Why Mummy Swears Read online

  I also always come out of an interview with absolutely no idea what I might have said in response to the questions and all I can do is hope that when asked, ‘Why do you think you would be the right person for this job?’ is that I replied something about my skills, qualifications and interests, and threw in something about being a team player and didn’t actually answer, ‘Because my lord and master the Dread Cthulhu thinks it would suit me. I slaughtered a black cockerel and inspected the entrails for portents and signs, and he spoke to me thus.’ But I am never sure. It’s a bit like when voting in important elections and despite carefully making sure my cross is in the right place, as soon as I pop my ballot paper into the box I am gripped with dread that I voted for the wrong one, and what if the election comes down to the wire and every vote counts and I voted wrong and now Western Civilisation will collapse and it will ALL BE MY FAULT?

  I tried discussing my fears and concerns with Simon, but he is still not entirely sold on the idea of me going back to work full-time. ‘I just don’t see why you need to be full-time,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t it fit in much better with the children if you are part-time, and you can be there to help with homework and make dinner and stuff? I’m not entirely sure I like the idea of them being latchkey children.’

  ‘They will hardly be latchkey children. I only worked part-time when they were tiny because it meant we didn’t have to spend such prodigious sums on childcare, and yes, we thought it was better if one of us could be at home with them at least some of the time. But they’re both at school full-time now, and there’s breakfast clubs and after-school clubs and in another year, Jane won’t even be at primary school. They’re not babies anymore, they don’t need me as much as they used to, and as time goes on they will need me less and less, but I might not get another opportunity like this, so I’d quite like to give it a shot.’

  ‘But why now? Why can’t you wait until they’re older to go full-time, and just get another part-time job? I don’t think you are really thinking about what’s best for the children here, darling.’

  ‘Because I want THIS job! I don’t WANT another part-time, stop-gap job. It was only ever meant to be a temporary fix, to keep the wolf from the door while the kids were little. The only vaguely interesting thing I have done to earn any money in the last eleven years was designing that Why Mummy Drinks app, which, if you may recall, did rather well. And now the children are really not that little anymore, if you haven’t noticed, so I’d quite like to do something that is a bit more stimulating, a bit more challenging, instead of babysitting the computer illiterate and explaining to Jean from Shipping for the eleventy billionth time why her computer does not “hate her” and does not “eat things”. Why is it so wrong that I want to do something for ME? What about MY hopes and ambitions? Do YOU think of what’s best for the children every time you make a career decision, or do you think about what YOU want?’

  ‘Well, you did literally just tell me your main ambition in life was to keep an otter in the bath,’ pointed out Simon. ‘So forgive me if I don’t try to facilitate all your dreams. And of course I think about what’s best for the children,’ he lied. ‘I just don’t think that that’s having two full-time working parents, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, darling,’ I said. ‘If you are so very concerned about the children’s welfare, there is a very simple solution, you know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, if I get this job, I’ll be earning as much as you. So if you are really worried about it all being a bit much with us both working full-time, you could always go part-time instead and take on responsibility for the house and the childcare?’

  Simon paled. ‘Err, no, no, I’m fine, I’m sure we can make it work. If this is what you want to do, I’ll support you. No need for me to go part-time. I’m sure the children will be OK.’

  ‘Thank you, my love,’ I said sweetly.

  Tuesday, 6 September

  Ha, ha. I am READY! Bring. It. On.

  The uniforms have been bought, at vast and painful expense.

  Hours upon hours have been spent queuing in Clarks, desperately clutching our little ticket and glaring menacingly at any parents who look like they might be trying to queue-jump, and more appalling sums of money have been handed over for shiny new school shoes that will shortly be battered and scuffed and caked in mud, leading me to wonder why I spent eleventy billion pounds on properly fitted shoes so my precious moppets’ tiny, youthful feet will not be squashed and can develop into suitably middle-class trotters, when they couldn’t care less and will trash them within the first week. And I could have saved myself the money and effort and bought them a pair from Asda for a tenner.

  Trainers and gym shoes and PE kit have been purchased. School bags and pencil cases and water bottles and what appears to be the entire bastarding contents of Smiggle are now grasped in my darlings’ sweaty paws, while they continue to whine about the unspeakable injustice of my refusal to pay £5.99 for a SINGLE RUBBER!

  My hands are calloused and bleeding from sewing name tapes on to all this cornucopia of capitalist consumerism. This is due to my starry-eyed naivety when Jane started school, which led to me ordering them five hundred fucking name tapes EACH from the kind people at Mr Cash’s label emporium, thinking fondly as I did of how smart their uniforms would look with the pretty labels sewn in (green for Jane and blue for Peter, with a little motif of a dinosaur for Jane and a choo-choo train for Peter), but completely overlooking the fact that I can’t sew, that I hate anything to do with sewing, and that I invariably end up throwing any project that requires sewing across the room and swearing furiously. Also, do you have any idea how many name tapes there are in a bag of FIVE HUNDRED? Approximately eleventy fucking billion, that’s how many! There will be enough to see them off to university, and actually, the website recommended the name tapes for nursing homes, too, and I wouldn’t be surprised if those bloody bags of name tapes were still going strong by the time Peter and Jane are ready to enter Shady Pines themselves.

  Next year I am buying one of those clever stamper things for labelling their stuff. Admittedly I say this every year and forget to order one until there is no time left, so I end up swearing and bleeding on the new white shirts as I wrestle with the sew-in ones, but maybe next year will be the year I remember. Actually, the really clever thing to do would be to order one NOW, so I have it to hand, but that seems wanton and profligate when I still have SO MANY BLOODY NAME TAPES and have just spent so much time sewing them in.

  Anyway, it is done now. Well, most of it is done. Well, OK, I sewed in three labels, looked at the mountains of stuff that still needed labelling and went, ‘Life’s too short’, had a glass of wine and got a Sharpie and wrote their names in the rest. It’s possible that this happens every year, which is why the supply of name tapes never actually diminishes much.

  But the alarm is set, bright and early for tomorrow morning, and another school year shall commence. Hopefully, this will be the year when my darling children finally reveal their hidden talents and turn out to excel at something, so I can be the proud, smugger-than-smug mummy in the playground, boasting shamelessly about their achievements, but given I am now struggling to come to terms with the fact that I am almost forty-two (FORTY-TWO! Withered cronedom is approaching at an alarming rate, despite the obscenely expensive creams I slather on my face) and I still haven’t discovered my own hidden talents, I think it is unlikely.

  When I check on the children before bed I will just have one more peek at their drawers filled with their lovely clean new uniform, as it will be the last time it looks like that this school year. Within a week they will have transformed those bright white polo shirts into grubby, paint-stained rags, and when given clean laundry to put away will either dump everything on their bedroom floor willy-nilly or cram it all anyhow into the drawers, completely ignoring the time I spent carefully folding it for them. At least I have the wit not to iron their uniforms, though I eased my guilt at my slatternly ways by buy
ing the ‘non-iron’ uniforms.

  Wednesday, 7 September

  Well, today went well. Peter and Jane have blithely spent the entire summer holidays getting up at 6 a.m. for no apparent reason other than to annoy me by galumphing down the stairs like a herd of elephants and then loudly fighting over who gets which iPad (as it is UNFAIR if one of them has to use the slightly older iPad, despite the fact that it makes NO SODDING DIFFERENCE to their horrible cartoons on Netflix), but this morning, when they had to get up and get ready for school so that we would actually start this academic year as we meant to go on – well, of course, this was the morning that they chose to sleep in!

  I had to drag them out of bed, both of them snarling like angry weasels and complaining bitterly that they were still tired, while I spat back that they were probably still tired because they had not gone to bloody sleep when they were told last night. Instead, they had spent two hours after bedtime getting up for drinks of water and trips to the loo and come downstairs and tell me about how they couldn’t sleep until I became incensed with rage after tucking them back in for the sixth time and shouted that OF COURSE they couldn’t sleep, because they were up wandering around the house, and I wouldn’t be able to sleep either and maybe if they tried actually staying in their actual beds they might be able to get some actual sleep. And, more importantly, I could watch Game of Thrones without them walking in at every single inopportune moment just when someone had got their tits out! Apparently this was mean of me, and I was told once again how EVERYBODY ELSE in their class gets to choose their own bedtime and go to bed whenever they want, and also THEIR mummies let them watch 18-rated films and play Call of Duty. So all in all, I was distinctly lacking in sympathy for my darlings’ protestations of weariness and exhaustion this morning.

  I did, however, manage to feed and wash and dress the cherubs (well, I didn’t actually wash or dress them, obviously, at nine and eleven they are – allegedly – perfectly capable of doing that themselves; I just hurtled into their rooms and shouted at them to PUT THEIR CLOTHES ON, while Peter fannied about with his Lego and Jane complained that she only had the ‘wrong kind’ of socks), and we were all ready(ish), with plenty of time to take the obligatory First Day Photo.

  The First Day Photo, as every parent knows, involves finding the corner of your house that looks least like a shithole and hustling your offspring into it, while shouting, ‘SMILE, darlings, JUST FUCKING SMILE. I need one nice photo of you today, just one, so I can send it to your grandparents and show them what adorable poppets you are. And put it on Facebook, so people know I love you! Oh FFS, please, it’s not that hard. You both just have to SMILE and LOOK AT MY PHONE at the same time. No, you BOTH have to look at the phone. Together. No, with your eyes open. Because you’re not fucking looking at the phone if you’ve got your eyes shut, ARE YOU? And SMILE! For the love of God, SMILE!’

  Some parents actually have special signs made for their children to hold, with the class the children are going into and jaunty little ‘Back to School’ phrases, the better to smugly remind us all via social media that they are #soblessed and just love #makingmemories, before lamenting that the holidays are just too short and their #mamahearts will be missing their #babies who are #growinguptoofast. I am not one of those mothers. I fear I do not even have a #mamaheart, as sadness is NOT the emotion I feel when my beloved munchkins are returned to the glorious bosom of education after six long bastarding weeks of us #makingmemories that mainly consist of everyone crying into ice-creams after being thwarted once again by the British weather.

  It was especially important that I got a suitable photo of the First Day of Term this year, because a) I forgot last year and had to fake it the next day and bribe the children not to tell their grandparents that it was in fact a ‘second day of term’ photo that I sent them (with the inevitably scuffed shoes cropped out) and b) quite astonishingly, it is Jane’s last year at primary school. I can’t quite believe it. Everyone says, ‘Oh, they grow up so fast,’ and I always wanted to snarl, ‘Do they? Really? Because I am not convinced they will grow up at all, ever. I think that my life will now consist of trying to stop this small wrecking ball destroying my house and picking half-chewed organic rice cakes out of my hair, and that is ALL THERE IS NOW!’ but it really doesn’t seem that long ago that I was counting down the days until she could start playgroup, and now she is finishing primary school and next year will be at BIG SCHOOL!

  I finally got some approximation of the photo I wanted, but not before I had ended up with an entire camera roll filled with photos of the children gurning and sulking, which I will feel guilty about deleting because #firstdayofterm, and, after yet another argument with Jane about why she is not allowed her own Instagram account (‘Because you have to be thirteen! Are you thirteen? No, no, you are not, so you are not having your own account! I don’t CARE if the rest of your class has their own account! It is not happening!’), we were ready for the off, for even I can manage not to be late on the first day of term.

  Simon, obviously, wasn’t able to come with us for the first day of term because he had to go to work and be very busy and important. It never fails to astonish me how Simon’s busy and importantness always seems to coincide with school events, so I have to go myself. I used to make a point of talking about ‘MY HUSBAND’ in a loud voice on such occasions, but since my husband never actually materialised I have stopped doing that, as I am afraid that all the teachers think I am a mad fantasist who has invented a husband for some reason and only wears a wedding ring to affect some strange 1950s notion of ‘respectability’.

  Anyway, the children were at least dispatched without further ado – Peter’s teacher is a rather sweet young probationer, but judging by her rather tight and low-cut sweater, there might be a sudden influx of daddies in that class volunteering to take part in school events, and Jane has a new teacher as well – an actual man is teaching in the primary school. Well, I say a man. In truth he is more of a boy – when I saw him in the playground I actually thought he was only slightly taller than an average Year 6.

  I suppose this will start happening to me more and more now. First I think the teachers look terribly young, next thing I will be complaining how youthful the policemen are and then insisting I want to see a ‘proper doctor’ as I don’t believe the whippersnapper before me can possibly be properly qualified. Actually, this has almost happened already – the last time I took Judgy to the vet I was unconvinced they had given me a real vet, such was the youth of the Man Child before me. I realised, of course, that clearly he WAS a proper vet, and a highly knowledgeable and skilled one when he exclaimed, ‘Well, that’s a fine wee terrier you’ve got there!’ Anyone who can recognise my dog’s superiority clearly knows his stuff.

  Thursday, 8 September

  Oh, fuckety fuckety doodah. The interview is tomorrow. TOMORROW. I am not ready for this – what was I thinking? Why would some cool, futuristic, space-age company employ ME? They do not want someone like me who is already complaining that the teachers and doctors and policemen are very young, they want those very young people who should clearly still be at school. At least after much browsing I have found something to wear. I had to go for the stupidly high heels, because I tried a slightly-cropped-trousers-with-ankle-boots look in the hope it would make me look like a millennial, but it just made me look like I’d got dressed in the dark and couldn’t find my socks or any trousers that fitted. The girls on Pinterest didn’t look like that. Christ, I can’t even pull off dressing as a millennial, so how on earth am I going to pull this off?

  I have researched all about the company, and rehearsed my HR-friendly answers, but who knows what people even ask in interviews anymore. Maybe they don’t want to know about my strengths and weaknesses. (I’m a team player, obviously, but sometimes I’m too much of a perfectionist – ha ha! No one tells the truth about their strengths and weaknesses in interviews do they? ‘My biggest strength is actually my ability to sleep at my desk with my eyes open, thus mak
ing it appear that I am present and productive, while actually napping, and my main weakness is probably an inability to use the toilet when there is anyone else in there because I am afraid I might inadvertently fart and someone will hear and they will call me FartGirl forever more, so sometimes I end up wasting a lot of time in the loo waiting for there to be no one else in there even when I only need a wee.’) But is that what they want to know now? Maybe they’ve gone all ‘blue-sky thinking’ and ‘outside the box’ (Ooooh, another strength – ‘I was the reigning office champion at Buzzword Bingo in my previous job for three years running’), and will ask you ‘zany’ questions about ‘What sort of tree would you be, if you were a tree?’ and ‘Squirrel or raccoon?’ that reveal some hidden psychological depths about you.

  Katie across the road came over for a coffee before school pick-up, as her oldest, Lily, has just started school.

  ‘It feels so strange, Lily being at school,’ said Katie. ‘Just me and Ruby in the house. I don’t know why, because it’s been just Ruby and me while Lily was at nursery, but somehow it feels different. I can’t believe she’s at school. She looked so grown-up going in!’

  ‘Ha!’ I said. ‘I know. The thing is, you will have thought she looked grown-up now on her first day, but in a couple of years you’ll be looking at the tinies going in and thinking how little they are and are they really big enough for school.’

  ‘They grow up so fast,’ sighed Katie, before shrieking, ‘RUBY! RUBY! LEAVE THE DOG! I SAID LEAVE JUDGY ALONE! DO NOT PULL JUDGY’S WILLY! FFS, what is WRONG WITH YOU! Oh, Christ, scrap what I said. They don’t grow up fast enough. RUBY! Do NOT pour your juice over Judgy. I said NO! Oh God, why don’t they grow up faster?’

  ‘Do you think I could pass for a millennial, Katie?’ I asked hopefully.

  ‘Well, millennial is quite a broad term, isn’t it?’ said Katie kindly.