Confessions of a Bad Mother (14 page)

Having pushed his way through the crowd, he says: ‘Hello,’
after which there is a dramatic pause before he takes in the fact that I am
topless. Unable to retreat easily due to the density of the crowd, and
evidently not wanting to seem rude, he hovers on tiptoe, eyes averted,
muttering: ‘And are you – er, ah – writing much?’

After Peter has fetched Lawrence for the twenty-fifth time we repair to
the sandpit, where, with carefully concealed flutes of champagne, we discover
you can take two children under two to a posh, stand-up party – if
you’re prepared to compromise. It’s just a matter of choosing which
things to compromise on, and it needn’t be the champagne. We go home
feeling we’ve coped quite well, even if our clothes are full of sand.

One Sunday we have lunch in Oxford with Antonia, an old swimming friend
of mine. I say ‘swimming friend’; I first met her lighting up a
cigarette in the changing-rooms, explaining that she’d been dragged there
by Iris, a friend who had to exercise in the water because she had only one
leg.

‘I hate fucking swimming,’ she muttered between drags. She
and Iris were both pushing seventy. They invited me for coffee, and gave me
their views on child-rearing. I had none at this point – children, not
views. Antonia and her daughter Eleanor, Eleanor’s boyfriend and their
daughter Araminta all shared a house, along with a gay, black film-maker, a
freelance illustrator and a changing assortment of others.

‘You know why Araminta’s so well behaved?’ said
Antonia, puffing away. ‘Because half the time, her parents can’t be
bothered with her.’

‘Well, surely … I mean—’

‘The other day, I came in and what d’you think I found?
Araminta bawling in her pushchair, on the landing. And where was Eleanor?
Upstairs, at her desk!’

‘Oh yes,’ added Iris, though with approval or disapproval I
couldn’t tell.

‘I said, “Eleanor,
what are you doing
?” And she
said, “Mother, if you must know, I couldn’t get the buckle undone
on the bloody thing, and I had a deadline, so I left her there.”
Really!’

‘Oh yes,’ repeated Iris.

‘But you see, this is why Minty’s so well
behaved.’

And sure enough, when we arrive at the house, Minty greets us
charmingly, and offers to show Lawrence and Lydia her toys. Lydia survives the
outing unscathed, but Lawrence trips and snaps part of his front tooth off on
the step. He recovers from this far sooner than I do. How did I manage to let
that
happen? I decide it’s Peter’s fault, for taking half a
Sunday off – which he never does – to meet someone from work. When
we get home, I help take our minds off it by teaching Lawrence to help me load
the dishwasher. Lydia can now put her own dummy back in, so she’s well on
her way to independence.

Just before his second birthday Lawrence learns to say: ‘No wannoo
…’ – the key phrase of this year, and henceforth our whole
relationship.

With Lawrence at Maureen’s I can concentrate for most of the day
on one child. This even leads to brief spells of peace, during which I feel I
am ‘
getting it right
’. One morning I allow myself a little
shopping. In the cafe at John Lewis I put my coffee down, and park
Lydia’s buggy some distance from the table –
so I think
– while I get a glass of water. At last, I feel I’ve reached
some sort of plateau. Things are going quite well, and—

Suddenly she rises up in her pushchair – like Glenn Close at the
end of
Fatal Attraction
– grabs my coffee and throws it all over
herself. As I take it black, it is very hot. I chuck my water over her, then
take the water from someone else’s table, marvelling at how quickly, in a
crisis, a middle-class person can say, ‘
Excuse me, could I
possibly take this? Thank you.
’

I tear her suit off. The John Lewis first-aid rep –
‘
I’m
Sue, the First-Aid Rep
’ – calls an
ambulance and throws more cold water and ice all over her, so that she goes
from screaming because she’s covered in boiling hot stuff, to screaming
because she’s freezing cold. A towel appears from somewhere. The
paramedics rush in with aloe vera gel which they smooth on, then wrap her in a
kind of cling-film like 1980s disco wear. They put an oxygen mask on her and
wheel her through huge corridors behind the sales floor, with me and the
pushchair running behind. The siren wails all the way to UCH. As we jump the
lights, I think:
Lawrence would have loved this.
At the vehicle entrance
to A&E, three plastic surgeons are waiting. Maybe business is slow. I have
given Lydia her dummy, which is pretty effective; she has stopped screaming and
fallen asleep.

‘I’m awfully sorry about this,’ I say. ‘She
was
screaming.’

‘When did you throw the cold water on?’ they ask.

‘Er …’

‘How soon after she spilled the coffee?’

‘Twenty seconds? I’m really sorry, I’m not
sure.’

They examine her whole front, paying particular attention to her pubic
area.

‘Did the coffee get down this far, can you remember?’

‘No. It stopped about there.’

‘Well, she’s lucky. That area scars very badly, but
you’ve saved her from being scarred anyway.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Every second before you put water on a burn like this makes
a big difference.’

I’ve actually done something right! There should be a kind of
tick, the opposite of points, that you can put on your Mothering Licence. Gold
stars, maybe. I sit in a cubicle while they put on more aloe vera, fresh
cling-film, and a wide bandage in which they cut arm holes to make a kind of
vest. They also give me a mini bottle of formula with a disposable teat, as I
have run out.

Back home, I tell Peter and Lawrence of our adventure.

‘Well done you!’ says Peter. The sense of having made a
difference, a tangibly positive difference, is fantastic. Three days later we
go back to have the dressing off. The skin is broken on one part of her tummy,
but she is otherwise perfect. Five years on, she still loves to hear the story
of Lydia and the Coffee.

The excitement never ends. Mira gives us a potty.

‘It looks brand new,’ I say. ‘Don’t you want
it?’

‘My children won’t pee into anything red.’

Lawrence loves it, though more as a toy than an aid to actual toilet
training. He associates it with weeing inasmuch as the two occasionally
coincide, but as he is always sitting down at the time, the wee does not
generally go in, or even near, the target. Mainly he likes to get my old doll,
Champagne – a sixties chav in yellow mini-skirt – and put her on
it. Then he sits on top of her in a disconcerting suggestion of some kind of
18–30 Holiday party game, shouting: ‘Wee wee!’

Afterwards he says, ‘
Aw-right?
’ sounding exactly like
Maureen’s scaffolder husband, Ron. He also likes to take the pilot out of
his Playmobil helicopter, and wipe his nether regions. I am getting nowhere
with this ‘training’. The only training going on is his training me
to realize my own limitations.

‘He’ll do it when he’s ready,’ says Maureen.

‘Children in Africa don’t need toilet training,’ says
my mother in
Horizon
mode. ‘They learn to do it all
naturally.’

‘Yes, but then they don’t need to be toilet trained because
they all die of Aids.’

‘I’m just trying to be helpful.’ Grandparents should
have a phrase emblazoned on them like a council motto:
Working to undermine
you
.

There’s one thing I have trained Lawrence to do. When he hears a
car hooting in the traffic, he says, ‘Shit.’

Suddenly he starts speaking in sentences, like the Starship Enterprise
going into warp drive.

‘Do that again and you’re in trouble,’ he tells his
teddy.

Lydia, ten months, is crawling, but of course we don’t make a big
deal of it because we’ve seen it all before. We make up for this by
stopping dead in our tracks when she smiles her dazzling smile. Caught in the
headlights Peter becomes completely useless.

‘You’ll forget to go to work if you’re not
careful.’

‘Shut up: I love her now, not you.’ The Calman pedantry is
showing up already. When Lawrence tells me: ‘I saw a mixer lorry,’
I say: ‘Was it up the road?’ He says: ‘No:
down
the
road.’

He does a pooh in the bath which is a talking point for days. It’s
not one of the Development Milestones as laid out in the little red book, but
he feels a sense of achievement which we feel it would be churlish to
undermine.

To train them to have the same taste as us – or at least not
primary-coloured,
kiddie
taste – we take them to the Ken Adam
exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery. There are video clips, drawings and
stills from his best-known film sets, including
You Only Live Twice
and
Dr
Strangelove
.

‘Look, Lawrence: a spaceship!’

‘A space chip: I eat it.’

‘How long before we can show them a James Bond?’ says
Peter.

‘How long before we can all go to the cinema together?’

There’s another pressing issue. I’m scared that if I leave
it too long, I’ll forget how to work. Or how to be Out There. I want to
be Out. I want to
go
somewhere,
be
someone again, a Person. I
want to go on the tube and have coffee in a paper cup. I ring up a nice
script-editor at the BBC, where they are interested in an idea of mine. He
invites me to come and see him and the producer. Peter now has our friend
Alison working for him, and they offer to mind Lydia while I have my meeting. I
wheel Lydia in, to admiring glances, but also realize I am quite nervous. I get
back on the tube.

In BBC reception a rather attractive man gives me a big, ‘
Are
you free tonight?
’ sort of smile. He looks a bit familiar, but I
can’t place him. I get to my meeting, but it starts late. Then, when the
producer
does
appear, there are building works and we can’t hear
what we’re saying. He makes a few calls to find another office, then we
set off. When we get there, he gossips and chats with the nice script-editor,
but no one mentions my actual script. Eventually they get round to it. It is
4.30 and Maureen shuts down at 5.30. She
never
works late. I’ve
got twenty-five minutes to get all the way back down the Westway and through
King’s Cross in the rush hour. If I grab Lydia and drive like a maniac I
might, just might, not be late.

‘So how’s the pilot coming along, then?’

Mustn’t be late for Maureen, mustn’t be late for
Maureen.

‘Hm? Oh, fine. Fine.’

He tells me to do another draft. Sick with anxiety, I get to Peter and
run along the corridors pushing Lydia like a rickshaw driver in the war
escaping the Japanese. I reach Maureen with two minutes to spare, and resolve
not to have another meeting for a long time, possibly never. It wasn’t
just the rushing; I realize I hated the feeling of being so far away. Still,
I’ve remembered the name of the attractive man in reception.

‘How was the meeting?’ says Peter.

‘Hopeless. But Gary Lineker smiled at me.’

‘So the day wasn’t entirely wasted.’

I decide to forget about having a career. On Sunday we go for a walk
with Julia and her four children on Hampstead Heath, and Lawrence falls
face-first into a huge clump of nettles. He is screaming, and in shock. We calm
him, and hold him, and all the children gather dock leaves. But what really
seems to help is shouting at the Sharp Plants.

‘You’re very naughty!’ I tell them. ‘Now just
–
Go
Away
!’

We have been looking for a babysitter, and think we have found one.

Sharon is a cheerful teenager who lives nearby and is instinctively good
with kids, possibly because she’s so much nearer their age. Also, being
seventeen she doesn’t collapse with exhaustion halfway through the day.
Even better than that, she knows Maureen and is therefore part of the network
of those women who allow the likes of me to swan about going on the radio and
writing books. There are a few exceptions: those literary females who manage to
create great works while being full-time mothers. Possibly they type with their
nipples. But if it weren’t for the Maureens and Sharons of the Western
world, far fewer books, magazines, radio and TV shows would be produced. Which
may indeed be no loss. But more women like me would also end up on street
corners waving empty vodka bottles at strangers.

Maureen takes her summer holiday in June, throwing into disarray the
working mothers of the two older boys who are now at school. It doesn’t
affect us – yet. In fact, it’s to our advantage.

‘Hey, let’s go on holiday at the same time!’

‘While it’s cheaper, and there aren’t millions of
other families taking up all the—’

‘Food.’

‘Whatever.’

We book ten days in Menorca, in a resort that looks like a newly built
suburb, surrounded by nothing. Sharon’s uncomplicated approach is ideal
for a baby and newly qualified toddler and a nearly two year old. We have a
wild and crazy idea.

‘Would you like to come on holiday with us?’

And thank God she says yes, as Lawrence – a keen walker –
spends pretty much the whole ten days escaping across the hotel grounds and
having to be brought back before he reaches the lifts. That leaves Peter and me
to take turns swimming and minding Lydia, who sits in the shade in her
pushchair sporting a 1920s-looking hat that covers everything except her
enormous cheeks. The pool is nice, but the alienating ambience of the complex
and the sudden dashes across the lawn to grab Lawrence put me in mind of
The
Prisoner
. This feeling is compounded when we leave Sharon to babysit and
find there is nowhere to go.

‘Next time,’ I say, ‘I’ll find a place with a
town.’