My sister, devotee of a tres chic London gym, commented the other day that the yummy mummies there never talk any more about nannies any more. Is it something to be ashamed of now, the idea of paying somebody else to look after your children - particularly if you're not working? But she's right. Read any interview with a celebrity or high profile mother, and they all refer to 'my lovely lady' or 'my super Latvian/Philippina girl' or even 'my housekeeper'.
Well, I reckon that nannies of various shapes and sizes should be on the NHS. The preventative benefits, particularly against post natal depression, would save the health service billions.
After E was born I was exhausted. He didn't sleep through until he was five. My eldest, G, had slept through from 6 weeks. Nothing with E worked, and the lack of sleep came as a sledgehammer blow. So my mother offered to help pay for help when we had our third baby. No, strike that. Not 'help'. I'm proud to call her a nanny. A Night Nanny.
So this is how it went.
There are no medals for coping, Mum observes, a month or so before her fifth grandchild is due. She’s flattening gingerbread beneath a rolling pin. A family like ours, she declares, riddled as it is with neuroses, can’t afford to wait with folded hands until the house of cards comes crashing down.
E is hobbling about like the crooked man, poking his light saver at my weed-choked flower beds.
My mother should know. She’s mopped up enough neuroses in her time. To her the notion that help, paid or unpaid, is a luxury for the spoilt or a crutch for the useless is bollocks. Not that my mother uses that word. But because I’m older, finally listening, finally admitting she’s frequently right, I know it’s not only wiser but safer to seek help before my knees buckle.
Where are the new roses? E is doubtful. His tour of inspection is complete and unsuccessful, because he’s found not one healthy plant hereabouts. I look at him blankly. You said this family was riddled with new roses, he expands. His saver growls menacingly at our parched lawn.
And who’s going to thank you, Mum resumes, handing me another cheque before taking her grandson off for a day’s trampolining, when the yummy façade crumbles and you’re discovered foaming at the mouth in the baby food aisle of Tesco because there’s no more cauliflower puree?
I watch them gunning away in the topless green sports car she calls Kermit. My mother says that if you open the Bible at any page, on any day, you will find a quote that make perfect sense. As I reach for the phone to call Night Nannies, my newspaper falls open at a startling survey carried out by Net Mums revealing that three times more mothers now suffer from post-natal depression than their own mothers did. I’m not remotely surprised. I’ve suffered from enough depression and new roses to know how they can come at you out of the blue no matter how much support you have.
The survey doesn’t give cogent reasons, but they’re obvious enough to someone as opinionated as me. In a supposedly sophisticated western world supposedly liberated women are suffering not from their hormones and depleted serotinin levels but from the fracturing of traditional family support, the weight of their own unreal expectations, and the woeful lack of follow up care from midwives and health visitors who used to be round with their weighing scales if you so much as whimpered but now leave you to drag yourself off to some distant clinic if there’s anything you need to know.
I believe modern life has eroded our instincts. Why else is parenting such hard work? I’m lucky enough to have my mother ready with her ancestral hand-knitted shawl to wrap and swaddle my babies, but how many young mothers are taught even this basic custom? Not many, judging by the babies with the little flailing, grasping, loose, insecure limbs you see in buggies who just want to be tight and safe.
If it was all a matter of simply ‘tuning in’ and ‘knowing your own baby’, why are we floundering?
My instincts are reasonably sharp but my mother is worried that if I don’t get enough sleep with this new baby I’ll get depressed again, in that low grade kind of way that you yourself don’t notice but which by God everyone around you does.
At first I automatically demur, as any daughter does, however forty she might be, before a well meaning mother’s suggestion. But then I accept that she’s not suggesting a vastly expensive, wimple-wearing, 24/7 maternity nurse. (Though R visibly perks up at the idea).
No. Night Nannies offers a perfect compromise. Trained nannies come for three or so nights a week, take over the care of the baby while the household sleeps, and leave again in the morning. Eventually they train the baby to sleep through. Now, many of my friends are shocked that I did this. How could I hand my newborn baby over to someone else at night? Watch me, is all I have to say. He was only down the hall, for goodness sake, being fed with my expressed milk while I got a blessed eight hours. What's not to like?
I also wonder if my friends will think that as well as being cold hearted and unmaternal, I'm a lazy cow with more money than sense?
Again I say bollocks. Here’s some perspective. The Angel they send me, Miss Flower as E calls her, mis-spelling her name in one of many billets doux, costs me the equivalent of six months’ worth of Silk Cut. She costs me the same as a three nights’ break for two in Barcelona. Or a top of the range flat screen TV. Her hourly rate is less than most cleaners and a darn sight less than most mechanics or plumbers. Not too difficult to rearrange one’s priorities, then. And what I get is bliss incarnate that is a night nanny and a relaxed happy family who can get on with the business of enjoying our new baby.
When D is born, he initially astounds everyone by sleeping for five hours at a stretch. But on the third night, when I’m still in hospital after the caesarean and before Miss F has galloped to the rescue and my milk is meant to be coming in and R has gone home and the baby is crying in his Perspex fish tank, I’m sobbing into my kimono. It’s one o’clock or thereabouts, the dark dozy time of night when everything happens in a hospital. Door buzzers, panic buttons, telephones, yacking nurses, flatlining -
I stumble about in the corridor outside my side room. The swing doors are pinching up snatches of real life behind departing visitors. I could just slip through. How long before anyone would notice? How far would I dare go? Would I be warm enough out there and what would I do for money? What about D ? His little arms and legs flailing as the swaddling came undone. Tongue tight and quivering like a cat's. If I got far enough outside the hospital, down the road, I wouldn’t hear him any more.
Someone else would come to stop the crying. She would lift him and rock him, glance round for his mother. Maybe she’d snip the tag off his wrists and ankles so he wouldn’t bleep at the exit like stolen shopping. She’d tuck him under her overcoat, a dead give-away in this heat, the police would later say, like a suicide bomber. She’d scuttle under the CCTV cameras, maybe even bump into me as I lumbered back inside.
But he’d be gone anyway. Only a tiny dent in the mattress where his head had lain.
A thin, blonde care assistant comes softly in to my room. I’ve pressed the button for a midwife, but this woman comes instead. She has a badge which says Carol or Cate or something. After trying to make sense of what I’m saying, she pads away and comes back with a carton of some magic potion which turns out to be 4oz of formula. Heresy! I weakly remember the mantra that thou shalt never give a bottle to a baby who is breastfeeding as she lifts D up for a robust cuddle. But I’ve been attached for hours like some dairy cow to the standard issue mechanised breast pump which whirs and roars as if it’s generating power for the whole of North Hampshire, and still only a teaspoon drips out. It’s my age. I’m dry as an old stick.
And talking of cows, it’s now a bottle of delicious Cow & Gate which the lovely care assistant is rubbing sensuously across D’s lower lip. And he devours the lot. Then he sleeps. And so do I. And the spooky thing is that when I ask about her, nobody has heard of a thin blonde care assistant called Carol or Cate .
But there are more angels, because the night we come home from the hospital D refuses to settle. Weariness mixed with panic sets in as the mew rises to a yell and we can’t do anything to stop it.
We’re pacing uselessly about, wondering like first timers what on earth to do. Time was when my hand would have reached for the Contented Little Baby Book, but somehow the recently bleached hair and litigious bent of its author has stripped it of its homely appeal. No matter. Suddenly this Renault 5 rockets through the balmy May evening, up to the house and out leaps Miss Flower, a vision in skin-tight jeans and lip gloss.
Slim as a whippet, she bounces through the front door ready to party. She’s young enough to be my daughter but there’s not a second’s hesitation as I hand the baby over. She scoops D into her arms, quite properly exclaiming at his gorgeousness, introduces herself to my other two sons, agog with admiration (‘she’s fit’ mutters my fourteen year old as G was then), asks where the fridge is with the expressed milk, and informs us exactly how she plans to operate.
And operate is the word. Precision is also the word. Regime. Flexibility. Also routine. All from the get go. I’m excused of being a bristle-lipped sergeant major at the age of 42 as I was then, but this 22 year old girl? She’s not only agreeing with me, she’s insisting on all of the above. She may have been born at the dawn of the Eighties when I was a fresher propping up the college bar but she shares my Sixties-bred notions of discipline and order.
That first night she orders me up to bed. I don’t need telling twice. Bed is the temptress that constantly calls to me, but I never spend enough time there. Bliss. I trudge up the stairs. Some mothers insist on the night nanny waking them so they can feed the baby, but what on earth is the point of that? There are four other nights when you can totter about in the dark breastfeeding for hours. Why do it when your nanny’s here?
The bedroom shuts behind Flower and my bemused baby. Her reign of mercy has begun.
I’d be worried the children will end up loving her more than they’d love me, remarks one friend who patently disapproves of my extravagance in introducing a nanny into my weary life.
Who could blame them? I reply, studying my night nanny's list of do’s and don’t’s for the night she’s off. She’s miles nicer than me. My friend is looking askance.
Look, however gorgeous the nanny is, I'm their mother, warts and all. I glance about because the playroom of mummies has gone deathly quiet. They’ll always love you best, whether you deserve it or not. But what’s wrong with sharing the care?
They're not convinced. Alright, I try again. What’s wrong with admitting defeat? They put their coffee cups down carefully, and sit up. It’s always good to hear someone else isn’t coping.
Am I a less caring mother because I hand D over three nights a week to a lovely, loving girl who knows exactly what she’s doing? My friend shakes her head. So what’s not to like?
She shrugs, tucking a limp strand of hair behind her ear which hasn’t been washed since her baby was born four weeks ago. Your upper lip can be as stiff as you like, I continue, warming to my theme. And I add meaningfully, as my friend hoists her own baby out of his Apache sling for another feed, it’s not a competition, you know.
I don’t seem to be able to sell the idea to my friends, but then they’re younger than me. More robust. More stubborn. More foreign to the idea of 'help'. Whatever. For seven weeks we have the luxury of Miss Flower's cheerful arrival every other night or so, when she takes over and I sleep. In the mornings she gets our three year old up as well - as E was then - teaches him to dress himself and to chant the days of the week, makes him pieces of toast sculpted into MG BGTs, and brings me a clean, dry baby along with a cup of coffee before disappearing in a flurry of Chanel and a jangle of bangles.
What about sleep training? I ask her, when the time approaches. Isn’t it cruel?
There is no cruelty here, she says. You can have eye contact with or cuddle a baby or child too much, except maybe when it's twelve and you're embarrassing it in front of its mates.
Don't listen to the people who think it's cruel to put a child out to air, either. Putting children out in the garden in all weathers, incidentally, was a practice employed through rain and shine, war and peace, by generations of my own great-grandmothers, grandmothers, mothers and me, with resulting legions of frankly larger than life grandparents, uncles, cousins and siblings to show for it. In fact, so securely was I strapped in and so soundly did I sleep outside that when aged a month or so I didn't stir inside my little harness even when my Silver Cross pram hurtled across the lawn one particularly breezy day and tipped upside down in a rose bush.
Shame I never slept at night until I was about two, what with all the projectile vomiting, but that's another story – one which my mother still shudders to recall...
Anyway, back to Miss Flowerwho has not, despite her vigorous views, sprouted a snaggle tooth like Nanny McPhee. Or some of those stiff, stubborn hairs which have no business jutting out of a smooth young chin. In short, not the aforementioned harridan. She's still as young and pretty as ever. So she plants her hand on her hip, the hip that doesn’t have D balanced on it. Anastasia, she says, shaking her head. How can it be cruel to let him cry for a little while, comforting but not stimulating him, letting him know you love him but that night time is not for play?
How do you comfort him, I ask, watching her cutting E's toast into mini Mercedes.
Hold his feet. Works best for tiny babies. She hands my baby back to me. Getting the chassis and the Mercedes logo is proving quite difficult on this piece of toasted wholemeal. If you hold their feet they quieten down. They can’t see you in the dark, but they know you’re there.
Hmmm, I say. People say they should sleep with you in your bed. Never be left to cry. Be fed when they want -
She gives the plate to E and turns to me. Do you want your home to become Liberty Hall? she queries in the kind of kindly but stern voice my Maths teacher used when she knew full well I didn’t know the answer. Since when did the little darlings know best? Do you want the lunatics to run the asylum?
She’s preaching to the converted, but I’ve got to have a battery of arguments to relay to my papoose-toting friends. What about putting the baby in a dark room on its own?
She is getting ready to go, that dreaded moment when she will zoom away down the road. She slides her feet into her sparkly flip flops. What do babies get used to in the womb? she tests me. Flashing lights and noisy mates? They need privacy, just like you and I. Then the cuddles under the duvet in the mornings are that much more of a treat.
Sleep training starts when D is five weeks old. He’s not a fragile five days’ old newborn, and the process takes precisely a week, with never more than twenty minutes of full-on crying and that only lasting two nights. He can keep going on a good big feed taken at 7pm, whether by breast or more frequently by bottle. Hardly boot camp.
A clockwork household. That’s what you want, says Flower on her last day. I’m leaning against the door, wondering if I can let her tyres down or take her spark plugs out to stop her leaving, because it’s her last morning. Think of it like a Swiss railway timetable, she says, packing hairbrushes, lipstick and baby wipes into her minute sparkly handbag which I swear is like the carpet bag in which Mary Poppins fits things like zoos and lamp posts.
You know, she says, pushing me gently aside. When things happen at the same time every day. Everything else may be going wrong, but if you stick to what I’ve told you everyone will be happy. That goes for a fretful baby (D’s eyes soften as he gazes at her) as well as a fretful mother.
Miss Flower says I’ve got to walk round the house lashing my whip, I tell R later, when I’ve recovered from the shock of her leaving. My husband beams.
Monday 1 June 2009
Wednesday 20 May 2009
A faux pas in Lourdes
One of the things that worries me now that my MS is out in the open is people pussy footing round me, afraid of saying something tactless or inappropriate, dropping bricks, making faux pas, watching what they say. I don't want that. I want jokes to be made, the piss to be taken. No egg shells. No offence intended, none taken. If I want to take the mickey out of the drab, naff image of disability and old age (cheap adverts for walk in showers, hideous shoes, bizarre folding chairs, unflattering garments) and drag glamour into it, then I will. In fact, I'm thinking of starting up my own group for the disabled to militate against regulated mealy mouthed political correctness. It could be Disabled Against Correctness. DAPs. Cripples Hating Interfering Politics. CHIPs.
When I was sixteen I went for the first time to Lourdes as a volunteer with a group of fellow Catholic school kids. It was a very hot July and I had a very small pink suitcase which got lost at the airport and wasn't returned until the day we left. I had nothing but the clothes I stood up in. No toothbrush, no tee shirt, no shampoo, no knickers. Zip.
And what do you think I said as I climbed grumpily onto the coach , which had been waiting for hours to take us in to Lourdes while I filled in forms? Bear in mind that we were a bunch of self satisfied private school kids but in the bus with us were a group of people suffering from various forms of disability and illness, from some adorable Maltese boys with Down's and other problems, arthritic old ladies, one woman terrifyingly close to death from cancer, and, yes, some younger malades in varying stages of MS.
Livid that I had no anti-perspirant, no hair brush, no spare lipstick, I stood at the front of the bus, and groaned loudly to my friend: 'God, I'm going to be crippled without my suitcase.'
And what do you think those sick people did. Purse their lips? Tick me off? Complain to some minorities board for compensation? No. They shook their heads in sympathy, those that could shake their heads. Murmured platitudes for my plight, those who could speak. And then laughed. All of them could laugh. We bumped through the mountain roads and into the strange holy, totally misunderstood world that is Lourdes, with its constant prayers and processions, its crocodiles of wheelchairs, its gharish shops selling illuminating, flashing Our Ladies, its limitless hope and inspiration, and its miraculous waters and this lovely collection of malades spent the journey offering me stubs of lipstick, spare toothpaste, moth-eaten flannels and a lot of useless advice.
My week in Lourdes humbled me in every way. We worked like dogs pushing wheelchairs, sitting up all night, learning how to change catheter bags, attending endless masses and dunking desperately sick adults and children in the holy waters. But we had a ball. We learned to appreciate how fortunate we were, able bodied, young, independent, free and so on, but far more signficantly how fantastic these sick people were, who loved every minute they spent with us, our youth, our liveliness. Our 'favourites' would wake up each morning and ask us all about our drunken antics in the 'Brancardiers' bar the night before (named after the braces that certain special helpers wear with special loops to hold stretchers), and told us that they there weren't hoping for a cure. Just for a week away from their lonely, limited lives at home and for some social and spiritual nourishment.
On a subsequent visit, we all witnessed our own minor miracle, when my sister, who had a weak leg not ironically from MS back then but from a hideous motor bike accident she'd suffered a few years previously, was struggling to push a wheelchair up a mountain road. The lady in the chair, who had been doubled up with arthritis, said calmly to my sister, 'Here, darling, you're exhausted. It's my turn. Let me get out and push you up this hill for a while. ' My sister was so tired she said,' Ta' and collapsed into the chair, let the lady push her for a while, and then couldn't undersand why, when they reached the inevitable bar where the others were gathered, everyone was staring, open mouthed. As far as I know that lady's health continued to improve and I hope 30 odd years later, that she's going strong...
There's no easy way to describe it without sounding corny, but spiritual is the word to use abuot Lourdes. Spiritual, and an absolute blast. We all went home changed, if not cured. Not only had I acquired three boyfriends but had learned all about hard work, hope, and holiness. I also learned just what MS looks like from the outside, in its varying stages including end stages. That's why I have no illusions about how things could be for me in the future.
Would I want to go back to Lourdes now? Well, I don't think I'd cut it as a helper, at least not for the heavy work. And to be honest, right now, I'm not prepared to think of myself as a malade. I'm not strong enough to make that shift from able bodied to not able bodied, and I am quite honestly shrinking away from joining the ranks of the desperately ill people in wheelchairs or voitures or even stretchers.
Incidentally one of the dear friends I made while working in Lourdes was John Monckton, who sadly made the papers a couple of years ago because he was the banker murdered in his front hall by two bastards who were not being supervised properly by the Probation Service. I'll never forget a tipsy discussion we were all having about various holy things, and I asked what was the odour of sanctity. 'Easy,' John said, with his shy, snuffling laugh, 'it's Chanel No. 5.'
When I was sixteen I went for the first time to Lourdes as a volunteer with a group of fellow Catholic school kids. It was a very hot July and I had a very small pink suitcase which got lost at the airport and wasn't returned until the day we left. I had nothing but the clothes I stood up in. No toothbrush, no tee shirt, no shampoo, no knickers. Zip.
And what do you think I said as I climbed grumpily onto the coach , which had been waiting for hours to take us in to Lourdes while I filled in forms? Bear in mind that we were a bunch of self satisfied private school kids but in the bus with us were a group of people suffering from various forms of disability and illness, from some adorable Maltese boys with Down's and other problems, arthritic old ladies, one woman terrifyingly close to death from cancer, and, yes, some younger malades in varying stages of MS.
Livid that I had no anti-perspirant, no hair brush, no spare lipstick, I stood at the front of the bus, and groaned loudly to my friend: 'God, I'm going to be crippled without my suitcase.'
And what do you think those sick people did. Purse their lips? Tick me off? Complain to some minorities board for compensation? No. They shook their heads in sympathy, those that could shake their heads. Murmured platitudes for my plight, those who could speak. And then laughed. All of them could laugh. We bumped through the mountain roads and into the strange holy, totally misunderstood world that is Lourdes, with its constant prayers and processions, its crocodiles of wheelchairs, its gharish shops selling illuminating, flashing Our Ladies, its limitless hope and inspiration, and its miraculous waters and this lovely collection of malades spent the journey offering me stubs of lipstick, spare toothpaste, moth-eaten flannels and a lot of useless advice.
My week in Lourdes humbled me in every way. We worked like dogs pushing wheelchairs, sitting up all night, learning how to change catheter bags, attending endless masses and dunking desperately sick adults and children in the holy waters. But we had a ball. We learned to appreciate how fortunate we were, able bodied, young, independent, free and so on, but far more signficantly how fantastic these sick people were, who loved every minute they spent with us, our youth, our liveliness. Our 'favourites' would wake up each morning and ask us all about our drunken antics in the 'Brancardiers' bar the night before (named after the braces that certain special helpers wear with special loops to hold stretchers), and told us that they there weren't hoping for a cure. Just for a week away from their lonely, limited lives at home and for some social and spiritual nourishment.
On a subsequent visit, we all witnessed our own minor miracle, when my sister, who had a weak leg not ironically from MS back then but from a hideous motor bike accident she'd suffered a few years previously, was struggling to push a wheelchair up a mountain road. The lady in the chair, who had been doubled up with arthritis, said calmly to my sister, 'Here, darling, you're exhausted. It's my turn. Let me get out and push you up this hill for a while. ' My sister was so tired she said,' Ta' and collapsed into the chair, let the lady push her for a while, and then couldn't undersand why, when they reached the inevitable bar where the others were gathered, everyone was staring, open mouthed. As far as I know that lady's health continued to improve and I hope 30 odd years later, that she's going strong...
There's no easy way to describe it without sounding corny, but spiritual is the word to use abuot Lourdes. Spiritual, and an absolute blast. We all went home changed, if not cured. Not only had I acquired three boyfriends but had learned all about hard work, hope, and holiness. I also learned just what MS looks like from the outside, in its varying stages including end stages. That's why I have no illusions about how things could be for me in the future.
Would I want to go back to Lourdes now? Well, I don't think I'd cut it as a helper, at least not for the heavy work. And to be honest, right now, I'm not prepared to think of myself as a malade. I'm not strong enough to make that shift from able bodied to not able bodied, and I am quite honestly shrinking away from joining the ranks of the desperately ill people in wheelchairs or voitures or even stretchers.
Incidentally one of the dear friends I made while working in Lourdes was John Monckton, who sadly made the papers a couple of years ago because he was the banker murdered in his front hall by two bastards who were not being supervised properly by the Probation Service. I'll never forget a tipsy discussion we were all having about various holy things, and I asked what was the odour of sanctity. 'Easy,' John said, with his shy, snuffling laugh, 'it's Chanel No. 5.'
Tuesday 19 May 2009
I've published and not been damned
Various reactions when I finally come clean to my family and the world about the MS. I kept it to myself for as long as possible to get my head around it. My husband R knew. My rock. My sister, who also has MS, knew, as did her husband, and really wanted me to tell people straightaway. I guess the knowledge was heavy for her to hold without sharing it. But I wasn't ready to hear the words from myself, let alone anyone else, and couldn't face the weight of other people's anxiety.
But with a family holiday to Hope Cove, Devon coming up at the weekend, our bi-annual trip to our lovely all mod cons but rustic retreat which tends to involve hearty walks to and from the sea, and to and from the pub, I knew that my dragging leg and reluctance to exert myself would be noticed and analysed as more than normal laziness, and then it would all come out at the wrong time and spoil our lovely break.
So we told my parents three weeks ago. Or rather, I bottled it and asked my R to tell them for me. Just like I got my sister to tell them when I was pregnant with no prospect of marriage. They were, as always in a crisis, shocked and worried, but calm. Accepting. Itching to get their hands on some research, information, advice, remedies of any kind. Proud that as a family we tend to keep our heads when all around are losing theirs. Chins up. Best feet forward etc. Makes us sound like some kind of marching band.
They already do so much, fetching the kids from school once a week, having them to stay, generally giving guidance and wisdom, helping pay for holidays etc, that I really didn't want this to burden them for the remainder of their days. But while they're hale and hearty, in fact, haler and heartier than me, I can show them I'm fine, and I intend to let them help me all they like!
Once they knew, I felt able to go really public. I mean, into print. First I had my hair cut. It's getting shorter and funkier, the grey roots resolutely covered in a kind of racy red. Not for me an entire column devoted to the rigours of going grey. I intend to do it with scarlet highlights and maybe the odd exotic turban when the time comes.
I submitted, and had accepted, an article by the Daily Mail, printed today. They sent a photographer to take grinning pictures of our little family. And in fact in the end used a family snap I'd emailed them just to give them an idea what we all looked like.
Anyway, the article is just talking, much as I am in this blog, about my life and how the symptoms all started and the diagnosis felt and how important it is that I keep going for my young family, how I'm going to deal with it. And I was paid to write it! Hurrah! There's our Christmas holiday to Austria paid for. And twice hurrah! I now, after twenty odd years of trying to wriggle out of it, even being pregnant on one occasion (pretty drastic I know), have a valid excuse not strap my feet into boots that look like plaster casts for the Elephant Man and slither down a cold, hard mountain! Can just sit in a beautiful chalet hotel staring out at the snow and my loved ones, tapping on my laptop, slurping schnapps and swallowing schnitzel.. but you'll have to wait for that instalment. Suffice to say it's paid for now and in these crunched times that is a real triumph.
I showed the article to my immediate boss at work, also a very good friend, who already knew about it because I'd let it slip the day I had my diagnosis. As well as a barrister or two up at the Crown Court she also showed the article to the others in the office who had not known before and were great and seemed really moved by my story. My fellow secretary, P, said it inspired empathy and she couldn't get it out of her head. I was thrilled, and told her so. She has summed up what every writer aims to do, to affect, to connect, and to stay in people's heads just like the Kylie Minogue song.
Our office is up a very narrow, dark set of stairs that one of our agents said reminded him of a bordello he visited when he was an undercover copper. Now my colleagues are all insisting that I should let them trundle and tumble down them to answer the doorbell when it rings. I said now that I make up their 'disabled' quota they should instal a Stannah stair lift. Which gave rise to much merriment on the subject of how naff disability and old age adverts can be. You know, those adverts in Saga for retirement homes and bath tubs where you open a little door and take a bath still in your bathing suit. Or reclining chairs and beds that practically fold you in half, or presumbly hurl you into the air like an ejection seat in an RAF jet, and two for the price of one. The hideous shoes that look like Cornish pasties my sister and I already refuse to wear. The pudding bowl haircuts. The elasticated slacks.
Anyway, one of the partners, a shy gentleman not given to sentiment, said an incredibly sweet thing. He'd shed a tear, he told me, when reading the article. And though he'd noticed my slight limp on occasion, he said he was relieved to see that the MS hadn't affected my good looks!
And then a tougher conversation, with my 20 year old son. I had told him briefly on the phone last night, in case someone saw the article and mentioned it before I got a chance, and then as luck would have it he was coming home from London anyway this very day to go with us all to the dentist - eccentric arrangment, I know - but also what a fortuitous day it was that I was able to see him face to face. Yes, he was more upset than I thought he'd be. He's a cool dude, beautiful to behold, but a sensitive and thoughtful dude and more so the older he gets. And if I'm boasting about how gorgeous my son is, well, I'm usually the first to castigate boastful mothers, but this time I'm allowed. I don't want this to make a difference to you, I said to him. But it does, he replied. Why? Because it means I must work hard, get a really good job, in case I have to help look after you.
Then he offered, for the first time in living memory, to peel the spuds for supper.
I guess, motherwise, I must have done something right.
But with a family holiday to Hope Cove, Devon coming up at the weekend, our bi-annual trip to our lovely all mod cons but rustic retreat which tends to involve hearty walks to and from the sea, and to and from the pub, I knew that my dragging leg and reluctance to exert myself would be noticed and analysed as more than normal laziness, and then it would all come out at the wrong time and spoil our lovely break.
So we told my parents three weeks ago. Or rather, I bottled it and asked my R to tell them for me. Just like I got my sister to tell them when I was pregnant with no prospect of marriage. They were, as always in a crisis, shocked and worried, but calm. Accepting. Itching to get their hands on some research, information, advice, remedies of any kind. Proud that as a family we tend to keep our heads when all around are losing theirs. Chins up. Best feet forward etc. Makes us sound like some kind of marching band.
They already do so much, fetching the kids from school once a week, having them to stay, generally giving guidance and wisdom, helping pay for holidays etc, that I really didn't want this to burden them for the remainder of their days. But while they're hale and hearty, in fact, haler and heartier than me, I can show them I'm fine, and I intend to let them help me all they like!
Once they knew, I felt able to go really public. I mean, into print. First I had my hair cut. It's getting shorter and funkier, the grey roots resolutely covered in a kind of racy red. Not for me an entire column devoted to the rigours of going grey. I intend to do it with scarlet highlights and maybe the odd exotic turban when the time comes.
I submitted, and had accepted, an article by the Daily Mail, printed today. They sent a photographer to take grinning pictures of our little family. And in fact in the end used a family snap I'd emailed them just to give them an idea what we all looked like.
Anyway, the article is just talking, much as I am in this blog, about my life and how the symptoms all started and the diagnosis felt and how important it is that I keep going for my young family, how I'm going to deal with it. And I was paid to write it! Hurrah! There's our Christmas holiday to Austria paid for. And twice hurrah! I now, after twenty odd years of trying to wriggle out of it, even being pregnant on one occasion (pretty drastic I know), have a valid excuse not strap my feet into boots that look like plaster casts for the Elephant Man and slither down a cold, hard mountain! Can just sit in a beautiful chalet hotel staring out at the snow and my loved ones, tapping on my laptop, slurping schnapps and swallowing schnitzel.. but you'll have to wait for that instalment. Suffice to say it's paid for now and in these crunched times that is a real triumph.
I showed the article to my immediate boss at work, also a very good friend, who already knew about it because I'd let it slip the day I had my diagnosis. As well as a barrister or two up at the Crown Court she also showed the article to the others in the office who had not known before and were great and seemed really moved by my story. My fellow secretary, P, said it inspired empathy and she couldn't get it out of her head. I was thrilled, and told her so. She has summed up what every writer aims to do, to affect, to connect, and to stay in people's heads just like the Kylie Minogue song.
Our office is up a very narrow, dark set of stairs that one of our agents said reminded him of a bordello he visited when he was an undercover copper. Now my colleagues are all insisting that I should let them trundle and tumble down them to answer the doorbell when it rings. I said now that I make up their 'disabled' quota they should instal a Stannah stair lift. Which gave rise to much merriment on the subject of how naff disability and old age adverts can be. You know, those adverts in Saga for retirement homes and bath tubs where you open a little door and take a bath still in your bathing suit. Or reclining chairs and beds that practically fold you in half, or presumbly hurl you into the air like an ejection seat in an RAF jet, and two for the price of one. The hideous shoes that look like Cornish pasties my sister and I already refuse to wear. The pudding bowl haircuts. The elasticated slacks.
Anyway, one of the partners, a shy gentleman not given to sentiment, said an incredibly sweet thing. He'd shed a tear, he told me, when reading the article. And though he'd noticed my slight limp on occasion, he said he was relieved to see that the MS hadn't affected my good looks!
And then a tougher conversation, with my 20 year old son. I had told him briefly on the phone last night, in case someone saw the article and mentioned it before I got a chance, and then as luck would have it he was coming home from London anyway this very day to go with us all to the dentist - eccentric arrangment, I know - but also what a fortuitous day it was that I was able to see him face to face. Yes, he was more upset than I thought he'd be. He's a cool dude, beautiful to behold, but a sensitive and thoughtful dude and more so the older he gets. And if I'm boasting about how gorgeous my son is, well, I'm usually the first to castigate boastful mothers, but this time I'm allowed. I don't want this to make a difference to you, I said to him. But it does, he replied. Why? Because it means I must work hard, get a really good job, in case I have to help look after you.
Then he offered, for the first time in living memory, to peel the spuds for supper.
I guess, motherwise, I must have done something right.
Sunday 17 May 2009
My old man
It’s that time of year again, R says, clearing his throat hesitantly. Even in my marble-free zone I register what he’s talking about. I also know why he still hesitates to come out with it. Twenty odd years after divorcing his first wife, there’s a damaged part of him that expects me, like her, to throw a wobbly and send him to Coventry for a month every time he gets an invitation to have some fun.
It’s the reunion, he says, transported before my eyes to a callow schoolboy wearing Chelsea boots and an over-eager quiff.
One of the many reasons I love my husband is his devotion to having fun with his extremely jolly old mates. We all know that women are capable of forging new friendships right up to and including the geriatric ward. And women will share their secrets, especially anything to do with men, sex and babies, with anyone remotely interested.
But it’s a rare man who’s going to confide to another man that his wife’s ‘late’ so that they can suck their teeth like a couple of Les Dawson characters. And I doubt a man, however reconstructed, would summon everyone to gather round so he can snap open his briefcase like a dodgy geezer selling sepia prints of naked ladies and unfurl a sheaf of ultrasound images.
Fathering a child is always public domain. This applies with bells on with an older dad. A younger man can get away with scratching his head, pretending it’s nothing to do with him, or even strutting about like the cock of the walk. An older man, while forgiven for doing all those, will also be scrutinised with a mixture of amusement and fascination.
Despite being warned that if they want to conceive older men should stop drinking, smoking, having a life or wearing tight pants, nature designed testicles like the porridge pot that never stopped boiling presumably with the intention of men continuing to reproduce until they dropped. Otherwise why wouldn’t Nature have invented the male menopause? Perhaps older fathers were, are, still needed to pass on a different quality of DNA, genes full of genial wit, urges to wear Argyll socks and listen to Status Quo, and the ability to fashion spiral staircases out of box hedges. Or were they designed to fill the reproduction gap if younger warriors were all killed in battle or impaled on a woolly mammoth?
At any rate it may be why nature designed child-bearing women to look less like Ann Widdecombe and more like Pamela Anderson. Their enhanced contours and tumbling blonde hair are all the easier spotted by rheumy eyes and are guaranteed to ensnare all that wisdom, genial wit and topiary skills.
Perhaps it’s the lioness in me, but fatherhood at whatever age is sexy as. Once the novelty has worn off the announcement of a pregnancy and the mother is blooming away like a one woman garden centre, am I the only one who sees the old man grinning sheepishly in the corner transformed into a virile, sexy beast the pertness of whose bum deserves re-assessment? Who can give me a sexier sight than a tiny baby cradled in the crook of a great big muscly arm?
His sheepish grin might eventually fade, to be replaced (in a first-time father) by slightly smug expertise in fundus heights and prostaglandins (men are so much more comfortable with the technicalities). The thought it was all over but here we go again father will raise his eyes to heaven in mock resignation as he fixes up the old cot and rattles the keys to the new people carrier that has ousted his bachelor-boy MG BGT.
As for the older father. Well, once any misgivings about having a child at his age are both long gone and futile he will quietly put away his application for a three-year mature student’s course in nude photography or the planned sabbatical spent measuring vanilla pods in Madagascar. While the older mother is busy shaking the spiders out of her old breast pump, he will be tentatively dusting off the sleek metallic Concept 2 PM3 loitering in the garage. And before you ask, it’s a rowing machine, not some kind of sex aid designed to revive flagging libidos – as if! I mean, show me the geek who invents a gadget to quash the male libido, and I’ll show you thousands of grateful women.
But once the baby is born it’s not so much blossoming for the mother as dead-heading. ThoThose grisly shiny photos taken in the delivery room? It gets worse. Because back in the nest you don’t have the excuse of bad lighting and a hospital gown. I could go on about the milk-encrusted nighties, the bouquets left wilting in the porch, the lack of five seconds to find a matching sock or go to the loo, let alone wield a hairbrush or unchain yourself from the dishwasher where you’ve been hunched for three days tending to all those well-wishers.
So while you’re staggering about like John Wayne in your husband’s tracksuit big daddy will be wearing what he’s always worn, for good or ill. He’ll be leaping about like a rutting stag getting cups of tea/flutes of champagne for the admiring visitors whilst changing tiny nappies.
And why do his outward signs of exhaustion go no further than a rather attractive smattering of silver-tipped stubble? Because he’s a stud, that’s why. Yup, even if he’s 72. Oh, and because his brief, cataclysmic contribution to this precious new life wasn’t followed by nine months of constipation and varicose veins with the bonus of a two-day labour at the end. Unless he’s lost all his hair and acquired high waisted trousers he’ll quite simply not look, or be, as knackered as you.
And here I put my hand up and admit to being totally biased. Having not had the luxury of an adoring partner padding about looking like the alpha lion of the pride when I had my first baby, I relished and continue to relish the experience with my last two babies of having their father at my side not only during their births but at home afterwards, watching him growing daily in stature as he cradles fretful babies against his manly chest (effective therapy for fretful women, too), soothes them with his deep, rumbling voice, fills his digital camera with their bald, toothless little faces, spoons parsnip puree endlessly into their mouths while intoning Dr Seuss’s ABC of a Sunday morning…
Call this dead sexy? You bet I do.
But what do R’s mates call it? He’s about to find out, because the reunion is upon us and he’s unable to contain his excitement. He pauses only to unearth E who is crouched on the bathroom floor, in the dark. What are you doing, darling? asks Daddy, switching on the light. Mending my lighthouse, says E, putting the last brick on the top of the sequence of red, black, red, black.
Then quicker than you can say milk monitor, R is in his car and away.
He and a group of rowing cronies still meet forty odd summers after they last fitted blade to rollock, and reminisce over far too many Remy Martins in a panelled dining room somewhere in Henley. Here they look over the river, scene of some of their youthful triumphs, and pat their guts ruefully.
To be fair, they are all in good shape. If you recall, they all went rowing on their 40th anniversary. But the difference between R and the rest of them now is that most of his mates have been lucky enough to remain married to their childhood, or at least youthful, sweethearts and have begotten armies of stunning, successful offspring who are already airline pilots and vintners. Yes, the demographers would be proud. Many of his friends are already retiring and leading a life of six month cruises and second homes in the Bergerac region.
A shadow of my husband returns from his reunion. Even his eyeballs are yellow. Yes great fun, he says, sinking into the sofa. Wouldn’t stop teasing me about you. That I’m so young? No. T kept telling everyone how he’s been to every one of my weddings. You’re still pissed, I grumble. Now, what did they all say about the baby? And what else about me?
Old dog, he mutters. I rear up. What did you call me? No, no, not you. He lifts his hand in surrender. It’s me they were calling an old dog. You know, lots of back-slapping, leg pulling - Stuff about lead in the old pencil… He’s starting to snore.
Lead in the old pencil? Couldn’t they think of anything more original than that? He shakes his head. Only that at last I’d learned what to do with it. And what about me? I poke him in the arm. Did they say anything about me? You know, child-bride-mother of your progeny? Gorgeous, he slurs, head lolling sideways. I get a brief glimpse of what he’ll be like when he’s, er, a little older.
Gorgeous? I press him. They think you’re gorgeous, he confirms. And they think I’m mad. They’re just jealous, I say smugly, because it means you’re still at it. But he snores. And that’s all I get out of him for the rest of the day. Oh well. At least I can comfort myself with the fact that even on my most Dot Cottonish of days I will forever be the trophy wife to my husband’s sugar daddy, because I’ll forever be thirteen years younger.
Nevertheless, when R has recovered from his session of drinking like a 25 year old rugby player I ask him to dispense with certain tell tale signs of his imminent git-hood or at least keep them cunningly concealed.
He’s blissfully unaware, for example, that in an older man a friendly twinkle in the eye can very easily be mistaken for an evil leer. My poor husband is devastated at the news. You’re still allowed to wink, though, I tell him. Because that’s one of his most charming habits. No-one can take offence at a wink.
Next I warn him that he must never, ever, be tempted to pull on leather-backed woven driving gloves as advertised in Saga before taking the car out for a Sunday drive. Other motorists will take one look at those hands on the steering wheel and try to burn him up.
What other prejudices do you have about motorists, asks G, passing by on his way back to London an eager for some wisdom on the subject mindful of the fact that he very nearly ended his own driving in its infancy.
Stop calling them motorists, for one thing. Like holiday makers, it’s a horrible word only ever used by journalists.
Like the word romp? wonders G comparing the picture on his driving licence to the smooth young face in the mirror. Not a jot of difference, even after two years. As in ‘two’s company, three’s a sex romp?’ Or 'wed'. Or 'blunder.'
Never trust a car being driven at snail’s pace by what appears to be a single tuft of white hair. R is still intoning his advice. Or by someone too small to reach the head rest, I tell him. They’re either very old, or too young, and they’re likely to stop dead at any point, for no reason, and never get going again.. Steer clear of anyone wearing a baseball cap. He’ll be a wide boy paying no attention, showing off, chatting to his friends or listening to heart-attack inducing music.
Is that why they’re called glove compartments, then? queries G. His brain’s obviously got no further than first gear today. Who? Blokes in baseball caps? No, he says, those little lockers under the dash. To put your woven back leather gloves in? And when can I get a sat nav?
That’s another thing, I tell R. Anyone opening your glove compartment will know from the Tom Cruise aviators and humbugs that you’re getting on.
Who cares? he yawns. At least they haven’t got a pair of another woman’s frilly knickers in there. I’m like Michael Douglas, me. Because you have a much younger, sultry, buxom wife who’s given you two adorable children? No. Because at my age you don’t give a toss about what other people think.
Even if they’re saying you’ve had a face lift? G challenges.
Well, he’s comfortable, no matter who’s skin he’s in, retorts R. And anyway no-one could ever accuse me of having a face lift.
Status Quo fans never do, says G obliquely, disappearing up the stairs to put gel into his little brother's hair.
I care if people think we’re old, I tell him. I haven’t finished my list of age-revealing crimes. C had a real shock the other day. Who’s C? R asks. If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a thousand – Now who’s revealing their age? he laughs.
It’s just that C was sitting here and she thought she’d found some dirty magazines. R struggles upright. Impossible! She thought she’d found something kinky hidden under our stack of Better Homes Than Yours magazine. R’s all ears now. What she saw was this. I half unfold the offending page to reveal an array of vicious looking riding crops with handles set off with hand-stitched leather wrist straps.
So? R tugs the page out of my grasp. Well, I say, you and I know what these are, but she was looking at me funny when I came back and looked totally aghast when she said, Rapunzel, what’s a Finger Loop Anvil Pruner? R relaxes. I’ll have you know it’s extremely cutting edge. His shoulders start to shake with silent laughter. Go on, he said. What else did she think she’d seen? I’m trying to look prim. Large Comfort Bypass Secateur? Precision Power lever?
He reaches forward and snatches the offending article out of my hands. OK, OK, he says. I’ll keep my gardening catalogues under lock and key in future.
As well as not giving a toss when you get older, says R a few days later, fielding a brace of children wielding torches that need fixing when he gets home from work. You have to laugh.
As always I look on, dewy eyed, as he tugs on pyjamas, brushes butter out of hair and makes The Gruffalo talk like Grant Mitchell. Amazing, said the Gruffalo. Amazing indeed, how my husband can shed all the day’s stresses and make his children, and his wife, howl with laughter.
If you’ve picked one of life’s gentlemen you’re on to a winner and so are your sons. Sometimes I’m tempted to say they don’t make them like my father or my R any more. My sisters and I obviously adore our dad, but it took our grandmother to point out just what a hero he was. Discussing his many attributes one day when we were kids she concluded: your father can do anything.
I replied cheekily, he couldn’t go to the moon, Grangran. She took another bite out of her egg sandwich (we were having a picnic at the time, as one always is when one is small) and calmly asserted, of course he could, dear, if he had the time.
Anyway, men like him with old fashioned courtesy and manners are few and far between. But we have one in our house, and I hope to rear three more.
So I’m showing my age. I don’t care. Show me a woman who doesn’t go all fluttery when a man stands up when she enters or leaves a room or a table, or doffs his hat if he’s wearing one. And I’ll show you a charmless old bat.
Eventually I have to stop the hilarity when R’s goofing round the bedroom yelling I’m an OGRE in Mike Myers’s hideous Scottish accent, and ask him, downstairs with a glass of wine and rewinding to his earlier comment, why he has to laugh.
You remember how your mother treasures the time when she was mistaken for G’s mum, some years ago? he begins, chucking peanuts in the air and catching them with his teeth. I nod. She probably still could be. She’s not only fitter than most teenagers, she has the bone structure to make Charlotte Rampling weep.
I know, I know, he says. And wasn’t she testing her new carver skis at the time?
Yes, but what of it? I wonder. Well, he says, I have the opposite problem. Now, problem is a word rarely used in our house, at least not by my perpetually optimistic husband. And anyway they’re not called problems any more in political-speak. They’re called challenges. Or issues. I ask you. Even traffic bulletins use the word now. We are reporting issues on the M3. So what’s that all about? White vans and Nissan Micras discussing their difficult childhoods, with no hard shoulder to cry on?
So do I have the opposite problem, I interrupt. People think I’m a kindly old biddy and that the adorable child I’m grasping by the ear lobe belongs to someone else. Not if you stick to your own advice about always wearing make up, clothes that fit properly and only eating bananas on Mondays, R says, patiently waiting for me to let him get to the point.
What opposite problem do you have, then, my love? I challenge him. I’ve lost the thread. If he’s not quick I’ll be snatching twenty winks.
As he starts to tell me about the funny thing that happened on the way back from the forum, I muse that for a man of his age my husband is in very good shape. Why do you think I married him? And before you say it, it was most definitely not for his money. All he brought to this particular party in the way of material goods was a sawn off rowing boat and a carriage clock.
But not only is he blessed in coming from what Grangran called ‘good stock’ meaning strong physically and intelligent mentally, but he is kindness personified and could charm the birds from the trees. After all, he charmed me from my fourth floor hovel in Earls Court –
He has very few wrinkles, thanks to smiling a lot and to the rigorous daily application of Astral cream (as advertised by that icon of ageless beauty herself, Joanna Lumley). He has almost as much hair as Frank Finlay and it’s easily as grey, but I would shoot him if I caught him trying to shave his chest or reaching for the Grecian 2000 - another kinky-sounding cosmetic which resonates more with garlanded youths cavorting about in loin cloths than the restoration of lost machismo by dint, or tint, of touching up the follicles Burt Reynolds style
I was only going to tell you what happened at work today, Burt, sorry R, says. Work? I ask, opening my eyes again. Remember, a well as being practically perfect in every way we older daddies have to earn a crust. It’s not all fixing Percy’s cracked funnel and removing stabilisers, you know. Monday morning, I go to work, and gravitas descends.
Who’s Gravi Tass?
Do you think I look older in my suit? It’s my turn to sit up. It’s only polite. I’m still at the table. Au contraire my darling, I soothe. If anything, you look even more handsome. But way too serious, he says gloomily. I had these clients today, he continues. What did they want? I ask politely. Oh, the usual. He pours another Famous Grouse. Sober advice about the wording of a codicil and how to sever a tenancy. Ouch, I say. Yes, he says, ouch indeed, because it was time for them to hand a cheque over but before they did the woman started looking round at all my family snaps, and she pointed at the pictures of E and said isn’t your grandson the spitting image!
You weren’t offended I hope? I ask running a finger over his seven o’clock shadow. Far from it, he says. That’s what I mean. You have to laugh. I take great delight in showing them the misty photo of my trophy bride and explaining that those scamps are the fruit of my loins.
You don’t really say fruit of my loins! I shriek, and he laughs again. So I bet there’s much hair-patting and eyelash fluttering and follow-up appointment making from the female client after that, I conclude. Because now they’ll look at you with new eyes.
Ah, he says, finishing his supper. But what will they think if they see me hobbling along the street later, hugging the fence as I struggle to get back to my car. They’ll think I’ve been pretending to be youthful and virile all this time.
Never, I say. Your boys are living proof that you’re a stud. They’ll just think, I don’t know, that you’ve just had a rather vigorous session – I leave a suggestive pause.
Yeah, he groans. With my chiropractor.
It’s the reunion, he says, transported before my eyes to a callow schoolboy wearing Chelsea boots and an over-eager quiff.
One of the many reasons I love my husband is his devotion to having fun with his extremely jolly old mates. We all know that women are capable of forging new friendships right up to and including the geriatric ward. And women will share their secrets, especially anything to do with men, sex and babies, with anyone remotely interested.
But it’s a rare man who’s going to confide to another man that his wife’s ‘late’ so that they can suck their teeth like a couple of Les Dawson characters. And I doubt a man, however reconstructed, would summon everyone to gather round so he can snap open his briefcase like a dodgy geezer selling sepia prints of naked ladies and unfurl a sheaf of ultrasound images.
Fathering a child is always public domain. This applies with bells on with an older dad. A younger man can get away with scratching his head, pretending it’s nothing to do with him, or even strutting about like the cock of the walk. An older man, while forgiven for doing all those, will also be scrutinised with a mixture of amusement and fascination.
Despite being warned that if they want to conceive older men should stop drinking, smoking, having a life or wearing tight pants, nature designed testicles like the porridge pot that never stopped boiling presumably with the intention of men continuing to reproduce until they dropped. Otherwise why wouldn’t Nature have invented the male menopause? Perhaps older fathers were, are, still needed to pass on a different quality of DNA, genes full of genial wit, urges to wear Argyll socks and listen to Status Quo, and the ability to fashion spiral staircases out of box hedges. Or were they designed to fill the reproduction gap if younger warriors were all killed in battle or impaled on a woolly mammoth?
At any rate it may be why nature designed child-bearing women to look less like Ann Widdecombe and more like Pamela Anderson. Their enhanced contours and tumbling blonde hair are all the easier spotted by rheumy eyes and are guaranteed to ensnare all that wisdom, genial wit and topiary skills.
Perhaps it’s the lioness in me, but fatherhood at whatever age is sexy as. Once the novelty has worn off the announcement of a pregnancy and the mother is blooming away like a one woman garden centre, am I the only one who sees the old man grinning sheepishly in the corner transformed into a virile, sexy beast the pertness of whose bum deserves re-assessment? Who can give me a sexier sight than a tiny baby cradled in the crook of a great big muscly arm?
His sheepish grin might eventually fade, to be replaced (in a first-time father) by slightly smug expertise in fundus heights and prostaglandins (men are so much more comfortable with the technicalities). The thought it was all over but here we go again father will raise his eyes to heaven in mock resignation as he fixes up the old cot and rattles the keys to the new people carrier that has ousted his bachelor-boy MG BGT.
As for the older father. Well, once any misgivings about having a child at his age are both long gone and futile he will quietly put away his application for a three-year mature student’s course in nude photography or the planned sabbatical spent measuring vanilla pods in Madagascar. While the older mother is busy shaking the spiders out of her old breast pump, he will be tentatively dusting off the sleek metallic Concept 2 PM3 loitering in the garage. And before you ask, it’s a rowing machine, not some kind of sex aid designed to revive flagging libidos – as if! I mean, show me the geek who invents a gadget to quash the male libido, and I’ll show you thousands of grateful women.
But once the baby is born it’s not so much blossoming for the mother as dead-heading. ThoThose grisly shiny photos taken in the delivery room? It gets worse. Because back in the nest you don’t have the excuse of bad lighting and a hospital gown. I could go on about the milk-encrusted nighties, the bouquets left wilting in the porch, the lack of five seconds to find a matching sock or go to the loo, let alone wield a hairbrush or unchain yourself from the dishwasher where you’ve been hunched for three days tending to all those well-wishers.
So while you’re staggering about like John Wayne in your husband’s tracksuit big daddy will be wearing what he’s always worn, for good or ill. He’ll be leaping about like a rutting stag getting cups of tea/flutes of champagne for the admiring visitors whilst changing tiny nappies.
And why do his outward signs of exhaustion go no further than a rather attractive smattering of silver-tipped stubble? Because he’s a stud, that’s why. Yup, even if he’s 72. Oh, and because his brief, cataclysmic contribution to this precious new life wasn’t followed by nine months of constipation and varicose veins with the bonus of a two-day labour at the end. Unless he’s lost all his hair and acquired high waisted trousers he’ll quite simply not look, or be, as knackered as you.
And here I put my hand up and admit to being totally biased. Having not had the luxury of an adoring partner padding about looking like the alpha lion of the pride when I had my first baby, I relished and continue to relish the experience with my last two babies of having their father at my side not only during their births but at home afterwards, watching him growing daily in stature as he cradles fretful babies against his manly chest (effective therapy for fretful women, too), soothes them with his deep, rumbling voice, fills his digital camera with their bald, toothless little faces, spoons parsnip puree endlessly into their mouths while intoning Dr Seuss’s ABC of a Sunday morning…
Call this dead sexy? You bet I do.
But what do R’s mates call it? He’s about to find out, because the reunion is upon us and he’s unable to contain his excitement. He pauses only to unearth E who is crouched on the bathroom floor, in the dark. What are you doing, darling? asks Daddy, switching on the light. Mending my lighthouse, says E, putting the last brick on the top of the sequence of red, black, red, black.
Then quicker than you can say milk monitor, R is in his car and away.
He and a group of rowing cronies still meet forty odd summers after they last fitted blade to rollock, and reminisce over far too many Remy Martins in a panelled dining room somewhere in Henley. Here they look over the river, scene of some of their youthful triumphs, and pat their guts ruefully.
To be fair, they are all in good shape. If you recall, they all went rowing on their 40th anniversary. But the difference between R and the rest of them now is that most of his mates have been lucky enough to remain married to their childhood, or at least youthful, sweethearts and have begotten armies of stunning, successful offspring who are already airline pilots and vintners. Yes, the demographers would be proud. Many of his friends are already retiring and leading a life of six month cruises and second homes in the Bergerac region.
A shadow of my husband returns from his reunion. Even his eyeballs are yellow. Yes great fun, he says, sinking into the sofa. Wouldn’t stop teasing me about you. That I’m so young? No. T kept telling everyone how he’s been to every one of my weddings. You’re still pissed, I grumble. Now, what did they all say about the baby? And what else about me?
Old dog, he mutters. I rear up. What did you call me? No, no, not you. He lifts his hand in surrender. It’s me they were calling an old dog. You know, lots of back-slapping, leg pulling - Stuff about lead in the old pencil… He’s starting to snore.
Lead in the old pencil? Couldn’t they think of anything more original than that? He shakes his head. Only that at last I’d learned what to do with it. And what about me? I poke him in the arm. Did they say anything about me? You know, child-bride-mother of your progeny? Gorgeous, he slurs, head lolling sideways. I get a brief glimpse of what he’ll be like when he’s, er, a little older.
Gorgeous? I press him. They think you’re gorgeous, he confirms. And they think I’m mad. They’re just jealous, I say smugly, because it means you’re still at it. But he snores. And that’s all I get out of him for the rest of the day. Oh well. At least I can comfort myself with the fact that even on my most Dot Cottonish of days I will forever be the trophy wife to my husband’s sugar daddy, because I’ll forever be thirteen years younger.
Nevertheless, when R has recovered from his session of drinking like a 25 year old rugby player I ask him to dispense with certain tell tale signs of his imminent git-hood or at least keep them cunningly concealed.
He’s blissfully unaware, for example, that in an older man a friendly twinkle in the eye can very easily be mistaken for an evil leer. My poor husband is devastated at the news. You’re still allowed to wink, though, I tell him. Because that’s one of his most charming habits. No-one can take offence at a wink.
Next I warn him that he must never, ever, be tempted to pull on leather-backed woven driving gloves as advertised in Saga before taking the car out for a Sunday drive. Other motorists will take one look at those hands on the steering wheel and try to burn him up.
What other prejudices do you have about motorists, asks G, passing by on his way back to London an eager for some wisdom on the subject mindful of the fact that he very nearly ended his own driving in its infancy.
Stop calling them motorists, for one thing. Like holiday makers, it’s a horrible word only ever used by journalists.
Like the word romp? wonders G comparing the picture on his driving licence to the smooth young face in the mirror. Not a jot of difference, even after two years. As in ‘two’s company, three’s a sex romp?’ Or 'wed'. Or 'blunder.'
Never trust a car being driven at snail’s pace by what appears to be a single tuft of white hair. R is still intoning his advice. Or by someone too small to reach the head rest, I tell him. They’re either very old, or too young, and they’re likely to stop dead at any point, for no reason, and never get going again.. Steer clear of anyone wearing a baseball cap. He’ll be a wide boy paying no attention, showing off, chatting to his friends or listening to heart-attack inducing music.
Is that why they’re called glove compartments, then? queries G. His brain’s obviously got no further than first gear today. Who? Blokes in baseball caps? No, he says, those little lockers under the dash. To put your woven back leather gloves in? And when can I get a sat nav?
That’s another thing, I tell R. Anyone opening your glove compartment will know from the Tom Cruise aviators and humbugs that you’re getting on.
Who cares? he yawns. At least they haven’t got a pair of another woman’s frilly knickers in there. I’m like Michael Douglas, me. Because you have a much younger, sultry, buxom wife who’s given you two adorable children? No. Because at my age you don’t give a toss about what other people think.
Even if they’re saying you’ve had a face lift? G challenges.
Well, he’s comfortable, no matter who’s skin he’s in, retorts R. And anyway no-one could ever accuse me of having a face lift.
Status Quo fans never do, says G obliquely, disappearing up the stairs to put gel into his little brother's hair.
I care if people think we’re old, I tell him. I haven’t finished my list of age-revealing crimes. C had a real shock the other day. Who’s C? R asks. If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a thousand – Now who’s revealing their age? he laughs.
It’s just that C was sitting here and she thought she’d found some dirty magazines. R struggles upright. Impossible! She thought she’d found something kinky hidden under our stack of Better Homes Than Yours magazine. R’s all ears now. What she saw was this. I half unfold the offending page to reveal an array of vicious looking riding crops with handles set off with hand-stitched leather wrist straps.
So? R tugs the page out of my grasp. Well, I say, you and I know what these are, but she was looking at me funny when I came back and looked totally aghast when she said, Rapunzel, what’s a Finger Loop Anvil Pruner? R relaxes. I’ll have you know it’s extremely cutting edge. His shoulders start to shake with silent laughter. Go on, he said. What else did she think she’d seen? I’m trying to look prim. Large Comfort Bypass Secateur? Precision Power lever?
He reaches forward and snatches the offending article out of my hands. OK, OK, he says. I’ll keep my gardening catalogues under lock and key in future.
As well as not giving a toss when you get older, says R a few days later, fielding a brace of children wielding torches that need fixing when he gets home from work. You have to laugh.
As always I look on, dewy eyed, as he tugs on pyjamas, brushes butter out of hair and makes The Gruffalo talk like Grant Mitchell. Amazing, said the Gruffalo. Amazing indeed, how my husband can shed all the day’s stresses and make his children, and his wife, howl with laughter.
If you’ve picked one of life’s gentlemen you’re on to a winner and so are your sons. Sometimes I’m tempted to say they don’t make them like my father or my R any more. My sisters and I obviously adore our dad, but it took our grandmother to point out just what a hero he was. Discussing his many attributes one day when we were kids she concluded: your father can do anything.
I replied cheekily, he couldn’t go to the moon, Grangran. She took another bite out of her egg sandwich (we were having a picnic at the time, as one always is when one is small) and calmly asserted, of course he could, dear, if he had the time.
Anyway, men like him with old fashioned courtesy and manners are few and far between. But we have one in our house, and I hope to rear three more.
So I’m showing my age. I don’t care. Show me a woman who doesn’t go all fluttery when a man stands up when she enters or leaves a room or a table, or doffs his hat if he’s wearing one. And I’ll show you a charmless old bat.
Eventually I have to stop the hilarity when R’s goofing round the bedroom yelling I’m an OGRE in Mike Myers’s hideous Scottish accent, and ask him, downstairs with a glass of wine and rewinding to his earlier comment, why he has to laugh.
You remember how your mother treasures the time when she was mistaken for G’s mum, some years ago? he begins, chucking peanuts in the air and catching them with his teeth. I nod. She probably still could be. She’s not only fitter than most teenagers, she has the bone structure to make Charlotte Rampling weep.
I know, I know, he says. And wasn’t she testing her new carver skis at the time?
Yes, but what of it? I wonder. Well, he says, I have the opposite problem. Now, problem is a word rarely used in our house, at least not by my perpetually optimistic husband. And anyway they’re not called problems any more in political-speak. They’re called challenges. Or issues. I ask you. Even traffic bulletins use the word now. We are reporting issues on the M3. So what’s that all about? White vans and Nissan Micras discussing their difficult childhoods, with no hard shoulder to cry on?
So do I have the opposite problem, I interrupt. People think I’m a kindly old biddy and that the adorable child I’m grasping by the ear lobe belongs to someone else. Not if you stick to your own advice about always wearing make up, clothes that fit properly and only eating bananas on Mondays, R says, patiently waiting for me to let him get to the point.
What opposite problem do you have, then, my love? I challenge him. I’ve lost the thread. If he’s not quick I’ll be snatching twenty winks.
As he starts to tell me about the funny thing that happened on the way back from the forum, I muse that for a man of his age my husband is in very good shape. Why do you think I married him? And before you say it, it was most definitely not for his money. All he brought to this particular party in the way of material goods was a sawn off rowing boat and a carriage clock.
But not only is he blessed in coming from what Grangran called ‘good stock’ meaning strong physically and intelligent mentally, but he is kindness personified and could charm the birds from the trees. After all, he charmed me from my fourth floor hovel in Earls Court –
He has very few wrinkles, thanks to smiling a lot and to the rigorous daily application of Astral cream (as advertised by that icon of ageless beauty herself, Joanna Lumley). He has almost as much hair as Frank Finlay and it’s easily as grey, but I would shoot him if I caught him trying to shave his chest or reaching for the Grecian 2000 - another kinky-sounding cosmetic which resonates more with garlanded youths cavorting about in loin cloths than the restoration of lost machismo by dint, or tint, of touching up the follicles Burt Reynolds style
I was only going to tell you what happened at work today, Burt, sorry R, says. Work? I ask, opening my eyes again. Remember, a well as being practically perfect in every way we older daddies have to earn a crust. It’s not all fixing Percy’s cracked funnel and removing stabilisers, you know. Monday morning, I go to work, and gravitas descends.
Who’s Gravi Tass?
Do you think I look older in my suit? It’s my turn to sit up. It’s only polite. I’m still at the table. Au contraire my darling, I soothe. If anything, you look even more handsome. But way too serious, he says gloomily. I had these clients today, he continues. What did they want? I ask politely. Oh, the usual. He pours another Famous Grouse. Sober advice about the wording of a codicil and how to sever a tenancy. Ouch, I say. Yes, he says, ouch indeed, because it was time for them to hand a cheque over but before they did the woman started looking round at all my family snaps, and she pointed at the pictures of E and said isn’t your grandson the spitting image!
You weren’t offended I hope? I ask running a finger over his seven o’clock shadow. Far from it, he says. That’s what I mean. You have to laugh. I take great delight in showing them the misty photo of my trophy bride and explaining that those scamps are the fruit of my loins.
You don’t really say fruit of my loins! I shriek, and he laughs again. So I bet there’s much hair-patting and eyelash fluttering and follow-up appointment making from the female client after that, I conclude. Because now they’ll look at you with new eyes.
Ah, he says, finishing his supper. But what will they think if they see me hobbling along the street later, hugging the fence as I struggle to get back to my car. They’ll think I’ve been pretending to be youthful and virile all this time.
Never, I say. Your boys are living proof that you’re a stud. They’ll just think, I don’t know, that you’ve just had a rather vigorous session – I leave a suggestive pause.
Yeah, he groans. With my chiropractor.
You know you're old when
...policemen, doctors, plumbers look young enough not only to be your ex boyfriends (and I really did meet the little brother of an old boyfriend while giving birth the first time - literally he was in the hospital, between my knees, breaking my waters., being a senior registrar..) but fresh faced enough to be your sons. But what's going on when headmasters look young enough to taken across your knee... ?
R returns to his old boarding school for a reunion with his mates which after much ribald emailing and liaising from places as far away as Vancouver involves getting together a rowing eight and racing, in front of an entire boat house full of boys and staff and posh parents, against the current, eighteen year old, strapping, handsome, scrumptious crew. Not that I have eyes for anyone other than my well preserved husband and his pretty prime peers, of course, their silvery hair glinting in the sunlight, arthritic knees creaking up and down the slide, overworked muscles heaving as they row away perfectly in time and, eh, what’s this, actually pull ahead of the whippersnappers in the other boat? No indeed, I’m busting with pride as they come off the water, having come second after all, and I dash about as the oldsters’ official photographer to catch this day digitally forever.
Anyway, the race only lasts about six minutes thank the lord and it’s into the boat house for beer and burgers. And speeches, but they all relate to the current triumphs and honour and glory of the school and R and his mates are far more interested in reminiscing about being caned, making apple pie beds and climbing over the walls to visit the girls from the school down the road. Funny to think how all those beehive toting, white plastic boots wearing, mini skirt daring floozies must now be sturdy matrons with grey bobs and puffa jackets.
This particular sturdy matron is actually wearing sparkly harem slippers today and white linen trousers as it’s a hot day. And I’m afraid I’ve heard all those anecdotes before. So after chatting to a very posh mummy of about my age who has a hunt ball to go but weirdly has braces all over her teeth (well, we're all in search of eternal youth, aren't we?), I accept a drink from a handsome young man in a blazer and tell him about my own sons and their current school and how their father longs for the dosh that they may follow in his footsteps to his alma mater. The young man waves his arm around the chic wooden boat house and the even chicer parents and says, ‘Well, they have bursaries here, you know.’ For the sons of impoverished old boys? ‘Always worth a try, especially if your boys have other skills and talents.’ I stroke my chin flirtatiously. ‘Any other ways I could try to charm them into giving us free places?’ I chortle. ‘Raid the headmaster’s piggy bank, perhaps?’ He ponders this for a while, smiles, fills my glass with Pimm’s, looks at me long and slow in the eye, and says, ‘Well, why don’t you email me next term and I’ll see what’s in my piggy bank?’
R returns to his old boarding school for a reunion with his mates which after much ribald emailing and liaising from places as far away as Vancouver involves getting together a rowing eight and racing, in front of an entire boat house full of boys and staff and posh parents, against the current, eighteen year old, strapping, handsome, scrumptious crew. Not that I have eyes for anyone other than my well preserved husband and his pretty prime peers, of course, their silvery hair glinting in the sunlight, arthritic knees creaking up and down the slide, overworked muscles heaving as they row away perfectly in time and, eh, what’s this, actually pull ahead of the whippersnappers in the other boat? No indeed, I’m busting with pride as they come off the water, having come second after all, and I dash about as the oldsters’ official photographer to catch this day digitally forever.
Anyway, the race only lasts about six minutes thank the lord and it’s into the boat house for beer and burgers. And speeches, but they all relate to the current triumphs and honour and glory of the school and R and his mates are far more interested in reminiscing about being caned, making apple pie beds and climbing over the walls to visit the girls from the school down the road. Funny to think how all those beehive toting, white plastic boots wearing, mini skirt daring floozies must now be sturdy matrons with grey bobs and puffa jackets.
This particular sturdy matron is actually wearing sparkly harem slippers today and white linen trousers as it’s a hot day. And I’m afraid I’ve heard all those anecdotes before. So after chatting to a very posh mummy of about my age who has a hunt ball to go but weirdly has braces all over her teeth (well, we're all in search of eternal youth, aren't we?), I accept a drink from a handsome young man in a blazer and tell him about my own sons and their current school and how their father longs for the dosh that they may follow in his footsteps to his alma mater. The young man waves his arm around the chic wooden boat house and the even chicer parents and says, ‘Well, they have bursaries here, you know.’ For the sons of impoverished old boys? ‘Always worth a try, especially if your boys have other skills and talents.’ I stroke my chin flirtatiously. ‘Any other ways I could try to charm them into giving us free places?’ I chortle. ‘Raid the headmaster’s piggy bank, perhaps?’ He ponders this for a while, smiles, fills my glass with Pimm’s, looks at me long and slow in the eye, and says, ‘Well, why don’t you email me next term and I’ll see what’s in my piggy bank?’
Death of a 19 year old
About a year ago my phone and my mobile went at the same time. Something/someone needed to speak to me. Soon it’s the anniversary of a terrible tragedy that well and truly puts my situation into perspective. It was G. Sounding very low. He told me one of his best friends had died. And when he told me which one, the breath was knocked out of me. Now, many enormous feet have passed through my door. His friends are cute enough but mostly fairly monosyllabic and usually concealed behind shaggy fringes, stubble or Alice Cooper-style makeup. Often they have the same names, too. But this guy, R, stood out, not only because he had that hair style that looks as if he’s pressed an iron to both sides of his head - upwards - but because he was adorable, chatty, eccentric, highly strung, vague and funny. He and G shared a room in a dodgy lodging house for a while during their foundation year, and he lived with us for a few days when doing his A levels which is when we got to know him over pleasant supper chats in the garden every evening. He used to play in a band, and that’s where G went that sad day, to a kind of candle vigil outside the club where he used to play. Organised by his mum, who I never met but who must have been then, and must be now, nearing the anniversary, in tiny little bits.
What do you say? The details are sketchy but he had a freak fall from a building during an adventure abroad. My own shock and sadness was exacerbated as I thought of all those gorgeous young people thinking of their departed friend and trying to get their heads round the fact that he won't be back. Driving past the college, walking up the High Street, I kept seeing boys who look like him, driving, walking, mumbling into mobiles. How would it be if that was G I kept seeing? The death of a child is the death of the future, isn’t it, for the parents? I grieve for R’s poor parents, his little sister, his band mates, all aching terribly, still.
I came close to losing G ten minutes after he passed his driving test. He took his car, three mates, went out into the countryside and turned his car upside down in a field. Again, sketchy, but he swears he wasn’t speeding and the deserted (thank God) country road was very wet. There were guardian angels flapping away like crazy that day, because not one of them had a scratch. The iPod, which had been blaring away, was silent as they hung upside down by their seatbelts. Then, spookily, classic FM, which none of them ever listen to, came on. History doesn’t relate what it was playing, but I’m convinced it was something very, very holy.
But what to say, think, when a young, decent person dies? All the holy stuff about giving thanks for what time we did have with him. That the memories are mostly good. That life is precious, it needs to be treasured, our loved ones need to be hugged close from time to time (certainly every day before the sun goes down). That we need,however young or old, to look at our own lives and try to live them that much better?
G came back very quiet and sober from that vigil, and tells me he doesn't want to talk. It didn't stop me bursting into tears time and again over those next few weeks, as I envisagedthe poor boy’s last moments, his parents’ horror when the news broke, their empty future, my own future if it happened to me. G didn't let me, and he still doesn't really talk about it a year later, but if you’re comforting someone else, you comfort yourself.
The last time I saw his mate R it was one of those chaotic Christmas periods when people came and went. I called him ‘darling’ absent mindedly, gathering him into the general melee of my family. I’m so glad that was the last thing I said to him. And he laughed.
What do you say? The details are sketchy but he had a freak fall from a building during an adventure abroad. My own shock and sadness was exacerbated as I thought of all those gorgeous young people thinking of their departed friend and trying to get their heads round the fact that he won't be back. Driving past the college, walking up the High Street, I kept seeing boys who look like him, driving, walking, mumbling into mobiles. How would it be if that was G I kept seeing? The death of a child is the death of the future, isn’t it, for the parents? I grieve for R’s poor parents, his little sister, his band mates, all aching terribly, still.
I came close to losing G ten minutes after he passed his driving test. He took his car, three mates, went out into the countryside and turned his car upside down in a field. Again, sketchy, but he swears he wasn’t speeding and the deserted (thank God) country road was very wet. There were guardian angels flapping away like crazy that day, because not one of them had a scratch. The iPod, which had been blaring away, was silent as they hung upside down by their seatbelts. Then, spookily, classic FM, which none of them ever listen to, came on. History doesn’t relate what it was playing, but I’m convinced it was something very, very holy.
But what to say, think, when a young, decent person dies? All the holy stuff about giving thanks for what time we did have with him. That the memories are mostly good. That life is precious, it needs to be treasured, our loved ones need to be hugged close from time to time (certainly every day before the sun goes down). That we need,however young or old, to look at our own lives and try to live them that much better?
G came back very quiet and sober from that vigil, and tells me he doesn't want to talk. It didn't stop me bursting into tears time and again over those next few weeks, as I envisagedthe poor boy’s last moments, his parents’ horror when the news broke, their empty future, my own future if it happened to me. G didn't let me, and he still doesn't really talk about it a year later, but if you’re comforting someone else, you comfort yourself.
The last time I saw his mate R it was one of those chaotic Christmas periods when people came and went. I called him ‘darling’ absent mindedly, gathering him into the general melee of my family. I’m so glad that was the last thing I said to him. And he laughed.
Saturday 16 May 2009
Diagosis Day
I know I'm jumping about all over the place. I wanted to start at the beginning, but as I've said, this diagnosis plonked itself there just when we were busy thinking that being older parents was the biggest challenge we faced. So much so that I had started a book all about older parents and why you should never be one.
This diagnosis presents fresh issues that would never cross your average yummy mummy's expensively highlighted head.. In our world modelling mini Boden and baking perfect cup cakes for the school fete comes a very poor second to wondering whether there's time for plastic surgery before the next quiz night or if you'll be doddering, ill or dead when your littlest kids graduate from university.
And yes, everything does revolve round the kids, doesn't it. On 10th September 2008 at about 10.30am I was given the diagnosis by a neurologist. I refuse to call him 'my ' neurologist in the manner of sick people who go all possessive over their medics. When I got back from the hospital I phoned my sister, who also has MS but of the relapsing remitting variety (mine is progressive - God, how scary is that?) I had already let slip to her that something was up and having awakened her anxieties (and she's not one to leave things at the hint stage) I had to tell her the outcome of my hospital appointment. But I decided not to tell anyone else for the time being. I didn't even want to tell my own husband. I think I thought that if I pulled the shell tightly enough around me, and not actually utter the words, it would all go away.
Having told my sister, I then don't want to talk about it any more. I think she feels shut out, but that's how it's going to be for the moment. My way of dealing with it.
She manages to make me laugh, though. In the same way as we refuse to shroud ourselves in beige anoraks and those Flit Flot shoes that look like Cornish pasties, we refuse to let our hair go grey (unless seriously jazzed up with highlights, as recommended by my hairdresser) and pudding bowled and wear elasticated trousers. Why does MS or any disability have to be so, well, ugly? There's nothing glamorous about adult nappies, drips and twitching in a wheelchair, but unless and until that happens, we intend to knock our own and other people's socks off.
I've just wandered round the house, thinking I ought to be doing something constructive like writing a short story for Virgin's upcoming 'Misbehaviour' collection of erotica, or putting the finishing touches to my 'literary' collection of short stories called Stabbing The Rain. I've never, since being a studious schoolgirl and Oxford student, shaken off the feeling that days should be filled with something useful like revision or planting out some rocket.
But I can't settle. I hoover. Like every frustrated writer who's just been diagosed with MS, rather than go back to my laptop I empty the dishwasher. I watch the tail end of Phil 'n' Fern and the whole of Loose Women, all discussing Victoria Beckham's cute new 'Poxie' haircut. I imagine myself on the sofa on This Morning. Actually it's always been my ambition to be on Richard and Judy. But what's my story, exactly? How it feels to get that diagnosis? How it looks, physically, to the outside world? Am I tragic enough? Am I tragic enough yet? Is it a death sentence? Am I particularly weird to be thinking about how to write about and talk about this thing to a kind of general public rather than burden myself with my own family's reactions? Yes, probably. Weird, that is.
An hour after my diagnosis, I'm at the school gate. Well, life goes on. I wonder how many people take to their beds and never get up again after hearing the words 'progressive multiple sclerosis'? It's tempting to turn my toes up and eat Kit Kats all day but I've a husband and two foreign students to feed, water, launder, take to swimming and karate (the kids, not the husband or students), not to mention a car to drive, shoes to put on, a job to walk to, legal briefs to type, and erotic short stories to write.
I walk through the crowd of mothers, buggies, kindly teachers and chattering children towards D's classroom. I'm numb, actually, not weeping or gnashing my teeth, and that's how I remain for the weeks ahead. Along the path beside the chapel, smiling at one or two mums, keeping my feet on the ground to stop from tripping. There's an invisible wispy cloud swirling round me like the grim reaper's cloak or like the cigarette smoke I gave up ten years ago. I've often read about people who've just been told they have cancer coming away from the consultant, locked inside their private cage of fear, amazed at the people, buses, even birds tweeting, as if nothing has changed. I remember feeling like that in the car going to the church on my wedding day, looking out at the people in their jeans, chatting, shopping, while I perched inside the ridiculously grand vintage Rolls, eyelashes stiff with mascara, hair in artless ringlets, tiny ivory buttons running down my back, a garter round my thigh, thrilled to bursting that everything in my life was about to change. Except the difference was it was going to change immeasurably for the better.
D bursts out of his class, hurling coat and bag at me, dashes to his brother to discuss the latest crazy bone swaps. So I wander back to the car, go home and stir fry noodles and baby corn.
But what's funny is that my friend L, who I must have greeted at school, emails me later that evening, and remarks that I looked radiant that day at school. And there was me feeling like the Bride of Dracula.
Radiant? That's a lovely way of describing a kind of reined in, hectic fear making my eyes shine, my cheeks flush, my hair toss glossily in the wind. And also, whisper it, a kind of hysterical relief, rather along the lines of Spike Milligan's epitaph: I told you I was ill. The neurologist actually said, no, you're not a hypochondriac. You are not imagining these symptoms. You are, indeed, ill.
Older Mothers - and I mean OLDER
'm deflected from what I was going to tell you about my current state of mind by something in the papers today which has, yet again, incensed me. Apparently it's become a race to beat the record to be the oldest, most wrinkly, most short lived mother in the world. Beating the 57 year old woman who had a baby made up of a Russian egg and her high-waisted-slack wearing, anxious looking husband's sperm, we now have a 66 year old English woman who seems to hae gone down the same donor egg route. We already have that witch-like creature in Romania and another one in Spain, both of whom seem never to have given a thought to the most important person in this story, the baby itself and what will he or she think about having a doddery or even dead parent when they're on the cusp of adulthood.
And do they have absolutely no idea how exhausting it will be? Why, oh why do they do it? I'll be castigated here, but I am an older parent myself and although my life is fulfilled and complete and with none of those bone aching regrets unwillingly childless parents must have, I stand here today to say you would have to be mad to set out to become an older parent.
Older parents such as my R and I, and those extremely older women reported in the press, are older as in old enough to be grandparents. We’re Saga’s target readership. We’re the relics in need of a boost but it’s gin sans seng that we reach for. Having babies was designed for younger, sleeker folk. So as we balance Child Trust Funds with faltering Pension Schemes forgive us for telling anyone who'll listen that this ain't a walk in the park.
Reaching un certain age you become resigned to many things. Wrinkles. Being old enough to be that copper who stopped you for doing 39 in a 30 zone’s mother. Failing to get into X Factor auditions.
So why add mastitis, sleepless nights and school runs to this toxic mix? Doesn’t that smack of early onset dementia at an age when most people are perfecting the fox trot? Tackling babies, toddlers and teenagers was never for the faint hearted or arthritic-hipped, but more and more of us middle aged (‘middle-youthed’ is never going to catch on) are going for it.
The journey older parents make may involve careers that needed establishing first, years waited or several marriages endured before finding the right partner, or fertility treatment battled through (and Richard and I have experienced at least two of those). But embarking on second time parenthood still feels, at times, like you’re the only lemming diving off that cliff.
Or the only fish swimming against a tide of young, fit, well paid lovelies. I mean, according to statistics I'm something of a miracle. I conceived my babies naturally (two accidentally) the last two at 38 and 41. Older mothers in general are doubling in number. There were 18,205 births to women aged 40-44 in 2003 (yes, I was one of those!) compared with 9,986 in 1993, though these figures don't specify how many were 'assisted' conceptions. The chances of conceiving naturally in your 40s plummet to around 10%. In your late 40’s, 2-3%. And in your 50’s, dear God, imagine that - it’s an optimistic 1%. The success rates, if you can call them that, for IVF treatments are 33% in your 30’s, descending to 8% in your 40’s.
Disraeli may have declared that there were lies, damned lies and statistics, but statistics can be fun when those clever people crunching the numbers come up with something positive to cheer you up. Once you’ve become an older parent, the exhaustion will hit you like running into a wall. But at least your kids will be clever, according to a report published at the time of writing which concluded that older mothers (provided, presumably, that they come from well off, relaxed, motivated parents) have brighter babies who get more A* GSCE grades than those born to mothers in their twenties. Fine. But frustratingly the studies end there, because they were only started 20 odd years ago. So what I want to know is, how far along the road are these brilliant babies born to doddering parents to becoming the next Alan Sugar?
So despite the warnings of obstetricians and fertility specialists not to defy nature or endanger health by putting off childbirth, some older parents are still able to produce wunderkinder from eggs that should have dropped off the tree and sperm that should long since have hung up their Speedos.
My parenting career was never meant to take this long. My childish dreams of becoming a princess never factored in my knight taking 35 years to show. I certainly didn’t envisage him turning up in a tired blue Saab rather than a prancing white charger. And while I waited, writing poetry and listening to 10cc, the fairy tale was gradually being crushed underfoot by the business of growing up.
But through the messy relationships and honours degrees, the travelling and the jobs, happy ever after always, for me, included not only plenty of earth-shattering sex but cherubic babies too.
I’ve never gone along with the finger-wagging assumption that having children young ‘ruins your life’, especially when that life consists mainly of hanging round bus shelters, sitting endless exams and being confused. What’s so great about being young anyway? Apart from the parties, it’s about smoking too much, dabbling in dubious sex, having no money and being lectured all the time.
The idea of getting the child-rearing over with in one’s physical prime is extremely seductive if properly organised. There you are, having babies when you’ve bags of energy. You’ve all the time in the world to decide what you want to be when you grow up, without being bamboozled. I always fancied being one of those glamorous, assured, youthful mothers (like my own sister, in fact) who have their kids in their early twenties, whose daughters look like their sisters and whose lives really do begin at 40 when they have confidence and maturity and no biological clocks or broodiness standing in the way of a glittering career. And money.
I wanted all of the above, and a committed partner by my side.
Which is why fingers wagged like crazy when I embarked on accidental lone motherhood at the age of 26. My pattern of swimming against the tide and in the process achieving precisely the opposite of what I claimed to want. My peers were all single and childless and this being the Eighties, swilling champagne and yelling into shoe box sized mobile phones. Me? I was getting sacked from a dream job with the late eminent literary agent Giles Gordon. He cited personality clashes but I fear it was more to do with my coming in to work every morning with a raging hangover, sinking several pints of Pils every lunch time, having a hectic love life and heading for a serious drink problem.
This ringing rejection sent me reeling. So I decided to throw off the shackles of my (literally) cloistered Catholic convent and quadrangled Oxford college and go to a place where no-one would know me as someone's daughter, sister or girlfriend. So I answered a newspaper advert, got on an aeroplane with a bunch of unknown Brits and flew off to Cairo to teach English for two years while all around me were becoming stockbrokers.
Amongst the plethora of experiences including running a nursery school in a slum area of the city, being caught up in a curfew when army recruits ran riot, riding in the desert, gasping at the antiquities that make Stonehenge look like so much Lego and learning rudimentary Arabic, I stumbled across the man with bright blue eyes who would become G's father sitting at my dining table one afternoon when I got home from work. I'll call him T.
As is the way when you live overseas, my flatmate had met him on a trip down to Aswan in the far south of Egypt where he was working, cut off from other ex pats, and told him to come and crash when he next came to Cairo. We hit it off instantly and became intensively good friends throughout the two years we were in Egypt and beyond.
When the amitie amoureux became passionel one night, and G was conceived, everything changed. T wasn't ready for fatherhood when unexpectedly thrust upon him and he was out of there. I kept tabs on him even though he was for most of G's first seven years in and around Africa.
In the meantime everyone else around me seemed to think this unexpected pregnancy was not only an embarassment but had slammed shut all the doors.
But scary, tough and lonely though single parenthood might and did prove to be, I saw having this baby more like flinging open the windows. It was going to be what my 9 year old E calls ‘a spectaculier adventure.’
But I was 26, for goodness sake. Not 66! Even then I was described obstetrically as 'elderly prima gravida' which made me laugh, as only the young and beautiful can laugh.
There are faded photos in our downstairs loo reminding Richard and I and our friends that once upon a time fatherhood meant being a thirty-something hunk in ill-advised swimming trunks, dandling a pig-tailed three year old who is now a married woman who trains and rides showjumpers and drives a 4 x 4. Motherhood was a pre-Raphaelite nymph reclining in the daffodils with a dimpled cherub who has a beard now and gets summer jobs at Glastonbury.
The long and winding road that led us to older parenthood came to an abrupt dead end when, six months after we first met, I took my eye off the ball, failed to pounce, and R married someone else. I was that socially perfect child-bearing age of 29, and R was a virile 42. I was a single mother. He was divorced and the original edible bachelor. I knew he'd be a terrific father but it was another 8 wasted years before we got together.
And in the migraine-inducing situations stakes, I can go a whole lot better than Bridget Jones. Because as well as having to listen to him at work banging on about this new woman every morning when they’d been on a date, I went like a fool to the wedding and instead of having a gorgeousness attack and proclaiming in the church that it should have been me, I spent the day lurking miserably in the shadows as he strode about looking handsome and making speeches. Then I watched the putative father of my children climbing into a white helicopter to fly off on honeymoon with another woman.
Thereafter he was known in my family as ‘the one that got away’.
Not long after that I took my son and decamped to London, thinking I'd find happiness. But the crock at the end of the rainbow turned out to be full of something other than gold. Living in London as a carefree singleton was one thing. Going back to London as an impoverished single mother was a disaster. It was like pressing your nose up against a window, never invited to come in. Everyone had moved on. They all earned ridiculous money, for one thing, had bigger houses and flats, flashier cars. Funnily enough they hadn’t moved on in the baby stakes, so on a whim they could be in a cocktail bar in the City, or Dublin or Paris or Positano. So even if I could afford to join in the shenanigans and even let my hair down, every move I made was always hedged about by the frantic search for a babysitter.
Who materialised in the shape of G’s father, the reconciliation with whom was one of the three most positive things to come out of our three years in London. His cautious forays into his son’s life started with the historic day when G, with me right behind him, strolled up to the stranger waiting on our doorstep and cheerfully said ‘Hi there’. I watched them walk off, both with the same loping stride, to spend their first afternoon together in Holland Park. Soon his dad was taking him off for full-on weekend visits, then holidays, so for the first time in seven years G had his own father to add to the list of people who loved him – and I no longer felt like a lone parent.
The second positive thing to come out of London was the soar in property prices, so that even my two room garret in Earls Court (or love nest atelier, as I preferred to think of it) which juddered regularly to the dawn rhythms of the District Line, ended up supplying the deposit for Cloud Nine, as R and I soppily called our first home together).
And of course the third positive outcome was my first date with R. Six years after we first met, he was free. And so was I. It took one phone call out of the blue, one slap-up dinner at his namesake restaurant Riccardo’s in the Old Brompton Road, one tipsy nocturnal ascent of the 87 stairs to my love nest for ‘coffee’, and we were inseparable. I wasn’t going to lose him twice. After kissing all those frogs, and I don’t care how corny this sounds, I’d found my prince at last.
The joys of the older man. Let me count the ways. He didn’t, even after two failed marriages, bleat on about commitment phobia. He wasn’t put off by my baggage because he had his own, God knows, and anyway he thought I was a goddess, warts and all. He had come through years of heartbreak being denied access to his own child but was happy to take care of mine. He was going to stick around to be a father to our children. He phoned when he said he would. He didn’t have the kind of irresponsible haircut which tells you a mile off that this one is a fuck-wit with all the moral rectitude of Russell Brand. He didn’t turn up late for dates, even though I only had to cross Earl’s Court Road to get to the rendezvous and he had to drive the length of the M3. He always booked a table. He was, and is, a true gentleman.
Dithering is a sin. Bad enough when you’re young, but when you’re older, it’s reckless. You don’t hang about. You haven't got time. You can’t be arsed with games.
And you’re honest. Richard’s first comment about babies once we were courting was to inform me (like Dustin Hoffman in Rainman repeating ‘I’m an excellent driver’) that he had extremely superior sperm. Too much information, perhaps? Well, he was privy to this fact thanks to years of unsuccessful IVF treatment during his first marriage when he’d actually seen said sperm doing the front crawl under a microscope and it/they were decreed to be top quality. You may think this is all a bit wildlife documentary, but as mating calls go it was, for this broad at least, a winner.
Which is why I was 38 (getting older by the minute) and six months gone when I married him.
And do they have absolutely no idea how exhausting it will be? Why, oh why do they do it? I'll be castigated here, but I am an older parent myself and although my life is fulfilled and complete and with none of those bone aching regrets unwillingly childless parents must have, I stand here today to say you would have to be mad to set out to become an older parent.
Older parents such as my R and I, and those extremely older women reported in the press, are older as in old enough to be grandparents. We’re Saga’s target readership. We’re the relics in need of a boost but it’s gin sans seng that we reach for. Having babies was designed for younger, sleeker folk. So as we balance Child Trust Funds with faltering Pension Schemes forgive us for telling anyone who'll listen that this ain't a walk in the park.
Reaching un certain age you become resigned to many things. Wrinkles. Being old enough to be that copper who stopped you for doing 39 in a 30 zone’s mother. Failing to get into X Factor auditions.
So why add mastitis, sleepless nights and school runs to this toxic mix? Doesn’t that smack of early onset dementia at an age when most people are perfecting the fox trot? Tackling babies, toddlers and teenagers was never for the faint hearted or arthritic-hipped, but more and more of us middle aged (‘middle-youthed’ is never going to catch on) are going for it.
The journey older parents make may involve careers that needed establishing first, years waited or several marriages endured before finding the right partner, or fertility treatment battled through (and Richard and I have experienced at least two of those). But embarking on second time parenthood still feels, at times, like you’re the only lemming diving off that cliff.
Or the only fish swimming against a tide of young, fit, well paid lovelies. I mean, according to statistics I'm something of a miracle. I conceived my babies naturally (two accidentally) the last two at 38 and 41. Older mothers in general are doubling in number. There were 18,205 births to women aged 40-44 in 2003 (yes, I was one of those!) compared with 9,986 in 1993, though these figures don't specify how many were 'assisted' conceptions. The chances of conceiving naturally in your 40s plummet to around 10%. In your late 40’s, 2-3%. And in your 50’s, dear God, imagine that - it’s an optimistic 1%. The success rates, if you can call them that, for IVF treatments are 33% in your 30’s, descending to 8% in your 40’s.
Disraeli may have declared that there were lies, damned lies and statistics, but statistics can be fun when those clever people crunching the numbers come up with something positive to cheer you up. Once you’ve become an older parent, the exhaustion will hit you like running into a wall. But at least your kids will be clever, according to a report published at the time of writing which concluded that older mothers (provided, presumably, that they come from well off, relaxed, motivated parents) have brighter babies who get more A* GSCE grades than those born to mothers in their twenties. Fine. But frustratingly the studies end there, because they were only started 20 odd years ago. So what I want to know is, how far along the road are these brilliant babies born to doddering parents to becoming the next Alan Sugar?
So despite the warnings of obstetricians and fertility specialists not to defy nature or endanger health by putting off childbirth, some older parents are still able to produce wunderkinder from eggs that should have dropped off the tree and sperm that should long since have hung up their Speedos.
My parenting career was never meant to take this long. My childish dreams of becoming a princess never factored in my knight taking 35 years to show. I certainly didn’t envisage him turning up in a tired blue Saab rather than a prancing white charger. And while I waited, writing poetry and listening to 10cc, the fairy tale was gradually being crushed underfoot by the business of growing up.
But through the messy relationships and honours degrees, the travelling and the jobs, happy ever after always, for me, included not only plenty of earth-shattering sex but cherubic babies too.
I’ve never gone along with the finger-wagging assumption that having children young ‘ruins your life’, especially when that life consists mainly of hanging round bus shelters, sitting endless exams and being confused. What’s so great about being young anyway? Apart from the parties, it’s about smoking too much, dabbling in dubious sex, having no money and being lectured all the time.
The idea of getting the child-rearing over with in one’s physical prime is extremely seductive if properly organised. There you are, having babies when you’ve bags of energy. You’ve all the time in the world to decide what you want to be when you grow up, without being bamboozled. I always fancied being one of those glamorous, assured, youthful mothers (like my own sister, in fact) who have their kids in their early twenties, whose daughters look like their sisters and whose lives really do begin at 40 when they have confidence and maturity and no biological clocks or broodiness standing in the way of a glittering career. And money.
I wanted all of the above, and a committed partner by my side.
Which is why fingers wagged like crazy when I embarked on accidental lone motherhood at the age of 26. My pattern of swimming against the tide and in the process achieving precisely the opposite of what I claimed to want. My peers were all single and childless and this being the Eighties, swilling champagne and yelling into shoe box sized mobile phones. Me? I was getting sacked from a dream job with the late eminent literary agent Giles Gordon. He cited personality clashes but I fear it was more to do with my coming in to work every morning with a raging hangover, sinking several pints of Pils every lunch time, having a hectic love life and heading for a serious drink problem.
This ringing rejection sent me reeling. So I decided to throw off the shackles of my (literally) cloistered Catholic convent and quadrangled Oxford college and go to a place where no-one would know me as someone's daughter, sister or girlfriend. So I answered a newspaper advert, got on an aeroplane with a bunch of unknown Brits and flew off to Cairo to teach English for two years while all around me were becoming stockbrokers.
Amongst the plethora of experiences including running a nursery school in a slum area of the city, being caught up in a curfew when army recruits ran riot, riding in the desert, gasping at the antiquities that make Stonehenge look like so much Lego and learning rudimentary Arabic, I stumbled across the man with bright blue eyes who would become G's father sitting at my dining table one afternoon when I got home from work. I'll call him T.
As is the way when you live overseas, my flatmate had met him on a trip down to Aswan in the far south of Egypt where he was working, cut off from other ex pats, and told him to come and crash when he next came to Cairo. We hit it off instantly and became intensively good friends throughout the two years we were in Egypt and beyond.
When the amitie amoureux became passionel one night, and G was conceived, everything changed. T wasn't ready for fatherhood when unexpectedly thrust upon him and he was out of there. I kept tabs on him even though he was for most of G's first seven years in and around Africa.
In the meantime everyone else around me seemed to think this unexpected pregnancy was not only an embarassment but had slammed shut all the doors.
But scary, tough and lonely though single parenthood might and did prove to be, I saw having this baby more like flinging open the windows. It was going to be what my 9 year old E calls ‘a spectaculier adventure.’
But I was 26, for goodness sake. Not 66! Even then I was described obstetrically as 'elderly prima gravida' which made me laugh, as only the young and beautiful can laugh.
There are faded photos in our downstairs loo reminding Richard and I and our friends that once upon a time fatherhood meant being a thirty-something hunk in ill-advised swimming trunks, dandling a pig-tailed three year old who is now a married woman who trains and rides showjumpers and drives a 4 x 4. Motherhood was a pre-Raphaelite nymph reclining in the daffodils with a dimpled cherub who has a beard now and gets summer jobs at Glastonbury.
The long and winding road that led us to older parenthood came to an abrupt dead end when, six months after we first met, I took my eye off the ball, failed to pounce, and R married someone else. I was that socially perfect child-bearing age of 29, and R was a virile 42. I was a single mother. He was divorced and the original edible bachelor. I knew he'd be a terrific father but it was another 8 wasted years before we got together.
And in the migraine-inducing situations stakes, I can go a whole lot better than Bridget Jones. Because as well as having to listen to him at work banging on about this new woman every morning when they’d been on a date, I went like a fool to the wedding and instead of having a gorgeousness attack and proclaiming in the church that it should have been me, I spent the day lurking miserably in the shadows as he strode about looking handsome and making speeches. Then I watched the putative father of my children climbing into a white helicopter to fly off on honeymoon with another woman.
Thereafter he was known in my family as ‘the one that got away’.
Not long after that I took my son and decamped to London, thinking I'd find happiness. But the crock at the end of the rainbow turned out to be full of something other than gold. Living in London as a carefree singleton was one thing. Going back to London as an impoverished single mother was a disaster. It was like pressing your nose up against a window, never invited to come in. Everyone had moved on. They all earned ridiculous money, for one thing, had bigger houses and flats, flashier cars. Funnily enough they hadn’t moved on in the baby stakes, so on a whim they could be in a cocktail bar in the City, or Dublin or Paris or Positano. So even if I could afford to join in the shenanigans and even let my hair down, every move I made was always hedged about by the frantic search for a babysitter.
Who materialised in the shape of G’s father, the reconciliation with whom was one of the three most positive things to come out of our three years in London. His cautious forays into his son’s life started with the historic day when G, with me right behind him, strolled up to the stranger waiting on our doorstep and cheerfully said ‘Hi there’. I watched them walk off, both with the same loping stride, to spend their first afternoon together in Holland Park. Soon his dad was taking him off for full-on weekend visits, then holidays, so for the first time in seven years G had his own father to add to the list of people who loved him – and I no longer felt like a lone parent.
The second positive thing to come out of London was the soar in property prices, so that even my two room garret in Earls Court (or love nest atelier, as I preferred to think of it) which juddered regularly to the dawn rhythms of the District Line, ended up supplying the deposit for Cloud Nine, as R and I soppily called our first home together).
And of course the third positive outcome was my first date with R. Six years after we first met, he was free. And so was I. It took one phone call out of the blue, one slap-up dinner at his namesake restaurant Riccardo’s in the Old Brompton Road, one tipsy nocturnal ascent of the 87 stairs to my love nest for ‘coffee’, and we were inseparable. I wasn’t going to lose him twice. After kissing all those frogs, and I don’t care how corny this sounds, I’d found my prince at last.
The joys of the older man. Let me count the ways. He didn’t, even after two failed marriages, bleat on about commitment phobia. He wasn’t put off by my baggage because he had his own, God knows, and anyway he thought I was a goddess, warts and all. He had come through years of heartbreak being denied access to his own child but was happy to take care of mine. He was going to stick around to be a father to our children. He phoned when he said he would. He didn’t have the kind of irresponsible haircut which tells you a mile off that this one is a fuck-wit with all the moral rectitude of Russell Brand. He didn’t turn up late for dates, even though I only had to cross Earl’s Court Road to get to the rendezvous and he had to drive the length of the M3. He always booked a table. He was, and is, a true gentleman.
Dithering is a sin. Bad enough when you’re young, but when you’re older, it’s reckless. You don’t hang about. You haven't got time. You can’t be arsed with games.
And you’re honest. Richard’s first comment about babies once we were courting was to inform me (like Dustin Hoffman in Rainman repeating ‘I’m an excellent driver’) that he had extremely superior sperm. Too much information, perhaps? Well, he was privy to this fact thanks to years of unsuccessful IVF treatment during his first marriage when he’d actually seen said sperm doing the front crawl under a microscope and it/they were decreed to be top quality. You may think this is all a bit wildlife documentary, but as mating calls go it was, for this broad at least, a winner.
Which is why I was 38 (getting older by the minute) and six months gone when I married him.
Thursday 14 May 2009
The Hello Effect
It's the heatwave of 2003, and I've just had baby D. I'm reading Hello magazine. The more I look at the celebrity older parent, the more I spot the difference. These are the very people us mere mortals should ignore, especially when we've just come home from the maternity unit.We all like to think we’re imbued with a special Madonna-esque quality when pregnant or just given birth (that’s not the pop star but Madonna as in the mother of God, who was a teenager when she had Jesus). But celebrities are hoisted onto a whole other plane. The media gushes like Old Faithful when someone famous has a baby (unless they’re Britney Spears who suffers ridicule throughout) but if that person is in her forties then her condition is akin to an immaculate conception.I nod to myself as I read beauty editors and nutritionists and medical experts abandoning their dire warnings about risk and lowered fertility levels and birth rates and rush to marvel at how good I - sorry, the celebrity mum - looks for her age, considering her condition.In Cherie Blair’s case, I muse, I don’t remember much being said about how good she was looking. There was more comment in her case about the pre-menopausal rush of fertility, with no doubt a bit of nudging and winking about the potency of her husband’s power and prestige thrown in.Anyway, this was all in my face when I had D at 42 but somehow Madonna (the pop star), Elle McPherson, Holly Hunter – they’ were all my sisters under the skin.But who am I kidding? These celebrity mothers aren’t old bats in tracksuits and frayed sundresses. At least we rarely, if ever, see them like that. We can ignore their age, because here they are still meeting our demands to look gorgeous, sexy, fertile but most of all - young!I'm in the garden. I can't leave R out of this role model hunt, and call him off the play mat to take a look. So who’s the daddy in the older parent story? Here we are. David Jason, Des O’Connor, John ‘scoring a try during injury time’ Simpson, anyone? Phil Collins, Bruce Forsyth. Gorgeous, sexy, young? I don’t think so. Fertile? Obviously. Er, Rod ‘plenty more tunes on the violin’ Stewart? Cute enough, but away already with the high-waisted blue jeans.
Celebrity or no, in looks (a little light face lifting aside) and age these daddies reflect real life in all its wrinkly glory. Where’s the big deal, the effort, the beauty treatments, for them? For a man to have a baby he can be a cheerful, pot-bellied, white haired old git (my husband’s phrase, not mine), so long as he has a working todger. Let’s go further. Technically, he doesn’t even need still-working parts. He could actually have the last laugh on behalf of his sex and become a father when he’s dead.My R isn’t so amused by that, even if he is a damned sight better looking that David Jason. Come to think of it, he points out, with egg donation and cloning and so on, soon it will be possible for a woman to be dead, and still be a mother?But far from being insulted, I trace my fingers over my sore scar and see the bright side. Babies with no pregnancy? I feel a futuristic thriller full of men in white coats coming on – preferably starring Clive Owen….R frowns at the Dr Seuss’s ABC book he’s gluing together and bridles at the mention of Clive Owen. And I admit that we’ve strayed from the topic of older daddies now, because Clive is most certainly not one of our number. So I jab at the photos of thin-haired guys with rumpled faces cuddling the fruit of their loins who also have, er, thinning hair and rumpled faces. Look, they’re just like us, I tell him. And you’re lucky, because it doesn’t matter how the daddy looks, celebrity or no, or how he did it. But there’s still something sexy about you. Show me a woman who’s not the teeniest bit curious about what any daddy is like in the sack, I say, and I’ll show you a liar.R adds the Dr Seuss to a pile of repaired Beatrix Potters, hands me a hungry baby, and sighs. Just because celebrities can do it, he says, stopping D rolling off the swing seat onto the patio as I wrestle with my maternity bra, doesn’t always mean you have to. Have to what? I ask, wincing as D latches on.Become an older parent, he explains. He grabs the magazine, flips to the recipe pages, and licks his lips at a picture of garlicky mussels. But I’ve become one now, I tell him, and so have you. Well, he continues, remarking that we need an egg poacher, you don’t have to have plastic surgery, multiple marriages, go on reality TV, publish books you haven’t even written, or release albums of tired Sinatra covers, he says, just because celebrities do.No, we don’t have to do all those things, I agree. I must say one thing that really does get easier with age is breast feeding. But we can to the parent thing just as well as Madonna.That’s where you’re wrong! R cries, taking E on to his knee to buckle on what he calls his ‘light saver’. You’re a celebrity addict. You should know this by now. Celebrity older parents are a breed apart precisely because they’re celebrities. Their parenthood is feted because they have proved that they are potent and virile and given us yet another reason to read about them. But don’t think for a moment that parenthood will ever be the same for them as it is for us. Oh, no. Parenthood, for them, will be better.Impossible, I protest, noticing as E scampers off how the squared-off hairline at the nape of his neck is exactly like his dad’s. How could it possibly be better?R comes outside again with beer. Stella for him. Guinness for me. Because celebrities will be photographed every step of the way, he says, at least until they reach the gates of The Priory. They will have sexier, browner bumps, groovier maternity clothes, more beautiful babies, they will jet between premiers and overseas locations and still be human enough to give the Malaysian nanny an hour off while they writhe about on their hands and knees until their PR person reminds them that no this isn’t a porn sorry pop video, they’re on their hands and knees because they’re playing with their kids, just like a 'civilian'.Some don’t even bother to pretend they’re ordinary, even if they come from Basingstoke, I’m forced to add, thumping D’s back until a triumphant burp comes.R fires up the enormous barbeque he’s bought in readiness for a fortnight’s visit from my in-laws who are about to descend from Montreal. There’s only two of them, but this monstrous barbie could feed the five thousand.I rest my case, cries R, brandishing the tongs and sounding like the lawyer he is. Even those who aren’t too posh to push may join the sisterhood for a brief, painful and bloody period. But unlike you, my darling, they’ll be receiving several grand to tell Hello magazine all about every dab of Echinacea, every grunt, every trickle of sweat.Easy, tiger. At least they pushed, I grumble, picking up the makeshift megaphone fashioned from baked bean tins to summon G for his burger.Yes, but pick up your magazine five minutes after the birth, says R, spreading mayonnaise all over his bun, and you’ll see Angelina, and Geri, and Davina, all dressed in the sort of pure white shirt no real parent would ever dare wear. I mean, look. Ketchup. Chocolate – the menu for the last three weeks is written all over your kaftan.By now the recipe page has disappeared to be stored in the ‘dinner parties R us’ file and the holiday pages, all azure skies and swaying hammocks, are being cut out and stuck into E’s rather wishful ‘all about me’ book.It’s not a kaftan. It’s the pussy bow blouse which I used to wear for work. You won’t find India hunched in the corner while her family hogs the sofa to watch EastEnders, will you? I warm to R’s theme, stuffing Pringles into my mouth and noting how pristine his shirt still looks. Oh no. She’ll be reclining in a cavernous nursery in a colonial mansion groaning with oversized teddy bears and four-poster cots. Her long, extended hair will be teased into girlish tendrils, her ‘look I’m an earth mother really’ bare feet will be pedicured to perfection and sinking into lush carpeting/tropically green lawns/soft sand.They will cradle the baby in a rocking chair/sumptuous bed/while perched perilously on the edge of a pristine kitchen worktop which has never seen an upside down Marmite sandwich. They’ll tell the Marquesa how marvellous their husband/partner/co-star/somebody else’s husband/already discarded boyfriend was at the birth.And apart from the odd shot of them sashaying through Heathrow airport weighed down with a 4 oz Avent bottle and a pair of sunglasses while Mick Jagger or whoever the father is staggers behind laden with a mink-lined sling, adds R, peeling a peach and watching E try to eat it with a spoon, you will never see the children again because their faces will henceforth be pixellated beyond recognition until they’re precocious teenagers springing into the limelight, fully formed, like Medusa’s warriors.Or like Peaches Geldof, mutters G, negotiating his size 12 Converses over D’s bouncy chair.Oh, when will I, will I be famous? I moan, reaching for another can of iron-rich Guinness.It’s all a mirage. You see? It’s a puppet! cries R. Take a look at our own little photo shoot, five minutes after the baby was born. No army of nannies and make-up artists just out of shot doing all the hard graft, the late night feeds, the washing, the school run, the homework etc. No picture assistant hunched over a computer airbrushing you to within an inch of your life, so that you look like you did twenty years ago – show her, G –‘…I scratch with un-manicured nails at the milk encrusting what used to be see-through chiffon as G lines up our hastily assembled clip frames, dusty from the window sills. They contain snaps of the happy event chaotically composed and evilly lit with all the subtlety of a dirty old man’s Polaroid. The unflattering glare of the fluorescent lighting highlights the scene with vile pink cellular blankets sliding off splayed knees, vast yellow bins in the background overflowing with ‘hospital waste’, sinister blood stains on the pillow and populated with puffy featured, jaundiced people with no hair, slitty eyes, fists bunched up as if begging for mercy and the pursed lips of an affronted dowager –- and that’s just the parents, says G.
Celebrity or no, in looks (a little light face lifting aside) and age these daddies reflect real life in all its wrinkly glory. Where’s the big deal, the effort, the beauty treatments, for them? For a man to have a baby he can be a cheerful, pot-bellied, white haired old git (my husband’s phrase, not mine), so long as he has a working todger. Let’s go further. Technically, he doesn’t even need still-working parts. He could actually have the last laugh on behalf of his sex and become a father when he’s dead.My R isn’t so amused by that, even if he is a damned sight better looking that David Jason. Come to think of it, he points out, with egg donation and cloning and so on, soon it will be possible for a woman to be dead, and still be a mother?But far from being insulted, I trace my fingers over my sore scar and see the bright side. Babies with no pregnancy? I feel a futuristic thriller full of men in white coats coming on – preferably starring Clive Owen….R frowns at the Dr Seuss’s ABC book he’s gluing together and bridles at the mention of Clive Owen. And I admit that we’ve strayed from the topic of older daddies now, because Clive is most certainly not one of our number. So I jab at the photos of thin-haired guys with rumpled faces cuddling the fruit of their loins who also have, er, thinning hair and rumpled faces. Look, they’re just like us, I tell him. And you’re lucky, because it doesn’t matter how the daddy looks, celebrity or no, or how he did it. But there’s still something sexy about you. Show me a woman who’s not the teeniest bit curious about what any daddy is like in the sack, I say, and I’ll show you a liar.R adds the Dr Seuss to a pile of repaired Beatrix Potters, hands me a hungry baby, and sighs. Just because celebrities can do it, he says, stopping D rolling off the swing seat onto the patio as I wrestle with my maternity bra, doesn’t always mean you have to. Have to what? I ask, wincing as D latches on.Become an older parent, he explains. He grabs the magazine, flips to the recipe pages, and licks his lips at a picture of garlicky mussels. But I’ve become one now, I tell him, and so have you. Well, he continues, remarking that we need an egg poacher, you don’t have to have plastic surgery, multiple marriages, go on reality TV, publish books you haven’t even written, or release albums of tired Sinatra covers, he says, just because celebrities do.No, we don’t have to do all those things, I agree. I must say one thing that really does get easier with age is breast feeding. But we can to the parent thing just as well as Madonna.That’s where you’re wrong! R cries, taking E on to his knee to buckle on what he calls his ‘light saver’. You’re a celebrity addict. You should know this by now. Celebrity older parents are a breed apart precisely because they’re celebrities. Their parenthood is feted because they have proved that they are potent and virile and given us yet another reason to read about them. But don’t think for a moment that parenthood will ever be the same for them as it is for us. Oh, no. Parenthood, for them, will be better.Impossible, I protest, noticing as E scampers off how the squared-off hairline at the nape of his neck is exactly like his dad’s. How could it possibly be better?R comes outside again with beer. Stella for him. Guinness for me. Because celebrities will be photographed every step of the way, he says, at least until they reach the gates of The Priory. They will have sexier, browner bumps, groovier maternity clothes, more beautiful babies, they will jet between premiers and overseas locations and still be human enough to give the Malaysian nanny an hour off while they writhe about on their hands and knees until their PR person reminds them that no this isn’t a porn sorry pop video, they’re on their hands and knees because they’re playing with their kids, just like a 'civilian'.Some don’t even bother to pretend they’re ordinary, even if they come from Basingstoke, I’m forced to add, thumping D’s back until a triumphant burp comes.R fires up the enormous barbeque he’s bought in readiness for a fortnight’s visit from my in-laws who are about to descend from Montreal. There’s only two of them, but this monstrous barbie could feed the five thousand.I rest my case, cries R, brandishing the tongs and sounding like the lawyer he is. Even those who aren’t too posh to push may join the sisterhood for a brief, painful and bloody period. But unlike you, my darling, they’ll be receiving several grand to tell Hello magazine all about every dab of Echinacea, every grunt, every trickle of sweat.Easy, tiger. At least they pushed, I grumble, picking up the makeshift megaphone fashioned from baked bean tins to summon G for his burger.Yes, but pick up your magazine five minutes after the birth, says R, spreading mayonnaise all over his bun, and you’ll see Angelina, and Geri, and Davina, all dressed in the sort of pure white shirt no real parent would ever dare wear. I mean, look. Ketchup. Chocolate – the menu for the last three weeks is written all over your kaftan.By now the recipe page has disappeared to be stored in the ‘dinner parties R us’ file and the holiday pages, all azure skies and swaying hammocks, are being cut out and stuck into E’s rather wishful ‘all about me’ book.It’s not a kaftan. It’s the pussy bow blouse which I used to wear for work. You won’t find India hunched in the corner while her family hogs the sofa to watch EastEnders, will you? I warm to R’s theme, stuffing Pringles into my mouth and noting how pristine his shirt still looks. Oh no. She’ll be reclining in a cavernous nursery in a colonial mansion groaning with oversized teddy bears and four-poster cots. Her long, extended hair will be teased into girlish tendrils, her ‘look I’m an earth mother really’ bare feet will be pedicured to perfection and sinking into lush carpeting/tropically green lawns/soft sand.They will cradle the baby in a rocking chair/sumptuous bed/while perched perilously on the edge of a pristine kitchen worktop which has never seen an upside down Marmite sandwich. They’ll tell the Marquesa how marvellous their husband/partner/co-star/somebody else’s husband/already discarded boyfriend was at the birth.And apart from the odd shot of them sashaying through Heathrow airport weighed down with a 4 oz Avent bottle and a pair of sunglasses while Mick Jagger or whoever the father is staggers behind laden with a mink-lined sling, adds R, peeling a peach and watching E try to eat it with a spoon, you will never see the children again because their faces will henceforth be pixellated beyond recognition until they’re precocious teenagers springing into the limelight, fully formed, like Medusa’s warriors.Or like Peaches Geldof, mutters G, negotiating his size 12 Converses over D’s bouncy chair.Oh, when will I, will I be famous? I moan, reaching for another can of iron-rich Guinness.It’s all a mirage. You see? It’s a puppet! cries R. Take a look at our own little photo shoot, five minutes after the baby was born. No army of nannies and make-up artists just out of shot doing all the hard graft, the late night feeds, the washing, the school run, the homework etc. No picture assistant hunched over a computer airbrushing you to within an inch of your life, so that you look like you did twenty years ago – show her, G –‘…I scratch with un-manicured nails at the milk encrusting what used to be see-through chiffon as G lines up our hastily assembled clip frames, dusty from the window sills. They contain snaps of the happy event chaotically composed and evilly lit with all the subtlety of a dirty old man’s Polaroid. The unflattering glare of the fluorescent lighting highlights the scene with vile pink cellular blankets sliding off splayed knees, vast yellow bins in the background overflowing with ‘hospital waste’, sinister blood stains on the pillow and populated with puffy featured, jaundiced people with no hair, slitty eyes, fists bunched up as if begging for mercy and the pursed lips of an affronted dowager –- and that’s just the parents, says G.
How Do You Spell Bucket?
It’s dark in my bedroom. Warm. I should be sleeping.
Because I’m knackered. Our house is like a war zone. My children have made me a star chart for bad behaviour and I’ve had to give up shouting for Lent. Life consists of hanging on by the toenails from dawn until dusk. I’ve lost track of my sleep deficit, let alone my few remaining marbles. No-one in their right mind should be conscious, let alone answering questions, at this time of day.
Nevertheless, there’s a voice in my ear.
Where’s the logic? It isn’t saying wake up, or I love you, or the house is on fire. There’s no gentle shaking, no quiet introduction to the rigours of the day. The voice, with no preliminaries, needs to know: ‘How do you spell bucket?’
Grainy light filters through reluctant eyelash. Or should that be reluctant light through grainy eyelash? A feathery chorus tunes up idly in the trees outside. Bucket? Bucket? Right now I’d swear it begins with an F. There’s a sigh like the rustling of paper, the smell of hot hair. Someone is muttering like Dick Dastardly. Who is it? Who? My little boy, that’s who. He’s the one demanding with menaces in that urgent husky shout peculiar to children learning to whisper. I use the term ‘whisper’ loosely. It could carry across Salisbury Plain.
The one muttering like Dick Dastardly and dribbling into the pillow is what’s left of me.
And my little boy, in more ways than one, is unravelling all my dreams.
Because I’m knackered. Our house is like a war zone. My children have made me a star chart for bad behaviour and I’ve had to give up shouting for Lent. Life consists of hanging on by the toenails from dawn until dusk. I’ve lost track of my sleep deficit, let alone my few remaining marbles. No-one in their right mind should be conscious, let alone answering questions, at this time of day.
Nevertheless, there’s a voice in my ear.
Where’s the logic? It isn’t saying wake up, or I love you, or the house is on fire. There’s no gentle shaking, no quiet introduction to the rigours of the day. The voice, with no preliminaries, needs to know: ‘How do you spell bucket?’
Grainy light filters through reluctant eyelash. Or should that be reluctant light through grainy eyelash? A feathery chorus tunes up idly in the trees outside. Bucket? Bucket? Right now I’d swear it begins with an F. There’s a sigh like the rustling of paper, the smell of hot hair. Someone is muttering like Dick Dastardly. Who is it? Who? My little boy, that’s who. He’s the one demanding with menaces in that urgent husky shout peculiar to children learning to whisper. I use the term ‘whisper’ loosely. It could carry across Salisbury Plain.
The one muttering like Dick Dastardly and dribbling into the pillow is what’s left of me.
And my little boy, in more ways than one, is unravelling all my dreams.
Wednesday 28 January 2009
Too busy to wallow
Turmoil. It's September 2005. I'm sitting in a Southampton clinic. Back home in Winchester it's all going down. My eldest son Gabriel is starting his A levels, my five year old is entering Year 1, I am just 44, suffering from sleep deprivation courtesy of my toddler's colourful nightmares, and I'm wondering whether to wear a wrap dress or boot cut jeans at the school gate so I don't stand out as 1664 woman (that's 16 from behind, 64 from in front) amongst all the gym slip mums. And now 'my' neurologist (I refuse to claim him as my own in the possessive way of sick people. Maybe it's comforting, but it would be like adopting an albatross) has just told me I've probably got multiple sclerosis.
It will be another three years before I get the definite diagnosis. So until then I'll ignore my dragging leg, weak bladder and nagging fear, and leave it there. I bury what is a 'definitely maybe' firmly in the sand along with my head, not even telling my darling husband. It's called denial. I know. But I have my reasons.
Firstly, my older sister also has MS, diagnosed around 1997 and managed so superbly by beta-interferon injections that with her hectic schedule teaching the art of silver smithing, her immaculately cut Joseph suits and teetering heels, you'd never know. But she had it first. My illogical, childish instinct (because logic isn't located in your guts, is it?) is that everyone will think I am copying her, yea, even in developing something as terrifying as this. My family is just getting used to her illness, relieved that she is managing it so well. How dare I come along and ruin it with a misjudged bid for attention?
You see? It's straight back to the nursery, as a psychotherapist would say, where as the weediest of my four sisters I was not only consistently teased for my big feet, big ears, sore eyes and early potty training problems, but also frequently told that I was a changeling.Not in the romantic, fairy story sense. More in the found in a cardboard box in a public loo sense. As a result, although I patently am part of the Stokes clan, right down it would seem to these infernal MS genes, I always felt an outsider looking in, pushing her nose up against the window watching the party going on without her. That weird, intermittent melancholy continued into my teens, into university at Oxford and beyond. The one it rarely happened was when I was living in Cairo. I wonder if that was because I was so obviously displaced, so gloriously foreign? Anyway, this intermittent disorientation eventually gave itself a name. Depression.
But that's another story. For now, apart from a love of committing my experiences, and other people's, and imaginary ones, to paper, I have no intention of stealing the limelight, certainly not for something as potentially devastating as this. And I do not, even when it is later definitively diagnosed, want a flashing neon sign round my neck labelled 'I've got MS so you can all worry like hell and overnight treat me totally differently because soon I'll deteriorate into someone wearing elasticated trousers twitching in a wheelchair'.
The second reason I keep it zipped for now is frankly that I have my hands full. After several fraught years as a single mother fuelled by love and pride in my son, fierce determination to reunite him with his father, the odd handful of Prozac, too much wine and plenty of unsuitable liaisons, my dreams have come true.
After knowing him for eight years, working with him for five, and even attending his previous wedding, I have finally married my lovely Richard, a gorgeous husband and fantastic father and stepfather. We have had our own two boys and live in our small but perfectly formed nest in possibly the nicest city in England. But waiting so long to marry and have more babies has meant I'm an older mother, and Richard, though full of beans, is sans doute an older father, pushing 60 at this stage of our story.
Our situation, brutally rammed home by the neurologist's dour words, contains issues that would never cross your average yummy mummy's expensively highlighted head.. In our world modelling mini Boden and baking perfect cup cakes for the school fete comes a very poor second to wondering whether there's time for plastic surgery before the quiz night or if you'll be doddering, ill or dead when your littlest kids graduate from university.
John Lennon said that life is what happens when you're busy making other plans. So, in this September 2005 I don't have time to wallow or even face head on what is thus far only a grim possibility. I have three boys who need me. Six if you count my husband and the foreign students (usually boys) who we take in as lodgers. I work part time for criminal lawyers. I write erotic short stories. I take photographic portraits. I like to party. It's not my time.
It will be another three years before I get the definite diagnosis. So until then I'll ignore my dragging leg, weak bladder and nagging fear, and leave it there. I bury what is a 'definitely maybe' firmly in the sand along with my head, not even telling my darling husband. It's called denial. I know. But I have my reasons.
Firstly, my older sister also has MS, diagnosed around 1997 and managed so superbly by beta-interferon injections that with her hectic schedule teaching the art of silver smithing, her immaculately cut Joseph suits and teetering heels, you'd never know. But she had it first. My illogical, childish instinct (because logic isn't located in your guts, is it?) is that everyone will think I am copying her, yea, even in developing something as terrifying as this. My family is just getting used to her illness, relieved that she is managing it so well. How dare I come along and ruin it with a misjudged bid for attention?
You see? It's straight back to the nursery, as a psychotherapist would say, where as the weediest of my four sisters I was not only consistently teased for my big feet, big ears, sore eyes and early potty training problems, but also frequently told that I was a changeling.Not in the romantic, fairy story sense. More in the found in a cardboard box in a public loo sense. As a result, although I patently am part of the Stokes clan, right down it would seem to these infernal MS genes, I always felt an outsider looking in, pushing her nose up against the window watching the party going on without her. That weird, intermittent melancholy continued into my teens, into university at Oxford and beyond. The one it rarely happened was when I was living in Cairo. I wonder if that was because I was so obviously displaced, so gloriously foreign? Anyway, this intermittent disorientation eventually gave itself a name. Depression.
But that's another story. For now, apart from a love of committing my experiences, and other people's, and imaginary ones, to paper, I have no intention of stealing the limelight, certainly not for something as potentially devastating as this. And I do not, even when it is later definitively diagnosed, want a flashing neon sign round my neck labelled 'I've got MS so you can all worry like hell and overnight treat me totally differently because soon I'll deteriorate into someone wearing elasticated trousers twitching in a wheelchair'.
The second reason I keep it zipped for now is frankly that I have my hands full. After several fraught years as a single mother fuelled by love and pride in my son, fierce determination to reunite him with his father, the odd handful of Prozac, too much wine and plenty of unsuitable liaisons, my dreams have come true.
After knowing him for eight years, working with him for five, and even attending his previous wedding, I have finally married my lovely Richard, a gorgeous husband and fantastic father and stepfather. We have had our own two boys and live in our small but perfectly formed nest in possibly the nicest city in England. But waiting so long to marry and have more babies has meant I'm an older mother, and Richard, though full of beans, is sans doute an older father, pushing 60 at this stage of our story.
Our situation, brutally rammed home by the neurologist's dour words, contains issues that would never cross your average yummy mummy's expensively highlighted head.. In our world modelling mini Boden and baking perfect cup cakes for the school fete comes a very poor second to wondering whether there's time for plastic surgery before the quiz night or if you'll be doddering, ill or dead when your littlest kids graduate from university.
John Lennon said that life is what happens when you're busy making other plans. So, in this September 2005 I don't have time to wallow or even face head on what is thus far only a grim possibility. I have three boys who need me. Six if you count my husband and the foreign students (usually boys) who we take in as lodgers. I work part time for criminal lawyers. I write erotic short stories. I take photographic portraits. I like to party. It's not my time.
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