In the end Layla was back home before her father. She had been designated driver for the evening and tended to prefer a quiet chat with her mates down the pub compared to, say, staying up until the early hours clubbing. Not that there were many clubs or options for all-night raving in rural Hertfordshire even if she had been so inclined. Either way, she didn’t drink much, and if she was driving, she wouldn’t have anything more than a lemonade. Joe, on the other hand, had been into London to watch England being thumped by New Zealand in one of the rugby autumn internationals. This had been followed by a compulsory visit to the neighbouring public houses where he’d evidently consumed north of ten pints by the time he blundered up the stairs and into bed. He was asleep within seconds of his head hitting the pillow, although he did manage to stay conscious for long enough to ask ‘Good shhhhopp?’ and run an optimistic hand underneath my pyjama top, which I removed when he started snoring.
I lay staring at the ceiling for a couple of hours, as is standard practice. I’ve never been a great sleeper but over recent years it’s been getting worse. I guess it’s one of the joys of perimenopause. I don’t have any hot flushes yet but pretty much every ailment or complaint after the age of forty seems to be attributable to ‘women’s problems’ in some way – as are most of the ones before forty, come to think of it. You’d think that the medical establishment might have found a more equitable way to deal with half the population by now, rather than having every single medical and surgical speciality geared towards men by default, and everything affecting women being lumped together as one problem group, attributed to our hormones and reproductive status – as if we had no other purpose or function. But t’wasever thus. No point in dwelling on the patriarchy at two in the morning (as I said to myself whilst dwelling on the patriarchy at two in the morning).
No, there were far more significant issues to worry about. Climate change, for example; whether the cats were due another worming tablet; civil unrest; the funny smell coming from the dishwasher; whether my lovely friend Farah had recovered from being punched in the boob by her eleven-year-old step-son whose actual mother was a firm believer in gentle parenting; the threat of imminent war in multiple regions across the globe; whether Layla should take a pair of wellies with her to university. And, most glaring of all – the number one question – what wasIgoing to do when she left?
I’m a terrible one for thinking I’ve kicked these internal conversations into touch during daylight hours only to have them resurface at night, which probably explains the chronic insomnia. Daytime is fine. Once I’ve woken up, and lain there for a few minutes cataloguing any new aches and pains, I can crack on with the day relatively untroubled by the existential issues that keep me awake at night (although concerns about Farah’s sore boob and what she’s going to do about her step-son have been living rent-free in my head for some time).
I get up and pull on some suitably shapeless clothes, often indistinguishable from my nightwear (sometimes, it is my actual nightwear). I may or may not brush my hair before pulling it into a scrunchie. I may or may not apply some moisturiser (although it’s vanishingly rare that I’d put on any make-up). I feed the cats, make breakfast for myself and Layla (and sometimes Joe depending on whether he’s already headed off to work), nothing fancy, just tea and toast. I wave my daughter off to school – or at least I used to. Recently I’ve been waving her off to her job at the local supermarket – and I head out to the shed to start work myself.
When I say shed, most people assume I have one of those bijoux home offices tucked into a beautiful area of an immaculately landscaped garden, Scandi spruce pine, polished glass, sleek interior. They think it’s just a humblebrag, like describing the wing of your stately home as an annexe. But no, this really is our shed, complete with lawnmower, stacks of teetering paint tins and padded camping chair that I pull up to an ancient fold-out table where I prop my laptop.
Most days I get a solid three to four hours of editing done outside. I might finish off indoors with a read-through while I’m sorting out dinner, and depending on the job, and the whereabouts of my family, I might choose to carry on into the evening. The majority of my workload at the moment is fulfilling a semi-permanent contract with a large pharmaceutical and medical device supplier, ProChem – it’s not hugely exciting, checking through the grammar and phrasing of adverts for incontinence pads and mobility equipment, but I now know a lot more about bulk-forming laxatives, fast-acting antacids, and slow-release cardiac medication than your average non-doctor. And it pays a regular, if not huge, salary. The rest of my working week is taken up with freelance editing – mostly dull technical journals, cross-referencing scientific papers and ensuring the citations are correct – but sometimes I’ll allow myself the treat of taking on an individual project, a self-published memoir for example, or a fiction submission from an aspiring author hoping to snare an agent. These are the jobs I love – helping someone shape and polish their words into an accessible, presentable state.
It’s just unfortunate that the income from these projects is so derisory. It probably costs me more in electricity to power the laptop than I can charge these clients. Basically, the life-affirming projects are rare and poorly remunerated, and the bulk of my work is technical and a bit dull, but overall, I’m stillhappy as an editor. I’m a methodical person and I’ve always loved getting lost in a story, even if it’s one about the benefits of beta blockers. Working from home means that I can be flexible about time, working the early hours of the morning or the late hours of evening depending on my social calendar. Which is why it’s something of a surprise that my social calendar isn’t fuller, or even slightly full. The truth is that this job can be very isolating. The features that make it so appealing are also its downside, and I can often go for days, even weeks at a time, without seeing anyone other than my husband and daughter.
This wasn’t always the case. When Layla was young, I had plenty of mummy friends living locally. Women whose houses I frequented for play dates and PTA meetings. Friends to bump into in the playpark and eyeroll with whilst studiously ignoring toddler meltdowns about why the slide is yellow, or why raisins are wrinkly, or why cars, or why grass (or why motherhood for that matter). Friends to share a morning cuppa with as we helped assemble marble runs or intervened in fights over the cursed Moon Sand (a work of the devil), or explained that, no, Hot Wheels track could not be attached to the dog and no, Aquabeads should not be inserted into nostrils.
I was involved in groups, I ran stalls at the fete, I attended coffee mornings for new school mums to help them come to terms with the trauma of having their four-year-old wrenched from their arms by stern Mrs Pattinson. I even had some friends whom I might invite round for dinner with their husbands, evenings where we’d all be so sleep-deprived and giddy with the freedom of having a babysitter booked that we’d slip into a coma after two glasses of wine. Either that or end up playing The Floor is Lava and breaking several items of furniture. Those were heady days indeed, packed to bursting with the mundanities of dealing with small people, exhausted and overwhelmed, but always surrounded by noise and chatter and activity.
Fast forward to now and those women either have full time jobs, or they’re busy with larger families and children younger than mine. Some have a child the same age as Layla, but we’ve realised we don’t have anything in common now that the kids have grown up. I have had a few friends like this where the only thing keeping us together was a shared dread of supervising the school disco or a shared love of the Mother’s Day assembly. Where most of our time was spent gossiping about the year four teaching assistant’s facial tattoos or the passive aggressive comparative ranking of our children’s academic potential. Those friendships were very much of their time and without the social glue of the school run there’s little incentive to maintain them.
And the people Idostill want to see on a regular basis are busy dealing with the logistics of older teenage children, most of which involves covert surveillance via tracker apps or spending interminable periods of time in the car. (Who knew that part of the motherhood deal was essentially providing a twenty-four-seven, five-star-rated Uber service for a client who paid no heed to the rules regarding clear locations for pick-up, readiness at point of pick-up, or the number of mates that can safely fit into a Nissan Micra without your driver losing their shit / licence?) These are the mothers who, when they’re not trapped in their vehicles behind floodlit pitches waiting for training to finish, are instead sitting outside strangers’ houses at midnight waiting for their children to emerge from parties – windscreen fogged, thermos of coffee in hand, not entirely convinced that they’re outside the right house – assuming so because of the number of partially clad seventeen-year-olds falling out of the front door. However, without knocking on the door and announcing themself as Jonathan’s mum (which would obviously be social suicide for Jonathan and he would never speak to them again) they can’t be a hundred percent certain. It’s a fraught period oftime when you’d really rather be at home in your dressing gown watchingReal Housewiveson catch-up.
These women are no longer available for social activities outside work because their evenings and weekends are now entirely devoted to the social activities of their offspring. They are also, as is the case with my friend Farah, often dealing with blended family dynamics, trying to navigate the tortuous tightrope between ‘caring new step-mum’ and ‘you upset my actual kids and you’re dead to me, biological mum’. Or they’re trying their best to cope with ageing parents: their multiple medical appointments, meals on wheels, broken hips and deteriorating cognitive function. Fitting in a quick cuppa and catch-up around that lot is virtually impossible.
A few years ago, when my father was ill, a lot of my time was taken up with caring for him. Juggling the frequent visits to my childhood home to coincide with the visits of a GP or district nurse, trying to ensure that my own mother didn’t fall apart under the strain of nursing her husband through a slow decline. But that phase has ended. My father died, and it was terribly sad. One of the most awful days of my life, even though it was what the doctor called ‘an expected death’, which apparently is supposed to make it better somehow. It doesn’t.
Now, aside from having to deal with Mum’s erratic romantic life, I can’t honestly say that my domestic burden is heavier than it used to be. I don’t have a blended family to worry about. Layla is increasingly self-sufficient, the bulk of household cooking, cleaning and laundry falls to me but it’s manageable, and Mum can organise her own meals perfectly well. There isn’t really any excuse for my lack of social life other than my own inertia, and truth be told, I’ve become a bit of a hermit – self-aware enough to acknowledge the problem but not yet self-aware enough to do anything about it. Hence the dilemma – what am I going to do when Layla leaves, taking her regular human contact andsocialisation with her? And until I resolve that conundrum, will I ever get a decent night’s sleep again?
The answer, it seems, is no. I woke up today to the tuneful accompaniment of my husband’s snoring, having accrued a grand total of three hours’ sleep. Less of an immersive experience and more of a quick dip in the plunge pool of napping.
‘Did you know,’ I said, prodding my husband awake (because if I was up then he deserved to be too), ‘that the average child has eight or nine cycles of deep sleep every night, whereas the average fifty-year-old has only two?’
‘Grrawmph?’ said Joe, unsticking his eyelids to peer at me.
‘And that poor sleep can lead to higher nocturnal blood pressure, which is a significant risk factor for heart attacks and strokes?’
‘Are you still working on that article about sleep apnoea masks for the ProChem website?’ he grumbled, rolling onto his side. ‘I can’t believe you’ve woken me up to tell me how important deep sleep is.’
‘Good point,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’ I continued to stare at him until he rolled back towards me.
‘What is it?’ he said, sighing heavily in the face of my determination to keep him awake. ‘Layla?’
‘Yeah. Just wondering whether we’ve bought everything she’s going to need. One of the Facebook Uni Mum group posts suggested that all new students should have a heated clothing airer but then there was a backlash from some of the other mums on the group saying that clothing airers are strictly forbidden and that your child could be thrown out of halls, and possibly arrested, if they’re found to be in possession of one. Then another mum said they’re encouraged to use the onsite tumble driers and the original poster said, what about the carbon footprint, and the original replier said that multipleindividual heated clothing airers would have an even bigger environmental impact, as well as causing fungal spores from damp in the bedrooms, and that we should be encouraging our kids to re-wear clothes and save resources as much as possible, and the third mum said, you obviously haven’t smelled my son after he’s been weight-training, which at least broke the online tension and provoked a few laughing emoji responses.’
‘Hmmmngh,’ said Joe.
‘And then a separate post the day before was from a mum who’d just bought their daughter a pepper spray to go with their rape alarm, but she’d bought it from quite a dodgy website and wasn’t sure about how to test its efficacy without causing significant injury to an innocent party – she was going to try it on her husband.’
‘I bet she was,’ he murmured into the pillow.
‘And she’d got a Rohypnol testing kit from the same website where apparently you pipette a couple of drops of the drink you think might be spiked onto this electronic sensor pad, which apart from anything sounds quite labour intensive to try and do discreetly in a nightclub, but she said that without any actual Rohypnol at home she couldn’t test its effectiveness either. And she’s wondering if the seventy-nine pounds she spent on both products was a bit of a waste of money. And then one of the replies said that rather than drinks being spiked, the thing to worry about is being injected by a date rape drug straight into your thigh, while you are standing in a queue at a bar or something, and that there was no testing kit for that anyway.’
Joe tried to pat my hand in a reassuring way. ‘Do you think maybe these Facebook groups have served their purpose, Hattie?’ he said. ‘Might it be worth coming off a couple of them? Especially the ones full of nut jobs.’
‘They’re not nut jobs, Joe,’ I said. ‘They’re just worried parents voicing their valid concerns.’
‘And scaring everyone else witless.’ He sighed again and pulled himself up to sitting so he could put his arm around me. ‘I know you’re worried,’ he said. ‘But Layla’s a sensible girl. She’s not going to stress about how her clothes are aired, and she’s not going to take stupid risks when she’s out in bars. She goes out to clubs and bars with her friends now and you don’t worry about that at all…’
