The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy (3 page)

Over the next few days, I set off in the morning in the hopeful anticipation of chancing upon Sexy Domesticated Dad, and then berate myself for feeling unreasonably disappointed when he doesn’t emerge. Perhaps he is working again and his wife is doing the school run, although I know she has a Big City Job that means she has to be at her desk by eight o’clock. Maybe they have an au pair who is taking their two children to school.

I allow myself to indulge in a harmless flight of fancy and imagine him in the British Library doing research for a book he’s writing. He could do that with one arm in a plaster cast but he almost certainly couldn’t type. He could dictate to me and I
could type it up. Him sitting in an old comfortable chair, his forearms resting on the arms, fingers pulling out bits of stuffing during silences while he contemplates me. We could spend long days shut up in his office (the children are out of the picture here), with me offering pithy advice and shaping the structure of his biography. Then I become indispensable, he can’t work without me. Not that I know what he is writing until I Google him one evening after the children have gone to bed and find that he is late delivering a manuscript on Latin America’s contribution to the international film world. Very niche. And a subject about which I know nothing. So there the fantasy ends. Benignly.

‘Excuse me, madam, would you like a drink, would you like to order something?’ I am aware suddenly of a waiter gently tapping me on the shoulder. He is wearing an impeccably clean and wrinkle-free long white apron tied round the waist several times, with a neat bow at the front just above his stomach. I think of the war of attrition being waged back home in the washroom, where the piles of unironed sheets and shirts are threatening to besiege the kitchen. Our Polish cleaning lady, who is meant to come one morning a week, is now too arthritic to manage more than a cursory dust and abandoned the laundry pile to its fate months ago.

I consider asking him where he gets his laundry done or even whether he would do it for me. Would sleeping on sheets as smooth and cool as ready-made icing restore my equilibrium? I resist an urge to rest my head on his apron and shut my eyes. These are the kinds of domestic issues that used to send my mother’s friends reaching for the Valium. They are not important anymore, I tell myself. In any case, there are new weapons in the household armoury: easy-iron shirts, disposable nappies,
and quick-cook pasta. Starch has long been banished, along with Soda-Streams and carpet beating.

Besides, domestic chaos is a genetic condition. My mother cleverly turned it into an intellectual statement and I grew up being told that a tidy home was anti-feminist. Women should spend more time fine-tuning their brains and less time ordering the linen cupboard if they wanted to break the domestic shackles that prevented them from achieving their intellectual potential, she used to say to me as a child.

The waiter urges me to look at a long and confusing list of cocktails. They all promise a better tomorrow and have names like ‘Sunny Dreams’ or ‘Rainbow of Optimism’. There are none called ‘Uneasy Truce’ or ‘Gathering Storm’. I feel like a stranger in a foreign land and ask for a ginger beer, partly because it feels familiar but mostly because the writing is so small that I can’t read the list of cocktail ingredients.

Another year and I will need bifocals.

I am waiting in a private members’ club in Soho for a rare evening out with my last remaining single girlfriends. Inside the old Georgian dining rooms, the walls are painted a deep crimson and even in the dim light they cast a warm glow, inviting intimacy and whispered indiscretions. People flutter around like moths, looking for familiar faces. Buoyed by alcohol they seem to have no doubts about the quality of their happiness.

I sit alone in the middle of a large faux regency sofa with wooden arms and faded velvet covers. Periodically people come over and ask me to move up so that they can sit down, but my urge to be alone transcends any desire to be affable and I tell them that I am waiting for friends. I know it will be a while before anyone turns up but I wanted to escape the chaos of bath
time and bedtime and told Tom that I had to be here by seven-thirty, just to catch up with myself. Sometimes I play so many roles in a day that I think I am suffering from a form of maternal schizophrenia. Cook, chauffeur, cleaner, lover, friend, mediator. It’s like being in a pantomime, unsure whether you are meant to be the back part of the donkey or playing the leading role.

Looking at my watch and calmly sipping my Luscombe organic ginger beer, I consider the major systems failure likely to be taking place at home. I imagine Fred refusing to get out of the bath and wriggling out of Tom’s grasp like a slippery eel. His brothers will hold on to Fred’s legs and shriek like banshees. Tom will swear under his breath and then the oldest two will repeatedly taunt ‘Daddy said the F-word’ until Tom loses his temper. Tomorrow he will no doubt hold me responsible for the anarchy. But there is a whole night between now and then. Even though this is the first time that I have been out for almost a month, I still reproach myself. Guilt is the bindweed of motherhood, the two so inexorably entwined that it is difficult to know where one ends and the other begins.

My brother, Mark, who is a psychologist, says contemporary mothers are the innocent victims of the nature-versus-nurture debate. According to Mark, we are burdened by recent trends in psychotherapeutic thought, which reject the idea that children are born with a unique set of traits and instead place full responsibility for every aspect of development fairly and squarely on our shoulders. ‘So mothers blame themselves for any shortfall in their children’s personality,’ he says. ‘Flash cards, Baby Einstein, pencil grip, it’s all part of the belief that you can model your children like clay, when the truth is as long as you avoid extremes, the outcome for the child will be pretty
much the same.’ I want to believe him, but when I consider the chaos of his own personal life, I always look back to our childhood for answers.

‘Do you mind if I sit here?’ asks a tired-looking man carrying a pile of loose papers under his arm. ‘I’m only going to be half an hour.’ When I look doubtful, he says exasperatedly, ‘I just want to be here long enough to avoid putting my children to bed.’ And then I know he is telling the truth. A fellow deserter from the domestic front line. I get out a newspaper from my bag to give him the illusion of privacy and a chance to rest with his own thoughts.

I decide, almost on impulse, to take up smoking again properly and ask the man whether he would keep my seat for a moment. He nods wearily without saying anything. It is so long since I bought a packet of cigarettes that I am left fumbling in my coat pockets for change, when I see how much they cost. Then I can’t remember how to use the machine. Do you put in the money first or choose the brand? In the end I press the wrong button and end up with a packet of John Player.

I light up the first one, and even though it tastes vile and I feel so light-headed that I think I am going to pass out, I doggedly continue as if to prove a point to myself. It should be like riding a bicycle, but it isn’t. I really need to get out more. Like a schoolgirl trying to finish a cigarette before the teacher spots me, I find myself smoking it so fast that the end becomes unpleasantly hot and the smoke billows thickly around my head. I start to cough and splutter. Through the fog I can see Friend with Improbably Successful Career circling the adjacent room looking for me. Instead of waving or calling her name, I watch in wonder as she drifts from table to table, peering at
faces and occasionally stopping to greet someone. Emma’s ease amazes me. She is wearing a pair of black low-slung Sass & Bide drainpipes, knee-high leather boots, and a fantastic silver top with tassels that are so long they form a kind of slipstream behind her. But it is not just about what she is wearing, although certainly the general effect demands attention. It is more the way that she occupies the space around her with such authority. The same way that it is not simply the smoke that makes me invisible. Nor the fact that I am wearing a velvet jacket the same colour as the sofa so that I merge with the furniture.

‘Lucy,’ she beams, sitting down beside me. ‘I’ve found you at last.’ The tassels finally calm down as she looks at the empty glasses in front of me. ‘What are you drinking?’ she asks.

‘Ginger beer,’ I tell her.

‘Lashings, I can see. Very Famous Five.’ The waiter comes over immediately and effusively greets her, in a way that is gratifying to them both, and she orders a bottle of champagne. It is fair to say that Emma is now so high up in her news organisation that most parts of her life qualify as expenses, so I do not wince.

As I sip champagne from a tall thin glass with a long elegant stem, Sexy Single Mum appears and makes me, as the guest of honour, move into the middle of the sofa.

‘Lucy, it’s so great to see you. I can’t even remember the last time we all went out together,’ enthuses Cathy, hugging me tightly.

‘How’s my lovely godson?’ I ask her.

‘Great. He’s with his dad for the night,’ she says.

The springs are weakest here and I sink into a dip, securely wedged between two of my closest friends, feeling something
akin to contentment. Then a friend of Cathy’s from work appears. As she sits down I marvel at a world of such spontaneity where people are unaccountable to anyone apart from themselves, free from complicated arrangements involving third parties and lists of phone numbers and instructions what to do if the children wake up.

Suddenly I am no longer a lonely married person on day release from the suburbs, but part of an attractive group of nominally single thirty-something women having a very good time, thank you very much. I imagine people looking at us and wondering how we fit together. Except that at a place like this, other people are too involved in the small print of their own lives for ours to warrant much attention.

There was a time in our twenties, although it seems fantastical now, when we lived parallel existences, carving out fairly successful careers and rather less consequential relationships. Then I met Tom at a party held by Emma, because he was one of the architects involved in designing the new offices for her company, and Cathy met the man we now refer to as Hopeless Husband on an ad shoot. We both got married and Emma nearly did several times.

After Ben was born, Cathy went back to work three days a week as a copywriter.

For a good few years we traipsed around the same toddler groups together on her days off. We shared weak cups of tea out of polystyrene cups. We had half-conversations with our husbands on mobile phones, as we wheeled pushchairs through playgrounds we had never noticed before, despite their proclivity for primary colours. We lovingly checked sandpits for old syringes, as other mothers warned us to do.

While the tedium of my own conversations with Tom often
left me numb, revolving as they did around subjects domestic, such as how to release Action Man from the U-bend in the toilet, Cathy’s got ever louder and more acrimonious.

Her husband veered between trying to establish himself as a furniture designer and working on building projects, neither of which generated much income. So she had to go back to work full time and shortly afterwards became a company director, making him feel ever more inadequate. Of course, it was more complicated than that, because it always is. Her husband found a therapist who told him his wife was holding him back and so he decided to dispense with wife and child and move back in with his parents. Now Cathy lives a dual existence, as responsible mother of a five-year-old and wild party animal – depending on when her ex-husband has their son at the weekend – with a full-time nanny organising the bits in between.

Downing a third glass of champagne, and now more than perfectly happy with the quality of my own happiness, I start to review private clubs to which I belong.

‘Of course there’s no waiting list, and if you want to drink you have to go into the loo with a hip flask, but in order of descending importance there is 1) Little Dippers swimming club, 2) Munchkin music group and 3) Fire Engine playgroup.’

‘That one sounds good,’ says Cathy. ‘I could do with a bit of rough.’

Then Emma shrieks. ‘Something tried to ladder my tights.’ The four of us bend down to look under the table.

‘Forget the local wildlife,’ says Cathy. ‘It’s Lucy’s hairy legs.’

Everyone demands to examine them, by running their hands up and down my calves in amazement. ‘God, Lucy, you could cause serious carpet burn with those,’ she says. I try to explain that having three children demands a minimalist beauty
routine. Having a three-minute shower counts as major pre-party preparations with anything from deodorant to a quick pluck of the moustache as bonuses tacked on to the end. Leg waxing has become a biannual luxury, after late-night attempts at home waxing ended in disaster involving hairy bed sheets. Incredulous looks all round.

‘But what do you do all day?’ asks Emma. ‘Isn’t it all yoga and Cath Kidston floral prints? And what about home baking?’

So I relay key developments of the day from the domestic rearguard. ‘I got up at six-thirty, made two packed lunches, listened to Joe read, rushed to school to drop the eldest two, arranged a date for Sam’s best friend to come for tea, looked in lost property for Joe’s jumper, and then raced to nursery with Fred,’ I tell them, leaning forward for dramatic effect. ‘And this was all before nine o’clock.’

‘No,’ they say in awe.

‘Do you really want more?’ I ask. They nod.

‘I went to the shops, raced home to unload everything, lowered the clothes mountain by about a foot, dealt with the discovery that Fred has been using the bin in our bathroom to pee in for two weeks, and then ran to his nursery to get him. Fred had a friend to play so I phoned my mother while they were upstairs. Then I discovered they had taken out all of Sam’s clothes from his chest of drawers, so I had to tidy up the mess. By then it was time to go back to school to pick up Sam and Joe. Then there was homework, tea, bathtime, and stories. Oh, and I forgot to mention that I played “I’m Jens Lehmann” for half an hour after tea.’ More puzzled looks. ‘He’s the Arsenal goalie. He’s almost a member of the family.’