I don’t know—maybe it’s biological. I saw a documentary on television the other day that described how men’s and women’s brains are wired up differently. Apparently it’s a scientific fact that women are better at multi-tasking than men are. So why am I blaming Matt, when I should be blaming myself for my unrealistic expectations? Lots of people would ask me what I’m moaning about: Matthew lends a hand, doesn’t he? He looks after the kids, and irons his own shirts. He even cooks, on occasion. At least he makes an attempt at cleaning, and who’s to say his way is the wrong way? Who’s to say it matters that there’s soap scum on the shower screens? Perhaps it doesn’t. Perhaps I’m being a neurotic perfectionist. Sometimes I stop, and think, and realise that I’m turning into my own mother. Once that would have been an appalling thought. I used to say to Matthew: Please, please, if I ever start turning into my mother, you must tell me. You must warn me.
Now, however, it doesn’t seem so simple. After all, it was my mother who taught me how to hemstitch, and what to do with bloodstains. Matthew didn’t even know how to sew on a button, when I met him. I had to show him how to do it. Am I really so anal, just because I insist that he doesn’t walk around with half the buttons off his shirt? Perhaps I am. I must be, or why else would he be seeing the Girl With Purple Hair?
When I think of losing him—when I think of how lovely he is, and how mean I’ve been—I can’t bear it. Do you know that he once came home with a cappuccino maker he’d bought for me (an impulse buy) and I was cross with him for wasting our money? How could I have done that? And the drum kit. Why have I been so horrible about the drum kit, when I used to love watching him play so much? The power of his arms, the loose and casual speed of them—I loved that. I loved his half-closed eyes, and his huge smile, and the way he sat on his stool, with his long legs folded up in their dusty black jeans.
One Tuesday, when he was minding the kids, he went out with them and bought some furniture polish. They were going to help him polish the coffee table in the living room, you see, and what’s more they did it. But naturally they used too much polish and didn’t wipe enough of it off, so the coffee table was sticky and streaky when they had finished. And of course Matthew had neglected to change the kids into their old painting clothes before they started, so their nice little matching Osh Kosh overalls (a gift from Mum) were ruined. And I was furious. Really. When I got home I was furious, even though the whole episode was one of those endearing, klutzy things that made Matthew the sweet-natured guy he always had been. Can you see what I’m saying? Can you see why I’m scared?
I’m afraid to ask Matthew if he’s having an affair, because in a funny sort of way I’m also afraid that, if he is, it’s because I deserve it.
I decided to look through our old phone bills. Fortunately, we get them itemised for tax reasons because I work at home a lot, so I knew that it would be easy to check whether Matthew had been making any unexplained phone calls. But I couldn’t get on to it right away. I had the dishes to wash (no dishwasher, unfortunately), the laundry to do and the kids’ breakfasts to make. What’s more, I had to tackle all these chores whenever I wasn’t changing nappies, making beds and settling quarrels. It’s amazing how scatty I’ve become, since having Emily. The house is always full of half-completed jobs, because no sooner do I begin to hang up the washing than Jonah demands another piece of cheese. So I cut the cheese, and give it to him, and then the phone rings, and then Emily wants me to put a dress on her doll, and then Jonah does a dump in his nappy, and I have to change it, and next thing you know it’s hours later, and the cheese is drying on the kitchen benchtop, and the wet laundry is still sitting in the laundry basket.
It doesn’t help that Emily takes her time over breakfast. She grazes, in other words; the meal can be spread over two hours, and I never know whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, nutritionists say that it’s natural for small children to graze, rather than eat three solid meals a day, because they have small stomachs. On the other hand, dentists say that grazing leads to tooth decay. All I know is this: it plays havoc with my schedule when Emily demands one piece of apple, followed (ten minutes later) by one piece of orange, then one rice cracker, then one dry Weet-Bix—which will shed its flakes all over the floor—one prune, one apricot bar, one cheese stick . . .
At least she eats, though. Jonah doesn’t eat. The lengths I go to, trying to persuade him that his meals should be put in his mouth. The vegetables I’ve tried to disguise! The boats I’ve made out of fish fingers and halved cheese slices! He’s very creative, though—I’ll give him that. What he does with his food is far more original than what I do with it. It’s been left in some pretty amazing places, I can tell you. And every time he sits down to eat, his highchair tray ends up looking like a work of abstract expressionism.
This morning, he asked for a honey sandwich. And I was delighted, at first. I’d forgotten that when Jonah is given honey, it ends up everywhere. On everything. And then he spilled his drink on Emily’s T-shirt, and Emily insisted that she had to change her clothes, and while I was helping her Jonah trod on the farm truck that he loves, and broke it, and cried, and I had to divert him with an old plastic pig of Emily’s, which she suddenly wanted to play with . . . well, you get the picture.
But I made it to the shops, at last. I put Jonah in his stroller, and pushed him up to the local supermarket (very slowly, so that Emily could stop every two minutes to check out an ants’ nest, a discarded shoe, a dead caterpillar, a bit of graffitti . . .), and bought a few things for dinner, more to keep the children entertained than anything else. I never do much shopping when I don’t have the car, because I can’t carry more than I can put in the stroller. Anyway, I don’t really care for that supermarket. It’s a bit crummy. The rice shelves are infested with weevils, and I’ve seen a squashed cockroach on the floor. What’s more, there are always big, sticky spills everywhere; there was one this morning, which Emily trod in. She made a bit of a fuss, because the soles of her shoes started to snap when she walked. But then Mandy came by, and she was distracted. That’s the thing about Emily. It doesn’t take much to cheer her up—not like Jonah. Jonah broods. He broods because he can’t get his stroller harness undone, or because he can’t line up five plastic horses precisely in a row. He’s frustrated, I think, by the fact that he’s still a small child. It’s a difficult sort of age, when you’re a perfectionist.
Anyway, as I said, Mandy came by with two of her three in tow. Mandy is the wholefood mother I was talking about. You know? The one without television? I tell you, she depresses me so much. There she was, looking slim and pretty, with her three-year-old Hamon walking quietly beside her and the baby, Isoline, hanging from her neck in a pouch. (I could never master those pouch things. They always gave me a sore back.) And there was I, overweight and dishevelled, pushing a grizzly Jonah as Emily dawdled along three metres behind me, making patterns on the shiny floor with her sticky feet. Needless to say, Mandy’s trolley was full of wholefoods: rolled oats, dried apricots, tofu, bean sprouts, soya milk, tuna in springwater. The fabric roof of my stroller, in contrast, was piled high with chocolate biscuits, pretzels, tinned peaches, cheese crackers, Ovaltine and jelly crystals. Oh—and the chicken nuggets, of course. Don’t let’s forget the chicken nuggets, which Mandy always says aren’t made out of chicken at all.
Then, just to top it off, Mandy started talking about her eldest, Jesse. Apparently he wasn’t happy at his current school. It was chaotic, she said, and the teachers were all disillusioned. Rather than have him travel long distances to a Steiner school— one in which a child’s individual talents were nurtured and acknowledged, rather than ignored—she was considering the benefits of home schooling. Home schooling. This, mind you, from a woman who has two other kids under four, a bloody vegetable garden, and a job making children’ clothes that she sells at local markets. (Her children, needless to say, are always beautifully dressed in casual, stylish gear that she whips up herself out of thick-w
eave cottons and fake linens in shades of stone, wine, denim, watermelon and buttercup.)
I just stood there with my mouth hanging open.
‘Well,’ she said at last, dismissing the subject with a little smile and a wave of her hand, ‘I don’t know yet. There’s the social aspect I have to consider. Anyway, how are you? You look well.’
‘I’m fine.’ Wild horses wouldn’t have dragged the truth out of me. ‘What about you?’
‘Oh, I’ve been having a terrific time. Remember that book club I told you about? Well I went to it, last night, and I took Jesse and Hamon and Isoline, and it was wonderful. Just wonderful.’ She fixed me with her mild blue gaze, and smiled her pleasant, gentle, earth-mother smile. ‘You ought to come,’ she urged me. ‘Bring the kids. They’d love it.’
Oh sure, I thought. They’d love to loll on my knee during a discussion of the latest Peter Carey.
‘They have their own book club,’ Mandy continued, ‘where someone reads to them, and asks them questions afterwards.’
I could just picture it: Jonah trying to wrest the book from this literary person’s hand (being under the impression that every book on earth is his personal possession—he loves his books with a vengeance), while Emily wanders off to check out the bone-meal biscuits in the dog’s bowl.
Terrific.
‘Sounds great,’ I mumbled, wondering how soon I could tear myself away without looking rude. Jonah was starting to grizzle again, while the angelic Hamon looked on in wonder. He’d probably never seen anyone grizzling before—certainly not in his own family.
‘I’m sorry I missed playgroup yesterday,’ Mandy went on. ‘Iso was a bit under the weather.’
‘Oh dear.’ Of course my instant reaction was: Christ! Germ alert! And I immediately set about obtaining a run-down of the symptoms. ‘What was it? Not that tummy bug that Jonah had?’
‘No.’
‘Liam’s throat virus?’
‘No, no.’
‘Don’t tell me it was something new.’ I tried to be jovial, though it was no joke, believe me. You have to be alert for the latest illnesses when you’re a mother, or you spend your life in a permanent panic. When you know that scarlet fever’s going around, you don’t run the risk of mistaking it for meningococcal meningitis, and completely losing your mind. Similarly, if you know that it’s chickenpox season, you won’t miss any telltale rashes. ‘Lisa told me about that friend of hers, whose baby got whooping cough—’
‘Oh no, it’s nothing like that,’ Mandy reassured me. ‘Iso was just a bit fretful. So I gave her a massage with essential oils and let her sleep most of the day. She’s fine, now.’
Just a bit fretful. Shows you, doesn’t it? For Mandy, fretfulness is a bloody disease, instead of a way of life. Like a bout of bronchitis. As for the baby massage—well, don’t talk to me about baby massage. Mandy tried showing me how to massage Jonah, once, but it wasn’t a success. He squirmed about in his coating of oil until he managed to wriggle straight off the change-table. Just as well Mandy caught him in time.
‘You didn’t miss much,’ I said. ‘At playgroup. Just as well you weren’t there, in fact—Lisa and I were doing the food.’
‘Oh, now Helen.’ She laughed fondly. ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself.’
‘No, really. I mean it.’ The news was bound to get back to her, so I bravely confessed. ‘It was all chips and green cordial. Hamon would have starved.’
Her expression shifted, slightly. But she was very kind.
‘It’s hard, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘So many children, and some of them so picky. I had a terrible time myself.’
Which was a barefaced lie, but I didn’t argue. When it was Mandy’s turn to provide the playgroup morning tea, she had rolled up with home-made bran-and-banana muffins, a choice of three (freshly squeezed) juices, home-baked sourdough bread, a dried fruit platter featuring mango and papaya as well as apple and apricot, carrot sticks from her own garden, and a dip she’d whipped up out of honey, yoghurt, wheatmeal, soy flour, pumpkin and all kinds of other things that have escaped my memory, though she must have given me the recipe about four times. Playgroup hasn’t been the same, since then. There’s always been a bit of competition when it comes to socialising skills and toilet training, but Mandy’s Morning Tea was like a gauntlet thrown down. People have taken to turning up with great slabs of carrot cake, pinwheel sandwiches, prune mice, orange jelly baskets, banana bread, muesli crunch biscuits . . . you name it.
I feel like a total failure whenever I shamefacedly break open a packet of party pies, or start sloshing the peanut butter around.
‘Anyway, we did some macaroni necklaces,’ I continued, as Jonah drummed his heels against the footrest of his stroller, making it perfectly clear that his view of the laundry detergents was getting extremely dull. ‘And Harlan bashed Nicole over the head, and that pedal car lost a wheel. Big crisis. In fact they were all a bit ratty yesterday, so you were well out of it.’
Mandy clicked her tongue. But before she could gently raise the subject of sugar-induced hyperactivity, I raised a hand.
‘Well, gotta go,’ I said, ‘or Jonah will strangle himself in his own harness.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Mandy was most sympathetic. ‘It must be because he’s so bright that he needs constant stimulation—’
‘Right. Absolutely. Well, bye!’ And I took my leave, hurrying away from her serene aura as if it were poison gas. I don’t know how she does it, I really don’t. How do they do it, these natural-born mothers? I guess it’s genetic. I bet Mandy never had any problems with breastfeeding. I bet Mandy was never under the impression that you only have to strap older babies—more mobile babies—into prams. I bet she never suffered the embarrassment, in consequence, of pushing a laden pram up over a high kerb and seeing her newborn slide out of the bottom, feet-first, into a gutter.
What’s more, I bet that if she had done such a thing, her first instinct would not have been to look around nervously, lest someone had witnessed her potentially fatal mistake.
It has to be said, I’m not much of a mum. Though it also has to be said that I was quite proud of the way I managed to make breakfast, wash up, wipe down, do laundry, change nappies and dress small bodies this morning while in a state of shock so severe that I actually went to bring in the garbage bin, even though the garbage is usually collected on Wednesdays. But I’m afraid that I screwed it all up when I came home from the shops, opened a cupboard door, and saw that I had forgotten to buy dishwashing liquid. Then I burst into tears like a little kid, and had to be comforted by Emily.
‘Don’t cry, Mummy,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ I despise parents who do that sort of thing to their children. I despise parents who behave like five-year-olds, and expect their kids to mother them. And yet there I was, crouched on the kitchen floor, doing what I most despise.
Emily is such a gorgeous little girl. She doesn’t deserve the sort of terrible things that go hand in hand with a divorce.
Should I just shut up, and ignore my suspicions?
I finally managed to cast my eye over the phone bills after I got Jonah to sleep, at one o’clock. He generally sleeps for about two hours in the middle of the day, unless the builders are here. When they are here I gnaw my fingernails and flinch at every hammer-blow, every squeal of the electric drill, every roar of bricks being tipped out of a wheelbarrow. Sometimes these noises wake Jonah; sometimes they don’t. I can never pick what he’s going to do. He has nerves like violin strings, that boy.
Today, however, I didn’t have to worry about builders, and Jonah went down pretty well. He had my old Rubik’s-cube key ring to amuse him as he drifted off. Not that he was trying to solve it, or anything, don’t get me wrong. He may be bright, but he’s not Mensa material. (At least, I don’t think he is.) He’s just one of those children that you can boast about—you know what I mean. ‘Jonah loves his little books.’ ‘Jonah adores his Rubik’s cube.’ ‘Jonah is infatuated with his Meccano set.’ Th
ere’s a downside to this as well, needless to say, because he doesn’t eat, he’s a lousy sleeper, and he’s moody as hell, but at least he’s a genius. That’s been Matt’s and my little joke, throughout all the sleepless nights and endless grizzling. ‘At least he’s a genius,’ we’ll say to each other, because it was something a friend once said to us about his kid, in all seriousness. ‘He’s a genius,’ this bloke announced, straight-faced, after we had complimented him on the child’s highly developed language skills. I was also told by a well-meaning female friend that moody children who don’t sleep are often highly intelligent. It’s the reward, apparently, for all the suffering that goes with an infant who already finds the world a bit of a bore.
Jonah, I’m sure, is often bored rigid; hence the screaming fits when he tries to draw a horse, and can’t. Or when he tries to reach a shelf, and can’t. His fine motor skills obviously haven’t caught up with his ambitions, which seem to be a bit unrealistic, poor kid—you can’t help sympathising when he fails to stack ten pieces of macaroni on top of each other, end to end. How can you explain to a child who isn’t yet two that some things just aren’t possible? Not that Jonah’s slow, when it comes to language. I was changing his nappy the other day when he suddenly announced wistfully, as he gazed out the window: ‘I like the pink flowers against the blue sky.’ It was creepy, I can tell you. Sometimes I wonder if he’s channelling some grownup dead person: a bridge builder, perhaps. A Chairman of the Board. If he does have a channelling gene, though, it’s definitely not from my side of the family. I know exactly where it comes from, and that’s Matthew’s Nonna. Matthew’s Nonna claims to be in contact with several deceased members of her family, praying to them constantly and always remembering their birthdays. There are little altars set up all over Matt’s family home, studded with photographs and statues and old pennants and trophies and bronzed baby shoes. You get used to them, after a while. (Jonah loves them, actually.) Matthew says he used to get worried about bumping into the ghost of his uncle Fabbio on the stairs, when he was a kid—or having to share a bath with his dead grandfather—but he’s over that now. In fact the channelling gene must have skipped a generation, because he never remembers the birthdays of his living relatives, let alone his dead ones.