and wrote ‘DREAMS’ on the cover. I looked at the first blank page. I wrote about my dream of trying to run through the cellar. I wrote a number next to ‘Lose a stone’.
This was the first time I’d felt happy for months. Was it happiness? I’m not sure now. Can you have happiness without contentment? But I was organised. I was crossing items off a list. I was on a roll. And something felt right.
I rushed out to the bike shed and wrenched the wheel off my bike.
‘Coo-ee,’ shouted Mum. ‘I’m making myself a sandwich for lunch—do you want one?’
‘I ate in town.’
You would think Mum would want something different to eat on a Sunday, her day off from the sandwich shop.
I stayed in the shed while Mum ate her sandwich. Soon, I was glueing the small fabric square onto the inner tube. I left it to dry. I wondered what it would be like to live in the shed. It would be like having your own flat. Cool. I spent the next hour slowly and methodically filing away my work from my GCSE courses and another two tidying out my desk drawers. I threw away a bin bag of paper. More than could have fitted into the drawers. Or so it seemed.
I got out the curriculum papers for my AS level subjects and started to read.
‘Can I have mine in my room?’ I asked Mum at suppertime. I didn’t want to lose the momentum. Spaghetti Bolognese—better than a takeaway.
I carried on reading.
Three more items to tick off on my list.
I crossed off ‘Lose a stone’ and wrote ‘Eat less’ in its place. I crossed off ‘Get a new boyfriend’ and wrote ‘Prepare for a new boyfriend’. It was all in the wording, the semantics. Aims must be achievable, measurable, exact. Each day must have a new list. Each list must have ten items. I was in control.
My sister thinks she’s so bloody perfect. So does my mum. Perfect. Someone ought to tell them.
I was kneading the dough on the wooden kitchen table, my rose-print apron wrapped around my hand-made gingham dress, when I had a maternal impulse to pat my two daughters on their plaited heads as they looked up at me with awe and gratitude…
Well, if you have no hope of being a perfect mother, you might as well imagine it.
‘We’ve run out of milk again,’ Jo whinged, crashing the fridge door shut. I abandoned my Walton fantasy to deal with the latest domestic crisis. ‘There’s plenty in there if you’d only looked properly,’ I shouted in my best bad-mother screech.
‘I have skimmed milk now, I told you.’
‘You never…’ But Jo was out of the door, slamming it behind her as if I were on a train about to leave the station. If only.
I checked the fridge and there was plenty of ordinary milk there. Not much else, though. I thought about going up to Jo’s room to apologise for shouting but I sensed that might be the wrong tactic. I always felt so apologetic, apologetic for being inadequate, I suppose. But whenever I tried to say sorry or explain myself, Jo looked at me with an adolescent contempt as if admitting my shortcomings was in itself a shortcoming. I have always approached parenting as if trying to work a new washing machine without the instructions—by trial and error. What on earth does anyone else do? Yet part of me suspected that other mothers had received the instruction booklet with their children, while mine had been missing. Still, back to the Waltons…
Imagining is good strategy. It’s so easy to imagine fresh ironed sheets on the bed, an Aga in the kitchen and a nanny in the back bedroom—a perfect lifestyle maybe. But imagining yourself as perfect comes a little bit harder, although it can be done with practice. And back then I was well practised. When the girls were little, I used to walk around with a picnic basket in one hand, a copy of Parenting magazine in the other, smiling confidently should Eliza or Jo fling herself onto the floor at Tesco in a temper tantrum. As if I knew exactly how to handle the situation. As if I were in complete control. Still, I muddled through those early years well enough, a permanent splodge of jam on my blouse like a bullet wound, play dough under my finger nails. I always seemed to be wiping one of the girls down with a licked handkerchief while forgetting even to clean my own teeth some days. I can’t think why Roger left me and quickly moved in with the highly successful, designer-clothed, play-dough-free Alice.
Now I have a teenager, things are very different. I adore Jo, yet sometimes she is barely recognisable as the little girl I once knew. Sometimes she is barely recognisable as a human being, but I still adore her. If I’m honest, I would like to press my remote control and fast-forward her past the teenage years and straight into a mother and daughter bonding session in the spa pool, bypassing hormones completely. I desperately tried to hang on to my ideal vision of the future: shopping together without arguing; eating a meal together without an uncomfortable silence; talking together without…well, just talking together. Properly. I thought all it would take was for Jo to change, I didn’t realise I had to change too. Not then, not before Lily Finnegan.
When we went to Victoria’s wedding, I found myself chatting to a fellow parent-of-a-teenager, whom I’d spotted across the marquee—she had that tired, bewildered, confused expression we all share.
‘What are teenagers actually for?’ I asked her, as we stood looking at her daughter, who was sprawled on the ground in her pink frock and Doc Marten boots, with a Walkman plugged into her ears.
‘To make us feel permanently inadequate,’ she suggested.
‘To make sure we never dare see ourselves as anything more than a taxi driver.’
‘Or cash dispenser.’
As we tried to laugh about it all, I discreetly scanned the marquee to ensure Jo had not slouched off to sit in the car be-cause it was all ‘so sad’. In fact, Jo was in rather a good mood, chatting to all the relatives and smiling from time to time. Not a stray hormone in sight. I almost relaxed.
It was a happy day, as weddings so often are, and when Jo didn’t feel well, I didn’t give it another thought. The unwritten rule of teenage behaviour is to make a drama out of the mundane and Jo was no exception. One slight spot or blemish put her straight into quarantine in her own bedroom. One little tiff with her friend Scarlet had her announcing that nobody liked her, she might as well commit suicide, and when she did nobody would come to her funeral. So a slight period pain at the wedding meant leaving early with a view to hospitalisation later.
Should I have insisted she lie down in George’s spare bedroom so that Eliza and I could carry on enjoying our day out? Did I do more harm than good by giving in to Jo’s foibles? I have no idea, I simply made my decision knowing that it was probably the wrong one. As always.
There are no manuals on how to parent teenagers. It is assumed that once you get them sleeping through the night, using the potty and counting to ten, you can sit back and relax. Surely a parents’ magazine for those of us with teenagers would be snapped off the shelves. We would be able to read articles like ‘A Valium-free Method for Dealing with Your Child’s Mood Swings’ or ‘Just Giving You the Benefit of My Experience’—and other phrases never to say to your teenager. All I could do was carry on with the washing-machine approach to parenting.
When
