There is, at times, an exquisite beauty to executing domestic tasks perfectly. I find this particularly true when I have hit on a podcast or a series of podcasts I really enjoy because it renders me capable of moving into a low, amnesiac gear meaning I can arrive in a pristine kitchen, having tidied it 45 minutes previously, with no recollection of doing so.
It is as if someone has broken into my house, tidied my kitchen and left. But it was not a Marie Kondo cat burglar! It was me!
I opened a cupboard the other day - the shameful cupboard in my kitchen, just jammed helplessly full of ancient crap that I can’t face throwing away but no longer serves any purpose - and it was TIDY. The glue sticks were all together. The duct tape and parcel tape and masking tape all stacked up on top of the other. Charging cables had been sorted, separated and tied with elastic bands. Spooky. What was this?!
Oh yes! Now I recall. I was listening to Smartless - (who do I fancy more, Will Arnett or Jason Bateman? I cannot decide) - and calmly cleared it out.
Is this Stockholm syndrome? Is this the 1950s all over again? In a way, it is irrelevant. It only matters because of the children.
My children can barely do anything for themselves. They cannot tie shoelaces or… or literally anything else. I lay their clothes out for them, turn down their beds, put their stuffed animals in amusing poses in order to welcome them home from school, cut crusts off, hand them their GoHenry card, flip out their coat collar, hit a shrill neurotic note when they are unwell, with hot drinks and cool flannels and thermometers and bedside vigils. I infantilise them.
Is this just an inevitable aspect of “mothering”? Or is it something more sinister?
Is it control?
Or is it penance.
Is it slavish penance to silently make up for how furiously incompetent, lazy and resentful I was about the demands of motherhood when they were very small, and so very tiring and unreasonable and difficult. Kitty asked me the other day to recall for her her most terrible and frightening illness, when she was 14 months old and had a temperature of 105C and black snot. It was black. (She loves hearing about these grisly sorts of things.) She always wants to hear how I told the doctor I was worried that the high temperature would give her brain damage and he said: “Hmm I see, have you ever heard of a high temperature giving someone brain damage?”
I didn’t want to tell her the most shameful thing about those terrifying three days, was how sorry I felt for myself.
I don’t know, maybe I wasn’t that bad. Maybe that’s how I felt on the inside, but in fact I stepped up perfectly admirably. Because that’s the thing about parenting: you don’t have to love it, but you do have to do it.
Now my children are my babies despite no longer being “babies” and it is so easy now, so pleasant and even soothing to always be the mother I ought to have been to them when I was 30, but was too young and stupid, vain, angry and inflexible. There is shame, too, that it is so easy now and it is only easy because it is easy. I want to let them walk over me, wear me to the bone, I want to disintegrate in order to give them life like that octopus in My Octopus Teacher.
I’m sorry, I am saying with the hot chocolate and the neat towels and the fresh pyjamas and the homework print-outs and the thoughtful snacks.
I’m sorry. Please forgive me.
I too flip flop between who I fancy the most throughout a Smartless episode (and beyond). Just when I think I’ve got the answer, I change my mind.
This is so brilliant and resonated so much. I am comforted by this bleak phrase I can't remember who wrote it - perhaps Rachel Cusk? she is bleak enough - that your baby prefers you depressed and there next to them rather than happy and away. It was meant to be a comment on how you need to fight for your mental health when looking after small babies by TAKING TIME AWAY. But I find it reassuring, because it's true - the bar for being around babies is quite low. I think they'll take a depressed/haggard/zombie/ratty parent any day of the week. Teenagers, no. But babies are a bit more basic. That's what I tell myself anyway, when I feel like this - which is A LOT.