Any Way You Want Me (2 page)

He rolled his eyes. ‘It’s great having kids, isn’t it?’

‘Oh yeah,’ I agreed. ‘Who needs a social life, anyway?’

‘Exactly,’ he said, reaching over to grab the remote and flip channels. ‘Especially when
Match of the Day
is about to start.’

I put our full-bellied, slumbering son back in his cot and watched him for a couple of minutes as he lay there breathing in the half-darkness. Then I tiptoed into Molly’s bedroom and tucked her duvet around her. She was cuddling her Fizz doll in her sleep, and smiling, her hair a mass of blonde fluff on the pillow.

My beautiful children. I was grateful, really, of course I was. I wouldn’t have swapped them for the wildest social life in the world. It just seemed a shame that one life had to end so abruptly when another began.

I didn’t mind the sacrifice of endless nights in front of the telly so much but I worried that Alex did. He’d been the uber-party animal in the pre-kids days, always getting invites for the hottest nights out, scoring the best drugs, suffering the worst Sunday come-downs. When we first started seeing each other, I had felt swept along by his energy and stamina, his passion for life, love, everything.

Those days seemed long gone. In my most miserable, sleep-tortured moments, I couldn’t help wondering if he was secretly longing to escape the domestic confines of parenthood, and abandon us for some dark-eyed, lithe-limbed lovely in a sweaty nightclub, where life was easy and everyone was dancing.

I went downstairs again, suddenly anxious to know if this was indeed what he was feeling, but he was snoring on the sofa. Gary Lineker burbled away about Arsenal’s defensive tactics in the background as I shook awake south London’s one-time party king. Then we went to bed.

The thought of Jack and my aborted night out stayed buried beneath an avalanche of more pressing things until the following Monday morning. Twenty minutes or so after I’d put the first load of washing on, I remembered.

A scribbled phone number on a page torn from his diary, stuffed in my trouser pocket. I knelt in front of the washing machine and watched helplessly as the assortment of babygros and cot sheets and Angelina Ballerina vests swirled and churned with Alex’s boxers and my vile nursing bras and . . . and, yes, there they were, my best black trousers.

I sighed. It wasn’t as if I was going to
call
him or anything. It wasn’t like I was going to . . .

‘What Mummy doing?’

I put an arm around Molly’s shoulders as she crouched next to me. She had pink felt-tip pen all over her cheeks. I kissed her blonde hair and she leaned into my side.

‘Just thinking about life, Molls. Wondering where it’s going.’

Her blue eyes were thoughtful. ‘Where it going,’ she repeated solemnly. ‘Where it going?’

‘That, my love, is the killer question,’ I said. Then I stood up and grabbed her, lifting her top to blow raspberries on her creamy-white belly. ‘And who’s been drawing all over your face?’ I asked. Her body was shaking with giggles. ‘Was it Nathan?’

‘Molly,’ she spluttered.

‘Was it . . . Doug next door?’

‘Molly!’

‘Was it . . . Grandma?’

‘MOLLY draw on me!’ she shouted. ‘
I
draw on me!’ She was beaming with pride.

I gave her a kiss. ‘Still haven’t mastered the art of lying, have you, Molls?’ I said. Unlike your bullshitting mother, I thought. ‘Come on, let’s go and clean you up. We’re going to Tumble Tots in a minute.’

‘Mummy, I done beautiful picture for you,’ Molly announced, snuggling in to me as we went through to the front room.

‘Have you? Aren’t you . . .’ I stopped. Aren’t you lovely, I had been about to say. As I saw the felt-tip explosion in the front room, I had to bite my tongue not to launch into a round of expletives instead.

‘Oh,
Molly
,’ I said, putting her down abruptly. My mouth tightened. ‘How many times have I told you – we draw on
paper
, don’t we? Not on the sofa. And not on Nathan!’

My eyes bulged in horror at the sight of my precious boy with green streaks all over his cheeks and forehead, although he was beaming gummily under the baby gym, more concerned with pulling the rattly giraffe off its ring. I surveyed the damage wearily. One brown scribble on the sofa (thank Christ for washable covers) and some experimental pink lines on one of the cream walls. Marvellous. Truly avant-garde.

The budding artist, sensing all was not well, rushed to my side and did her best to cuddle me. ‘I love you
very much
, Mummy,’ she told me earnestly. Then, knowing it usually turned me to sentimental mush, she threw herself on her baby brother. ‘I love you
very much
, Nathan,’ she said, sneaking a look at me to see if it was working.

Nathan burst into howls as her bony elbows dug into him.

‘Molly, you’re squashing him. Get up!’ I found myself yelling. ‘Look at this mess! I can’t leave you for two minutes!’ My fists were clenched. ‘Get off him! He doesn’t like it!’

Now they were both crying. I stared helplessly at their wide red mouths and the tears that were springing out of their eyes. I snatched up a packet of baby wipes and started scrubbing the pen-marks off their faces. Oh God, now we were going to miss the start of Tumble Tots and the smug mum collective would purse up their lipsticked mouths as, once again, we crashed the double buggy in there late, guilty apologies pouring out of me. Sod it. Sod them. Why wouldn’t this green come off Nathan? He was staring at me as if he hated me for wiping his cheeks so frenziedly.

‘Molly, go and find your shoes.’

‘I want my wellies.’

‘I said shoes, not wellies.’

‘I want my
wellies!
’

‘OK, fine, get your wellies, then.’ Get your sodding bollocking wellies, see if I care.

There, one small boy de-greened. ‘Right, let’s get the buggy out,’ I said. ‘Here’s your coat, Molly. Oh, you put your wellies on all by yourself, well done. Do you want me to put your coat on?’

‘I do it.’

‘OK,’ I said, fingers twitching as I watched her stuffing one arm down the wrong sleeve, upside down. ‘Shall I just start you off . . .?’

‘
I
do it, Mummy! Let
I
do it!’

‘Right, fine, you do it. Let’s go.’

We were ten minutes late for Tumble Tots in the end. Not exactly a crime against humanity, although you might be forgiven for thinking so if you’d seen some of the arched eyebrows, and heard the tutting.

A couple of the other mums waved knowingly across the hall and I smiled gratefully back. Not everyone was in the motherhood mafia, at least.

‘You’d better join this group,’ Debbie, the Marlboro-voiced, scarily tattooed Tumble Tots leader told me, pointing to one corner where ten or so toddlers were dementedly rampaging up and down climbing frames. ‘Hello, Molly – been drawing, have we?’

I tried to smile but couldn’t remember how to do it. Instead, I grabbed Nathan and followed my daughter, who was pelting towards another group of kids altogether, having seen her friend Ella whizzing down a slide.

‘I go with Ella,’ she was shouting.

Ella’s mum, Anna, elbowed me as I went over. ‘Remember, we’re
pleased
we’ve got feisty daughters, really, Sadie,’ she told me. ‘We’re glad we’ve got independent, free-spirited . . .’ She caught sight of the look on my face. ‘All right, we’re wishing they were obedient, passive little flowers, then, I admit it.’

We watched as our obedient, passive little flowers started bouncing alarmingly high on a mini-trampoline, holding hands and singing. ‘WIND the bobbin up! WIND the bobbin up! Pull, pull, clap, clap, clap.’

‘Wind the mummy up, wind the mummy up,’ Anna sang softly.

‘Pull, pull, smack, smack, smack,’ I added, with feeling.

*

I stopped off for a coffee at Anna’s on the way home. I’d met Anna when we’d both been hugely pregnant with our second babies, while breathlessly chasing our first ones around at a music class in Clapham. Ella was every bit as strong-willed as my own daughter, and Anna became an ally immediately. Nathan and Theo had been born within weeks of each other, and our friendship had deepened as we’d weathered the hellish early months together through coffees and large sugary doughnuts and plenty of crying.

‘Anna, do you ever wonder if there’s more to life than this?’ I asked. We’d left the girls to trash Anna’s sitting room while we sat in the relative peace of the kitchen. Nathan squirmed on my knee, brandishing a teaspoon with an air of triumph, and I wrestled to keep hold of him with one hand, clutching my coffee cup with the other.

Anna was frowning and sniffing Theo. ‘Have you just . . .?’ she started asking him. Then she pulled a face. ‘Do you mean, is there more to life than stinking nappies and wind the bloody bobbin up and arguing about why your daughter can’t wear her new coat in the bath?’

‘Yes. That’s exactly what I mean.’

She looked at me as if I was mad for even asking. ‘God, yes, of course I wonder. Last night, I found myself trying to work out how much money I’d be earning now if I hadn’t given up my job and had kids.’ She gazed down at the table, and traced a pattern in the spilled sugar with her finger. ‘It was so depressing and I felt so
guilty
for finding it so depressing that I went to bed instead.’

‘Quite.’ I took another slug of hot coffee. ‘And it’s not just the job and money stuff, it’s the what’s-happened-to-
me
? thing that I can’t bear. The where’s-my-life-gone? feeling.’ I sighed and kissed Nathan’s head, feeling bad for even saying the words out loud.

She was nodding. ‘I know. It’s like, what happened to the Anna who used to have a packed diary, gym membership, exciting sex-life, amazing career prospects? Where the hell
is
that woman? I really used to enjoy being her.’ She swilled her coffee around. ‘It was like she just melted away. She disappeared.’

I stared at Nathan as he patted my hand, his fingers closing around my thumb. ‘Do you think our mums ever had this sort of conversation?’ I asked.

She shook her head. ‘No way. Not mine, anyway. My mum always says it was the happiest time of her life when me and my brother were tiny. The happiest time! Some days it feels like this is the worst thing that ever happened to me.’ She bit her lip. ‘Only some days. I mean, most of the time, it’s great and lovely, but . . .’

There was a moment’s silence. She didn’t have to say the ‘but’. We both knew what the ‘but’ was.

‘You know, the stupid thing is, if I didn’t have kids now, in my mid-thirties, I would be desperate for them,’ I said, to spare her having to finish the sentence we all avoided saying. ‘And here I am, with them, and all I can think about is how I want to feel like . . . like a sex kitten again.’

Anna spluttered, but then stopped as she realized I wasn’t joking. ‘Seriously?’ she asked. ‘Blimey, I wish I had the energy to even consider sex these days. What’s got into you? Are you mad?’

She was smiling at me but I couldn’t smile back. ‘Anna, the other night, I went out and I ended up pretending to be someone else, just because the thought of my own life was too boring to think about.’ I grimaced. ‘And also because I really enjoyed talking to this guy. You know what, it was great to be talking to a man where the conversation didn’t revolve around why no one had paid the gas bill and how the mortgage was going to be a struggle this month. It was just . . . fun. And flattering.’ I looked across the table at her. ‘Does that make me an awful person?’

A scream of rage interrupted us then and we rushed into the sitting room to find Ella and Molly both clutching the same fairy wand and shrieking at the other one to let go, even though there was another wand, exactly the same, on the carpet next to them.

‘Molly, give it back to her!’

Ella, let her have it!’ Anna and I shouted in unison.

CRACK! The wand promptly broke in half and both girls fell over and started sobbing.

‘Come here, Ella, love, you’re all right,’ Anna said, trying to cuddle her two children at once and nearly toppling over as she lost balance. Then she looked at me, her hazel eyes serious for once. ‘It doesn’t make you an awful person at all. You’re a mum. We all feel like that.’

You’re a mum. We all feel like that.
Her words kept coming back to me as I heaved the double buggy back home. Did being a parent automatically mean you couldn’t be the complete package of the person you wanted to be? Why
couldn’t
you be sexy as well? Why couldn’t you be a high-flying career woman without the guilt? Why did you always have to give something up?

I looked down at my children and felt like weeping as I saw Molly trying to hold Nathan’s hand. ‘Hello, little babe,’ she was saying. ‘Hello, little fella.’

They were so lovely but they were so bloody exhausting. Surely there had to be some kind of middle ground, one where you didn’t necessarily concede your whole life to these small tyrants who deafened you with their cries and smothered you with their love – or was that just wishful thinking?

Two

On Saturday night, my mum came over to babysit, and suddenly I wasn’t so sure if I wanted to escape the kids any more. Nathan was full of mashed potato and milk, and snoring contentedly in his cot, but Molly was tired and clingy. ‘I be little baby,’ she kept begging, crawling up onto my knee. ‘I go back in Mummy’s tummy.’

‘Let’s find your pyjamas, Molls,’ my mum suggested. ‘Do you want the Tweenies ones or the pussy-cat ones?’

‘Pussy-cat,’ she decided, leaping off my knee again. ‘I put them on all by
myself
!’

I watched them go. My mum was one of those supercapable women whom children automatically seemed to obey. She had a way with them, as my dad was always saying proudly. She’d brought up me and my two sisters with a tidy two years between each of us and, like Anna’s mum, professed to have loved every minute of it. She was either lying, deluded or suffered acute memory loss; I wasn’t sure which.

‘Let’s go,’ Alex said, checking his watch. His eyes flicked to the door. ‘Your mum can manage now.’