Why Mummy Swears Read online

  ‘Are you quoting Gloria Gaynor at me? And you complain about gay clichés!’

  ‘I am POURING MY HEART OUT!’ said Sam. ‘And what if I never meet anyone else? After Robin left the kids and me, I didn’t want to get my heart broken again, but now I think maybe that I do want to meet someone else, and what if I don’t? What if I don’t, Ellen? And that guy, well, he just brought it home a bit about how hard it is to find someone you want to spend the rest of your life with, or even go for a fucking coffee with, without them boring the fuck on about single-estate, bastarding Arabica, dark-roast twatting COFFEE BEANS and what sort of coffee maker is best to bring out the flavour. But what if he’s all that’s left? What if it’s Mr Coffee Faux Hipster Pants or an eternity of loneliness, Ellen? WHAT THEN? And Hannah and Charlie are so happy, and I will never, ever find love again …’

  Simon had wandered off somewhere around the complaints about the inadequate hipsterness of Sam’s potential shag, murmuring something about getting another drink, so the full force of Sam’s existential crisis was left to me to deal with.

  ‘Firstly, darling, have you been on the gin?’ I enquired.

  ‘Yes,’ mumbled Sam tearfully.

  ‘OK, well that’s probably not helping then, is it? You know gin makes us over-emotional and paranoid.’

  ‘Does not!’

  ‘Bloody well does too! Don’t you remember last year, when we went to that gin tasting and I spent all the next day crying and looking up dog rescues to put a plan into action for when my darling Judgy died, so I could have a replacement lined up, even though he is only six and in disgustingly rude health?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ admitted Sam. ‘But just because you’re a fucking basket case on the gin, doesn’t mean that my concerns for my lonely future aren’t valid.’

  ‘No, I’m just saying the gin doesn’t help. But don’t you also remember that right before Hannah and Charlie got together, we had almost this exact same conversation with her, right down to the children leaving her and her being alone forever. And now look at her! You never know what’s around the corner. You could meet the love of your life tomorrow in Sainsbury’s, buying milk. He could be out there, right now, waiting for you. He could even be Beardy Coffee Guy, if you gave him a chance.’

  ‘He’s not Beardy Coffee Guy,’ said Sam firmly. ‘Beardy Coffee Guy is a knob. But Ellen, what if I don’t meet someone, anyone? What then?’

  ‘Well, what about someone I work with? There’s lots of gorgeous blokes!’

  ‘Are there?’ said Simon, materialising again at exactly the wrong moment.

  ‘Aren’t they all hipster wankers too? You have a soft-play room,’ grumbled Sam.

  ‘They’re not so bad,’ I said brightly.

  ‘Oh GOD!’ said Sam. ‘Are you becoming one of them? You already said they are weirdly obsessed with coffee too, and now they’re “not so bad”? WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH ELLEN?’

  ‘Fuck off, Sam, I’m just saying they’re not all bad. Anyway, if all else fails, according to Hannah’s mum, in her day the PTAs were notorious for having sex parties, so maybe there’s some hope for you there?’

  Sam shuddered. ‘I cannot think of anything worse than a PTA sex party,’ he said. ‘At what point do you think the yummy mummies would stop wittering on about how much difference KonMari-ing their drawers has made and boasting about how advanced little Cressida and Barnaby are, and actually get down and dirty with it?’

  ‘Probably never. Can’t you just see Tabitha MacKenzie’s Mummy still bleating on about how she really thinks that sending Tabitha to that early advanced maths class when she was two has made all the difference as Felix Jenkins’s Daddy bends her over Perfect Lucy Atkinson’s Perfect Mummy’s Perfectly Annie-Sloaned dresser, and then Tabitha MacKenzie’s Mummy cries out in ecstasy as she spots the Marie Kondo book on the coffee table?’

  ‘Sometimes, Ellen,’ said Sam sternly, ‘you take these things too far. However, that horrific image has at least shaken me out of my massive pity party, so I suppose for that at least I must thank you.’

  ‘Oh, pull yourself together and come and dance,’ I said. ‘And don’t even think about suggesting shots!’

  Of course, Sam suggested shots, and of course we did them, and astonishingly, even Simon joined in the shots, and we all ended up getting really quite splendidly, if shamefully for our age, rat-arsed. And then Simon remembered that a new architect had started at his office last week, and maybe he would do for Sam, because he didn’t have a beard, and he had never heard him mention coffee other than to say he was making some and did anyone else want any.

  ‘No!’ shouted Sam. ‘I findsh him myshelf! At Shainsburysh, with the milk! Our eyesh shall meet and boom! Love. True love. I don’ want a man who will “do” for me. Love! I’sh gonna find love!’

  ‘Awww!’ mumbled Hannah. ‘Everybodiesh should all be in love! Like ush, yesh, Charlie? Lovely love!’

  ‘To LOVE!’ I bellowed, and promptly missed my mouth and poured an entire shot of flaming sambuca down my cleavage. Luckily Charlie is a doctor, and thus after all those years of excessive drinking as a medical student is still able to keep his wits about him in a crisis, so he managed to hurl a glass of water over me before my bra caught fire, which was lucky, as me setting my tits alight would have been a memorable but unfortunate end to the party.

  Saturday, 29 October

  Aaaarrrrrghhhhhh! I am GREEN! Not metaphorically. Fucking LITERALLY! My face is a shade that can only be described as a fetching pea green. What the fuck am I going to do?

  Last night was the PTA Halloween Disco. All Perfect Lucy Atkinson’s Perfect Mummy’s predictions came true, in that I had to throw the hissy fit of all hissy fits to actually get people to step up to the mark and volunteer to help; Oscar Fitzpatrick and Edie Prescott’s Mummies did indeed try to abandon them; and most of the parents were more interested in propping up the bar and getting smashed than they were in actually keeping an eye on their children who were running amok, smacked off their tits on refined sugar. But hey, they were glugging Herculean quantities of Australian Chardonnay that we had got for £4 a bottle in Asda and were flogging for £4.50 a glass, and after all, it’s all about the money!

  The hall looked rather fabulous, though, liberally strewn with the entire contents of at least three branches of Poundland, and the happy cries of the precious moppets as they rammed said refined sugar and E numbers down their throat suggested that we had done rather a splendid job. Although of course Kiki (dressed as a slutty witch with her tits out, and selfie-ing like mad) sighed that it wasn’t quite what she had had in mind and she wasn’t sure it was really ‘content worthy’, and if the school would only get on Instagram the whole thing could have probably been #sponsored by Party Pieces and maybe even Pippa Middleton would start following Kiki back. Or, at the very least, Binky from Made in Chelsea.

  With Mrs P’s dire warnings about PTA swingers still ringing in my ears, I had taken immense care to dress up as the least-sexy witch in the world – my inspiration was mostly drawn from Grotbags off the Pink Windmill Show, complete with painting my face green. I looked, if I did say so myself, rather good, if somewhat terrifying – a few of the reception children were reduced to tears by my outfit.

  After the disco, our ears still ringing to the strains of the ‘Macarena’, most of the volunteers magically melted away, leaving only Sam, Cara, Katie and me to clear up. The volunteers in the bar, it turned out, had been opening bottles at random to pour glasses of wine, instead of finishing one and opening another, so there were quite a lot of opened bottles that would obviously go off, so it would have been rude for us not to start drinking them.

  There were too many bottles to finish over the clearing-up, so we took them back to my house to polish off while we counted the lovely money. I do love counting money, even if it isn’t mine – there is something very cheering about rustling piles of tenners. I sometimes wonder if I haven’t missed my vocation as some sort of cash-base
d, dodgy, Lovejoy-esque antiques dealer? I would also probably be very good at solving the crimes that would obviously go hand in hand with such a career choice, although not right now as I am a bit conspicuous, being, as I mentioned, BRIGHT FUCKING GREEN.

  Anyway, money counted, vino finished, everyone tottered off home and I found myself really rather tired after the very busy night at the disco, and the wine, and so I just sat down on the sofa to have a little rest. Still with my Grotbags face paint on. And now, it’s the morning, and I woke up still on the sofa, and although I was quite alarmed by the initial sight of myself, I reassured myself that it was only face paint and would wash off, only it turns out that you are not supposed to leave face paint on for fourteen bastarding hours BECAUSE THE FUCKING STUFF STAINS YOUR SKIN AND SO I AM BRIGHT FUCKING GREEN!

  Oh, FML! What am I going to do? I can’t go to work like this. I can’t even do the school run like this. Things like this never happened to Lucy Atkinson’s Mummy. Google suggested olive oil, and I have slathered myself in most of a bottle of extra virgin, but I am STILL FUCKING GREEN, because GOOGLE LIES! Maybe coconut oil? Olive oil is so passé, anyway. Simon and the children keep pointing and laughing, so I am glad my pain is at least amusing to someone. Bastards.

  Monday, 31 October

  Still green. It is fading slightly, but there is still a definitely greenish hue. In a flash of inspiration, I remembered that you get green concealer to cover up redness, and so I thought perhaps the reverse would work too, and if I covered my face with blusher under my foundation, it would cancel out the green. It didn’t. I was just a livid shade of puce. With a hint of green. I cancelled all my meetings today and tried to just hide at my desk with my hair over my face, like the oldest emo in the world, hoping very much that nobody came over to try and talk to me. Of course, today was the day everyone wanted to talk to me, even Ed, who actually left his office for the first time since I started.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine!’ I mumbled, staring at my desk.

  ‘Are you feeling OK?’

  ‘Totally A-OK! Tippety top!’

  ‘You’re a funny colour.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Sort of … green?’

  ‘I expect it’s the lighting in here. I think Alan has a touch of eau de nil about him?’

  ‘No, it’s just you who’s green.’

  ‘Oh, did you say GREEN? Yes, yes, I might be a bit green, actually, now you come to mention it.’

  ‘Why?’ said Ed.

  Oh, fuck. Why? Why was I green? Ed might not say much, but he doesn’t seem the sort of person who is very easy to bullshit. I decided to come clean.

  ‘Well, the thing is, I actually was at a Halloween party in fancy dress, and I might have had a bit too much to drink and left my green make-up on for too long, and it has slightly turned me a little bit green,’ I admitted.

  ‘Oh. Well. I thought maybe you had something contagious,’ said Ed. ‘Good. Um, try not to make a habit of being green, though, if you wouldn’t mind?’

  ‘I won’t,’ I said, with as much dignity as possible under the circumstances.

  When Ed had hastily retreated to the safe space of his office, where no verdant females lurked, Alan started laughing.

  ‘Rock and ROLL, Ellen!’ he chortled. ‘I thought you were all about clean living and yoga.’ (I may have given the impression I do yoga. Technically it wasn’t a lie; I DID do a yoga class once, and I even have a yoga mat I got cheap in TKMaxx.) ‘I thought maybe you’d overdone it on the green smoothies and turned yourself green. I did a green-smoothie detox once. I shat algae for a week. Never again!’ he shuddered.

  ‘Getting drunk at a party …’ sighed Lydia. ‘I remember getting drunk at parties. Before babies. Now I just feel like I have a permanent hangover because I’m up with the toddler most nights. Lucky you, Ellen! I can’t even remember the last time I went to a party that didn’t serve the food in brightly coloured little Ikea bowls. Or that served anything other than sausage rolls and mini pizzas.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t quite like that …’ I started to say.

  ‘My flatmate did something similar at university,’ said James. ‘He got it off with Swarfega.’

  Swarfega! Aha! Why hadn’t I thought of that?

  ‘Oooh, it’s lunchtime,’ said James. ‘I’m going to the deli down the road. Does anyone want anything?’

  ‘Shit, I better go and call the nanny. The baby had the squits when I left this morning,’ said Lydia.

  ‘Nothing for me, James. I’m going to the gym,’ said Alan.

  ‘It wasn’t very rock and roll at all,’ I said to the empty office, but everyone had scattered.

  NOVEMBER

  Friday, 4 November

  Join the PTA, they said. Feel all warm and fuzzy that you are doing something nice for the children, they said. It will hardly take up any time at all, they said. Well, they were LIARS! All of them. Big, fat, filthy liars!

  No sooner had the Halloween green faded from my face, than another email popped in from Lucy Atkinson’s Mummy. I had instructed Simon that he could be the one to rush back from work and pick up the kids and shovel their Friday pizza down them, because I was going out for Friday drinks at a cool bar with my new colleagues. A young people’s bar! I would even abandon the car and get a taxi home, so I could be a proper grown-up. I wasn’t therefore best thrilled as I chugged down my third Gibson (a cocktail with pickled onions in it. What bliss!) to see her email. I get a cold chill down my spine when I see an email from Perfect Lucy Atkinson’s Perfect Fucking Mummy ping into my inbox, as, like with emails from Jessica, there is never any good news to be had there. I really shouldn’t have opened it while I was Out Out and half cut, because sure enough – bam!

  Hi,

  As you know, I usually organise the collection for the teacher’s Christmas present, but I wondered if you would consider doing it this year, as I am very busy.

  Xxxx

  Four kisses. This is an indication of the shit storm into which I have just been landed. When people you don’t know very well sign off with kisses, I find the number of kisses is a passive–aggressive indicator of just how much of a ball ache they have just dumped on you – the more kisses, the worse the situation. And the teacher’s present is a bastarding minefield! It should be perfectly simple – everybody stick a fiver in an envelope, and give it to the nominated person, who then buys John Lewis or M&S gift vouchers, which is a polite way of saying, ‘Dear Lovely Teacher, Thank you for putting up with our monstrous offspring. Please accept this small token of our appreciation, which you can now use to buy booze to numb the pain caused by our devil spawn. Or pants, if you so wish. Lots of love, All The Mummies And Daddies.’

  But it is never that simple. I have been copied in on eleventy billion of these email threads, because the people who like to fuck the whole thing up also insist on hitting ‘reply all’ for every single message BECAUSE THEY ARE UTTER BASTARDS, and I just know the whole thing is going to descend into a giant clusterfuck – especially if I am in charge of it. Lucy’s Mummy, annoyingly perfect though she is, with her skinnier-than-skinny jeans and her soy lattes on the way to her yoga class and her hair THAT ALWAYS LOOKS PERFECT EVEN WHEN IT IS WINDY was very good at tactfully talking down the mummies who wanted to adopt a Guatemalan orphan for the teacher or buy them recycled earrings made out of Himalayan goat droppings. I am not tactful. There is an excellent chance I will tell them all to go fuck themselves by the third email.

  Oh, and joy of joys, another email:

  Forgot to say – the person who organises the teacher present usually just organises the Mums’ Night Out at the same time. Looking forward to it!

  Xxxxx

  Five kisses! Oh, FML. Organising the Mums’ Christmas Night Out. That is a poisoned chalice, if ever there was one (quite literally a poisoned chalice if the Cocktails of Doom on last year’s Night Out were anything to go by). Thirty over-excited women (well, twenty-eight and Sa
m, who is granted Mummy status by dint of being a gay single father, and Julian, who insists on telling every woman he meets how ‘sensitive’ being a stay-at-home dad has made him, by which he means he’d like to try to get into their knickers. Oddly, Julian’s sensitivity does not appear to extend to actually doing anything useful like helping at PTA events, but he is very good at coming on the Christmas Night Out and being lecherous, and also at dumping his offspring on any other unsuspecting parent who shows even the slightest interest in his ‘photography’ business, as obviously it’s ‘so hard, being a full-time parent and trying to run a business, so actually, if you could just have Phoebe and Marcus for a couple of hours that would be amazing! I could give you a discount off one of my family portrait sessions as a thank you! Oh, you’re a star! I won’t be any later than 5 p.m. to pick them up! 6 p.m. at the very latest. Absolutely definitely no later than 7, for sure, as Susan is home by then. Cheers! See you later! Oh, and you don’t mind giving them dinner, do you? Just remember that Phoebe is gluten-free and Marcus is lactose-intolerant. Super! Byeeeeee!’) crammed in a pub, forced to wear paper crowns against our will while eating over-priced lukewarm turkey and pretending that we have anything in common with each other apart from the fact that we happened to force another human out of our bodies in one or another unspeakable way in the same twelve-month period (apart from Julian and Sam, of course, though Julian has a worrying habit of trying to join in the labour stories by relating Susan’s birth experiences, which doesn’t really seem appropriate given no one has ever met Susan in the two years that his kids have been at the school. I would start to think that Susan is a figment of Julian’s imagination and he just borrowed the children from an unsuspecting friend years ago to try to help him pull the Yummy Mummies, but then I remember that Simon is so rarely seen at the school either that I suspect a lot of people think that I have just made up a husband).

  I just wanted ONE night being a grown-up in a nice bar. Just one! Why did all this shit have to land tonight? Along with several whining texts from Simon about when should he put the pizza on?/when would I be back?/did the kids have a whole pizza each or one between them? etc., I was seething quietly about this when Alan brought over a fourth Gibson and winked at me.