The Wrong Mother (34 page)

 

 

 

9 May 2006, 10.30 p.m.

 

Today I did what I’ve often fantasised about doing but never believed I would. I underestimated my own audacity. My mobile phone rang at ten o’clock this morning. It was Mrs Flowers, ringing to say that Lucy had been sick, instructing me to come and collect her. I felt as if concrete slabs were falling inside my chest one by one, a ‘domino effect’ of horrified realisation: everything I wouldn’t be able to do if I went straight to St Swithun’s as I was being ordered to.

Children are sick all the time; usually it is insignificant. I asked how Lucy was now.

‘Subdued,’ said Mrs Flowers. ‘She’s sitting on Miss Toms’ knee, reading a story. I’m sure she’ll perk up no end when she sees Mummy.’

I heard myself say, ‘I wish I could come and get her, but I’m in Prague.’ I don’t know why I picked Prague. Perhaps because its name is short and terse, easy to bark when you’re in a foul mood. ‘Even if I got on the first flight back . . .’ I stopped, as if I was trying to work it out. ‘No, you’d better ring Mark,’ I said.

‘I already have,’ said Mrs Flowers. ‘He’s recorded a message on his voicemail saying he won’t be back until after lunch.’

‘Oh dear!’ I tried to sound anguished. ‘Can you cope until then?’

Mrs Flowers sighed. ‘
We
can cope. It’s Lucy I’m thinking of. Never mind. We’ll give her lots of cuddles and try to keep her happy until we can get hold of Daddy.’

You’ll try, and you’ll succeed, I thought, because you’re brilliant with small children. I too was thinking of Lucy, however selfish Mum might say I am. Last time I picked Lucy up early from school because she was ill, I ended up threatening her, tears of fury pouring down my face. ‘I was poorly at school today, Daddy,’ she told Mark later. ‘And it made Mummy poorly too—she cried all the way home. Didn’t you, Mummy?’ Mercifully, she didn’t tell Mark the rest: that I shook my finger in her face and said, ‘If you’re ill, you’ll go straight to bed when we get home and have a long sleep; you’ll sleep for the rest of the day and let Mummy get on with all the things she has to do. If you don’t want to sleep, that means you’re well enough to stay in school and I’ll take you straight back there.’ A terrible thing to say, I know, but it was a Monday. I look forward to Mondays like nobody would believe; after each weekend, my need to get away from Lucy and have some time and thinking space for myself is overwhelming. I love my daughter but I’m terrible at being a mother. The sacrifices that are required of me are against my nature, and it is time that the world—including Mrs Flowers—started to take my innate deficiencies into account. If I said I was a dreadful tennis player, no one would urge me to keep trying until I’m as good as Martina Navratilova.

We ought all of us to ‘play to our strengths’. Which is why I felt betrayed when Cordy told me she is planning to give up her job when her new baby is born. So much for my theory about her leaving Dermot in order to be able to leave Oonagh and motherhood behind as well. ‘I can afford not to work for a few years,’ she said, in response to my asking why. ‘I’ve got quite a bit saved up. And I haven’t really enjoyed being a working mum. I want to be there for my kids myself, not have to rely on my ageing parents or a semi-literate childminder. I want to do the whole mummy thing. Properly.’

I felt bilious, and was unable to speak while I waited for the feeling to subside. So that’s that, I thought: the end of the career of one of the brightest women I have ever met. Cordy could make it to the top of any profession she chose. If she doesn’t like being a financial adviser she could do something else—train to be a lawyer or a doctor, write a book, anything. I have always had so much more respect for her than for the mothers who immerse themselves in what Cordy calls ‘the whole mummy thing’, the ones who are only so good at mothering because they have to be, because they are afraid of setting foot outside their own front doors and they need the perfect excuse. Can’t hack it in the real world? Have a baby, then, and let everyone praise you for your commitment and devotion to your child above all else. Pride yourself on stuffing your child’s school bag full of papayas and kiwis for snack time, instead of the small dented apples that working mothers rely on. Stand at the school gates twittering, ‘All I’ve ever wanted is to be a mum.’

People without children can’t get away with making an equivalent statement, can they? ‘Excuse me, madam, but why do you sit at home all day doing sod all?’ ‘Oh, well, it’s because I want to devote myself full-time to being a niece. I’ve got an aunt, you see. That’s why I’ve decided not to achieve anything ever. I really want to pour all my time and energy into my niecehood.’ People would be quite blunt and say, ‘Don’t you think you ought to do something else as well as being a niece?’ I know the obvious answer: babies and children take up more time than aunts. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental truth in what I’m saying.

I asked Cordy if she was familiar with the ghost story about the monkey’s paw. She wasn’t. It didn’t help that I couldn’t remember all the details. I told her a trimmed-down version. ‘An old couple find a monkey’s paw, which enables them to make a wish. Any wish they make will come true,’ I said. ‘They lost their only son in tragic circumstances—he fell into a piece of machinery at the factory where he worked and got mangled so badly that he died . . .’

‘They wish for him not to be dead?’ Cordy guessed.

I smiled. You have to word it in exactly the right way or else the story doesn’t work. ‘The couple closed their eyes, held the monkey’s paw in their hands and said, “Please, please, bring back our only son—that is our wish.” That night, there’s a knock at the door. They rush to open it, and it’s him. Except it’s not him as he used to be: it’s a walking, breathing, bloody mangled mess, a grotesquely twisted lump of meat brought back to life, unrecognisable as human—’

‘Yuck!’ Cordy elbowed me in the ribs. ‘Shut up.’

‘I always think of that story when I think about working mothers.’

‘Why, for God’s sake?’ Cordy asked.

I told her: because, for Gart’s sake, when a woman returns to work after having a child or children, she is not the same. She is a semi-destroyed version of her former self. Mangled, virtually falling apart, she goes back to her workplace and she knocks on the door, and her colleagues are horrified to see how she’s changed.’

‘Christ on a bicycle,’ Cordy muttered. ‘Maybe I ought to give up work straight away.’

‘No!’ I snapped at her. She had entirely missed the point. ‘The monkey’s-paw mother doesn’t care what she looks like. She doesn’t give a damn! She knows where she belongs and she’s determined to go back there, no matter how inconvenient it is for everybody else.’

Cordy looked at me as if I was weird.

‘Don’t sacrifice your career,’ I begged her. ‘Think of all the other monkey’s-paw mothers struggling on, turned inside out but still fighting. If you give up, you’ll be letting them down.’

She told me she’d think about it, but I had the sense she was only saying that to placate me. Later, I realised my little sermon had been pointless. You can’t tell anyone anything; no one listens. Look at Mark and me. He thinks I’ve sold myself short, thrown away all my talents. And I think he’s wrong. He would like me to paint or sculpt. He says I’d be more fulfilled, but that is utter rubbish. He wants these things for me not for my own sake but because it would make him feel better if I earned ‘pocket-money’.