Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years

by Stephanie Calman

  Baby Come Back

  Like a wave depositing fleeces, old flip-flops and about a dozen carrier bags through the hall, Lawrence returns.

  This time he looks completely different; his hair is very short, and he seems to be growing a beard.

  He clasps Lydia to him, his head clearly visible above hers, and swivels her slightly back and forth. I step forward.

  And he walks past me.

  I’ve been practising – or if not quite practising, reminding myself not to be too intense. And anyhow, I don’t want to come over like someone who’s been waiting all these weeks, with nothing else to do.

  So, don’t be intense, don’t sound desperate, don’t start a complicated conversation right away. ‘Can I come into the house first?’ I seem to remember him saying when he once came back from a holiday with his friends.

  And don’t cry.

  And this is particularly hard because when he left at the end of the last holidays, I drove him to the tube station with his new girlfriend, and they both sat in the back, looking at something on his phone the whole time. And when I pulled over – there’s nowhere to stop, so you do have to fling the door open like a getaway driver – they got out and just walked away. Didn’t say goodbye, thank you for the lift, nothing.

  I drove home, trying to talk myself out of a massive overreaction. He does love you, come on, you know he does. And feeling absolutely bereft.

  Did my mother miss me when I first went to Dad’s on Fridays? She never said so, never went for a last hug as I dragged my heels on the stairs. But maybe she did.

  I say:

  ‘Would you like a drink?’

  OMG! I can’t believe you just did that.

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  You didn’t even look at me.

  ‘How about outside? The garden’s really nice at the moment.’

  I give Peter a look. He gives me his ‘FFS rise above it’.

  I wasn’t desperate, I wasn’t intense. I’m being Casual! PLEASE HUG ME!

  Sarah H said: ‘It was awful when they used to dump their bags and go off with their friends.’

  Other people have this too. That helps, right?

  No: it doesn’t.

  But he doesn’t go off with his friends. He opens a beer, leans against the counter, encloses me in a manly yet filial hug, and says:

  ‘So, Mother: what shall I make for supper?’

  Last Exit to Westworld

  Lawrence is down for the summer, and on a sunny day in July we drive to Kent, to take my mother to lunch at the village pub. Conversationally, she has slowed down. What hasn’t changed is that she still doesn’t ask the children about themselves.

  ‘Why not ask them what they’re doing?’ I snap.

  All my encounters with her come loaded with the baggage of many volatile years, like the history of a lovely but troubled island. Whereas the children are only on holiday at this apparently marvellous granny, I’m the returning native unable to forget the battles and demonstrations of the past. As tourists here, they only see the beach.

  Afterwards Peter and Lawrence walk behind her as she moves along, inch by inch, bent over her walker. She cannot balance anymore and has no feeling in her feet. Lydia and I go ahead, to put the kettle on – and because I can’t bear to watch my once tall, beautiful mother taking such tiny, panicky steps.

  The path is narrow, with next-door’s wall on one side, and her tall garden boundary on the other. Just a few yards from the house, she comes to a stop. As she anxiously grips the handles of the walker – and the brakes – Peter and Lawrence are trapped behind her in the gateway. None of them can move.

  We don’t know there’s anything wrong until we hear them calling from the front garden.

  ‘Cushions!’ they shout. ‘Get some cushions!’

  We rush out to see them straining to hold her upright as her legs fold slowly beneath her until she is stuck in a kneeling position on the path, her knees splayed painfully outwards. Behind her, still jammed in the gateway, Peter and Lawrence can’t lift her; they’re going to try to break her fall, which seems to happen in slow motion.

  Lydia and I run back and forth with about a dozen cushions – some beautifully decorated by Mum with her fabric paints – and pass them over her head and they try to wedge them under her to stop her folding up like a broken chair.

  It’s no use. She’s in pain and can’t move.

  I dial 999.

  Within minutes two burly paramedics appear, and with no chance of getting through the blocked gateway, somehow prise my mother’s hands off the walker, release Peter and Lawrence back along the path, and extricate her. Then they effortlessly lift her into the ambulance and whisk her away.

  ‘No need to follow,’ I tell Peter. ‘It’ll be an X-ray at most, then she’ll be back.’

  I have no idea that we’re on the approach to our final separation.

  Later I learn she has fractured her ‘tib-and-fib’ – tibia and fibula, the two major bones in the lower leg. When I get there the next day, the break has been set, but within a few hours she has lost her normally healthy appetite, causing her digestive system to break down. And the little mobility she had is now gone.

  The hospital visits over the next seven, terrible weeks are so stressful, the doctors so elusive, the communication so appalling and the expectations for an elderly patient so incredibly low, that I come back trembling with anger and despair. My sister, who alternates with me, brings mum her favourite snacks: apricots, olives and avocados with little pots of home-made vinaigrette, all of which are barely touched.

  When I bring Lawrence, he shows her an episode of Mock the Week on his phone. She laughs, though I sense the pace is now too fast for her. We beg her to eat an apricot, or an olive. How about some avocado, with Claire’s delicious dressing? She has one mouthful. Tea, coffee and water all sit mostly untouched.

  ‘If you eat and drink, Mum, you’ll be able to get out of here.’

  It’s like a distorted mirror of Lawrence’s first meal as a baby.

  This is what a really badly run institution is like, where people actually do die in corridors, and what many of us have to look forward to. Never mind Oxbridge and learning Mandarin: we need to know how to survive this.

  Lawrence comes away shaking his head in bewilderment, and we go to a nearby pub. After two hours’ begging her to eat, and pleading with the staff to recognize that she is fading away, I can’t even summon the words ‘gin and tonic’, so he sends me to the garden to sit down.

  ‘What did you choose?’ I say.

  ‘A Bloody Mary. I did have to tell them how to make it, though.’

  Maybe the barman moonlights at the hospital.

  ‘See what I’ve been going on about?’

  ‘Mothership,’ he says, ‘you did not exaggerate.’

  ‘Fuck fuck fuck!’

  ‘There there.’

  ‘I can’t stand it!’

  ‘Sssh, ssh, it’ll be OK.’

  It won’t, of course, but hearing him say it is unexpectedly reassuring in a way it wouldn’t be coming from another adult, such as the distant cousin who replies to my email that Mum is deteriorating with a breezy ‘Chin up!’

  When you waddle into the delivery suite, or your home birthing spa or wherever, you’re not having a baby: you’re having someone to comfort you when your own parent is dying.

  While we’re worrying about trivia like whether they’re top in Chemistry or going to be picked for the football team, our children are not only getting better at doing stuff, like eating their vegetables and packing something other than cuddly toys to take on holiday, they’re developing compassion and leadership skills. Maybe they already have the compassion, then learn to deploy it on their own parents.

  Now I see why in some societies they have a lot of children: one to get the drinks; one to queue for food because suddenly cooking is too overwhelming; one to go upstairs and squeeze between the filing cabinet and the wall in the study to reset the Wi-
Fi booster which is plugged into the hardest to reach socket in the house. And one to look up the Mental Capacity Act 2005, for ammunition should we need it, when we realize she isn’t going to come out, and – even if it means a fight – we’re going to get her out of there so her last days on earth will be spent somewhere less like hell.

  Yet to have that golden hour in the sunny pub garden, with him, nearly makes the whole horrible experience worth it.

  ‘I could stand almost anything,’ I say, ‘just to have a drink among the flowers with you.’

  ‘Mother,’ he says. ‘You really do need to get out more.’

  ‘When you finish university,’ I say, ‘come home and never leave.’

  He puts his arm round me.

  If either of us is ever dropped into a catastrophe like this, will he and his sister get us out?

  Eventually we track down a nice geriatric specialist, hidden at the end of an unmarked corridor – possibly to prevent any elderly patients finding him – and in late September, he gets my mother moved to an excellent local care home. And because she won’t be there very long, and he does the secret form no one knows about, it’s free.

  Lawrence and Lydia come and arrange family drawings and photos on the wall by her bed, chatting casually as if they do this all the time.

  ‘Granny, look – I’m putting the bird picture there.’

  ‘And the photo of us over here.’

  ‘You’re facing the garden and there are bird feeders!’

  I put up a copy of an engraving from a Victorian obstetric manual that she likes, of a doctor reaching under a woman’s ankle-length skirt, captioned: ‘You should be able to get Freeview now.’

  The people there are lovely and she lasts another three and a half weeks, pretty good going for someone whose last full meal was in July.

  At the beginning of October, a care assistant rings me sounding agitated, but I can’t understand what she’s saying, thanks to a very strong South-East Asian accent. Plus she’s using a term I don’t know.

  ‘She’s what? I don’t understand.’

  It sounds like ‘sy-no’.

  What the fuck is sy-no?

  ‘Can you spell it? Spell it, please!’

  It’s cyanosed.

  Lydia grabs a phone and looks it up.

  ‘It means she’s gone blue.’

  Oh. Nice image. Thanks.

  Lawrence is back in Manchester and my sister has hurt her back, so it’s just us.

  ‘Can you come soon?’ the woman adds bluntly. ‘She’s near the end.’

  We pack quickly.

  ‘Is that your toothbrush?’

  ‘Lydia, hurry up!’

  ‘My mother’s dying . . . Fucking hell!’

  ‘Are you all right, Mum?’

  ‘Mm. I just feel really weird. Should I bring my boots?’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘In case we go for a walk.’

  There’s a particularly good walk, from her front door. You walk through the village and past the allotments, where the children used to pick her raspberries – carefully avoiding the huge beds of chard – then you climb steeply up onto the North Downs Way, stop by the chalk crown – like a white horse, but a crown, and gaze down at the village below. We’ll be staying at the house; a walk might be just the thing.

  We get down the M20 without speeding, and miss The End by fifteen minutes.

  The staff stayed with her and held her hand. That’s somehow the saddest part. I still don’t know why people being nice makes you cry.

  ‘You don’t have to come in and see her,’ I tell Lydia.

  So she goes into the lounge, where she’s shown to a row of chairs, arranged as if in an airport or on a ferry, and given a mug of tea.

  I’ve seen a dead body before, I tell myself: I’m no longer a corpse virgin. And it can’t be as hard as seeing my father, who died with no warning at all.

  She’s lying on her back, her skin stretched over her cheekbones, almost as if she’s had a face-lift – not her style, as she was never vain. And her mouth is slightly open, suggesting disconcertingly that she might be about to speak. There’s also a breathing sound, which is really, really –

  ‘What IS that? Peter, don’t leave!’

  ‘I think it’s the special mattress.’

  The staff are very kind, but they do want the name of an undertaker quite soon. So I come back out to borrow Lydia’s phone charger; we don’t want the phone dying as well.

  ‘Here you are,’ she says. ‘And Mum – look at this.’

  She holds up her tea: the mug is captioned ‘LOL!’ and below that, so you really can’t avoid it: ‘Laugh Out Loud.’

  ‘Granny would have appreciated it, don’t you think?’

  I do.

  Part of her so clearly comes from my mother, and – which seems even more counterintuitive – part of what we’ve got right as parents is from her too. Even as I have consciously Not Done What My Parents Did, I have been drawing on their contribution. In fact, even the Not Doing What Your Parents Did might be something I’ve learned from them too.

  ‘D’you think it’s OK to laugh, though?’ she says.

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Peter finds us a friendly undertaker and I haggle a bit over the willow casket, then we go back to the house, get a Chinese takeaway and watch the first episode of the new Westworld on our iPad. It’s based on the film she took me to when it came out in 1973, one of her absolute favourites. We both fancied Yul Brynner, even as a murderous cowboy android.

  Lydia says:

  ‘It’s literally what Granny would have wanted.’

  It is.

  And she would have appreciated her grandchild supplying the punchline.

  Xenomorph

  Late last night, when the four of us got back from seeing Alien Covenant, Peter poured me a Scotch to soothe me after the sight of yet another crew kebabbed in their own ship.

  Instead of being hunched down in her seat, terrified, like me, my daughter was scrutinizing the hardware and the latest incarnations of the Xenomorph, studying minute changes in the detail. When you speculate about which family traits are inherited, you somehow don’t imagine this.

  My mother told me once that her fascination with insects mitigated any anxiety. Where others saw a threat, she marvelled at the science. The day we had to run unexpectedly from a swarm of bees in Dad’s garden, she actually walked, quite calmly, gazing up at them in admiration, while he and I legged it into the house.

  And I do think that if the bees or ants had got into power during her lifetime she would have worked for them quite willingly. She might even have stood, mesmerized, in front of a ravenous, glistening Neomorph, as the synthetic David does in Covenant, though I know she would never have sacrificed us humans. Well, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t, though she did believe that ants and bees both had a superior social structure.

  I once bought Lydia The World of H.R. Giger, a book of drawings by the Swiss chappie who designed the Xenomorph for the original film – but I was in a hurry, so only glanced at it.

  The night before her tenth birthday when I got it out to wrap it, I had a quick flick through. Along with the first sketches for Alien and other variations on that theme, were some similar creatures having very obvious sex with human women – I mean, not at all subtle or discreet. And they were quite, well, phallically challenging – though not challenged.

  So I shoved it back again, on the Present Shelf with the spare books, novelty socks, periodic table tea towels, and DVDs; I have three of Shakespeare in Love, my go-to gift when stuck. I also taped the phallic pages together just in case it was discovered by a visiting toddler – or worse, their parents.

  Eventually, of course, she found it, though by then she was a good few years older – about fourteen. And I still didn’t intend giving it to her; even if she didn’t freak out, I assumed she’d have to hide it from her friends.

  ‘Hey, Lyds, what did you get for Christmas?’

  ‘
Oh, a pair of jeans, some bubble bath, a set of wolf coasters and a book of huge, psychotic homicidal arthropods, some of them having sex with women.’

  ‘Oh . . .’

  So I explained that I’d bought it after only the most minimal scrutiny, and only later discovered the sci-fi porn. She untaped the pages, looked through it without reacting and said:

  ‘I see what you mean! But the designs are so cool. Can I have it?’

  All right, I thought. No one’s crying; it’s not rape. I thought I might even spin it the other way, if I found myself in the company of anyone really uptight.

  ‘And oh my God, when she opened it on her tenth birthday, along with the Lego and friendship bracelet set . . .!’

  That’d take their minds off the catastrophe of their child getting a B.

  Then it was Hallowe’en and she bought a dark blue leotard, which she dyed black, and a little French knitting device, to make the narrow ‘cable-y’ things that go round the Alien’s chest, and spent several hours shaping some papier mâché on an armature – made from some of my anti-squirrel wire – to make the disturbingly long head, edged with teeth. Then she devoted a further few hours to the inner jaw, with a delicate criss-cross mechanism like you see on those novelty boxing gloves that spring out at you. But in this case, being inside the head, it only came out when bitten down on at the back, which was excellent though quite uncomfortable, and no homework was done for the whole weekend. And once it was on, she couldn’t really see.

  But she was led around the area by her friends for about forty minutes, then came back for hot chocolate, having scared a satisfying number of the locals. And the head lived on the kitchen radiator for a while, causing guests to glance uncomfortably in its direction between sips of wine or tea, before asking,

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Why don’t you do something with the Alien Head?’ I’d say from time to time, the way women say to their husbands, ‘Why don’t you do something with that pile of wood in the garage?’ and she’d look at me blankly – because, as I eventually realized, the process of making it was the exciting part.