you know there’s only one person who can haul you out.
It is five o’clock.
The potatoes have to be peeled and the toilet unblocked; it’s probably a plastic toy, it’s becoming a habit with Pip, your youngest.
You have to change this life, somehow, or something in you will implode like a depth charge way beneath the surface.
Lesson 10
There are very few families whose internal mismanagement and domestic unhappiness are not mainly the fault of the mistress
Nine p.m. Just the dishwasher to unpack now and then you’ll draw your bath and unclench, at last, in the warmest room in the house, the main bathroom.
The phone. Susan. A mum from the boys’ school and you don’t know how it came to this: a Susan so entwined in your life. Rexi is friends with her eldest, Basti. You met when the boys were in the same nursery and then they moved to primary school together, have known each other for years. It is assumed. But you became friends before you realised how unsettling she is. A mother with an overdeveloped sense of her own rightness, with everything, and there’s something so undermining about that.
Every conversation, to Susan, is a form of competition; there must always be the moment of triumph. When she’s first seen every morning, at the school gate, she forces you to say how lovely her little girl looks, to compliment.
‘Look at Honor, she dressed herself today, doesn’t she look gorgeous?’
‘Where’s Honor, is she hiding on my shoulders?’
‘Isn’t she beautiful?’
Yes of course, and you are a woman who does not have a daughter but it would never cross Susan’s mind that the keenness for a girl once sliced through you like a ragged bit of tin; you can’t deny there was a moment of disappointment at each subsequent son who appeared from your womb – just a moment, wiped as soon as you held them to your breast. And now, every day at the school gate, there is the ritual noticing of what you do not have, every day this conversation you have somehow allowed in your life.
Susan is obsessed by her children. Like no other woman you know. Always talking about how good her Basti is – at maths, swimming, art, he’s just swum four laps, helped plant her herb garden, is never sick, always good – not one of those naughty ones.
You always cringe at this – your boys are boys, you adore them but they are not always the best; often your heart is in your mouth when your family is with other people, about what may be said, knocked over, who may be shouted at. Susan is critical of your Rexi whenever he’s had a play date. Always, on the doorstep when you pick him up, you have to submit to her little ritual of complaint. The only time you can ever remember her complimenting your eldest was when she said, in wonder, ‘He’s good looking … now.’ Now. Your beautiful, sunny, ravishing boy, from day one.
‘Rex didn’t eat his food … wouldn’t play with Honor … was very loud …’
You have allowed it, for so long – Susan’s reward for taking one son off your hands, for giving you a blessed break; it means one less child for a few hours and you both know how needed that is in your life, a tiny sliver of extra space.
Lesson 11
A state of sublime content and superabundant gaiety – because she always had something or other to do.
If not for herself, then her neighbour.
It is nine-fifteen and Susan is still on the phone and inwardly, at her voice, there is a tightening in your stomach, a knot – what has her Basti excelled at today, what triumph has to be endured? And your head is full of the ‘Shout Book’ you have just discovered under your middle child’s bed. Jack has recorded, meticulously, every time he is yelled at. By you. In writing neater than it’s ever been at school.
Saturday: 14th January. 2 times.
Sunday: 15th January. AMAZING. Nothing.
Monday: 16th January. 3 times.
Devastation. Today it was all to do with him wearing a good shirt to his grandmother’s tomorrow, for her birthday tea.
‘I hate that button shirt so much it makes me walk backwards,’ he had shouted.
You laughed at the time and later jotted it down; for what, God knows. You had to laugh, they give you so much and don’t even know it. These bouncy, shiny little scamps fill every corner of your life, plump it out; you love them so consumingly but you’re not sure they believe it, Jack most of all, your middle child you worry will one day slip through the cracks.
‘Please, God, stop Mummy shouting,’ was his prayer tonight.
‘Don’t!’ came his muffled protest from under the duvet when you tried to tickle him into giggles, to kiss away all your guilt, but he recoiled as if your touch would scald him which only made you want to caress him, cuddle him, envelop him all the more.
Susan is prattling on, she wants you to do the coffee before the class assembly on Monday and didn’t catch you today. She is president of the P.T.A., you are a class rep, this is the new world you have thrown yourself into with the zeal you once reserved for law. You’re deeply embedded in this intense little microcosm, yet feel sick every day now as you approach the gates for pick up. Wear a mask of joy – you have perfected it but if only they knew of your relief when for some reason, too rarely, you don’t have to be there. It’s your twice daily torture and you feel ill, sometimes, as you near the school gates. You wait in the car so you’re not standing there early, having to talk. Filling up afternoons with play dates for the boys so they’re not missing out and filling up your own evenings with drinks and dinners with your mummy friends for the same reason and you need the solace and release of using your brain, somehow. You’ve been with some of these women for over five years now. And their flaws are getting worse as they age – as are yours; it feels like you are all hardening into your weaknesses and you’ve got years of this school run ahead of you. The competitiveness, petty power games, boasting, one-upmanship; sometimes you feel like you’re ten again, back in the school yard. It’s stealing who you really are, who you became, once.
Lesson 12
Beware the outside friend who only rubs against one’s angles
Your shout book.
What Mothers Do (or, The Tyranny of the School Gate)
