by Sara Downing
My childhood was a happy and safe one. My parents created a wonderful world for us of cosy family life, and lots of love. Our summers were spent mucking around in the garden or traipsing off across fields on a trek, backpacks full of jammy dodgers and tizer. My sisters were more like friends than siblings; both older than me although not by much, we never fought, pinched each others' toys or pulled hair, as little girls sometimes do. We shared our toys, then shared our boys. When the talk turned from Sindy dolls to snogging, we went through it all together. There was forever a pool of young men hanging around our home, and one of us was always either in love, heartbroken or ‘giving up boys’. Looking back on it, it must have been hell for my Dad. He was so protective of us all, and although no man could ever be good enough for his girls, he was very tolerant and managed to avoid decking any teenage lad who upset his daughters. I think my Mum quite enjoyed having a house full of males after years spent amongst raging female hormones. I used to love watching her face light up when the latest blue-eyed lothario was sweet-talking her to get to one of us. She would fall for it every time.
I really respect my parents; that generation had it right in raising their families; there wasn't the focus on material things like I see in the kids at school now. We were happy with what we had, and that was enough. The summers were long and hot and our house was filled with love and fun.
Mark and I have had a long engagement, a very long one. It had been two full years into our relationship before we even thought about settling down together, and then we were largely propelled into it by the circumstances at the time. Our engagement was therefore pretty unromantic; we hadn’t even lived together properly at that stage, but there we were suddenly being pushed by events surrounding us into what we knew we would always do but hadn't yet managed to get round to. So it had been more of a ‘Perhaps it would be the right time to....’ sort of conversation, and we both knew it made sense to make things more permanent at that stage. Funny how they are no more permanent now than they were then. If only Mark had managed to keep up that level of commitment and get me a wedding ring to keep my engagement ring company, which has for so long languished alone on my fourth finger.
And here I am now, several years later, still only engaged, and just not convinced that motherhood is for me – yet, at least, and I tell Mark that. I can’t see myself as a Mum, not right now, even though I always thought I might be at some point. Putting it into words makes me realise for the first time just how strongly I feel about it. I'd heard my friends say time and again how the urge had suddenly kicked in, after years of child-free heaven, to fill their house to the brim with offspring, but surely that urge must have been there all along, just latent, hidden under the career prospects and cracking salaries, waiting to be unleashed. When I think back, I can’t remember ever really feeling that urge, even a dormant one. I had never played the Mummy role through in my head, never rocked imaginary babies in my arms, looked longingly at maternity clothes, or gone all soppy over a teensy weensy babygro. It had just never happened for me in that way.
I try to explain all of this to Mark, but it comes out as a jumbled mess and not as the balanced opposing side of the argument that I'd hoped. Not that I'd really known what I would say, didn't have anything to say, given that it was not something I had been working up to as it had been for him. I'd had no time to prepare my case for the defence, other than today, and then I'd been busy having a birthday.
Mark can’t understand why I’m not jumping at the chance to get down to some baby-making with him. But he is also failing to see why I feel I have to get married first. Then I start to wonder if this really is just my delaying tactic – will tying the knot suddenly make me want to have babies?
At that moment I am hit by a failure to understand something fairly crucial. How could we have come so far in our lives together, without ever discussing this properly? No more than as a dismissive wave towards the future, anyway. Mark is pretty upset, but he’s also ignoring my side of the argument. It’s not only my fault that we have never talked it through in any depth. I think we have both arrived at this point in our lives equipped with a set of assumptions about each other, some right and some, quite obviously, way off course. I don’t know what to say to him next.
Three
As I pull up outside Evie’s house, the faded Cotswold stone radiates a warm and mellow glow in the late afternoon sunshine. Hers is one of those cosy, inviting homes where you know the hall will always be clutter-free, the toilets recently cleaned, a scented candle burning and the coffee machine primed and ready for action. Evie will always be beautifully turned out too – I have never yet managed to catch her out, slouching around on a Sunday morning in tatty old joggers and one of James' tee shirts, no make-up, or pre-shower with her hair not washed and straightened to perfection. I don't know how she does it. Well, actually I do. It probably has something to do with Suki, the Nanny-come-Housekeeper whose quiet presence means that Evie is free to get on with the finer things in life, whilst the tat and toilets are taken care of for her.
This time though the smell of baking greets me; Evie has given Suki the afternoon off, and she and the girls have spent most of the day baking, by the look of it. The surfaces are piled high with every sort of kiddie-friendly cookie and cake imaginable. It looks like she has worked her way through the Domestic Goddess handbook and out the other side, like a busy little cooking bookworm with an urge to bake for Britain. ‘Are you having a party or something?’ I ask, wide-eyed, only needing to sniff the air to get a hit from the sugar-sweet aroma.
‘Well they will last the girls a few days, and they have some friends coming over for a sleepover tomorrow night. You'd be amazed how much cake eight girls can eat between them,’ she replies. Evie has clearly had a great time, judging by the flour on her nose and cheek, her cake mixture-streaked Cath Kidston floral pinny, and the hugely satisfied grin on her face.
‘We don't get to do this sort of thing often enough,’ she enthuses, wiping her hands on a tea towel. ‘Term time is hopeless, I'm always so busy ferrying them around to one thing or another. And weekends are full of homework, or pony club, or whatever. It's been so good today just to kick back and cook with them. We've had a ball. They've really talked to me, too. Properly.’ She sighs happily and flops elegantly and with an exhausted but contented sigh onto one of the bar stools tucked under her granite-topped kitchen island.
Imogen and Anastasia, sensing a grown-up ‘chatting session’ coming on, take advantage of the moment to slip out of the kitchen and up the stairs, no doubt in the avoidance of clearing up more than anything else.
Evie is usually hard to pin down on a school day, but the girls’ exclusive private school flushed them out a week earlier than my school, so the three of them are at home, with time on their hands and varnish on their nails. Imogen and Anastasia are lovely girls, ten and eight respectively, both very different, but both with their Mother's expensive tastes and desire for the finer things in life. Watch out boys, in a few years time these girls will be snaffling around for affluent boyfriends who can keep them in the style to which Daddy has allowed them to become accustomed. Yet to say they are spoilt would be wrong. They both have their heads screwed on pretty firmly; Evie has done a good job raising them with high moral standards, and has brought up two bright and sensible girls, even if she can’t help herself from splashing a little bit of cash on them now and again. I think it’s great for her that she can.
I wonder if Evie will attempt to extol the virtues of motherhood upon me? But she knows too how I feel about getting married. I can imagine her trying to appeal to my retail addiction with promises of the as yet unchartered waters of baby shops – clothes, shoes, prams, cots, all the paraphernalia needed to get one very small person through the earliest stages of its little life. Some serious shopping to be done.
When my sisters' children were born, I remember being completely floored by the amount of equipment their homes were suddenly filled with. A once spaci
ous three-bedroomed home now heaving at the seams with giant pieces of baby stuff. And the oddest thing of all, a whole bedroom fully decked out to house the little monster, with a beautiful cot, matching curtains and bedding, gadgetry, teddies, the works, only none of it being used because the little darling is sleeping (or not) in the master bedroom, as close to the mother's side of the bed as it can possibly get, in some kind of wicker thing that looks like a dog basket, propped up on a spindly little frame, because babies (apparently) sleep better near the mother and the risk of cot death is reduced. It sounded like some kind of government propaganda to me, put about to keep new mothers so knackered through lack of sleep that in no way could they return to the workplace until the child was at least twelve, thus leaving all those wonderful, abandoned positions available for the men to snap up.
Evie will see things from my side too, I am sure of it. She knows just how much my career matters to me. I am never going to earn megabucks, like she could have done, or like Mark is starting to now, but my whole sense of self worth and persona is defined by what I do, and it makes me who I am. I can’t imagine myself doing what Evie does; I need something for me – not just to be defined as someone else's wife or mother.
I’ve always wanted to teach, since those days as a small child when I would line up my teddies and ‘learn them their lessons’. I couldn’t imagine having to give it all up for long enough even to give birth, let alone taking maternity leave for ever and a day, which seems to be the norm now.
My job is wonderful; my school is in one of those unbelievably perfect Midlands villages, the sort of place where people have either been there for ever, or return after ‘gallivanting off’ for a few years to get an education, get married, see the world or all of the above. We’re a bit different because we did the whole gallivanting off thing from London to here and then stayed.
The children I teach are fantastic, too. I know a teacher's lot is to repeat the same stuff year on year with a different set of kids, and how dull does that sound. But it’s the things they say and do which leave me never ceasing to be amazed by the human brain in all its diversity. I could laugh or cry in equal measures at some of the wild stories and fantasies, the misinterpretations and mispronunciations I hear on a daily basis. For a bunch of eight and nine year olds, they are remarkably perceptive and mature. I can see in most of them the caring, considerate, inquisitive and interesting adults they are going to be in the not so distant future.
My school is in a very comfortable catchment area, so there are no real rough and tough kids; the worst are the handful from the less well-to-do homes in the village and a couple from the very small cul-de-sac of local authority housing, but even they are ‘nice’ compared to some of the children I came across in London, and their parents can at least string a sentence together. Not a single ASBO in sight at this school; in London some of the kids saw it as the only qualification worth having.
So babies just don’t feature in this happy teaching equilibrium of mine. The nappy, puking and sleepless nights stage is not what I find rewarding about children. Give me a six year old with a fully formed set of functioning parts and a willingness to learn, and I am away. If children came ready made and fully housetrained then maybe I could buy into the whole thing a little easier. I need to have conversations with kids, not babble in that jammy-wammy, oochy-coochy sort of way that new mums (and dads, come to that) do. Mark doesn’t get that. On Saturday evening he just kept ranting on about the feel of a newborn dozing on your shoulder, and something about the sweet little snuffling sounds they make. All I could envisage in that scenario was the trail of puke down the back of your top when they produced a rip-roaring liquid burp which belied their tiny frame.
I thought Mark and I were happy as we were, and I don’t see any real reason to upset that. We both have great careers, loads of friends and a fantastic social life. We tick along nicely; he doesn't inspire in me any extremes of emotion; I love him, I usually like him, rarely hate him, occasionally resent him. Although the latter is usually related to his inability to put the lid down on the toilet or his failure to grasp the fundamental difference between the laundry basket and the floor. But from conversations with my friends, it appears their other halves are just the same, so I suppose it must just be a man thing. Blame the genes not the jeans, when I find them hanging out of the laundry basket yet again. All that and yet I live with a relatively tidy and fastidious man, who once had his own place and actually kept it clean. It would appear then that all men, after that bachelordom period of living on their own and fending for themselves has elapsed, are programmed to think that dirty dishes levitate to the dishwasher and the washing machine is voice activated and only responds to the lady of the house. Don't get me started.
‘Just imagine it Grace, lots of little mini-me's and -you's running around all over the place, think about it.’ Mark had been straight back on the attack at the breakfast table this morning. Whatever had happened to a quiet and peaceful breakfast in this house? He’d caught me at a moment when there wasn’t a diversionary tactic in sight. I was trapped at the table with him; I wasn’t running late for school so couldn’t just make a dash for it, I’d made my sandwiches the night before, and the car was already loaded with the marking I needed to take in. Bugger it, I was stuck. He hadn’t mentioned the subject at all yesterday, and I had naively hoped that maybe it had gone away. Just a little bit. Fat chance of that. He is renowned for his persistence; it’s what makes him such a good lawyer.
I had just thought about it, for the whole of a nano-second. Lots? Running around? Help. I love my cream sofas and carpets just the way they are.
‘Yes but before you get to the running around stage, and even during and after the running around stage, you have to go through the pooey nappies and no sleep stage. Not to mention being pregnant and actually giving birth in the first place. Have you thought that through?’ I had reeled off, barely coming up for air.
‘I have,’ he replied, smugly. Were there any aspects of parenthood he hadn’t considered in his in-depth analysis? I could imagine him drawing up some sort of business proposition entitled ‘Having a Baby – the Pros and Cons of Parenthood,’ and coming down firmly on the side of the Pros. I half expected to be presented with it, neatly bound in an A4 folder.
‘If you give up work now you would be so rested and relaxed by the time things happen that you being as strong as you are, you would cruise through it all, and you'd hardly notice all the getting up at night and no sleep. Plus stay at home mums can sleep in the daytime too. Even if you have to get up six times in the night, you could sleep when the baby sleeps during the day.’
Give up work? Stay at home? Be a full-time mum? What planet was he on? Not the same one as me, quite obviously, but I decided to let that last comment slide in the hope he wouldn’t come back to it.
‘So how many times a night would you be getting up then?’ I’d boldly ventured.
‘Well of course as the only breadwinner it would be important for me to get a good night's sleep.’ He’s not a lawyer for nothing – he’s so good at evading questions. Next stop politician.
‘So not at all?’ I’d asked. My mouth fell open, my eyes wide with disbelief. Help, someone had stolen my fiancé and replaced him with a relic from the nineteen-fifties, who thought a woman’s place was at home, barefoot and pregnant.
Not feeling the urge to fight any more, and not knowing what else I to say, I decided to bring the meal to an early conclusion. I stood up and started clearing the table.
‘Look, we had a great weekend, Mark. Can’t we just let this drop for a while? Now’s just not the time.’ I’d said, my body language dismissive as I put away cereal packets and wiped the table.
Mark’s persistence had whittled away in my mind, though, as I finished getting ready for school. Why didn’t Mark think things were OK just as they were, and more importantly, why was he still evading the marriage issue? I couldn’t bear the thought that he felt there was something missin
g from our lives, a gap which could only be filled by having a baby. He is enough for me, I thought; my life is full and complete with only him in it, I don’t feel I need more. Although at that moment, some space and a partner who hadn’t got a mind like a one-track record would have been nice.
Evie’s kitchen is a mess – I don't think I have ever seen it without everything in its proper place, shiny and waiting – but today the house feels like a real home, buzzing with life, and love, and......... kids. I wonder if an element of that is for my benefit. No, I am just being cynical, I reassure myself. Evie is not trying to show me how warm and fuzzy family life can be, she is just having a fun day with her girls, a break from the daily grind.
‘It's made me realise how much I miss my girls,’ she goes on. ‘OK, I know they are always here, they never board like some of their friends do. But life is so hectic, we hardly ever get a chance to chat like this. It's amazing how much they'll talk when they’re distracted. It makes me a bit worried that they bottle all this up normally. I wish they would talk to me like this every day.’
‘Well they are growing up,’ I offer. ‘They will start to keep things closer to their chests.’ I may not be a mother, but I do understand pre-pubescent girls, and boys, pretty well. More than ten years of teaching has given me that, and far more. ‘Was there anything worrying in what they told you?’ I probe.
‘No, not worrying in the true sense, it just made me realise there are huge chunks of their lives I know absolutely nothing about,’ she replies. ‘Like the things they and their friends talk about. Weight issues for one, which was scary. They talk about ways to stay stick thin, even at their age before their bodies have started developing. I mean, you and I would never have seen things like that as a worry at their age, it's frightening really. I know they're in with a good crowd, but there's nothing to stop the most well brought up girl from becoming anorexic. It's made me realise just how I need to keep my eyes open,’ she sighs. I can see her thinking how her daughters are growing up and slipping away from her already, despite their still young age.
