Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years

by Stephanie Calman

  So, with those words of reassurance in mind, I repeat:

  ‘Kick him – in the balls if you can manage it. Or scratch – scratching is good, because then you can get some DNA under your nails and they’ve got a better chance of catching him. Shout or scream, scratch, run. Got it?’

  I watch their faces for signs of anxiety. I want them to absorb the advice, but not dwell on the danger. However they don’t look anxious – they look bored.

  ‘Shout, scratch, run,’ says Lawrence. ‘Can we go now?’

  We will have this conversation again.

  Conflict Resolution

  Are you ever too young to learn conflict resolution?

  Lydia’s had an argument with her friend Poppy, who has knocked over her jewellery stand, sending about twenty sets of beads onto the floor. Now the two of them are in separate rooms, not speaking.

  I go in and tell her:

  ‘Stop this at once. She’s your guest!’

  ‘I don’t care!’

  ‘Is any of the stuff broken?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well then!’

  It’s not physically possible to get in and out of the area without stepping on something or knocking something over. I know, because the central heating timer is in her cupboard, and every autumn, while other people are raking fallen leaves, I have to clear a path through the dolls, bags, horses, diaries and half-used bead sets to reach the ‘On’ switch. And even then, as I pivot on one tiptoe to come back again, I usually emerge with a My Little Cocktail Glass or Sylvanian coatstand stuck to my foot.

  ‘Go and say sorry. Now.’

  ‘NO!’

  Like parents who want their children to learn the piano because they didn’t, I want her to learn conflict resolution even more because I have no skills in this area myself. I grew up with one passive-aggressive parent and one aggressive-aggressive one. My father blew up a lot, but my mother provoked him. And as they were useless at compromise, rows generally ended when he broke something and stormed out. So what I’ve learned from that is to boil silently then explode: the worst of both worlds. Plus when the children fight, I reward their bad behaviour by giving them lots of the Wrong Attention. And when I try to apply sanctions, I get that wrong as well. Not long ago I told them:

  ‘If you carry on arguing you won’t get any pocket money today.’

  And Lawrence said,

  ‘Pocket money day’s on Friday.’

  ‘Oh, I thought today was Friday.’

  And he sighed before turning back to his comic.

  ‘At least try to threaten us properly.’

  But he and Lydia were soon chatting away again, like a warring couple brought together by their shared contempt for a useless relationship counsellor. So my strategy worked, in a way.

  Suddenly I realize Poppy’s mother is due any minute to collect her, so I rush back in and persuade the girls to watch television – anything to break the stalemate before the other parent arrives. Though not a recognized mediation technique, it works, and I see them do their joke air-kisses as they say goodbye. The next day we get comics, and Lydia chooses a Robin Hood one. Inside there are free postcards of the characters in the TV series, and she writes one to Poppy:

  Dear Poppy,

  Let’s never ever have another argument.

  Love Lydia xxx

  Is that it? Is what I’ve been missing all these years something that simple: a six-word declaration of peace that brings the dispute to an end without blame on either side. Is it generational? Or is everyone better at this than me?

  That she’s chosen the Sheriff of Nottingham card rather than Robin or Marian is quite amusing, though; she loves her friend, but not quite enough to give away her favourite ones. At least I assume it’s that, rather than a subliminal endorsement of the medieval despot’s own style of conflict resolution, namely imprisonment, extortion, crushing small birds in cages and death by hanging.

  ‘Do you fall out with your friends?’ I ask Lawrence the next day.

  ‘All the time.’

  But he can’t say how things are resolved: lessons start again, or the subject is changed, and the problem goes away. Once, waiting in the lunch queue, he was punched in the head by another boy. When the school rang to tell me, I was beside myself.

  ‘That’s that same boy who picked on him before!’ I said. ‘You’d better tell me you’re getting his parents in.’

  ‘Well, there was probably something on both sides.’

  Oh, right. Remember the UN in former Yugoslavia? I rest my case.

  ‘Well!’ I tell Lawrence firmly. ‘I’ll be making sure they deal with it, you can be sure of that.’

  But instead of falling gratefully into my arms with a ‘Thank you Mummy!’ he said,

  ‘Oh, it’s all fine now.’

  ‘What? That awful boy who punched you?’

  ‘I’m saying: don’t do anything.’

  He gave me a ‘duh’ look and went back to his homework.

  I never had quarrels with my friends. There was one who was very changeable – a good laugh one day, in a huge sulk the next. But I never dealt with it. I can’t have arguments with people because I don’t know how to continue beyond them. If there’s a problem I have no strategy except to run away. There’s no question: at eight and nine the children are already far more adept at these things than I was – or probably ever will be.

  ‘What?’ says Peter. ‘You argue with me.’

  ‘That’s different.’

  I argue with him because we live in the same house and he’s annoying.

  ‘And your mother – my God, there are times . . .’

  ‘That’s not what I mean. And, by the way, you never help!’

  He looks nonplussed.

  ‘Whenever they argue I always have to deal with it – you never do!’

  While he’s annoying me, a bitter row breaks out over the Plasticine. They both want the orange to make palm trees and are suddenly hurling it at each other. It ends with Lawrence clutching his head in pain and Lydia storming upstairs. For some reason Lawrence is furious with me.

  ‘I’m not responsible for this,’ I say.

  ‘You shouldn’t have children then!’

  Seeing as I’ve produced a blamer and a sulker, I can only agree.

  Later, Lydia comes back and apologizes, and I watch as they share out the Plasticine and continue playing.

  ‘See?’ says Peter. ‘Everything’s fine.’

  And I know, I just know, that despite having done absolutely nothing as usual, he’s going to take the credit. And sure enough, he picks up his newspaper, pops a piece of cheese into his mouth in the most unbelievably infuriating way, and says:

  ‘Must be my influence.’

  And then he looks surprised when I storm out.

  Ages 9 & 10: The Art of the Deal (1)

  Now it’s Christmas time, and the givin’ ain’t easy. Lydia’s been leaving pictures cut out from her favourite reading matter, the Argos catalogue, wherever she thinks her father and I will pause long enough to memorize them: by the wine rack, mainly.

  This year she’s pining for the strangely named Teksta, apparently a horse-of-many-talents.

  ‘You’ve already got a pony that can walk.’

  This was Tawny, her undying favourite for about three days. Before him there was a Sindy pony bought on eBay, which lacked autonomous motion – rather like its owner at weekends – but had a nice face and came with a bridle and saddle, in a home-made box filled with real straw. And before that was the unicorn hobby horse whose cheek you pressed to make it neigh. All reside cheek by fetlock in Lydia’s modestly sized bedroom.

  ‘But this one can nuzzle you and neigh! It’s touch and motion sensitive!’

  In other words, more responsive than the average husband.

  ‘But how long will you play with it for?’

  ‘Forever! Please please please oh please!’

  She even writes ‘PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE OH PLEASE’ in capitals alo
ng the margin of the ad.

  Meanwhile Lawrence wants a PSP. He’s never had a games console, which makes him, among his peer group, statistically unique.

  ‘You’ve never asked us before. And you have managed without one all this time,’ I point out.

  ‘I was being nice.’

  ‘Remember the CD players,’ Peter intones.

  Two Christmases ago, we gave them each a CD player. We’d had enough of the fights over the downstairs stereo, with Lydia putting on The Jungle Book while Lawrence moaned all the way through it, demanding The Best of Queen.

  But these big, exciting presents weren’t the raging success we imagined.

  Lydia got Abba Gold to go with hers, and does play it occasionally; I heard her singing along to ‘Money, Money, Money’ in her room the other day with a friend who’d come to play. But most of the time it just sits there.

  So, while we are broadly in favour of any technology which buys us a bit of peace and quiet, you can see why we’ve so far resisted the lure of the Game Boy, the Xbox and the Wii. How do we know they’ll actually play with them? And, absurd as it sounds, we quite like the sound of their little voices, even when it consists largely of:

  ‘He won’t let me have the red pencil!’

  ‘She wouldn’t give it to me first!’

  And computer game homes are characterized by an eerie silence, broken only by the sound of bank statements being opened and weeping.

  The other reason we have for not getting Lawrence a PSP is that Peter keeps referring to it as a ‘PCP’, i.e. the hallucinogenic drug popularly known as angel dust, briefly and lethally popular in American housing projects in the 1980s, which caused users to jump out of windows. So he cannot be trusted to go into shops.

  However, he has lately begun to worry that we’ve gone too far and are starting to be a bit like those parents who don’t allow television, only buy wooden toys and put their children in Birkenstocks.

  I disagree. We allow unlimited television, have no wooden toys except Brio, and embarrass our kids by arguing with them in the chip shop about whether they’re allowed a white roll while they wait for their fried carbs. Thus with almost no effort we are achieving the worst of both worlds: low standards and children who feel hard done by.

  It’s two weeks to Christmas. Time is running out!

  We go trailing round town in a last-ditch attempt to find the ideal present for each child that isn’t the unsuitable thing they actually want.

  ‘I’ve got a radical idea,’ I say, sinking into a chair in John Lewis, vacant probably because the previous occupant has gone to the toy department to commit suicide. ‘How about we just stop struggling and give them the things they’ve asked for?’

  ‘My God,’ he says. ‘It’s radical all right!’

  I can see his brain forming the thought, soon to become the words, slippery slope.

  Because he grew up at a time when a lavish Christmas meant a pack of chocolate cigarettes and a slightly more colourful jumper, he’s afraid of what might happen if we give our children – for want of a better word – a load of ‘fancy’ stuff. Because, as my father also felt about these things – where will it end? The idea lurks – if I’m honest, in both our minds – that once we give them battery-powered horses and games consoles, we’ll be unable to avoid TVs in their rooms, karaoke machines, diamond ear studs and, ultimately, cars.

  ‘My sister and I begged and begged for a talking doll,’ I say. ‘Where you pulled a string in its back to hear a series of deeply uninteresting phrases. And she became obsessed with getting a Katie Kopycat: a doll that sat opposite you and mimicked your actions.’

  ‘Jesus, that sounds a bit ahead of its time.’

  ‘I think she was just connected to this “magic desk” that came with her, and there were two pens joined together so when you wrote something, she “copied” it.’

  Like: Dear Mummy, if you don’t buy me this doll I won’t love you any more.

  Both my parents disapproved of toys like that because they left no room for the imagination; the more the toy did, the less there was for the child to make up.

  And I’m sure they weren’t the first. I bet every generation has its favourites that the masses rush out to buy in droves, but which a certain kind of middle-class parent refuses to get. You can just imagine an Ancient Greek telling her child:

  ‘All right, you can have a slave. But no way are you getting one of these new-fangled spinning tops . . .’

  So my mother held the line. She was a keen student of D.W. Winnicott – he of the ‘good enough mother’ – and read books with titles like The Role of Play in Child Development. She even took us to the Institute of Child Health to be observed playing behind a two-way mirror for one of their research projects, which has to be the poshest form of child-minding ever.

  My father’s position was just the effect of having grown up poor: what if you bought all these expensive toys and then became ill and lost your job, as happened to his father? I think sometimes when he lost his temper it was out of fear.

  But he totally believed in fun. One year he got someone to make us a really big Wendy house – in plain brown hardwood, big enough for adults to stand up in if invited. And other kids’ parents were appalled by the amount of mess we were allowed to make.

  ‘When I was about four,’ I tell Peter, ‘we moved for a while to a flat that had an extra bedroom. Mum made it the playroom and gave us some Crazy Foam. We took all our clothes off and just sprayed it all over each other. I remember it vividly, sliding about on the lino, laughing hysterically.’

  It occurs to me now that she should have grabbed that room for herself; I would have.

  Peter’s parents were even less keen on ‘gimmicks’, as they might have termed them, being a slightly earlier generation, who’d suffered not only rationing but the Depression as well.

  ‘Basically, they were against anything with batteries.’

  ‘So what did you plead for, that you didn’t get?’

  ‘When I was eight I wanted a Scalextric set.’

  Can I just say I got him one as a wedding present.

  ‘And what did you get?’

  ‘I had Meccano, which was “educational”. I did play with it a lot, though.’

  And never lost a single piece. I don’t know it yet, but in a few months the children will be up in his study using it; Lawrence to make a car, Lydia to build a toy animal enclosure. It may be educational, but don’t hold that against it.

  ‘Why not Scalextric, though?’

  ‘Because “it’s just cars going round and round” . . . And, in those days, motor racing was incredibly dangerous, not like now.’

  The year he was born saw the worst accident in racing history: eighty-four people were killed.

  ‘But you weren’t planning to actually be a racing driver, were you? And besides, Scalextric requires some skill and focusing and is fun.’

  I found the adrenalin rush and the level of concentration it demanded really absorbing and thus an excellent de-stresser, even though despite practising a fair bit I’ve never managed to accelerate and keep the car on the track. In the coming years I will be beaten several times by my eight-year-old nephew.

  Peter’s ramblings may sound irrelevant, as they so often do, but then I think, the fear of My Little Overdraft is definitely part of it, and also control: a bit of us wants them to be nine and ten forever, playing sweetly with the gifts we choose.

  A sales assistant comes over and asks if we’re thinking of buying the chair.

  Peter hauls me up.

  ‘Maybe we should get them those things,’ he says. ‘They don’t ask for much. And we might get tons of brownie points.’

  ‘And,’ I say, ‘Lydia says she’ll play with that horse forever and ever and EVER. So she won’t need anything next year.’

  So we do.

  And Lydia plays with it once.

  And Lawrence plays with the PSP a lot, but it won’t save his scores. So we take it back to J
ohn Lewis. And they tell me to either buy a memory stick or complain to Sony, which is not what the Sale of Goods Act says, not remotely. And instead of arguing with them, which I know will distress him, I give in and hate myself.

  So it’s not getting the PSP which has turned out to be a Key Stage, but seeing his mother offering to solve a problem, claiming to be his protector and champion – and failing to do so. He will have lost faith in me. All this trouble we’ve gone to, not having Father Christmas, and explaining that ads are fiction, and telling the truth about death – that was supposed to establish our integrity. And I’ve undone it all. And he’s too young; this sort of disillusionment shouldn’t happen for ages yet.

  But here I am again, thinking that all these stages are supposed to be at a certain point – always a point in the future, instead of handling them when they do happen, i.e. today: now.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I tell him, over a rather good chicken and avocado ciabatta in the cafe. ‘I’m not sure what we should do.’

  He chews thoughtfully.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he says. ‘I think I might just put it up for sale in the school newsletter.’

  I search his face for signs of a complete collapse of faith in the female parent, but he looks fine.

  As for me, I have to confront the discovery that John Lewis isn’t the all-giving, all-nurturing meeter of my needs I believed it was, that delivers where other shops fail, and always cares.

  So you could say we both moved on a stage today.

  After he ate most of the Christmas chocolate teddy she was given and broke her trust in adults forever, Peter bought Lydia a giant Toblerone to make up for it.

  And now he has weakened again, and eaten five sections of that self-same Toblerone.

  It’ll be all the more shocking for her when she finds out, as he’s the parent with the willpower. And he’ll have to go back to square one to rebuild her trust in him and regain his position as the Nice One. I am sorry for her, but pleased to see him in trouble for a change. Except he hasn’t owned up.