Calman - Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years

To Katarina

There was a Third Parent, Lawrence: it just wasnt you.

My daughter Lydia and I are in the formal wear department of BHS, buying her a dress.

My husband Peters sister has found the last available sane heterosexual man in London and is getting married again. Its going to be a small event no bridesmaids or best man or anything but were all going to dress properly. Peters wearing a suit, and Lawrence has been given one by an older boy up the road. Ive got a beautiful raspberry-coloured skirt from Reiss. So that just leaves Lydia. And BHS is the place for affordable wedding gear. Lydia isnt actually mad keen on dresses, but this is a wedding. You dress up. Right?

I immediately spot a dress in a lovely plum colour; you could cut out the label and say its Monsoon.

Isnt that lovely?

Silence.

Lydia, thats definitely one to try on.

No!

Just try it on.

NO!

For Gods sake! Just choose that one!

NO!!

Coming from a very minimal family, Ive been starved of weddings though not of divorces and am very much looking forward to this one. In fact, the shortage of family weddings was a reason I decided to have one myself, which raised the number in my life up till then to two. And Im damned if the issue of that happy union is going to fuck up number three. But she is mutinous.

If you dont choose that dress Im going to go home without you.

Not really an option, but these are desperate times.

Im going to go home without YOU!

We go on like this for what is probably only a few minutes but feels like hours until she grudgingly settles on a mid-length mauve number. Its not quite as classy as the plum but perfectly fine, with a little matching flower on the bodice and a bolero of embroidered net. Mission accomplished.

But we walk to the tube station in silence. We have the dress, yet theres no sense of achievement, or even relief just a dull numbness. Im like the Soviet Air Defence officer in the 1980s who saved the world when the Incoming Missile signal lit up, by not pressing the red button. I get no parade, no outward sign of anything having been achieved. Im just: not dead.

This overreaction to choosing clothes, for a wedding which is meant to be A HAPPY OCCASION, FOR FUCKS SAKE has thrown me right off balance. When we get home I make some tea, but I feel utterly demoralized. Is it possible that our child has reached that stage which I know is coming, but is a good few years off? Not yet surely it cant be!

She seems to be in the early stages of adolescence.

And she is seven.

The summer holidays arrive and we go to the coast. The kids and I are walking alongside the low beach wall, and from nowhere, like a squall, a row starts up. Lawrence has somehow got a stick, and Lydia wants it.

For Gods sake, I say, just get another stick.

But no: they must both have that stick.

He gets up onto the wall, and she follows. He holds the stick out of her reach; she goes after it. They end up fighting each other along the narrow concrete ledge, like Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) but with more whining.

Then they both fall off.

You wouldnt believe a seven- and an eight-year-old could make that much noise. People driving past slow down to look, and a nearby builder briefly puts down his drill.

After a whole morning trying to entertain them, I have totally had it.

STOP BLOODY FIGHTING! WHY WERE YOU FIGHTING? NO WONDER YOU FELL OFF THE BLOODY WALL! WHAT DYOU EXPECT?!

We-he-he werehhhhnt fi-hi-hi-ghting, Lydia gasps between sobs, while Lawrence just lies on the ground, screaming.

I pick them up, look for injuries can see none fish around in the linty pockets of my non-attractive seaside coat, and find a chocolate-covered mint, slightly bent. And because Im a parent, not a laboratory rat and therefore dont learn from experience I bring out the one mint before making sure theres a second.

There isnt a second.

And so they continue crying all the way to the sweet shop, where I buy them a tube of Smarties each because, whatever happens in life sugar will always be there for them, and take nothing in return but their health.

As a parent, I assume they fight in order just to ruin my day. However, David Attenborough says that young animals such as lion cubs attack each other as practice, for when theyll have to struggle for survival against predators. So it apparently has a purpose apart from to drive me off my head.

Not that I get this at the time.

And whether I take them to A&E, spend the rest of the day giving them treats or merely shout at them and cruelly force them to share a single bent mint will ultimately make no difference. They are developing in the way they need to. But, as I say, I dont know this yet. And if I did, it probably wouldnt help.

Mentally wrung out, I march them back and hand them over to Peter.

I thought we were going to take turns, he says.

We have. I have. Your turn now.

Still, tomorrow is another day.

Unfortunately.

Again theyre fidgety and bored, so we get in the car to go down the coast a bit for a change of scene. They say the next town but one is lovely.

Maybe its like the next-door queue in the supermarket or other peoples marriages: better because youre never in it. Whatever its like, it cant be worse than France last summer, when we drove for an hour to a chateau with a play area which was literally a slide on a square of boiling-hot gravel. But, setting off for anywhere with children and any kind of expectations is probably an exercise in futility; most kids, most of the time, just want to play undisturbed with their building blocks or cars, or at a push some wet sand, and you generally dont need to go anywhere apart from to those hangars of sensory assault by primary colours known as soft play centres, which they absolutely LOVE, and which for some reason I almost never go to without a raging hangover, or maybe I just acquire one while Im there without even getting to be drunk first.

We leave late, and Lawrence is already getting low blood sugar. He and I have that sort of metabolism where we have to eat six times a day, and Lydia and Peter have the other kind. Where Lawrences typical breakfast is bacon, eggs, toast and sausages, Lydia has half a mango and Peter just an apple because he ate in September.

Then, just as I realize Lawrence really has to eat soon no, now because he is getting psychopathic, we hit the main road, and a traffic jam. The other seaside town is only forty minutes away, but its already taken us half an hour and weve only gone a mile up the road.

Right, we have to find food! Its nearly lunchtime, I say, resenting the fact that Im always the one to have to point it out, and annoyed with myself because the only thing in my bag is a chocolate wafer which is technically Lydias, because Lawrence had his yesterday. And anyway its completely the wrong thing. Lydia agrees to share it, but it only restores Lawrences sugar levels for about four seconds before hes writhing in agony on the back seat.