cringed as her son ran his hands across the glass-fronted staircase as he made his way down. A day didn’t go by where she didn’t have to clean grubby handprints off everything. As her husband Tom routinely argued, the minimalist decor that looked so cool in the interiors magazines wasn’t the cleverest idea for a house with children. But Madeleine sure as hell wasn’t compromising on comfort over style. Just because you had kids didn’t mean they should rule the roost.
‘Look, it’s not as if this is a new thing,’ she chided. ‘We always go to Granny Cooper’s on Monday nights. And we haven’t seen her since before the holidays.’ The two murmured something apologetic as they rushed through the hallway to fetch their coats and Madeleine turned back towards the kitchen to where Tom sat at the table checking over the kids’ homework. ‘Are you ready, honey?’ she asked. ‘Your mother will be wondering where we are.’
‘Pure nonsense, all this new-fangled phonics stuff,’ he said in a distracted voice, and from that angle Madeleine noticed a couple of new silver streaks in his hair. And the stress lines that had been eased somewhat during their trip to Florida over the Easter break had sadly since returned to her handsome husband’s forehead.
The four of them had had such a ball in Clearwater, swimming and kayaking in the gulf, taking endless walks along the powdery sand, and enjoying sunset barbecues on the patio of the beach house they’d rented for their two-week stay.
The frowning man sitting in front of Madeleine now was a million miles from the one laughing and splashing in the water with the kids by day, and strumming Willie Nelson tunes on his guitar as the sun went down over the Gulf of Mexico.
Back to reality.
‘What ever happened to just learning the letters instead of pronouncing the sounds?’ Tom complained. ‘That teacher of Jake’s has a lot of nerve too. Look at what she wrote on his maths homework from last week; he actually got points off even though he answered the bloody question correctly. All because he didn’t do it with the “new” standards. A load of crap, if you ask me. All these lazy pen-pushers in the Department of Education who know nothing about education making nonsensical new rules that we don’t need.’
Madeleine rolled her eyes good-naturedly at yet another diatribe from her husband on why the ‘new-fangled’ ways of learning were ridiculous – totally different to how they did things back in their day. A contrarian by nature, it wasn’t unusual for Tom to rail against the status quo, but times moved on and she was sure the teachers knew what they were doing. In truth, Clara was a lot further on in reading than Madeleine had been in her very first year at school. However, it was late and she didn’t have time to discuss this just now, especially since she knew what his next point would be.
‘This is why we should be thinking again about homeschooling them. Because of this palaver. I’ve told you, Maddie, it’s seriously worth looking into—’
‘Not now,’ she said, cutting her husband off, irritated that he seemed to have forgotten the fact that, like him, she had a job, so where on earth would she get the time?
But her ‘job’ – a popular blogging channel for mums that was rapidly growing in popularity and reputation – was all too easily overlooked. To Tom, Mad Mum was just a frivolous hobby and a means for Madeleine to entertain herself while the kids were at school. How quickly he’d forgotten that she was once a marketing executive at the top of her game, before giving it all up six years ago and in some fit of madness (the blog wasn’t just a play on her name) taking early redundancy to be a stay-at-home mother. Madeleine grimaced. She adored Jake and Clara but God knew (as did so many of Mad Mum’s fans) that she was never going to be a candidate for Mother of the Year.
Though to be fair, Tom was an amazing dad; brilliant with the kids (way better than she was most of the time) and a wonderful husband. He was senior management in a top Irish bank and related job pressures meant that she’d always borne the majority of the childcare load.
All well and good while the kids were younger, but now that they were both in school, was it really that terrible for Madeleine to want to get some of her own life back?
She supposed she shouldn’t blame him too much though; her husband had just become so used to the current family dynamic that he’d forgotten the fact that she needed something other than parenthood to define her. And Mad Mum filled that role very well.
Madeleine had originally started the blog as a means of blowing off steam while alone in the house with the kids all day, bemoaning the day-to-day trials of motherhood in a good-natured but deliberately non-mumsy way. At work, writing compelling copy for various campaigns had always come naturally to her, so this felt like a natural extension. And by outlining her frustrations and warts ’n’ all experiences with her new-found domestic role, it was, she supposed, an attempt to rail against the po-faced and somewhat smug ‘how-to’ guides for mums already out there, and she sensed an appetite for some down-to-earth straight talking.
Still, she’d been taken aback by the overwhelmingly positive response her witterings had received, and very quickly her visitor numbers and social media following spiked to remarkable heights. Ever the marketeer, she quickly realised that she had, quite by accident, amassed a captive and thus potentially very valuable demographic, one that admired and trusted her.
But it was really only when Clara started play school a couple of years ago, freeing up Madeleine’s mornings, that she’d taken steps to turn Mad Mum into an actual business.
And while Tom had always been supportive of her endeavours, over the last year or so, she got the sense that he was a little taken aback by the business’s increasing drain on her time as she set determinedly about securing advertising and sponsorship. Of course he didn’t yet have a true inkling of exactly what those efforts were achieving.
But her beloved would get one hell of a surprise at the meeting they’d scheduled with their accountant next week when he realised Madeleine’s ‘little’ media business might actually end up pulling in something close to his salary soon. Thanks to the blog’s burgeoning visitor numbers, avid social media followers, as well as recent TV appearances, her profile was on the rise, and the site had already pulled in some heavy-hitter online advertising partners.
No way was she going to cut the boots from under all that by going back to having the kids at home all day. In truth, Clara starting proper school last year and thus Madeleine getting her life back had been a godsend, and the additional free time the impetus she’d craved to get her business plan into high gear.
‘Hon, we don’t have time to talk about it now,’ she told Tom, glad of an excuse to fob him off. She loved him and they’d always been a great team, but there was no denying that middle age (and no doubt parenthood) was turning her once laid-back and easy-going husband into a grumpy old man. Such a pity that their next family holiday wouldn’t be until the summer; though she could help Tom recapture some of that relaxed gulf coast vibe by plying him with the odd margarita now and then, she thought wickedly.
After grabbing her handbag, Madeleine checked her freshly curled and newly lightened tresses in the hallway mirror, and once again tried to hustle her errant family out the door.
Hopefully the ‘bouncy do’ would hold up well enough for tomorrow’s TV appearance. Madeleine had only got the call from the Channel 2 producer immediately after lunch and had just managed to snag a last-minute appointment with her trusty hairdresser before picking Clara up from school. She wanted to look her best for her slot on Morning Coffee, a popular lifestyle show featuring an ever-changing panel of female guests chatting about interesting topics of the day.
Tomorrow they would be discussing Mad Mum’s latest blog – a controversial piece by Madeleine, which had very quickly gone viral, about why maternity leave was a Very Bad Thing. She smiled, looking forward to the inevitable public outcry and debate, something her profile thrived on.
While most of her posts about motherhood were often deliberately tongue-in-cheek, this was a topic she actually believed in wholeheartedly. If it wasn’t for maternity leave, and how it neatly assigned all the earliest and most