance in life because they didn’t spring from george’s loins. And ... Διάβασα ότι υπάρχει απόδειξη ότι η οικογένεια περιβαλλοντικοί παράγοντες μπορεί να έχουν επιπτώσεις στη παιδική ηλικία IQ. Έτσι, ακόμη και αν είχαν γεννηθεί έξυπνη, οι πιθανότητες είναι ότι θα καταλήξετε με σκατά για εγκεφάλους σαν τον πατέρα τους. Δεν είναι τόσο δίκαιο. But they’re being exposed to him during their formative years.’
‘You were exposed to Albie during your formative years, and you could not be more differe—’
‘And your nature couldn’t be more different from Sylvia’s, but you delayed having children because you were scared you’d end up like her!’ Ralph had a point. ‘That’s the nurture side. The impact of your environment,’ he added.
Ralph couldn’t relate to Louwhiney’s children either, even though they were biological. She had two daughters, Amanda and Candida. And never mind that they were whiney like their mother; Ralph couldn’t get past the stupidity of his sister naming her youngest after a vaginal yeast infection.
‘I was mistaken. That night my mother dished up brains for dinner, Louwhiney’s was also on the platter,’ he said to me after Candida was born.
‘So, there were four brains on the plate, not three?’
‘Nope. Still three. I was being generous. I credited george and simon with each having their own, instead of a shared one.’
Ralph also believed that this brain his brothers shared had a miniscule cerebral cortex, the part responsible for dealing with higher order brain functions. But he thought that both my kids had large, highly developed cerebral cortices. This made me feel better; to my mind, it justified their behaviour.
Where Hannah did outrageous things, Casper said outrageous things. But his ready repartee from an early age was astounding. A very intelligent child, Casper needed extra stimulation, so I started him at day care two days a week (not long after Hannah’s indelible moment).
‘My balls are cold.’
Hermione was aghast. ‘You must not say that!’
‘Why? They are.’
Hermione reported the incident verbatim to me when I picked Casper up that afternoon.
‘At least he’s got his contextualising down pat.’ I laughed. She eyed me disapprovingly. I stopped laughing.
Joe found my kids’ antics amusing. Sylvia was unimpressed. ‘Good, now you know what it feels like to have a daughter just like you!’ She said this smugly.
‘Hannah’s not like I was.’
‘Oh, yes she is!’
‘No, no, no. She’s much worse. And what about Casper? Both my kids are much, much bigger pests than me.’ I smiled at her. ‘I’m so proud.’
Her head snapped back in shock. She looked at me like I was drunk on Frobscottle—it’s the green fantasy drink from Roald Dahl’s book, The BFG. Fizzy Frobscottle’s bubbles travel downwards instead of upwards, and cause noisy farts—Whizzpops.
I knew Sylvia would have trouble getting her snapped back head around my attitude—it’d seem preposterous to her that someone might have even a measure of pride in offspring who could potentially besmirch the family name. I was prepared to remind her that her Whizzpopping husband had already done just that.
My pride wavered a little over the next three years, though. Rarely a week went by when Casper didn’t say something that might be cute at home, but was cringeworthy when said out loud in a public place. Department stores, doctors’ surgeries, in a crowded lift and, worst of all, on the odd occasion when we were in synagogue. All that fervent socialisation through mixing with other families, playgroup, play dates, day care and kindy went down the crapper not long after he started school.
Odyssey In A Teacup Page 18