Why Mummy Drinks Read online

  I hesitated for a second, wondering if I could wangle myself an invitation too, just so I could nosy at Sam’s house and see if he is as perfect and gorgeous as he seems, and also because then I could casually drop it into conversation with the Bloody Perfect Coven who have been twittering around him like hormonally charged starlings, but who, as far as I know, have not yet received an invitation for either themselves or their children. Then Sam said, ‘I know it is a bit weird, your children going to a stranger’s house, so please come along too, I quite understand.’ Ha! So I got to tag along, having again dodged the desperate saddo bullet, even if the flip side was that he thought that I thought he might be a paedophile/child trafficker/criminal overlord. One can’t have everything.

  Sam’s house was not actually what I was expecting at all. I’d assumed he would live in a super-cool, gadget-filled glass box complete with stylish but uncomfortable-looking twentieth-century furniture – basically the Grand Designs vision that Simon hankers after, complete with the Mies van der Rohe chairs that he covets and that we cannot afford, not least because the pig dog would chew them and the children would jump on them and break them.

  The house was in fact much more like my vision of a home; with squishy sofas and beautiful painted French furniture and tasteful clutter, unlike the clutter-clutter that fills my house. Slightly tactlessly I remarked on this to Sam, but he was very nice about it and said the lack of clutter-clutter was largely due to him just moving in and half the furniture and stuff going to his partner Robyn in the split. Robyn is apparently an interior designer, hence the Very Lovely Things.

  I longed desperately to ask more about the errant Robyn, and how and why she would leave a man like Sam, who added to his general perfection by having Mint Clubs, which are the King of Biscuits, but he changed the subject quite firmly so we ended up talking about the various children’s after-school activities in the area – which are good, but not worth the vast sums of money that they cost. It was a dull but safe conversation, and it in no way provided opportunities for me to say anything like, ‘Would you mind terribly if I licked you? It’s just that you’re rather sexy.’

  Then Sophie and Jane appeared, screaming, because Toby and Peter had interrupted their game of ‘Makeovers’ to attack them with Nerf guns, which was perhaps just as well, given how much makeup and glitter the girls were already plastered in, despite apparently only being halfway through the makeovers. Amidst a lot of shouting and scuffling I hastily removed my juvenile stripper look-alike and the tiny Rambo and dragged them home while there was still a semblance of Sam thinking we were a nice, normal family that he and his children would like to befriend.

  All this, AND it is Fuck It All Friday. Hurrah and huzzah! So I can give up the unequal battle to save the children from scurvy and abandon the broccoli in favour of frozen pizzas. I can also give up all pretence of limiting their screen time and plug them into the electronic babysitters while I get quietly sozzled on indifferent wine and stalk old boyfriends on Facebook and Simon falls asleep on the sofa in front of Wheeler Fucking Dealers yet again, and, despite snoring like an angry warthog drowning in a vat of porridge, shouts ‘I’m watching that!’ if I try to prise the remote out of his clutch. Not that it will do me any good even if I do get custody of the remote, as Simon is such a massive bastarding Gadget Twat that he has rendered using the TV beyond my capabilities with all his various boxes and ‘streaming’ devices, each with their own remote that needs to be tuned to a different channel. As I can never remember which remote is for which box though, I end up jabbing hopelessly at All The Buttons until one of the children takes pity on me and makes it work.

  The dog is looking at me most disapprovingly this evening. I fear he has somehow sensed that I am harbouring impure thoughts about Sam and he is judging me as a shameless harlot for using him as a conversation opener.

  Saturday, 26 September

  Simon spent the afternoon in his shed and I spent the afternoon painting the sideboard in the dining room in an effort to replicate the quirky shabby-chic vibe of Sam’s house. While I did this the children attempted to do something creative with what had once been glitter glue, but as the glitter glue had dried out and I had attempted to revive it with some warm water and PVA glue, the substance they were smearing over themselves and the table looked more like unicorn jizz.

  Simon was a bit shirty when I revealed the revamped sideboard in its chalk-painted glory, as it had been his grandmother’s and is a family heirloom, apparently. Harshly, he insisted it was ‘Just shabby, with no chic’, which may have been because I got a bit carried away with the ‘distressing’.

  Due to Simon’s lack of vision about my upcycling, the last qualm I had about abandoning him to go out for a drink with Hannah vanished. He actually looked surprised when I appeared in Going Out Clothes, with hair brushed and lipstick and mascara on. So much so that he said, ‘You look nice. Is that for me?’ despite the fact I must have told him at least nine times that he would be looking after the children tonight, including washing the unicorn jizz out of their hair, because I was going out to keep Hannah company so she doesn’t have to sit alone in her empty house while Dan has the children for the night.

  I may have snapped that at him at bit more brusquely than was necessary, as he actually looked a bit sad and deflated that the effort was not for him, so I said, ‘Do I really look nice?’ to which he just responded, ‘Yeah, you look okay’, which is exactly what every woman wants to hear. Twat.

  Poor Hannah has fallen back into the pit of despair having found out that Dan has been shagging some twentysomething slapper he met at the gym and being utterly unapologetic about it when she asked if that was why he had left her. Dan is such a dick. At least Simon won’t find any nubile twentysomethings in his shed.

  I wonder if I should try to set Hannah up with Sam when she is over Dan a bit? That would be both a kind and altruistic thing to do, to help them both find love again, as well atoning slightly for my shameless crush on him. Maybe if he was taken I would fancy him a bit less? Also, it would piss off Dan no end if he saw Hannah with someone as gorgeous as Sam. What price his twentysomething gym bunny against That Arse?

  An evening hearing about The Dickishness of Dan over a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc actually made me feel quite kindly disposed towards Simon, and I even planned to tell him that when I got home, except he was out cold on the sofa with bloody motorbike racing blaring out of the TV. How can he sleep through that? He was snoring and wearing his oldest and nastiest fleece and refused to wake up even when I threw a cushion quite hard at his head. So I left him there and went to bed.

  When did Simon get so old? We used to stay up all night, talking and listening to music. Not even talking about anything in particular – we couldn’t claim to be setting the world alight with our radical views on art and politics. In fact, I don’t know what we talked about, but I know we did. When I met him, he was a something between a Goth and a New Romantic, wearing a big black coat from a charity shop and chain-smoking Marlboro Reds, and I thought he was so cool. Maybe he looks at me and wonders what’s happened to me, too? I still remember what I was wearing the night I met him – a very short black skirt, DM boots, a sort of fisherman’s jumper I had stolen off an ex-boyfriend and an over-sized tweed jacket I had nicked off my dad, who phoned me every week demanding its return, except I couldn’t return it now because it reeked of cigarette smoke and hash. With hindsight, I must’ve looked insane, but I was very pleased with myself.

  We were at university, in Edinburgh, and I had seen him around in first year but had never spoken to him, as he was older, in the year above me, and part of a cool, arty lot and I, well, I was neither cool nor arty, despite my best attempts to be both. It was towards the end of my second year that he came over to me one night in the Pear Tree pub and asked me for a light, confessing later that it was just an excuse to start talking to me, which was possibly the most absurdly flattering thing that had ever happened to me.

  And now h
ere we are, with two children and a mortgage slightly larger than we are comfortable with, and jobs neither of us are terribly happy in, and a ruined sideboard that I have to admit does not look better now the paint has dried, as I had very much hoped it would (actually it looks like it belongs in a skip, so there goes my plan of a career change to interior designer). And the other day Steve Wright played ‘Disco 2000’ on the Golden Oldies. ‘Disco 2000’! ‘Disco 2000’ is not an ‘oldie’, it is the best song in the world ever, and it was only out about a year ago, wasn’t it? How the fuck can it be an oldie? FML. My youth is dead.

  OCTOBER

  Sunday, 4 October

  Simon is still going on and on about the wretched sideboard.

  ‘What possessed you, Ellen? What are you going to do about it, Ellen? Do you know how long that has been in my family, Ellen? What’s my mother going to say when she sees it?’

  Eventually I lost patience with his whinging and bellowed, ‘It’s just a sideboard! It’s just a lump of wood! It’s not the end of the world! It’s not even worth anything!’

  Simon looked hurt and pathetic and sniffed, ‘It has immense sentimental value, Ellen, and you ruined it, without even consulting me. I think I’m entitled to be a bit upset, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, Simon, darling,’ I snarled. ‘Perhaps if you didn’t spend all weekend in your fucking shed, avoiding any interaction with me or your children because apparently you have busy and important things to do in there, then maybe you might have been there to discuss it with me. Hmm?’

  To which he retorted, ‘I’m very bloody sorry that I think I’m entitled to a bit of time for myself at the weekend, darling, but some of us have to work full-time. Some of us don’t get to finish work at lunchtime and have days off in the middle of the week, darling, so some of us are a bit fucking knackered by the weekend actually.’

  ‘SOME of us don’t fucking finish at lunchtime, SOME of us finish just in time to drive like a maniac to the school to pick up SOMEONE’S children, DARLING! SOME of us then spend the rest of the evening taking SOMEONE’S children to their various clubs, making dinner, doing laundry, supervising baths and homework and putting SOMEONE’S children to bed, because of course SOMEONE is too fucking tired after work to do anything except sit in front of the fucking television with a beer. SOME of us spend our so-fucking-called “day off” trying to restore some sort of order to the shit-hole of a house, and SOME of us then spend our weekends also cleaning, doing laundry, ironing and entertaining SOMEONE’S children! Actually. DARLING!’ I shrieked.

  I felt I had made some very valid points but I was afraid my rage may have reached such proportions that my voice had become so shrill only a dolphin could have heard my excellent argument for why Simon was a selfish bastard.

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, Ellen. Why does everything always have to be a competition with you? You’ve wrecked my grandmother’s sideboard, but it’s all about how hard done by you are.’ Simon groaned.

  ‘It’s not a competition; I was merely pointing out how I spend my “free” time. And now, if you will excuse me, I will spend some more of my leisure taking your children on a delightful playdate.’

  ‘We’re going to Sophie and Toby’s house,’ put in Peter.

  ‘Sophie and Toby haven’t got a mummy; they live with their daddy, Sam. Lucy Atkinson’s Mummy says Sam is lush,’ announced Jane helpfully.

  ‘Who is this Sam?’ Simon enquired coldly.

  ‘He is a new father at the school. He’s a single dad.’ I informed him.

  ‘And is he, indeed, lush?’

  ‘I can’t say I’ve noticed, to be honest,’ I lied brazenly, hoping I wasn’t actually blushing.

  It was lovely to be out at Sam’s. I do love his house. I caught myself more than once wondering what it would be like to sit having coffee in the morning at his duck-egg-and-cream kitchen table, with Sam all tousled in a dressing gown opposite me. No, not a dressing gown. So unsexy. Maybe some Calvin Klein pyjama bottoms and a nice T-shirt, quite a tight one, and some stubble … STOP IT, ELLEN! STOP IT NOW!

  Saturday, 10 October

  To the park with the children this afternoon. Somehow the park is never quite the japesome frolic that I feel it should be. To start with, there is the lovely task of scouring the play area on arrival to make sure there are no broken bottles or condoms lying around, abandoned by bored teenagers the night before (though I suppose one should be glad they are at least taking precautions, even after a bottle of cheap vodka, but the conversation about why the children mustn’t touch the ‘special balloon’ they have found is not a particularly enjoyable one to have with a hang-over). Then, of course, one has to run the gauntlet of the Coven of Bloody Perfect Mummies dispensing their healthy homemade date and granola cereal bars to their rosy-cheeked offspring while you have not brought any snacks because you were under the impression that now your children were school-aged they could possibly go for a whole hour without shoving food in their gobs every thirty seconds. But as you are the only mummy there without snacks, it seems you were wrong, and they must be fed constantly, like squawking baby birds – only it is quite frowned upon if you let them eat worms, as I discovered when Peter was three.

  I was digging through my pockets in search of sustenance, so far having located a fluff-covered object that may once have been a jelly baby, when who appeared but Sam, also apparently unfettered by enough food to sustain his children for a month-long siege, and he actually came over and sat down next to me, despite Perfect Lucy Atkinson’s Perfect Mummy and her acolytes cooing greetings to him as he passed and attempting to bribe his children by proffering courgette traybake (‘Don’t worry, there’s no sugar in it, I only use apple juice as a sweetener in my baking.’). It is possible that Sam only chose to sit next to me because by arriving at the park first I had cunningly annexed the only bench with a modicum of shelter from the howling east wind that sweeps through, threatening hypothermia to parents, while the children cast off their expensive warm jackets and run amok, oblivious to the cold.

  ‘I’m confused, Ellen,’ said Sam. ‘Why are all these children eating? Do they not get fed at home? And what are they eating? Toby just told that blonde one that he “doesn’t do” green cake, which seems a fair point.’

  ‘Haven’t you come across Competitive Mummying before?’ I asked. ‘Maybe they don’t do it to you because they all too busy looking at your … er … fathering skills.’ (So nearly said arse!) ‘Watch them, the idea is to demonstrate, via the most disgusting snack possible, how well rounded and balanced your children are. Extra points for the longer your offering takes to make – ideally you will have soaked chia seeds in almond milk overnight at the very least – and the more obscure the revolting ingredients, the better. It’s quite funny when it backfires, though. Last week Emilia Fortescue was sick on her mummy’s French Sole ballet pumps after an attempt at force-feeding her a hemp and spirulina muffin. Once snacktime is over they will start shouting instructions to the children to demonstrate their gymnastic skills on the climbing frame, or their architectural skills in the sandpit. Perfect Lucy Atkinson’s Perfect Mummy used to like to shout her instructions in French, but she was totally trumped last week when Tabitha MacKenzie’s Mummy issued her instructions in Mandarin. Lucy’s Mummy’s face was to die for.’

  To my astonishment, I realised Sam was actually laughing at this. I hadn’t meant to be funny, it was mostly a judgemental and disgruntled rant having spent the last hour freezing my arse off on this bench while staring resolutely at my phone because I lacked the strength to be patronised into the Vortex of Inadequacy that is inevitable in any conversation with the Coven of Bloody Perfect Mummies, looking up only at the more bloodcurdling screams to make sure they weren’t coming from or had been caused by Peter or Jane.

  ‘Why on earth do they do that?’ Sam asked incredulously.

  ‘I dunno,’ I shrugged. ‘I think it’s something to do with them once being terribly important in their careers but giving it all up t
o have their children brought up by an Eastern European nanny while they go shopping, or, occasionally, if they want to pretend they still “work” they play at being a “designer” of some sort – any sort will do; children’s clothes and jewellery are the usual, though, and cashmere baby-gros are currently trending as the Mummy Business du jour. Though of course if your husband has a large property portfolio you can call yourself an interior designer if you’ve bought some cushions. All this is done in between going to yoga and Pilates and checking their very rich husband’s phone to see if he is having it off with The Nanny (nannies don’t get names), and so they need to validate their continuing importance by competing and showing off to each other about who is the most organic and loving and thus who has the most well-rounded, nurtured and, most importantly, gifted children. Oh, and also they lie. See that one? Fiona Montague. She used to knock two months off her baby’s age at Mummy and Music and Me so he appeared more advanced than he actually was. She hadn’t really thought it through as far as his first birthday, though.’

  My God, having started on the judgemental ranting, it seemed I couldn’t stop.

  ‘And you don’t feel the urge to join in?’ asked Sam. ‘To break out your bento box full of, I dunno, savoury Vacherin cheese slices seasoned only with the tears of Pyrenean mountain goats?’

  Ooooh, Sam is judgy too!

  ‘DAIRY? Are you MAD? They are all lactose and gluten-free, with a whole host of other “intolerances” too. In fact, last year’s in-thing was finding the most obscure ingredient to declare your child allergic to and trying to get the school to ban it. I tried to claim mine were allergic to glitter, but it didn’t bloody work.’

  ‘Seriously, though, how have you not been sucked into their madness?’