Confessions of a Bad Mother (25 page)

‘Oh. Hm. Ah.’

‘What?’

‘Presumably you’ve seen this hole?’

I choose my words carefully.

‘I am aware of it, yes. Lydia, get away from there.’

‘I mean, the one nearer the front is much smaller,
but—’

‘There
are
two, then. God …’ My hope that
there are no holes, that the other dentist is mad, fizzles out.

Why didn’t we get one of those little white cards? If he’d
bothered to send reminders, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

‘Yes. You see – can you lean back again, Lawrence? The
smaller one’s there. And the rather larger one is …
there
.’

I can see it now. Almost half the tooth is gone. I feel weak.

‘I don’t understand it. He has been brushing. They both
have, and she’s fine. Lydia, stop skipping.’

‘Well, nonetheless …’

‘I don’t know what to say.’ In the periphery of my
vision I can see a needle. In my anxiety to disprove neglect, I completely
ignore Lawrence. I don’t care what he’s feeling, only what Dennis
thinks of
me
. His hand moves towards the needle.

‘Shall we put that side to sleep?’ I wish I could. Now I
have to reassure my poor little boy by hiding my fear of needles. I must try to
remember not to widen my eyes when he picks it up and brandishes it in the air.
Breathe slowly. Keep focusing on him, not the hypo … So far, so good
…

‘Oooh!’ says Lydia. ‘What a
big
needle
!’

‘Lydia, go out to reception and get one of those books you were
looking at.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘Go on!’

‘No!’

Luckily, this has slightly diverted Lawrence’s attention and the
needle is now in. But it stays in, of course, for ages. He groans.

‘Try not to move,’ says Dennis. Time slows down. He has had
that needle in his cheek forever. After about a century it comes out.

‘Well done!’ I say. ‘The worst is over.’

But when he attempts to do the filling, Dennis discovers the area is not
numb. He has to do the whole thing again.

‘I don’t like to give them too much …’ he
muses. But on the other hand, my child seems to have the constitution of a
mammoth. He ends up with virtually an adult dose. And even then, he is so
resistant that Dennis can’t manage the second filling at all.

‘It’s starting to wear off. I don’t think I’d
better attempt the second one. We’ll do it when you come back.’

‘Come back?’ The filling is temporary. We have to do
it all again. I take him to the toy shop and buy
him a glow-in-the-dark set of Geomag for £10.99. He has already has a
non-glow-in-the-dark set that lives under the bed, and after one play, this one
joins it there.

When we come back, again Lawrence needs not one, but two, long stabs
with the needle. Throughout it all he is incredibly quiet, sweet and good.
Despite this, I berate him for not doing his teeth properly. Not surprisingly,
he wants some kind of compensation for being stabbed
and
picked on, all
in the one day.

‘Ice cream?!’ I splutter. ‘You’ve just had a
filling!!’ So, feeling even worse, I buy him the Mousetrap game for
£22.99. He and Lydia open it all over the floor and immediately lose
several of the pieces. But I feel ever so slightly better.

Now that Lydia and Lawrence are showing an interest in the subject
– examining each other in the bath, giggling, etc. – it seems the
right time to share with them the Great Wonder of the Miracle of Life. I have
planned how it will go. There’ll be no cutesy stuff, but it won’t
just be dry science either. They’ll sit at my knee, their little faces
gazing up in wonderment, as I – like David Attenborough – impart
this Great Truth.

‘Gosh!’ they will gasp.

And: ‘Wow!’

Possibly followed by: ‘
Urgh!
’

But that’s fine, because I am expecting it. I am Not Embarrassed,
and everything is under control.

When’s the Right Time? Some people are still shirking the issue
when their kids are pushing puberty. A bit late; you don’t want to leave
it until they know more than you. So I decide to go for the point where
they’re old enough to understand the basics, but not too old to think
that willies and so on are inherently fascinating. I shall not shirk! For once,
I am going to copy my mother.

I was five when she began her comprehensive rundown of the Facts of
Life. This was in the Sixties, when a lot of kids believed that babies came
from the huge bottles of coloured liquid that stood in the windows of
chemists’. God knows why; it was just accepted in many quarters, like
having Dream Topping instead of cream, and wearing a vest. Looking back, quite
a few of the parents probably believed it as well. Mum would have none of it.
Having drawn the pictures for various public health leaflets with titles like
You and Your Breasts
she was fearless and tireless. She gave us the full
itinerary of the sperm – including the fate of stragglers, diversions and
blocked fallopian tubes, and the entire life cycle of the ovum, from ovulation
through menstruation in all its glory, to conception and beyond. From erections
and secretions she did not flinch. The only problem was getting her to stop. By
eleven I was running from the room, begging: ‘Can I do my maths homework
now?
Please?
’

It was like
Star Wars
; just when you thought you’d heard
the last of it, along came yet another bit of the story you were sure you
didn’t need. On the other hand, it served me well at secondary school.
Friends came round eagerly, knowing that my mum would answer all the questions
theirs wouldn’t. She also let me read
The ABZ of Love
, with its
shall we say – generously illustrated entry on ‘erection’.
While bunking off games, a few of us would gather in the cloakroom to discuss
it all – very useful, as at fourteen, the range of experience was wide.
One girl was in a grown-up relationship – ‘
last night we did
69
’ said one of her notes passed along the back row in Latin, while
another was a strict Catholic whose mother described sex as,
‘
something terrible you have to do when you get married
’.
She’d obviously got it mixed up with ironing. Relying on the biology
syllabus was not recommended; thanks to the poor quality of early photocopying,
in the mock O level the male and female reproductive systems looked the same.
One of my friends labelled the male one as the female, so you can’t
assume anything. During my period not long ago, I tried to explain to Lydia
about ovaries; I told her: ‘
You’ve got all your eggs already, in
two little boxes in your tummy
,’ to which she replied: ‘
Are
there chicks in there?
’

So I am primed. But as usual, events get ahead of me.

Watching
Friends
one night, I become aware of the patter of tiny
hands and knees. They have snuck in and are arranging themselves, like
decorative bolsters, along the back of the sofa. Peter is out, so I grab the
chance to curry favour.

‘I’m going to be really nice and let you watch for a bit,
OK?’

They ignore me. They are already deep into Rachel’s intention to
say goodbye to Barry the Dentist.

It’s an old episode. Once upon a time, in the past, Rachel was
going to marry Barry, but she called it off. Now she’s been seeing him
again, but he’s about to marry her friend Mindy and she does, like, have
a conscience y’know. So she goes to his surgery to say she can’t
see him any more. And they end up having sex in the chair. The sex itself being
just implied – this is network after all, not HBO – the children
initially only have Rachel’s encoded references to go on.

When Phoebe and Monica ask: ‘
So, did you go see
Barry?
’ she says: ‘
Ye-es …
’

‘
How did he take it?
’ says Monica. And Rachel answers
(Big Laugh here): ‘
… Quite well!
’

Then Monica says, ‘
You have dental floss in your
hair.
’ (Another Big Laugh.) This of course goes right over their
heads. However, her confession grips them immediately.

‘They had sex in the dental chair! They had sex in the dental
chair!’ they chant, bouncing the poor old sofa to hell. And I suddenly
realize that they have no idea what ‘sex’ actually is. For all they
know it could be root canal work. There’s going to be no David
Attenborough Moment. I have to tell them now.

‘Kids, shall I tell you what sex is?’

‘Sssh!’

‘Mummy,
move
! I can’t see!’

I bide my time and wait for the break.

I must focus. I’ve got approximately two minutes. The
Friends
bumper comes up.

‘OK, listen. Sex is when a man and a lady love each other and do
lots of kissing, and the man puts his willy into the lady’s
noo-noo
.’ They are hysterical at the idea, not least because
it’s only recently that they’ve started becoming helpless at the
word
noo-noo
, although we’ve used it for ages.

With about fifteen seconds left I don’t go into more detail, but
do add, having seen them eyeing each other speculatively: ‘Only grown-ups
are allowed to do it.’

Friends
comes back on. In the rush to describe the whole
procedure, I have forgotten to mention it can make a baby.

Lawrence is about to be seven. People say you should avoid having an
August baby, but they’re wrong. Because their birthday always falls in
the holidays, you never have to have a party with thirty kids. Or twenty. Or
even ten. In fact, because
almost the whole class is away
at this time,
numbers are extremely low. This year, we are taking Lawrence and two friends to
the zoo. With Lydia that makes four. And the timing is perfect, because this
very month, Komodo Dragons have arrived – ‘launched’, if
that’s the right word, by David Attenborough. Attenborough is
Lawrence’s hero. He is getting three entire series of his programmes for
a birthday present, adding up to about 4,000 hours of viewing. I figure if we
put the first disc on now, he’ll be switching off about March.

When we get to the zoo, it turns out that launched is exactly the right
word, as, a week before our arrival, one of the Dragons leaps off a wall and
ends up in hospital.

That leaves one other, which when we visit has understandably succumbed
to agoraphobia, and a much smaller – presumably infant – example,
which loiters disconsolately among the municipal,
Ground Force
-style
landscaping.

But it’s fine because there are birds – Lawrence’s
favourite – and the aquarium, which is still ‘undeveloped’,
i.e. the animals haven’t been replaced by corporatesponsored video
screens. It is exactly as it was when I last came thirty years ago. And the
children get a firsthand idea of what it’s like to actually live
underwater, since the rain is coming through the ceiling. Afterwards, we have
lunch out. It’s not expensive, yet, with the entrance tickets and snacks,
we seem to have spent £200. We go back on the tube, exhausted. But at
least we’ve saved the £200 we would otherwise have spent on an
entertainer and a church hall. And we have managed to tire them out by
accidentally booking a restaurant nowhere near the zoo.

Two months later, Lydia is six. Her party will be making palaces out of
cardboard boxes with me and Katarina, so she is allowed only five guests
because – and this is an important point – ‘
you
can’t make palaces with more than six
’.

Unfortunately, in the run-up to her birthday I lose the list, and
because my memory doesn’t extend to six names, tell one of the mothers
who’s trying to lift share that the child she wants to share with
hasn’t been invited, so not to mention it. But she has been. The
confusion spreads until – none of the other five wanting to say the wrong
thing – the poor woman wonders why every time she suggests a lift share
they all change the subject. On the day, I find the list at the bottom of a
huge pile of papers, and manage not to upset any six year olds – just.
But to be fair to me, I have a lot on my plate – literally.

We are supposed to be decorating the sitting room as the underwater
kingdom of the Sea-Fairy Queen, the autocratic mermaid I invented at the
seaside. But a week before, our DVD club accidentally sends us
The
Belstone
Fox
, a rather dark 1973 film starring Eric Porter –
and Dennis Waterman, on horseback – which opens with a family of foxes
being battered to death with spades. One cub survives (‘Tag’) and
is rescued, to be brought up with the very hounds being trained to exterminate
it on the hunt. At the end, Tag manages to get most of the hounds killed by
leading them onto the railway track, and Eric Porter dies in a cave. Lydia
loves it, and skips about telling anyone within a three-mile radius
incomprehensible chunks of the plot. And she doesn’t want the underwater
kingdom any more, she wants this. Peter has also bought her a cuddly fox from
Ikea from which she is now inseparable, so this is partly his fault. I phone
him.

‘Forget the Sea-Fairy Queen; we’ve got to do a country
landscape with fox and hounds.’

‘But I’ve just got all this green netting.’

‘She doesn’t want it.’

‘Well, can’t you persuade her?’

‘Hey, here’s an idea! If you don’t want her to become
obsessed with foxes, don’t take her to Ikea and buy her a bloody great
big one.’

‘You didn’t complain at the time.’

‘I forgot.’

I too am disappointed. I’ve been looking forward to suspending the
green netting below the ceiling and hanging twirly green crepe paper from it
for seaweed. I was going to put little boats on it, and stick a couple of
Barbies up there, swimming, with their legs hanging down so when you look up
it’s like those underwater shots in
Jaws
. I really wanted –
oh, never mind. Lydia is only interested in the fox story, and won’t go
anywhere without ‘Tag’. It has to sit on the table while she eats
her cereal, where it attracts abuse from Lawrence and becomes spattered with
Weetabix and Pritt Stick.