The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  For Lucy Sweeney, motherhood isn’t all astanga yoga and Cath Kidston prints. It’s been years since the dirty laundry pile was less than a metre high, months since Lucy remembered to have sex with her husband, and a week since she last did the school run wearing pyjamas.

  Motherhood, it seems, has more pitfalls than she might have expected. Caught between perfectionist Yummy Mummy No 1 and hypercompetitive Alpha Mum, Lucy is in danger of losing the parenting plot. And, worst of all, she’s alarmingly distracted by Sexy Domesticated Dad. It’s only a matter of time before the dirty laundry quite literally blows up in her face . . .

  About the Author

  Fiona Neill is a features writer for The Times Magazine and author and creator of its hugely popular ‘Slummy Mummy’ column. After working abroad for six years, as a foreign correspondent in Latin America, she returned to the UK to become assistant editor of Marie Claire and then The Times Magazine. Brought up in Norfolk, she now lives in London with her husband and three children.

  The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy

  Fiona Neill

  For Ed

  ‘Every woman is a science, for he that plods upon a woman all his life long shall at length find himself short of the knowledge of her’

  John Donne

  ‘You can dream different dreams while sharing the same bed’

  Chinese Proverb

  1

  ‘A deaf husband and a blind wife are always a happy couple’

  I LEAVE MY contact lenses to soak overnight in a coffee cup and wake up in the morning to discover that Husband on a Short Fuse has drunk them in the night. For the second time in less than a year. ‘But I told you they were in there,’ I protest. ‘I can’t be expected to remember that kind of detail,’ he says. ‘And I’m not going to try and make myself sick this time. Wear your glasses.’

  Tom is sitting up in bed, hair standing on end, wearing a pair of crumpled striped pyjamas with the top button done up, arms crossed defensively. I am wearing a pair in tartan, buttons missing. When you both start wearing pyjamas in bed, does it represent the beginning or end of something in a relationship, I wonder? He reaches over to stack three books on his bedside table in order of size and to line up the mug that once contained my contact lenses equidistant from the table lamp on the other side.

  ‘I just don’t understand why you put them in a coffee cup anyway. There are millions of people up and down the country who perform this ritual each day and they never resort to using a mug to store something so integral to their daily routine. It’s a form of sabotage, Lucy, because you know there is a risk I will want a drink in the night.’

  ‘But don’t you sometimes want to live a little dangerously?’ I ask. ‘Tempt fate a little bit, without harming anyone you love in the process?’

  ‘If I thought there were unanswered philosophical questions behind this, rather than an empty bottle of wine and consequent amnesia, I would be worried about your mental state. I might be more sympathetic if you showed a little concern for me. It could be a medical emergency,’ he says petulantly.

  ‘But it wasn’t last time,’ I interject, swift to stymie the inevitable slide into hypochondria.

  I resist the urge to tell him that there are bigger priorities right now, involving the need to get our children to school at the designated hour on the first day of term. I fleetingly recall dropping a contact lens on to the carpet a couple of months ago and start a painstaking examination of the floor area on my side of the bed. In a semi-fortuitous discovery I find in no particular order: a lens that the toddler had removed from my glasses last week; a half-eaten cream egg from so long ago that it has petrified; and an unpaid parking fine, which I swiftly stuff back under the bed.

  ‘You need systems, Lucy,’ says Husband on a Short Fuse, unaware of what is being uncovered just feet away from him. ‘Then life will become so much simpler. In the meantime why don’t you wear your old glasses? It’s not as though you need to impress anyone.’ He gets out of bed and moves into the bathroom for the next part of his early-morning ritual.

  A decade ago, in the foothills of our relationship, this kind of exchange would have qualified as a fully blown argument, one of those violent eruptions that had the potential to capsize the entire affair. Even five years ago, roughly halfway through our marriage, it would have constituted a significant disagreement. Now it is no more than a footnote to the narrative of married life.

  As I walk up the stairs to the top floor of the house to wake our sleeping children, I decide that relationships are like pieces of elastic, where a little tension is permissible, even desirable, if the two ends are to remain bound together. Too slack and everything falls apart, like those marriages where people say they never argue and then which overnight dissolve into nothing, not even recrimination. Too much tension and they snap. It’s all about equilibrium. The trouble is that generally there is no forewarning when you are about to lose balance.

  I curse as I trip over a Lego model on the stairs and it breaks into tiny bits, joining forces with some toy cars and an arm that used to belong to an Action Man. My chin comes to rest on the top step and, tucked into the side of the carpet, I spot a tiny light sabre, no more than a centimetre long, that belongs to one of Joe’s Star Wars models. It vanished a couple of months ago in suspicious circumstances after our mercurial toddler Fred mounted a covert operation into his brother’s bedroom in the early hours of the morning.

  How many hours have I wasted searching for this light sabre? How many tears have been shed over its disappearance? For a brief moment I rest my head on the carpet, feeling something close to satisfaction.

  I stop outside Sam and Joe’s bedroom and gently push open the door. Sam, the eldest, is in pole position asleep on the top bunk, Joe on the bottom, and Fred on the floor underneath. Like a club sandwich. No matter how many times I return Fred to his own room during the night, he has an innate homing device that leads him either back to his brothers’ room or to the end of our bed where we often find him asleep in the morning.

  I stare in wonder at my sleeping children, their limbs casually strewn across beds and floor, and my restless thoughts fade. During the day they are in perpetual motion and it is impossible to freeze any moment for more than a few seconds. Asleep there is the chance to observe the exact tilt of a nose or constellation of freckles. I touch Sam’s hand to wake him up but instead his fingers curl tightly around my own. Their body clocks are still on holiday time. I am instantly transported back to that first moment shortly after he was born, when he did this for the first time and that surge of untapped maternal love spilled over and I knew that nothing would ever be the same again.

  Sam is almost nine years old. I stopped being able to lift him about two years ago. He is too big to sit on my lap and I am no longer permitted to kiss him farewell at school. Soon he will be lost to me entirely. But all that warmth of early childhood will have been stamped upon him. Surely there will be
reserves of affection that he can draw upon during the dark teenage years, when he sees us with all our flaws. As he lies on the bed, his long-limbed body already clumsy with impending adolescence, I realise that I am looking at the last vestiges of childhood. I am sure this is why some women go on and on having children, so there is always a willing receptacle for their love.

  Joe stirs first. He is a light sleeper, like me.

  ‘Who will help Major Tom?’ he asks before his eyes open, and I feel my heart sink slightly.

  Playing David Bowie on our way to Norfolk during the summer holidays had seemed like a huge step forward in the fraught world of in-car entertainment. The narrative quality of his lyrics would appeal to the children’s imagination, we thought. And they did. But we never moved beyond the first track of Changes.

  ‘Why did the rocket leave him?’ he asks now, peering from beneath the duvet.

  ‘He got detached,’ I tell him.

  ‘Why wasn’t there another driver to help him?’ he asks.

  ‘He wanted to be on his own,’ I say, stroking his hair. Five-year-old Joe is made in my image, with his wild brown curls and dark green eyes, but his temperament is inherited from his father.

  ‘Does the rocket leave him behind?’

  ‘It does, but there is part of him that wants to escape,’ I explain.

  Joe pauses.

  ‘Mummy, do you ever want to escape from us?’ he asks.

  ‘Occasionally, but only into the next room,’ I laugh. ‘I have no plans to go into outer space.’

  ‘But sometimes when I talk to you, you don’t hear, so where are you then?’

  Sam has climbed down his ladder at this point and is already putting on his school uniform. I urge Joe to follow suit. Two-and-a-half-year-old Fred will remain undressed until the last minute because the moment our backs are turned he will simply remove his clothes. I go back to our bathroom in search of Tom – the husband, not the major.

  There was a time when Tom’s ablutions fascinated me, but even though they are still remarkable in their fastidiousness, familiarity has tempered the novelty. In brief, he goes into the bathroom and prepares everything he needs for shaving: brush, foam and razor sit on a small table beside the sink. He turns on the cold tap in the bath for exactly three minutes, and then switches his attention to the hot tap. That way, he says, no water is wasted. I have always argued that the arrangement should work better in reverse but he has never taken up the challenge. ‘If something works, why would you want to change it, Lucy?’ While the bath is running he puts on the radio and listens to the Today programme.

  The washing process is only interesting in as much as he spends an inordinate amount of time rubbing the soap with the sponge. Often during this part of the proceedings he chats. Even after we had been living together for a couple of years I still sometimes misjudged that moment when banter became acceptable. Interrupting prematurely could lead to moods that were difficult to diffuse. But impeccable timing made him expansive and generous. And so the slow dance of marriage was perfected.

  As I rifle through bathroom drawers, I try to explain that pale blue National Health glasses from the eighties range are not the kind of accessory worn on the school run, but he has already retreated into the next phase which involves submerging himself apart from the tip of his nose and shutting his eyes in a meditative underwater pose from which no amount of children’s shouting can rouse him.

  Now he is out of reach, and I am left sitting on a chair with my legs crossed, elbow resting on my knee, palm of my hand on my chin, talking to myself, a metaphor for our relationship.

  I am briefly transported back to the first night I spent with Tom at his Shepherd’s Bush flat in 1994. I woke up in the morning and decided to make a swift exit and crept around the bedroom looking for my clothes. When I couldn’t find them, I retraced my steps to the sitting room because I could remember with some clarity that we spent a longish period on the sofa before finally making it to his bedroom. But they weren’t there. I was completely naked and recalled mention of flatmates. Running back to the bedroom on tiptoe to avoid waking anyone up I began to wonder whether this was an amusing diversion for him. Or whether despite recommendations to the contrary, there was a dark side to his character that involved holding captive women who slept with him on a first date. When I went back in the bedroom he had disappeared and then I really began to panic. I called out his name but there was no reply so I gingerly put on a shaggy dressing gown that I found on the back of the door to make a logical search of all the rooms.

  When I went into the bathroom, I screamed. He was underwater with his eyes shut, completely still. I thought he had fallen asleep and drowned. I felt a real sense of loss that I would never have sex again with this man, because it had been very good. Then I imagined phoning the police and trying to explain what had happened. What if they thought I was involved in some way? All the forensic evidence would point in that direction. For a moment I thought about running. Then I remembered that I didn’t have any clothes. So slowly, trying to keep my breathing under control, I went over to the edge of the bath, stared at him for a few seconds noting the waxy hue of his skin, and pushed my index finger very hard into that soft cleft between the eyebrows to see if he was conscious. Relief at the force of his head pushing back against my hand was quickly replaced by shock when he grabbed my upper arm so hard that I could see the skin going white between his fingers and he shouted, ‘God, are you trying to kill me? Because I thought it was a pretty good night myself.’

  ‘I thought you had drowned,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t find my clothes.’

  He pointed to a chest of drawers on the landing just outside the door, where they lay in a neatly stacked pile. Yesterday’s knickers, lovingly folded in half on top of a bra that had seen better days and an old pair of Levi 501s.

  ‘You did that?’ I asked nervously.

  ‘Attention to detail, Lucy,’ he said, ‘that’s what it’s all about,’ and then sank back under the water.

  The conversation was over, but no one could say that I didn’t know from the outset what lay ahead. And yes, we did go back to bed.

  As he sprawls in the bath and I brush my teeth, I run through a critical inventory of his body starting at the top. Hair, still dark, almost black, slightly receding, but only to the expert eye. Laughter lines and worry lines fighting for supremacy around his eyes. A slight frown between his eyebrows that ebbs and flows depending on the progress of his library project in Milan. Chin area a little jowly because he eats more when he is worried. Fewer sharp angles all round, his stomach and chest softer, but surprisingly lovely. I must remember to tell him that. A reliable man, who promises comfort and conventional lovemaking drawing on a well-practised repertoire. An attractive man, so my friends tell me. His head pops out of the water and he asks me what I am staring at.

  ‘How long have we known each other?’ I ask him.

  ‘About twelve years,’ he replies, ‘and three months.’

  ‘At what point in our relationship did we both start wearing pyjamas in bed?’

  He considers the question carefully. ‘I think it was the winter of 1998, when we were living in west London and we woke up one morning and the window was frozen on the inside. Actually, you used to borrow mine.’

  He was right, in the early days I had adopted an intimate and easy approach to sharing that I felt reflected the depth and breadth of our relationship. But after the first year together he sat me down at the kitchen table and told me it wouldn’t work unless I stopped using his toothbrush. ‘Do you realise how many germs we carry in our mouths? Any self-respecting dentist will tell you that there are more in your mouth than in your arse. Saliva transmits all sorts of illnesses.’

  ‘I just don’t believe that,’ I said, at a loss to say anything else.

  ‘Hepatitis, Aids, Ebola, they can all be transmitted orally,’ he insisted.

  ‘But you would catch them anyway because we are having sex,’ I rationalised with him
.

  ‘Not if you use condoms. When you lick your contact lenses before you put them in your eye you might as well stick them up your arse and then put them in.’

  It was apparent that this conversation had been brewing for some time. I acquiesced on both issues and it was never a problem again. I still borrow his toothbrush and lick my contact lenses but never in front of him, although occasionally he runs his finger over the bristles in the evening and eyes me with suspicion, wondering why they are damp.

  ‘What were you thinking about underwater?’ I ask him with genuine curiosity.

  ‘I was calculating how much time we would save in the morning if we put Rice Krispies in bowls the night before. Could be as much as four minutes,’ he says before sinking back under.

  But he re-emerges after a few seconds to announce, by way of apology for his earlier outburst, that he will take Fred to his new nursery. ‘I’d really like to,’ he says. ‘Besides, you might not find the way.’

  And I am glad, because although I should feel relief that Fred is starting nursery, and for the first time in eight years I will have time for myself, the day is tinged with a heavy sense of loss, and I know that I might cry.

  And so it is that I find myself, half an hour later, meandering along the pavement with my hand on Sam’s shoulder, in what I hope is a motherly fashion, on our way to school. ‘Are we late?’ he asks, already knowing the answer because just at the point when we were about to walk out the door, Joe scurried past the kitchen table, and knocked a carton of milk all over his school uniform and my jeans, causing a critical ten-minute delay in proceedings. Despite the best-laid plans, packed lunches prepared the night before, uniform stacked neatly on chairs, shoes lined up in pairs by the front door, breakfast already on the table, toothbrushes sitting beside the kitchen sink, you cannot mitigate against unforeseeable disasters. Getting to school on time is as finely tuned as air-traffic control at Heathrow: any slight change in plan can throw the whole system into chaos.