Motherhood.
I have been finding it very hard to write recently, as has been obvious, so I thought I would take a word at random and then try to find some memory attached to it. So this is today's.

When my third child was born I knew that this was the last one and if I was ever going to get it right then it had to be now. I had been doing my best impression of a model mother for some months when I happened to read an article in one of the Sunday supplements. 'Are you wasting your child's time of greatest learning potential?'(or something)'Here is a mother who's making sure her son has the best possible start'. And there was a large photograph of my acquaintance, Mary, bending smilingly over a toy-crammed cot.

I had met Mary because she had once been engaged, before I knew him, to a man who became one of my closest friends. They had stayed on warily amicable terms in spite of the odd circumstances of their parting. He had rashly asked her to marry him while he was still engaged to his previous girlfriend, who lived abroad. After juggling these two fiancees in an indecisive and cowardly fashion for some months he finally snapped and broke it off with them both. Mary appeared to take this stoically and only begged him to spend one last evening with her before he left. They had drinks and dinner and then wandered around the streets talking calmly and nostalgically about their time together. Finally he hailed a taxi and they drove to her home for a final goodbye. As she stepped out onto the pavement she collapsed, unconcious. At the hospital they pumped her stomach and told him that it had been a near miss - if she had made it those last few steps into her house and shut the door she would have died. And that was what she had wanted. In her pocket had been a huge number of @spirins and from the very first moment he had met her, right up until the ride in the taxi, she had been secretly taking them one after another throughout the entire evening.

Well - Mary had moved on, in fact she was now a well-known journalist though in a rather specialised field. She wrote acclaimed articles about people with exceptionally serious physical deformities. And, apparently, had become a baby expert. Her child was only about six months old but already had a full time-table of stimulating learning experiences lasting not only throughout the day but even at night. She had set up a tape recorder by his cot which played selections of classical music to him while he slept - and he was already showing strong preferences. I was totally crushed. I was doing none of these things and I didn't have the time or energy to begin. How could I have music playing at night, he slept in my room? Even though I threw the newspaper away its words lurked in the back of my brain making me feel inadequate.

Another few months passed and I was at a drinks party given by a social Catholic hostess. I was introduced to a charming priest, in charge of one of London's most fashionable churches. I mentioned that he looked rather tired, I supposed as one of the drawbacks of his church being so popular. 'Not exactly. Its ridiculous really but I am being kept up at night by this baby'. 'What do you mean?' 'I don't quite know how it happened but one of my congregation was talking to me about her problems managing her job and her child and she seemed quite desperate. So I said my housekeeper would babysit one afternoon for a couple of hours. And it has escalated to this farcical point where she is leaving the baby with us for five days at a time and just coming for it at weekends. Every time I ask her to take it away she threatens to kill herself. The ironic thing is that she's a journalist who writes about childcare'. 'Err ... is her name Mary, by any chance?'. 'How could you possibly have known that? Oh dear, I shouldn't have said anything'.

This is all years in the past and Mary finally got a full-time Nanny (in fact two - one for week-ends) and did not kill herself. But I never forgave those months when I felt harrassed and inadequate because of her articles. And her son never showed any particular aptitude for or interest in classical music. Although for a short time he was in a rock band which had some minor hits.
- posted by Iris @ 5/14/2004 11:49:00 PM comment