“Oh, dear,” I say loudly. “Not juice all over your lovely football kit. Better go upstairs and get changed.”
Yesss!
4 P.M. Ben’s party is full of Paula’s nanny friends with their charges, many of whom I don’t recognize. They are part of his life without me. When these unfamiliar girls say his name and my son lights up with pleasure I feel a twinge of — what? If I didn’t know better, I’d call it remorse.
In the sitting room, a handful of nonworking mums are in animated conversation about a local nursery school. They hardly seem to notice their kids, whom they handle with an enviable invisible touch, like advanced kite fliers, while the Mothers Inferior like me overattend to our clamorous offspring.
There is an uneasy standoff between the two kinds of mother which sometimes makes it hard for us to talk to each other. I suspect that the nonworking mother looks at the working mother with envy and fear because she thinks that the working mum has got away with it, and the working mum looks back with fear and envy because she knows that she has not. In order to keep going in either role, you have to convince yourself that the alternative is bad. The working mother says, Because I am more fulfilled as a person I can be a better mother to my children. And sometimes she may even believe it. The mother who stays home knows that she is giving her kids an advantage, which is something to cling to when your toddler has emptied his beaker of juice over your last clean T-shirt.
Here in the kitchen, though, I find solace in the company of a handful of familiar women, the tattered remnant of my original postnatal mother-and-baby group. Amazing to think we’ve known each other for more than five years now. Judith, the plump brunette over by the microwave, used to be a patent agent. Went back to work for a couple of years, but then one day she discovered dog hairs in the back of the family Peugeot. Trouble was they didn’t have a dog. Told herself it was nothing to worry about, until the gnawing sensation in her stomach drove her to slip out of work. Parked outside her own house and trailed the nanny to a flat off the Holloway Road. Inside the unlocked door, she found Joshua fenced in a corner behind a fireguard, watched over by an Alsatian, while the nanny, Tara, amused herself in the next room with a boyfriend who had a Metallica tattoo on one of his pumping buttocks.
We all told Judith it was just incredibly bad luck, a single rotten apple in the wholesome nanny barrel. “But what if he saw something, Kate?” she sobbed down the phone.
“Josh didn’t see anything, Judy, he’s not even three. And they don’t remember a thing before they’re five.”
But Judith never risked child care again. We knew that she tortured herself with the thought of the dog’s jaw so close to her baby’s face because, back in those early days, we lacerated our consciences every time we got home and found a new bump or graze on our own infants. These things happened; it was the fact they happened off your watch that seemed to hurt. And then there was the secret never-to-be-spoken conviction that you would have got there sooner. Got to the table corner before her forehead struck, to the tarmac before his tiny knee. Awacs, isn’t that what the military calls it? Nature gives Mother an advance-warning system and Mother is convinced that no minder or man can match her for speed or anticipation.
Judith didn’t object when her husband Nigel said that, as she was no longer working, she could get up for the kids whenever they woke in the night. And, as he was under such pressure at the bank, he would need to take a skiing holiday while Judith got on with the relaxing business of being at home with three children under four. (The twins arrived soon after the nanny left.) The Judith I first knew would have told Hubby where to get off, but that Judith had long disappeared.
The rest of us held firm for a while to the conviction that we had been educated for something better than the gentle warming of Barbie Pasta. But then, one by one, we stopped. “Giving up,” isn’t that what they call it? Well, I’m not calling it that. Giving up sounds like surrender, but these were honorable campaigns, bravely fought and not without injury. Did my fellow novice mothers give up work? No, work gave them up, or at least made it impossible for them to go on.
Karen — she’s spooning jelly into Ella’s mouth — found herself sidelined at her accountancy firm after it was made crystal clear, by the opaque route of nod and wink, that after having Louis she was no longer considered partnership material. Taking her eyes off the Career Path for a few months, she had found herself on what they call the Mummy Track. (The Mummy Track has the appearance of a through road; you can travel for many hundreds of miles along it before you notice you’re going nowhere.) Karen thought she could do her job in four days, one of those days at home; her boss agreed, and that was the problem. If Karen managed, he said, it would create “an unhelpful precedent.”
Funny thing is, when you’re starting out you assume their babyhood will be the hard part, that if you can just butch your way through those fuzzy first weeks then everything will return to normal. But it gets worse: at least at six months of age they can’t tell you it’s you that they want.
Five and a half years after the birth of our babies, only three out of our original group of nine still have jobs: Caroline is a graphic designer in advertising but based at home, so she gets to squeeze all her work in round Max’s school times. She couldn’t make it today because she was putting the finishing touches to a brochure for IBM. Alice — cute face, raven bob, leather gilet, over by the sink — went back to being a director of documentaries that won awards for rooting out corruption in high places and a particularly plangent kind of sadness in low ones. Every night when she got in late from the editing suite, Alice carried a sleeping Nathaniel into her bed. When else would she get to hold him? It was only for a little while, only while he was little. But Nat didn’t grasp that his lease on paradise was short: soon he was lying across the width of the bed, forcing his mother and father into narrow coffins at each side. When Jacob came along, Alice took him into bed too. Soon afterwards her partner, Don, left home, citing a nineteen-year-old researcher and irreconcilable sleeping arrangements.
I look at Alice now, gaunt as an addict. From a distance, she looks as youthful as when we first met, but up close you see how motherhood has stolen her bloom: the boys seem to have literally sucked her blood. She may have won a Bafta, but her sons are even needier by night than the talent she corrals by day, and how would she find the time to meet a new man, even if there was one out there willing to take on the bolshie scions of another male? Reading my thoughts, she says with a grim smile, “My only fix now is the boys, Kate.”
I place my hand on the golden orb of my own boy’s head. A clump of chocolate Rice Krispies is nesting in his left ear. Time to sing “Happy Birthday.” Paula produces a Zippo from her pocket to light the candles (Christ, she’s not smoking now, is she?). I carry the cake to the table. Ben’s eyes are watery with wonder, mine with regret at the fleetingness of it all. Is this the last time I’ll see a baby of mine turn one? And how much of that first year have I actually seen?
“Oh, Kate, you shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble,” says Alice, eyebrow raised and gesturing at the Teletubbies icing.
“Bad mother,” I mouth silently at her across the table.
Laughing, she whispers back, “Me too.”