much?
What is that lump on the back of the cat’s head?
Why have I eaten so many potatoes these past few days?
How does everyone else get through each day without giving up?
The only thing I could do to quiet my brain was watch a couple of episodes of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. These beautiful, yet strangely cold, women lived in a universe where life looked busy yet relatively easy (and seemed devoid of emotion, each face rendered immobile by Botox). I am sure someone at Mango-Lab, the market research company I worked for, would offer up a cultural context as to why this reality TV soothed me but I’ll just say that after watching an hour, I could usually go back to bed again.
‘I don’t want to go to nursery!’ my daughter howled up the hallway from her bedroom. It was a Monday. 5 a.m. Up and down the country, children were shrieking at their parents, and telling them they didn’t want to go to whatever childcare was lined up for that particular day. It always made me sad to see the drop offs, the weary stooped shoulders of the parents. The red rimmed eyes of the kids. In reality, nobody wanted to be thrust out of bed at some ungodly hour and sent somewhere they didn’t want to be – whether it was a jaunty room full of toys and tissue paper collages or a grey tomb, populated with young people hunched over laptops, the room pumped with freezing cold air.
I reached for my phone and saw there were already fourteen emails in my inbox. The temptation to read them was too much. I tried to ignore Bella’s cries for a few seconds longer.
MASSIVE PROPOSAL NEEDS TEAM – said the first. URGENT CLIENT QUOTE! IMMEDIATE ATTENTION REQUIRED – the second. CRAFT BEER CLIENT WANTS GROUPS TOMORROW EVENING IN SCUNTHORPE – the third.
The whole thing made me want to curl up into a ball. It would be a day of trying to bat these unpleasant demands away. It was like a depressing round of ping pong. The problem was there were only so many balls you could avoid. At least one would hit you between the eyes.
Also, since when had EVERYTHING been written in CAPITALS?
It no longer gave a sense of URGENCY to anything because it was used in all company communications these days.
The thing was it was hard to get everything done – having a successful career, a strong relationship, owning a home (well that was pretty much impossible), and having a family. And then on top of that, for me anyway, work had proven so stressful that it had kicked my reproductive prowess to the kerb for a good while.
The morning was a blur of soggy, uneaten cereal, then an alternative breakfast of boiled egg, which went uneaten. Leggings were put on and taken off.
‘I don’t want to wear tights,’ Bella said as I hunched over her tiny frame trying to wiggle her legs in. It was a bit like trying to get an octopus to stay still.
‘It’s cold outside darling. You need to stay warm.’
‘I want bare legs.’
‘You can’t have bare legs. It’s cold.’
She grabbed a fistful of my hair and I felt a sudden rush of anger. Should I let her go to nursery with bare legs? Was this a battle worth having when there were CRAFT BEER GROUPS THAT NEEDED TO HAPPEN IN SCUNTHORPE ASAP? I took a deep breath. It was all about breathing this parenting thing. And not smacking (though I had actually smacked Bella once and beaten myself up for weeks afterwards). And trying to be much kinder than you felt in that moment. I breathed in and out whilst she looked up into my face, puzzled as to why my lips were pursed together.
‘How about leggings instead?’ I said.
Bella smiled and wrapped her arms around my head, squeezing so tight that I felt my teeth would come out. This was a moment of happiness. Right there. I was trying to get better at spotting them but the moment you did, they flew off again. How could I bottle this emotion so it lasted the rest of the day?
Then a battle with a toothbrush and the blue toothpaste versus the orange one (one washed off and then the other put on the brush instead.) Then off to nursery and a kiss for Pete (we’d exchanged ten words that morning – chiefly about what we’d take out of the freezer for dinner that night). Then Bella was off on her scooter flying towards imminent death, and I was sprinting with my laptop in a rucksack on my back doing the tell-tale run of a parent, stooped stop-start run, walk, run, walk, shrieking – ‘STOP BEFORE YOU GET TO THE ROAD!’ Then alternating this with checking my phone to see if there were any new emails I needed to ping a response to, and – ‘STOP BEFORE YOU GET TO THE ROAD!’ And then more emails. Then some crying (Bella and I both).
On the train, I took out a small mirror and noticed with horror that another white hair had popped out on the bottom of my chin. These were becoming more common and soon I would resemble Rip Van Winkle. I licked my finger and tried to encourage the hair to lie flat but it wouldn’t play ball. Aside from the beard, I was okay looking. The thing is strong features do you a service as you age as it gives structure to all that sagging skin. It’s like a good scaffold. I also dyed my hair blonde every six weeks because whilst I knew grey was fashionable, I wasn’t sure if it really was or whether people were just being PC and were too scared to say it looked terrible.
I checked my inbox and it seemed that many of the emergencies had been resolved aside from the craft beer one, and I had a sinking sense that this would be the ball that would hit me and stick. I arrived at the office, which was eight floors up in a lifeless glass building in Vauxhall, and sat down at the nearest free desk. There was a lot of bustle, and it was obvious that many people had been in for some time. Mango-Lab, had changed a lot since I’d started back in 2003. It had originally been a company of ten, and now employed over four hundred (we had global offices too). I had no clear idea who most of the people were. On bad days, it felt like a factory; people came in, got their laptops out, plugged their headphones in, and you didn’t speak to them until they got up to leave (and then it was some trite comment about train delays or TV shows or dinner plans). During the day, you wanted to avoid making tea for everyone as you’d be stuck in the kitchen for thirty minutes sorting out the Lady Grey from the Jasmine Green and the builders with just a dash of milk etc.
I had the sense that people used to talk much more but this was now changing. When someone came up to your desk, the ideal outcome was to get them to shut up and go away. We emailed and texted one another as if none of us were in the same building.
Since returning from maternity leave, I worked three and a half days a week and whilst I’d like to tell you this arrangement worked just fine for me, it didn’t. I constantly felt like I hadn’t got a clue what was going on. There were new initiatives launched every two weeks. There was Monday Power Lunch (where an older person such as myself had to sit with a younger person and be told what was what). Wednesday Round-The-World Breakfast (self-explanatory – again the onus being on talking to one another and sharing our mutual passions for travel and eating diverse food types). Friday Fun Sessions – possibly the worst of all the initiatives as we were made to stay an hour longer and drink beer, when we (I) really wanted to get home after a long day spent collaborating, team-building and being generally enthusiastic. It takes more than a trolley laden with beer to shake off a week’s resentments and bitter rivalries. These initiatives combined with the heavy workload made life exhausting. You were either answering emails or being forced to bond with colleagues, which afforded very little time to sit in the toilet crying (though I managed this at least once a week anyway).
Still, the company was doing well. Or it was difficult to tell as one week we were told it was good and then two weeks later that it was dicey. They were hiring more people which felt positive. All of them unfeasibly young and fresh. These new hires contributed to the feeling that I was no longer at the ‘cut and thrust’ of the market research world. There were only a few of us oldies left now, and the three or four favoured ones had their own offices with proper heating, so you only spotted their grey hair flouncing past atop their haggard faces when