by Georgie Hall
How is it possible that Paddy and I have raised a daughter whose virtual world revolves around a fifties Disney Princess idyll of old-fashioned femininity, from its shapely eyebrows to its sweet-scented gingham kitchen?
‘Something smells good!’ Paddy appears from the garage with a box of beer under one arm and his cricket pads and bat over his shoulder. He’s still wearing his towel.
Has he been in there all this time, I wonder? He’s looking a bit shifty. Best not to ask.
Ah, the sweet scent of domestic bliss.
*
Let’s get this out there: Paddy and I are both products of traditional, gender-divided upbringings, inheriting a combination of latent chauvinism and conflicted feminism that can make for a bumpy ride.
When I was a teenager, I mistakenly believed feminism was for academics or activists who always seemed impossibly articulate and grown-up, superbeings like Susan Sontag and Gloria Steinem or scary placard bearers like Andrea Dworkin. I never doubted I was the mental and emotional equal to any man; it was feminists I felt inferior to. While they wrote earnest, uncompromising books for Virago, I devoured romantic bonkbusters and watched Baywatch. I borrowed The Female Eunuch from the library when I was fourteen, then speed-read it shamelessly, dying to get back to Shirley Conran’s Lace.
It wasn’t until my late thirties that I felt comfortable even calling myself a feminist, by which time Tina Fey and Joan Rivers had laughed me into it, the Spice Girls had zig-a-zig-zigged for girl power, and Caitlin Moran was mixing feminism up with TopShop and Wookies in a fifth wave that made up for not being able to quote directly from The Second Sex.
Paddy’s upbringing was no less bilateral. Unlike my parents, both his worked, and both for the same employer: his dad maintained the machinery on the factory floor and benefitted from a union, a men’s-only social club and a pension scheme; his mum served part-time in the canteen for pin money. Eddie divided his free time between his shed, lock-up, allotment, pub, club, football stands and his Lady Love; Ruth went to bingo with the girls from work. As with my parents, Eddie played no part in housework, childcare or cooking, but had complete autonomy over the bills and television remote control.
When Paddy and I said ‘I Do’ it was in the understanding that our marriage wouldn’t be like our parents’. We’re equals. We both toil just as hard for our crusts. I might currently earn more than my husband, but it’s worked both ways during our marriage. And he’s always been prepared to do his domestic half (happy would be pushing it); the problem is I like the way I do those things more, and so does he, just as I prefer the way he reverses the dinghy trailer into the garage or changes a tap washer.
I worry that we’ve passed our subconscious prejudices onto our children. Not so much Joe, a fluidly postmillennial male, but Summer is set-dressing her life to be far too perfect, and Ed has distinctly binary leanings. In an age when gender-neutral parenting is all the rage, were Paddy and I too brainwashed by our own childhood diet of Peter and Jane, Terry and June and He-Man and She-Ra to shake off the sexual stereotypes? Or am I just much better at baking cakes?
*
Saturday night is ‘family’ night. We eat the lamb balls (Summer leaves the couscous, Ed leaves the sauce, I eat my tiny actress portion, and Paddy demolishes everyone’s leftovers plus two slices of bread and butter as a defiant class statement). Then we retire to sofas to watch rubbish game and talent shows on ‘proper TV’ (well, I watch them and answer/comment/criticise excitedly while the other three look at their smaller screens).
Throughout, my legs tingle and jump uncomfortably. This is new.
Paddy and I sit an unfriendly dog width apart. He drinks a lot of beer. I take this as justification to drink too much wine, reaching out to stroke a cushion in lieu of Arty.
Just as I start to well up, a book is placed on the sofa arm beside me: 1001 Amazing Facts. I look up and see Ed flicking his knuckles, a repetitive stimming action he does when he’s excited or anxious.
‘For you.’
‘But it’s yours.’ He won it in a Blue Peter competition along with an orange badge, and he treasures both.
‘I want you to have it as an Act of Kindness.’
Ed’s year at school have all been tasked with ‘Acts of Kindness’ this term, the theory being that Aspies have to learn traits like generosity, empathy and polite conversation which come instinctively to neurotypical people. He has a habit of choosing unlikely moments to enact these, but I’m absurdly touched that so many of these gestures are bestowed on me.
‘It’s to help you with television quizzes because your average is low,’ he explains.
‘Thank you, Ed. That’s so thoughtful.’
Tonight’s kindness makes me even more teary, which he doesn’t understand at all. I hug the book to my chest which he doesn’t understand either, so I look up an Amazing Fact about the number of bridges on the Trans-Siberian railway instead, which pleases him enormously (3,901 if you’re interested).
After Ed slopes off to bed, Summer talks us into watching the first episode of Killing Eve Series Two. Paddy budges up to sit on Arty’s ghost, arm swinging protectively round me at the sight of Villanelle in Batman pyjamas breaking a kid’s neck. He knows this sort of thing freaks me out. I’m practically hyperventilating with discomfort for the rest of the episode, partly because it’s way too sadistic for my taste, and partly because his arm is making me very hot. I don’t want to shrug it off because we’re both trying to make up for last night, and gestures like this are rare for Paddy. Plus, I keep jumping out of my skin in horror.
*
I’ve never been particularly comfortable with violence on screen, from the flying ketchup of eighties slasher movies to the flat-capped, gritty beatings of Peaky Blinders. My aversion worsened after I had children, and recently I’ve found it upsets me more than ever.
I question why we are so obsessed with human pain and suffering, what is it about us that we need to recreate man’s violence against man for our own thrill-seeking entertainment, close up in HD? Must we celebrate unnatural death in order to feel alive?
The thought makes me both uncomfortable and terribly sad, and to wonder what is it about me that I cannot bear to watch something millions love, including my own family? Is it another middle-aged woman thing? Yet another hormone awry, robbing me of taking pleasure from something? Sex and violence. Please don’t let shopping be next.
*
When the credits finally roll, Paddy and Summer want to binge watch the rest of the series, outvoting my plea for an award-winning literary tear-jerker on Beeb Two. My legs are running with jumpy electric twitches now; I cross them, fold them under me, stick them straight out on a footstool and then shake them about, which feels quite good until Summer snaps at me that I’m deliberately spoiling the programme.
The wine bottle is empty.
‘I might go to bed.’
Paddy’s arm stays round me. ‘Give it a chance.’
He likes protecting me.
My legs full of spasms, I stick it out until a creepy male character is stabbed in the throat with a knitting needle then has a dirty loo brush shoved in his mouth, at which point I wriggle out from Paddy’s arm (he’s too engrossed by now to complain), wish them goodnight and head upstairs. Free to waggle my legs around at will, the twitching eases.
In bed, I Google leg twitches to learn that Restless Leg Syndrome is a common side effect of poor circulation, itself a common side effect of low oestrogen, AKA female decrepitude.
The phone vibrates with a late-night message from my brother, a gif of Simon Le Bon on the prow of a yacht in the ‘Rio’ pop video (Miles and I were both massive Durannies), along with a line of smile emojis and SOS! Bring life jackets tomz.
He must be out in the garden to have a phone signal.
Yawning, I send a tired What’s Up?
He replies with a screaming shock face: Jules gave Ma and Pa the downsizing lecture. Now she’s being a complete cow. Help!
I’m not taking sides.
Don’t be so Swiss, Sis.
It takes me a moment to work out he means neutral. Miles loves talking in riddles. His mind remains a puzzle I’ve been trying to unravel since the day he arrived in the Finch family, red-faced and wailing, and therefore unlikely to make it into the Thame Gazette’s Beautiful Baby page, his six-year-old big sister Julia told me.
‘Mummy wouldn’t have needed this one if you’d been born a boy, Eliza,’ she’d pointed out pragmatically.
‘He ith going to be my betht fwiend,’ said three-year-old me.
A promise I kept for the next twenty years until Miles broke too many girlfriends’ hearts, crashed my car and bought himself a Club 18-30 holiday on my credit card. I should have spotted the signs of acute narcissism when my Bionic Woman became his first martyr.
My brother has sent a picture of Emmental cheese labelled YOU.
Holier than thou, I reply.
Haha! What do you call a small Swiss man?
Toblergnome. We spent much of our childhood reading joke books out to each other.
He sends a picture of Julie Andrews atop a mountain range in The Sound of Music.
Please stop interrupting my midlife crisis, I complain, adding green and black love hearts, pressing send.
I have friends who don’t communicate with their siblings from one year to the next, yet my childhood remains so close to the surface it still colours everything.
Now he’s sent rainbow love hearts and a grumpy gorilla meme that reads You can’t have a midlife crisis if you don’t have a life! to which he’s added a row of crying laughing emoticons.
I decide to ignore it. They should make a menopausal emoji, I reflect. A bad-tempered, red-faced, tearful sweaty one. Maybe I’ll get Edward to submit a design to Unicode. Could that be my lifetime legacy?
Yawning, I re-open Google to finally search out noble acts and challenges that might make my life feel more worthwhile. Where shall we begin? A sponsored sky dive, community litter-picking, a silent retreat for conflicted feminists?
I join Greenpeace.
Slow start, but worthwhile.
Now I renew that long-lapsed Amnesty membership and sign half a dozen Change.org petitions. I’m on a roll!
Pop-ups remind me that I must share all this to social media to help spread the word, but I hesitate. To those who disapprove of public virtue signalling, it’s anathema, to the woke it’s never enough. And I need to do something more… Just more. Charity isn’t immortality, even Gift-Aided. We need to give more of ourselves than money. More of our soul. In a secular society, this is our redemption, and it’s all too often done with the regret of hindsight, like my mother’s ambition to take on the mighty Amazon or Jules running marathons from a marriage she’ll never leave.
My expectations are lower; I simply want to feel like the woman I was, to tap back into her I-can-do-anything lifeforce.
Younger Me had no bucket list, not even a To Do list, just infinite possibilities of self-improvement stretching out into the misty distance ahead.
Now that misty distance is shortening rapidly towards cataracts and cloudy urine samples, I worry about all the things I always meant to do – the travelling, the culture, the mind-blowing sex, the big career break, the kind acts, the immortality. Can I still live that life?
I’m too tired to decide…
I must have been asleep an hour or more by the time Paddy joins me. I drift up to semi-consciousness enough to feel him prise the phone out of my hands and lean across me to put it on my bedside table. He settles back to briefly spoon, his erection pressing into my back. He knows full well it won’t get any action. He’s just making a point.
9
Crunch Time
We’ve just collected Joe from the station, and I’m trying not to be too tearful and overexcited by this all-too-brief gathering of my three children. Any lapse of concentration could prove fatal because Summer is behind the wheel of the rust bucket, L-plates slapped on fore and aft, Nike eyebrows furrowed in concentration.
It’s terrifying. We start out by narrowly missing a cyclist, then fail to spot the lights changing at a pedestrian crossing. June is flaming at max, and so am I, my flush triggered by hot upholstery and fear.
‘It’s thirty along here, Summer,’ I murmur, eyeing the speedo.
‘I know. Hey, tell us all about uni, big bro!’ she calls out to Joe. ‘Stop yakking about Sonic, Ed.’
Ed’s voice, machine-gun fast, is midway through urgently describing his new game in painstaking detail. He breaks off with an overexcited, ‘Yeah, how’s it hanging, mate?’
I bite down on a smile, stealing a look over my shoulder because it’s such an un-Ed thing to say and he’s trying to look cool for Joe. Although he’s poker faced as usual, his gaze holds his brother’s, a rare honour from the boy for whom eye contact can be as hard as one-armed press-ups.
‘Life’s good thanks, Ed,’ Joe yawns away his own smile.
Understated in white T-shirt and jeans, hat brim tipped low over sleepy eyes, he’s wearing three days’ stubble, a chronic hangover and a new compass tattoo on his wrist that Summer’s already announced she wants too but cannot have or Dad Will Freak.
Each time I see our son, the man he’s going to be has taken him over a little more, a stronger version of the boy we’re letting go. Joe possesses Paddy’s inner quietness – along with the light eyes and hair – only with more self-belief. Describing student life with customary wry wit, his voice has the same husky lilt as Paddy’s when he was younger.
My little interjections of ‘I remember that!’ and ‘I was just the same!’ bounce off them all. I must stop trying to relate everything to me. I’m just Mum, my previous existence the stuff of myths.
A car horn makes me swing back in a panic. ‘You’re in the lane for the superstore, Summer, keep left.’
‘I am not! Don’t lecture me, Mum!’
‘I’m just giving you a driving lesson.’
‘Correction, you are a responsible adult with a full driving licence accompanying me while I practise.’ The car shudders as we tackle a roundabout in fourth gear.
After fifteen hours of professional lessons and with her test already booked, Summer needs this practice. Boy does she need it, being both a supremely confident yet slapdash learner.
Sticky with sweat, I try to get Robbie Williams’ ‘I Love My Life’ going in my head for positive energy, today’s low having started when Paddy left the house so absurdly early it scuppered any tea-in-bed rapprochement plans (the match doesn’t start until two, but he said something about running errands for team captain Simon, from whom he rents his workshop barn so cheaply we’re perpetually in his debt).
We drift right, on a collision course with a panicked-looking elderly man in a Honda Jazz.
‘Watch out!’ I don’t love my life again yet and now I’m losing it, and my beloved children with it.
I reach across to snatch the wheel left to save our souls. She slaps me away.
We miraculously don’t crash.
Summer drives on, fuming at fellow road users. ‘That was her fault!... Why did he do that?...Get out of my braking distance, bastard!’
She drives just like her mother, bless her.
*
It still takes me by surprise that I continually relive my childhood through parenthood, the bittersweet parallel of witnessing my own mistakes repeated by my children no matter how eager I am to spare them the same pain.
Like me, Summer sees throwing away her L plates as her freedom pass, and she’ll need the same L for Luck to pass first time. Woefully underprepared in Mum’s Renault 5 (her advice before the test simply ‘act like you know how to drive, darling girl’), I put in a performance of a lifetime that granted me a full licence. The thirty-three-year gumball rally that’s followed may not always have been pretty, but I can boast a decade’s No Claims Bonus.
What I’m not, and never will be, is a good teacher. My parents were just the same
when we were learning to drive: Mum would grip her seatbelt release and the door handle and shriek ‘slower, ye Gods!’; Dad would just fall asleep, usually after a boozy lunch. I disagree with anybody who says: ‘those who can’t, teach’. Those who can teach are angels, higher beings of patience and faith. Especially travelling at speed through a popular tourist destination without dual controls.
*
‘Not too fast,’ I advise as Summer navigates Warwick like she’s in a car chase.
She brakes and then tuts at me. Tuts! She knows I hate tutting. I tut back. It escalates. We end up sounding like a pair of furiously dripping taps.
Then I hear Ed whispering, ‘It makes ladies barren and mad, Auntie Jules says.’
‘What’s that?’ I snap.
‘Nothing.’ His headphones go back on and I feel guilty for breaking up the chat.
I love my life, Robbie reminds me.
‘I spoke to Dad yesterday, did he say?’ Joe leans forwards.
‘Yes, he enjoyed your tips on making conversation with girls.’
He laughs. ‘Yeah, that cheered him up. He was seriously salty?’ (Both Joe and Summer do that younger generation thing of turning statements into questions to be less confrontational. It has an adverse effect on me.)
‘What is “salty”?’
‘Grumpy,’ Summer translates, telling Joe, ‘The Elds have had a big argument.’
I had no idea she knew the scale of the Dog Fight. (And I wish she wouldn’t refer to her father and me as ‘Elds’, which makes us sound like leathery animatronics from a fantasy movie.)
‘It’s your anniversary next week isn’t it, Mum?’ asks Joe. ‘Are you planning anything special?’
‘Let’s focus on today first. This lunch is all about Grandpa.’
‘Yesterday I told Dad he should take—’
‘Bus lane, Summer!’ I yelp as we sail inside a line of static traffic. ‘Sorry, Joe, you told Dad he should take what? Was it “Mum to the Seychelles”?’