Chapter Two #2
And the people I do still want to see on a regular basis are busy dealing with the logistics of older teenage children, most of which involves covert surveillance via tracker apps or spending interminable periods of time in the car.
(Who knew that part of the motherhood deal was essentially providing a twenty-four-seven, five-star-rated Uber service for a client who paid no heed to the rules regarding clear locations for pick-up, readiness at point of pick-up, or the number of mates that can safely fit into a Nissan Micra without your driver losing their shit / licence?) These are the mothers who, when they’re not trapped in their vehicles behind floodlit pitches waiting for training to finish, are instead sitting outside strangers’ houses at midnight waiting for their children to emerge from parties – windscreen fogged, thermos of coffee in hand, not entirely convinced that they’re outside the right house – assuming so because of the number of partially clad seventeen-year-olds falling out of the front door.
However, without knocking on the door and announcing themself as Jonathan’s mum (which would obviously be social suicide for Jonathan and he would never speak to them again) they can’t be a hundred percent certain.
It’s a fraught period of time when you’d really rather be at home in your dressing gown watching Real Housewives on catch-up.
These women are no longer available for social activities outside work because their evenings and weekends are now entirely devoted to the social activities of their offspring.
They are also, as is the case with my friend Farah, often dealing with blended family dynamics, trying to navigate the tortuous tightrope between ‘caring new step-mum’ and ‘you upset my actual kids and you’re dead to me, biological mum’.
Or they’re trying their best to cope with ageing parents: their multiple medical appointments, meals on wheels, broken hips and deteriorating cognitive function.
Fitting in a quick cuppa and catch-up around that lot is virtually impossible.
A few years ago, when my father was ill, a lot of my time was taken up with caring for him.
Juggling the frequent visits to my childhood home to coincide with the visits of a GP or district nurse, trying to ensure that my own mother didn’t fall apart under the strain of nursing her husband through a slow decline.
But that phase has ended. My father died, and it was terribly sad.
One of the most awful days of my life, even though it was what the doctor called ‘an expected death’, which apparently is supposed to make it better somehow. It doesn’t.
Now, aside from having to deal with Mum’s erratic romantic life, I can’t honestly say that my domestic burden is heavier than it used to be.
I don’t have a blended family to worry about.
Layla is increasingly self-sufficient, the bulk of household cooking, cleaning and laundry falls to me but it’s manageable, and Mum can organise her own meals perfectly well.
There isn’t really any excuse for my lack of social life other than my own inertia, and truth be told, I’ve become a bit of a hermit – self-aware enough to acknowledge the problem but not yet self-aware enough to do anything about it.
Hence the dilemma – what am I going to do when Layla leaves, taking her regular human contact and socialisation with her?
And until I resolve that conundrum, will I ever get a decent night’s sleep again?
The answer, it seems, is no. I woke up today to the tuneful accompaniment of my husband’s snoring, having accrued a grand total of three hours’ sleep. Less of an immersive experience and more of a quick dip in the plunge pool of napping.
‘Did you know,’ I said, prodding my husband awake (because if I was up then he deserved to be too), ‘that the average child has eight or nine cycles of deep sleep every night, whereas the average fifty-year-old has only two?’
‘Grrawmph?’ said Joe, unsticking his eyelids to peer at me.
‘And that poor sleep can lead to higher nocturnal blood pressure, which is a significant risk factor for heart attacks and strokes?’
‘Are you still working on that article about sleep apnoea masks for the ProChem website?’ he grumbled, rolling onto his side. ‘I can’t believe you’ve woken me up to tell me how important deep sleep is.’
‘Good point,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’ I continued to stare at him until he rolled back towards me.
‘What is it?’ he said, sighing heavily in the face of my determination to keep him awake. ‘Layla?’
‘Yeah. Just wondering whether we’ve bought everything she’s going to need.
One of the Facebook Uni Mum group posts suggested that all new students should have a heated clothing airer but then there was a backlash from some of the other mums on the group saying that clothing airers are strictly forbidden and that your child could be thrown out of halls, and possibly arrested, if they’re found to be in possession of one.
Then another mum said they’re encouraged to use the onsite tumble driers and the original poster said, what about the carbon footprint, and the original replier said that multiple individual heated clothing airers would have an even bigger environmental impact, as well as causing fungal spores from damp in the bedrooms, and that we should be encouraging our kids to re-wear clothes and save resources as much as possible, and the third mum said, you obviously haven’t smelled my son after he’s been weight-training, which at least broke the online tension and provoked a few laughing emoji responses. ’
‘Hmmmngh,’ said Joe.
‘And then a separate post the day before was from a mum who’d just bought their daughter a pepper spray to go with their rape alarm, but she’d bought it from quite a dodgy website and wasn’t sure about how to test its efficacy without causing significant injury to an innocent party – she was going to try it on her husband. ’
‘I bet she was,’ he murmured into the pillow.
‘And she’d got a Rohypnol testing kit from the same website where apparently you pipette a couple of drops of the drink you think might be spiked onto this electronic sensor pad, which apart from anything sounds quite labour intensive to try and do discreetly in a nightclub, but she said that without any actual Rohypnol at home she couldn’t test its effectiveness either.
And she’s wondering if the seventy-nine pounds she spent on both products was a bit of a waste of money.
And then one of the replies said that rather than drinks being spiked, the thing to worry about is being injected by a date rape drug straight into your thigh, while you are standing in a queue at a bar or something, and that there was no testing kit for that anyway. ’
Joe tried to pat my hand in a reassuring way. ‘Do you think maybe these Facebook groups have served their purpose, Hattie?’ he said. ‘Might it be worth coming off a couple of them? Especially the ones full of nut jobs.’
‘They’re not nut jobs, Joe,’ I said. ‘They’re just worried parents voicing their valid concerns.’
‘And scaring everyone else witless.’ He sighed again and pulled himself up to sitting so he could put his arm around me.
‘I know you’re worried,’ he said. ‘But Layla’s a sensible girl.
She’s not going to stress about how her clothes are aired, and she’s not going to take stupid risks when she’s out in bars.
She goes out to clubs and bars with her friends now and you don’t worry about that at all… ’
‘I suppose,’ I said, not wanting to admit to the nights I’ve lain awake worrying specifically about that. ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe I just need to chill out a bit more.’
He smiled, removed his arm and shrugged back down under the covers, happy his work was done, while I continued to sit bolt upright and stare blankly at the wall for another hour.