by Emma Murray
I scroll down through the responses, gratified that most of them are sensible ‘welcome to Woodvale’ messages, with some accompanied by sad-face emojis for those who either don’t have the costume to lend, or who have the costume but not in the right size. So far, so acceptable. But of course, Chantal doesn’t get off that easily. Here’s Tania, once again sticking the knife in.
WELCOME to Woodvale, Chantal! You’re going to LOVE it here. Instead of borrowing the costume, why not make one yourself? My LO looked adorable in the fireman outfit I made him last year, and it really doesn’t take long to stitch together. DM me if you need more tips!
Suddenly, I’m really fed up of all this. Why the FUCK would Chantal want to make her own bloody costume when she has just moved house and is probably up to her eyes with unpacking and looking after her kids? Why aren’t these stupid women more supportive, instead of constantly trying to outdo each other?
I am so livid about it that I decide to vent my frustration about the impact of social media on motherhood as part of my pitch.
From the moment we have our first child, we are in a permanently vulnerable state. In the early stages, we’re sleep-deprived, cranky and often lonely. Although there is no code to crack for child-rearing, we go online for answers anyway, Googling obsessively, desperately trying to find answers that make us feel we’re not failing after all. When we’re not Googling, we’re on Facebook, looking for some sort of comfort and reassurance. For some reason, being validated by a group of total strangers gives us a little lift (the more ‘likes’, the better we feel), which seem to help us get through an otherwise terrible day.
And this is what social media should be for – a community that supports its members, that recognises when people need help and advice, and gives people a platform to share their concerns without feeling belittled or judged. But rather than reaching out to struggling mums, many people use social media to compete instead.
You see, I couldn’t care less if you choose only to feed your child organic food grown in the back garden, or if you make every single one of their meals from scratch, or even if you make every single fancy-dress costume with your own fair hands. What I do care about is whether you are judging others for not doing the same thing; for not understanding other people’s choices or situations, and making them feel they are less of a mother because of it. If we were all just to admit that we are all as entirely clueless as each other, and stop the one-upmanship, then surely the world would be a friendlier place. So I propose a call to arms: the next time a mum posts something that implies she is lonely, desperate, and struggling, why not drop her a PM and suggest meeting her for a coffee, rather than telling her what she should be doing? Or ask for her number and giving her a call? Surely it’s about time that we all embraced the ‘social’ side of social media and give each other help and support.
Satisfied, I close my laptop, and glance at my watch. I still have enough time to do one more very important thing today. Full of purpose now, I jump in the shower, wash away all the evidence of my first swim in the sea, and throw on some jeans and a T-shirt. Marvelling at the glorious weather, I decide to risk driving with the top down for the journey.
Ten minutes later, the heavens open and I am forced to pull in at a layby and wrestle the top back in place. I complete the rest of the journey with frizzy hair and a dampened mood. Still, when I roll to a stop, my spirits brighten. This is the right thing to do.
Switching off the engine, I sit in the car surveying the house where Jen is staying. It’s a small, ordinary-looking 1970s pebble-dashed semi-detached house in an estate of identical semi-detached houses, situated about twenty minutes by car from the sea – basically the opposite of ‘just down the road’, as described by my mother. All the curtains are closed in that way people used to do to notify the entire burglar community that they are gone on holidays and the house is therefore unoccupied. I look at its ordinariness and for the life of me can’t imagine Jen living there. Jen, who lives for high-street fashion and dressing up-and-coming celebrities. This is the type of place she would be mortified to even stand next to, never mind stay there.
A thought crosses my mind: Jen doesn’t know I’m coming and I’m not sure if she even wants to see me. What if she thinks the fact that she has been ‘jilted’ is the only reason I am contacting her? I don’t want her to think that this is a pity visit. Maybe she’s not even there, I think hopefully, and immediately feel ashamed. It’s not about you, I berate myself, it’s about her.
Determined now, I push away my anxieties and see this for what it really is: a friend visiting an old friend who happens to be heartbroken. With a heavy heart, I push open the car door and get out. No going back.
I walk up the crazy-paving garden path and press the doorbell firmly. Nothing. I step back a little to see if the curtains have moved even an inch, but everything stays still. I wait for a few more moments before pressing the bell again and decide on a quick peep through the letterbox.
‘She’s not there,’ a woman’s voice says behind me.
I pop up so fast that I almost trap my fingers in the slamming flap of the letterbox.
As my eyes come to rest on this figure, my heart thumps faster.
‘She’s here!’ the woman says, cheekily pointing to herself with two upright thumbs.
I stare at her for a moment. For there, standing before me in this dreary old estate, is Jen – my best friend.
And she looks absolutely fucking fabulous.
We embrace like we saw each other only yesterday, and then she unlocks the door and leads me into the house.
I eye her as she walks effortlessly from kitchen counter to kettle and back again, while she makes me a cup of tea. Is this whole heartbreak thing total bullshit? I’ve never seen the girl look so well. She is wearing some cut-off blue denim dungarees with a white T-shirt underneath. Her feet are clad in simple flat red Converse. She looks the picture of elegance and trendiness.
Putting the mug in front of me, she says, ‘You’ve heard about Liam fucking off, then?’
I give a deep inward sigh. So, it’s true after all.
‘I’m a shit friend. I only know about Liam because my mum told me. That’s how shit I am,’ I tell her.
Jen tuts at me before marching over to give me a hug. She tells me to stop being ‘such a twat’ and that it was her fault that she hadn’t told me herself.
‘I just didn’t want anyone to know, really,’ she finishes softly. ‘Not until I knew it was definitely over.’
‘You look amazing!’ I blurt out.
She laughs ruefully.
At Jen’s suggestion, we grab our mugs of tea and retreat to the living room, which is decorated in true eighties style. After mocking the brown-and-orange floral carpet and green velvet curtains (with gold tie-backs), we sit down on the mustard corduroy-covered two-seater couch opposite a scratched mahogany coffee table with elephant legs, and face each other.
I suddenly feel out of my depth. It’s been so long since we talked properly. How I can summarise the last four years since I had Anna? How do I explain that I’m not the same person she was friends with for most of our childhood and into our adulthood? I’m no longer the care-free ‘it’ll be grand’, living-in-the-present Saoirse. Motherhood has made me more jaded, impatient, frustrated and generally fed up. I can’t say all that to her, given we have no shared experience; she’ll think I’m a monster. I mean, I think I’m a monster half the time. Especially since I’ve left my daughter behind in London. But looking at her now, I feel a rush of love for my oldest and best friend, and I realise that it’s not her fault that she didn’t have a kid and didn’t go through the same experiences as I did. Maybe things would have been the same even if she’d had children. She could have been one of those bloody organic mums, and I might have ended up falling out with her anyway. Who knows?
‘I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch,’ I say again, feeling helpless.
Putting her mug down, Jen takes my hand and
says, ‘No, I’m the one who should be saying sorry.’
I look at her in surprise. What does she have to be sorry for?
‘Listen, when you got pregnant, I knew our lives would take different paths. Please don’t get me wrong – I was so happy for you – but you know I have never wanted children, and I just couldn’t relate to what you were going through. We had shared so much together for so long, but this wasn’t something I felt I could be a part of,’ she says, tears glistening in her eyes.
Starting to well up myself, I squeeze her hand in reassurance.
‘It’s OK!’ I say, blinking my eyes rapidly to stop the tears from flowing.
Jen shakes her head vigorously.
‘No, Saoirse, it’s not OK. Remember that time I called you? It was just a few weeks after you’d had Anna, and I was calling you because I had just bumped into Liam in the pub. I mean, you’d just had a bloody baby and there I was shiteing on about my love life. I mean, how fucking ridiculous,’ she says, shaking her head in frustration.
I take a deep breath but before I can say anything, she says something that stops me in my tracks.
‘You see, the thing is, Saoirse, I knew how stressed out you were – you’re my oldest friend; I could hear it in your voice – and I did nothing to help.’ We’re both crying now, and I mean really crying.
‘Please don’t beat yourself up about this,’ I manage to say through my sobs. ‘I should have been honest with you about how much I was struggling.’
Jen releases my hand and reaches across to the coffee table to grab a box of tissues. We each take one, and blow our noses in perfect synchronisation. When we have recovered a little, we exchange watery smiles.
‘I just felt so useless,’ Jen says in a small voice. ‘I mean, I haven’t a clue about babies. I wouldn’t know one end of a nappy from the other, and the thought of trying to calm a screaming child sends a chill down my spine. What good would I have been to you?’
I take a moment to think about it. Even if I had confessed to Jen about how bad things had been, how could she really have helped me?
‘Listen, it’s my fault for not being honest with you in the first place, but even if I had, I wouldn’t have expected you to take care of Anna for me. I barely let David touch her in the early days… But if I had my time all over again, I would have asked you to come over, organised a takeaway and a bottle of wine, and just talked about something other than feeds, nappies, and sterilising. I think that would have made me feel more normal.’
Jen puts her head in her hands, and says angrily, ‘I could have done that, Saoirse!’
And I tell her I know. Then we spend a few more teary moments fighting each other for whose fault it was, and grabbing more tissues before falling into an exhausted silence.
‘Tell me about what happened with Liam,’ I say finally. ‘Surely he knew how you felt about not wanting children?’
‘That’s the thing, Saoirse. He knew from really early on in our relationship that I wasn’t into having children. He told me he felt the same way.’
Her head dips for a moment and when she raises it, I notice that her cheeks are flushed and tears are in her eyes once again. She is deeply hurt, and my heart aches for her.
‘We got on so well, Saoirse. Don’t get me wrong, we had our moments, but we had so much fun together. Why the hell would he throw that all away?’
I shake my head and squeeze her shoulder. ‘So why did he change his mind?’ I ask.
‘I think he was getting a lot of hassle from his mother about her wanting grandkids. Then, of course, his brother had a baby boy, and Liam really took to him. He started asking me if I would ever consider it. I told him no way. Then one day, he came home and told me he couldn’t live the rest of his life without being a father. And that was it.’
I wrap both my arms around her while she cries and we stay like that for a bit. Poor Jen – I feel so desperately sorry for her. She straightens herself gently and grabs another tissue.
‘I wouldn’t mind, but since he fecked off, it seems as though I’m losing the run of myself in the health department,’ Jen says.
My forehead creases in concern. ‘What’s going on?’ I say.
‘It was a couple of months ago. I had just got a pedicure and was in my flip-flops walking home. Suddenly I felt like I needed to do a massive fart. Nothing catastrophic, you know, like the ones you can let out silently without anyone getting hurt?’
I nod and smile, grateful for a bit of light relief. Despite the grim nature of the topic, I love Jen when she is in storytelling mode. I remind myself not to laugh, though. That would highly insensitive.
‘So, there I was, trying to let it out gently and suddenly I felt my pants get a bit damp, and I just thought – no. I have not just shit myself.’
Despite the seriousness of her story, I can feel the corners of my mouth starting to twitch.
‘Anyway, when I get home, I leg it to the bathroom, pull down my skinny jeans and there is just this perfectly round, like, pancake of shit in my pants, and a small bit on the crotch of my jeans.’
I cover my mouth and try desperately not to laugh.
‘So, of course, my first thought is, how the hell am I supposed to take my skinny jeans off without ruining my new pedicure, you know?’
I nod helplessly at this, although I’m not sure I would have given the pedicure the same level of significance.
‘So, for starters, I end up waddling into the kitchen, grabbing a pair of scissors and cutting my pants off,’ she says.
I feel a bubble of laughter start deep inside me and manage to control it in my throat, letting out a small squeak in the process.
‘Anyway, the pants are off, but the jeans are still around my knees and the pedicure needs at least another three hours of drying time so I can’t take them off, even though they smell of shite. But then again, I have a wealthy client in half an hour who has hired me to find her a wedding outfit.’
‘What did you do?’ I say, just about managing to get the words out.
‘Sure what else could I do, Saoirse? I pulled up my jeans, sprayed a bit of perfume around the crotch area and went to the job fully commando.’
That is it. The thought of glamorous Jen going to her posh personal-shopper job without wearing any underwear, with the faint whiff of ‘eau de poo’ cracks me up. I laugh and splutter and gasp until my breath catches and my stomach hurts. I am ashamed of how good it feels – it seems like years since I have had a good laugh like that. Wiping the tears from my eyes, I glance at Jen and immediately sober up when I see her face.
‘Jesus, sorry, Jen. I don’t mean to be insensitive,’ I say, reaching out towards her.
‘I don’t mind if you laugh – it is a funny story,’ she says, waving me away. ‘Besides, apparently, shitting yourself is fairly common when you’re under a certain amount of stress.’
‘All goes down the plughole after you turn forty,’ I say grimly, thinking about my own undignified twice-nightly dashes to the toilet.
Then Jen tells me that she has been offered her own permanent segment on the popular Irish television show Revealed!, giving viewers tips on how to dress smartly, using fashion inspiration from the high street.
‘Oh, Jen, that is fantastic!’ I say, clapping my hands. And I mean it. That gig is right up Jen’s street.
But she shakes her head sadly.
‘How am I supposed to present a fashion show when I’m the type of person who shits herself?’ she says.
‘Jen, honestly, I’m sure it won’t happen again,’ I say, feeling helpless.
I look at her long, toned legs and her wingless arms and I feel a flash of envy. We’re the same age but she could pass for my much-younger sister.
‘You look incredible,’ I whisper. Then I take big risk. ‘Especially for someone who shits themselves and has just been jilted.’
Jen catches my eye and the pair of us totally crack up, and I’m glad the risk has paid off.
When we have
recovered, Jen gives a mock yawn, an exaggerated stretch and declares a subject change, saying, ‘The only thing worse than people talking about their break-ups is people talking about their dreams, or their children.’ She catches my look. ‘No offence.’
‘None taken,’ I say. And I mean that because even though I have a child of my own, I don’t want to hear stories about other people’s kids, unless they have done something particularly gruesome, and then it’s just entertainment.
Then she asks me about David (‘Has he taken the covers off the garden furniture yet?’) and Anna (‘I can’t believe I still haven’t met her!’), and with some effort, I answer no to the furniture question, before telling her that she has to come to London and see Anna – and I really mean it. A quiet moment follows and it crosses my mind that I could tell her all about David’s affair and my life falling apart, but I don’t. I’m not ready to open that little box just yet. Besides, the last thing I want to do is take away from her problems. Instead, I spend the next few minutes telling her all about the Ryan episode – how I managed to get so pissed I didn’t remember him, even though he had walked me to my door, and how I threw myself into the sea just to escape the mortification of it all.
Jen snorts into her tea. ‘Jesus, Saoirse, only you could get so shit-faced that you would forget someone who looked like a famous movie star,’ she says.
‘What do you mean “only me”? When was the last time I blacked out from drink, anyway?
‘Don’t look so shocked, woman!’ she says, laughing. ‘Have you forgotten what happened with Killian Moriarty?’
I glare at her for a second and flop back on the couch and think. Now there’s a blast from the past. Killian was a long-term friend I ended up sleeping with after a Tequila night out but had no recollection of the event itself the next morning. It was the only proper blackout I had ever experienced, and it really put the shits up me. Because of that episode, I haven’t touched Tequila since. I can’t believe she is even bringing him up, and I tell her so. And then I tell her that the Killian thing is totally different from the Ryan thing, and then she says something that renders us both speechless for a bit.
