me I’m overreacting!’ shouted Jane, ‘I’m not overreacting. You’re the one who drove Dad away because you were always nagging him and who’s ruined our family and made us move to a hovel without indoor plumbing, but you say I’m the one who’s overreacting! Maybe YOU’RE overreacting by dragging us out here for no reason rather than just being nicer to Dad instead of BEING HORRIBLE ALL THE TIME!’
I was protesting that we DID have indoor plumbing and wishing I could tell the children there was so much more to Simon and me separating than me just not being that happy, when I was distracted by Peter wandering upstairs and collapsing dramatically on the landing because he was STARVING.
‘You’re not starving,’ I said automatically. ‘You’re just slightly hungry.’
‘I can’t find any food,’ said Peter gloomily. ‘Like, there’s literally NO FOOD, Mum.’
‘Have you looked?’ I asked. ‘Because there are boxes and boxes of food in the kitchen.’
‘Which room is the kitchen?’ said Peter hopelessly. ‘I can’t tell. There’s boxes everywhere, so how am I supposed to know where the kitchen is?’
‘Do you think it might be the one with the sink?’ I suggested. ‘And the fridge? Were they not any sort of a hint to you?’
Peter looked at me blankly. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I never thought of that.’
Peter wandered off back downstairs, in search of sustenance, and Jane burst furiously from the bathroom.
‘Is there a shower in the other bathroom?’ she demanded.
‘What other bathroom?’ I said.
‘There must be another bathroom,’ she insisted.
‘No, darling, there’s only one bathroom, I’m afraid. That’s sort of the thing about downsizing. You have a slightly smaller house. The clue is somewhat in the name, you know.’
‘But there must be another bathroom. An en suite or something. That can’t be the only one.’
‘It is,’ I informed her, as her face fell.
‘But there’s no shower,’ she wailed. ‘How am I supposed to wash my hair?’
‘Well, in the bath, sweetheart. Like people did for hundreds of years before the Americans invented showers.’
In truth, I’m not 100 per cent sure whether Americans invented showers or not, but it sounded plausible as they invented most mod cons. Luckily Jane was too distraught to challenge this statement, which made a nice change, as she usually likes to query every single thing that I say.
‘I can’t,’ she whimpered. ‘It’s not possible. I’m not THREE, to have plastic cups of water sluiced over my head, Mother! This is awful. Are you SURE you don’t have an en suite you’re hiding from me?’
‘Why would I hide an en suite from you?’ I said in surprise (though in truth, as I looked around the dimensions of the cottage, which could at best be described as ‘bijou and compact’, there was a small part of me also hoping for some extra rooms to materialise from somewhere, like the splendid room full of food the Railway Children found the morning after moving into their own slightly less than dreamy cottage).
‘I don’t know. I don’t know why you do anything anymore, Mother. You’ve abandoned Dad, you’ve made us come and live in this dump, and all you offer us in return is wittering on about how we’re going to get chatty chickens. So I wouldn’t put it past you to hide an en suite from me,’ she said bitterly.
‘That’s so unfair,’ I said. ‘I haven’t abandoned anyone.’ I bit back my words as I was about to snap, ‘Your father was the one who moved out, if you recall, not me. He was the one needing his “space to think”, not me. I’m the one who’s always here for you.’ But I managed to stop myself in time, as my mother’s voice rang in my ears, saying those exact things to me, reminding me how she was the victim and encouraging me to take her side. I would not have my daughter see me as a victim, and I would not, even if it killed me, say anything to make her feel she had to choose between Simon and me. The only reason I’d managed to stop myself telling the children about Miss Madrid was to avoid making them pick sides. Tears pricked in my eyes at the sheer injustice of it, though, that the more I tried to be fair and not make them take sides, the more Jane raged and hated me and blamed me for everything. Luckily she’d stormed off to find something else to complain about before she saw the treacherous tears. I wiped my eyes and sniffed ‘Strong Independent Woman’ to myself, as Peter bellowed up the stairs, ‘MUM! There’s TWO rooms with sinks down here, so how do I know which one is the kitchen?’
I trudged downstairs to explain to Peter in words of ideally less than one syllable that the BIG room with the fridge, cupboards and table was the KITCHEN, and the very small room beside the back door with nothing more than a sink in it was the SCULLERY. There then ensued a lengthy discussion about what exactly a scullery was, culminating in Peter saying, ‘Well, if it’s just a utility room from the olden days, why don’t you just CALL it a utility room?’ and me insisting, ‘Because this is a lovely, quirky, quaint old cottage, darling, with oodles of character and they have sculleries, not utility rooms. It’s all about the soul, you see,’ while Peter shovelled Doritos into his mouth and look at me in confusion.
‘OK, Mum,’ he said kindly. ‘We can call it a scullery if it makes you happy.’
I was so nonplussed at winning the scullery battle so easily, and fretting that it was because Peter felt sorry for me (in the old house, everyone but me had persisted in calling the larder ‘the big cupboard’ despite my frequent exhortations to call it ‘the larder’ because we were more middle class than a ‘big cupboard’), that I forgot to take the Doritos off him before he inhaled the entire bag.
He was still cramming fistfuls of Doritos into his mouth when Jane marched downstairs and announced that she supposed she’d just have to make do with having a bath, and where were the towels? I suggested that perhaps she could help with the unpacking for a little longer before buggering off to bathe herself, but was frostily informed that this wasn’t an option and her life had been ruined quite enough. I replied that maybe, just maybe, if she’d shown the TINIEST bit of interest in her new home, the lack of bathrooms and showers would not have come as such a shock to her, but this was met with an eye roll and a snort. I counted myself lucky to have avoided a ‘FFS, Mother!’
I’m still trying to pinpoint when the ‘Mothers’ began. When she started talking, Jane would call me Mama, which was too bloody adorable for words, then when she was about three and a half, a horrible older child at nursery made fun of her for saying Mama, and she switched to Mummy. Then it became Mum, but it happened gradually, so I don’t really remember when exactly she gave up on Mummy, although it didn’t really matter, because Mum was OK, and anyway, only screamingly posh people with ponies called Tarquin (both the people and the ponies) still call their mothers Mummy past the age of about twelve. But I was quite unprepared for the day when I stopped even being Mum and simply became Mother – a word only uttered when dripping with sarcasm, disgust, condescension or all three. To my shame, I think I vaguely recall a time in my teens when I also only referred to my dearest Mama as Mother in similarly scathing tones, so I can only hope it’s just a ‘phase’ and that she’ll grow out of it. Though I’m wondering how many more fucking ‘phases’ I have to endure before my children become civilised and functioning members of society.
It seems like people have been telling me ‘It’s just a phase’ for the last fifteen bloody years. Not sleeping through the night is ‘just a phase’. Potty training and the associated accidents are ‘just a phase’. The tantrums of the terrible twos – ‘just a phase’. The picky eating, the back chat, the obsessions. The toddler refusals to nap, the teenage inability to leave their beds before 1 pm without a rocket being put up their arse, the endless singing of Frozen songs, the dabbing, the weeks where apparently making them wear pants was akin to child torture. All ‘just phases’. When