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16 March, 2014 / Parenting

When the kids don’t need you…

I’d been away for three days for work. No big deal, I know – I didn’t expect champagne and bunting to herald my return. But… a tiny bit of fuss would have been nice. A hug, or a resume of all the things I’d missed. ‘Did you have a good time?’ asked one of my sons, gazed fixed upon his iPad.

Yes, fine, thanks,’ I replied, setting down my suitcase. And that was that. Clearly, family life had trundled along fine without me. No one appeared to have been excluded from school, developed scurvy or even noticed my absence particularly. I sloped upstairs feeling thoroughly disgruntled, until it occurred to me that… this is what’s meant to happen.

Indifference to parental comings and goings, I mean. And it’s okay – it really is. Sure, it takes a little getting used to, but think how weird it would be if your adoring offspring remained that way forever. It’s lovely, being watched intently by a three year-old while you apply your make-up. Imagine, being that fascinating to anyone! But if a seventeen year-old were to behave like that, I’d assume drugs were involved, or that they were building up to make some terrible announcement. ‘What is it?’ I’d keep barking. ‘WHY ARE YOU STARING AT ME LIKE THAT?’ My blood pressure would be through the roof.

We know, of course, that children are programmed to gradually separate from us, progressing from occasional eye rolls to full-on communication avoidance. For me, the toughest time was when they hit the 12, 13 mark. I wasn’t prepared for my once-loving children to suddenly regard me with disdain.

I took to hovering around them like a needy kid who’d been shunned from the gang. When they had friends around, I’d buy their favourite snacks and barge into their room to serve them. They’d all look round in alarm, as if I’d waltzed in wearing a fringed bikini, and someone would mutter, ‘Just leave it at the door, would you?’

Then, gradually, the distance between us began to feel normal. And as soon as I’d accepted it as a perfectly healthy developmental stage, I stopped the loitering, the snivelling and bribing them to hang out with me. They were stretching their wings. That’s what kids are supposed to do.

Anyway, it’s not all bad news, this feeling of being slightly redundant and not knowing what to do with ourselves. Here are some unexpected – and quite delightful – things that happen as the kids start doing their own thing.

– If teenagers seem aloof, it’s because they are busy thinking about the world. Like this Ukraine situation: ask an older relative what’s going on, and they’ll have you pinned to the wall for 17 hours until you have to invent some domestic emergency to get away. But ask a teenager and they’ll come back with precisely the kind of short, digestible response you required.

– You’re not needed. Of course, you hope you’ll always be their first port of call whenever they’re worried or sad. What I mean here is being ‘needed’ in a cutting-up-food, dabbing-lotion-onto-verrucas kind of way. The tedious stuff which we didn’t mind while it was happening – but don’t exactly mourn when it’s all done.

– You feel more united as a couple. When your kids won’t hug you anymore, you and your partner are likely to seek solace in each other. Happily, there’s more time to be ‘romantic’ (ahem) now you no longer have drifts of Lego to sweep up. Plus, nothing creates a sense of solidarity like being regarded as a pair of imbeciles by your kids.

– You and your teens can enjoy a new way of relating to each other. I mean, what choice is there? They’ve made it clear they don’t want you checking their homework or arranging their pizza toppings to look like a face.

– You can do what you want. When our boys were tiny, virtually every sentence Jimmy and I uttered to each other started with ‘I’m just…’ ie, ‘I’m just… going to the shops/kitchen’ (which implied, ‘Is that okay with you?’). We were shattered and stressed and felt it necessary to keep each other under constant surveillance. You couldn’t have a pee without asking if that was all right. The one time Jimmy ventured off piste – ie,  went to the pub without written permission – I threw a cake at him.

Those days are long gone. Now we just say, ‘I’m going to town and then I’m meeting Andy for a drink.’ And that’s that. No wrangling, no negotiating, no ‘I’m just.’ God, it makes me so happy to be able to type that.

16 March, 2014 / Parenting

Our first kid-free holiday in 18 years… what will we do?

Family holidays were easy when the kids were little. Well, not easy exactly. By the time I’d finished packing I’d be utterly exhausted (although Jimmy could never understand why I made such a big deal out of preparing for a trip. ‘You should be like me,’ he gloated. ‘A couple of T-shirts and a pair of shorts and you’re done.’).

I would have laughed – bitterly – had I not been busy packing a million items of kids’ clothing, toys, board games, DVDs and inflatable tortoises, plus all the medical stuff for every possible emergency, which apparently we didn’t need – because just a couple of T-shirt and a pair of shorts and you’re done.  

Anyway, once we were away on some gorgeous beach, all my stresses would melt away. The kids were happy to run in and out of water all day. But it’s been a long time since anyone collected razor shells or dabbled about in rock pools. The pic above was last summer, when we rented a house near Pollensa in Majorca and took our three teens, plus three of their friends – it was brilliant. The kids totally took over the barbecue and we barely did a thing (apart from Jimmy, who drove the terrifying 9-seater car around mountain roads). But this year, everyone is doing their own thing, or being taken away by friends’ families. So Jimmy and I are going away on our own.

Just the two of us! We haven’t done this for eighteen years. I’m sort of bereft and delighted. Last kid-free holiday we still used travellers’ cheques and took about five minutes to pack (camera, Birkenstocks, pants). We didn’t have mobile phones or any other twittering gadgets. So it all feels quite different this time. It took about six months to decide what to do, the choice was so boggling. And now I wonder what we’ll talk about for a whole week. Also, we’re so excited I worry we’ll over-schedule ourselves and either do too much or too little. And it’ll be odd, lying on a beach with no one kicking sand all over the food or trying to bury us. And how will we amuse ourselves without running off for ice cream and snacks? 

 Still, it’ll be interesting to wander around crumbly old towns without being annoyed because the kids aren’t enjoying it enough. We won’t be shouting, ‘Look at that church. Why aren’t you appreciating it? We might as well be at home!’ 

There’ll be no one moaning if we suggesting going to see some Boring Art, or demanding lobster off the menu when we stop for a quick lunch. ‘No, you can’t have the lobster, I hate to be mean – but it is £800.’ The holiday house cleaner won’t drive after us in a furious rage to the airport, due to a grubby handprint on a bedroom wall – as happened to us in Corsica. We won’t be fined for shoving a glass down the inner workings of the pool (‘I was trying to trap ants!’) – as happened in Sicily. No one will perch on a radiator and accidentally pull it off the wall (Brittany) or puke in the hire car (everywhere). We will not have to park a big suitcase in front of the dent in the hire car when we return it, which happened because everyone was shouting in the back and Jimmy reversed into a pillar. 

Also, no one will look disgusted at the sight of us in our bathing wear. At least, no one who knows us. I can’t bloody wait.

10 March, 2014 / General

The birth of a book

My new novel, Take Mum Out, is out this Thursday, and it feels a bit like the run-up to giving birth. Okay, when a book is born, no one rushes up to tell you off because it’s not wearing a hat. And you don’t feel compelled to make a little room absolutely perfect, in readiness for its arrival.

But still, like the very end of pregnancy, it’s almost impossible to keep your mind on anything else when publication day’s around the corner. I am fidgety and eating masses. For instance, yesterday: the biggest salad known to man (I say salad, but it was basically a mountain of roast butternut squash and feta) for lunch, followed by a blow-out curry at our local Indian. I am, literally, eating for two.

It’s due to nervousness, I think. I know I’ll soon be checking Amazon sales ratings like a woman possessed, which goes like this:

7.20 a.m  Mustn’t keep checking Amazon. It’s not helping me in any way.

7.22  All right, just a little look.

8.20  Another quick look. Things might have changed dramatically. Oh… they haven’t.

9.10  It feels a bit dysfunctional, checking this often…

9.30  I MUST STOP!!

10.17  Just one more little look and then I’ll stop…

…and so it goes on, achieving nothing except worry and strife, like trying not to call a clearly disinterested man back in 1987, but being unable to stop my pathetic fingers grappling for the phone.

Anyway, it’s not all bad, because really, when your book is let out into the world, there’s not an awful lot you can do about it. When my first novel was published ten years ago, I expected the kind of fuss and attention you’re party to when you produce a real baby. But of course, it was just a normal day. My kids (then aged three and seven) expressed disappointment that there weren’t any pictures in it, and my dad said he didn’t like the cover.

So far, so good. I popped into Glasgow to prowl around Waterstone’s, as if trying to muster the courage to steal something. In fact, I was really building myself up to ask someone who worked there if it would be okay to sign copies of my book. ‘A signed book is a sold book,’ a publishing person had told me once, assuring me that it was perfectly fine to march up to a bookseller, brandishing a pen, and say, ‘Hello – I’ve come to sign your stock.’ ‘Authors do it all the time!’ he declared.

I hovered about by the self-help titles, sweating profusely and sensing my face going red. What if the staff member thought I wasn’t the author, but some random weirdo who scribbled on books for fun? I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I left the shop, feeling like an utter fool and wondering if anyone had observed my creepy behaviour on CCTV.

In fact these days most of my books are sold in supermarkets, rather than bookshops, which is the way of things now – and you can’t stomp into a massive branch of Tesco and start writing on things. So I don’t even try. Instead, I’m attempting to be sensible this week, and keep myself busy by pushing on with the book-in-progress.

And it’s helping. It feels good and purposeful. In fact it’s made me realise that, when your book is born, the best course of action is to throw yourself into making the next one. Which isn’t always the case with a baby.

28 February, 2014 / General

How to stay married when the kids leave home

‘At this stage in our lives,’ my friend Sarah said cheerfully, ‘loads of couples split up.’ She went on to explain that, having gone through those intense early parenting years, we have now a reached a point at which our kids don’t really need us any more (apart from to ferry them around and hand them money). ‘So,’ she concluded, ‘people often decide there’s no reason to stay married.’

To me, this seems terribly wasteful. You’ve weathered those baby and toddler years, existing without sleep or proper nutrition. You’ve bickered over whose turn it is to stand in the park for three hours, in the pouring rain, and spent romantic evenings sand-blasting dried Weetabix off high chairs. Surely you’re now due some fun together? Deciding to split up now would be ludicrous. If we were going to do it, it would have made a whole more sense when we were ashen with sleep deprivation, and never went out. Why divorce now, when we have the opportunity this summer to take our first child-free holiday in 17 years?

Sarah reckons we’re in a ‘danger zone’ now because the glue that held us together – ie, our offspring – will soon disappear. Off to college they’ll go, leaving J and I miserably sipping sherry and occasionally rousing ourselves for a game of whist. Well, that’s not going to happen. I may be jinxing things by even writing about this, but I have a plan, and it feels very exciting. Here it is.

Staying together when the kids leave: my strategy

– Talk to each other. Admittedly, this can be scary. What if the only thing we can think of to say is, ‘Did you put the bin out?’ or, ‘What’s this thing in the fridge?’ We may have to practice getting the conversation flowing again. Drink might help.

– Try to be rational. Looking back, when our twin boys were babies I wasn’t quite myself. J only had to make an innocent remark for me to fly off the handle or run upstairs screaming. ‘This is a nice ham salad,’ he once had the audacity to remark – my cue to throw a small velour sleepsuit in his face and start sobbing (my reasoning being that a ham salad couldn’t really be ‘nice’, and that his comment was really a thinly-veiled criticism of my domestic abilities).

Thankfully, we are now living in more rational times, and should therefore get along better. Plus, most argument triggers are child-related: who’s being too  strict/soft, why don’t they help more in the house and whose fault is it that they don’t, etc. Remove teenagers from the equation and what is there left to fall out about?

– Get out of the house. Although we haven’t needed a babysitter for years, we still tend to forget that we can go out, pretty much whenever we want. We need to remember that teenagers are capably of cooking, putting a wash on, walking the dog and taking themselves off to bed. No one needs to be tucked in. J and I no longer need to be perpetually on call. We are free!!

And that, I think, is the crux of it. We were only together for two years before I got pregnant, and it feels like there’s a whole lot of catching up to do. Cinema, restaurants, fancy bars and even weekends away… there’s so much we can do, the choice is boggling.

My only real worry is that, by the time we’ve decided, everywhere will be shut.

11 February, 2014 / General

Valentine’s day… do you bother? Or not?

When I was a teenager, Valentine’s day was a massive deal. Everyone – the girls at least – obsessed over cards: who to send them to and what cryptic/witty message to write inside. I spent weeks planning on how to get Smeggy’s (for that was his nickname) card to him without him knowing it was from me, and settled on the genius idea of throwing it in through the boys’ gym changing room window. Ha! That’d fox him. ‘It was Gibby-et,’ one of his mates informed him. ‘I saw her running away.’ (Gibby-et was my nickname; ‘Smeggy and Gibby-et’. Kind of evocative of Terence Stamp and Julie Christie, don’t you think?).

Anyway, Valentine’s day was always a crashing disappointment. This feeling was heightened by the popular girls flaunting their massive padded satin cards, usually depicting teddies, with sick-making messages like, ‘I wuv you’ on the front. And Smeggy hadn’t even looked at me. No, I wasn’t bitter – much.

Now we’re all grown up and no one cares about Valentine’s day any more.

As it falls the week after my husband Jimmy’s and our twin sons’ birthdays, I’m all out of inspiration and cash. Still, we somehow manage to do something, and it feels important that a modicum of effort is made. No need for an outlandish bouquet, or dinner in a restaurant stuffed with couples and a special Valentine menu, which usually isn’t very nice. Just something small, personal and thought-about, to mark the day.

It’s not to ‘feel loved’ because, if you are loved, chances are you have a pretty good idea anyway. And if you’re not, then a card hastily snatched in Asda isn’t going to make you feel any better. No, I think it’s because to not exchange something, however tiny, feels utterly bleak. It’s a bit like using moisturiser: no big deal in itself, but on the day you don’t bother, you feel all dry and crepey and wrong.

One year, Jimmy and I did opt out of the whole February 14 shenanigans…

Our kids were small, we were knackered and broke and for some reason, one of us said, ‘Let’s not bother with it this year.’ And the other one said, ‘Yeah. I’ve never cared for it anyway. It’ll be a relief to stop.’ After all, who needs a designated day on which to express their love? We were doing that all the time – in reminding each other to drag the wheelie bin out and getting angry about dropped towels and pants. Yeah, there was plenty of romance in our lives.

The day came – cardless, joyless. Something was definitely missing. Jimmy and I are generally ‘presenty’ types – we tend to buy each other a whole heap of things for Christmas and birthdays. I don’t hold with the thing of, ‘We don’t buy presents for each other because there’s nothing we need.’

Since when were gifts about need? In our house, we urgently need a decent non-stick frying pan, but I don’t want to be presented with one with a bow around its handle. We also need a loo that flushes efficiently, instead of gushing water until someone remembers to give the flusher a special jiggle. We need something to be done with our roof because, however much we pretend it’s not there, the damp stain on our bedroom ceiling is refusing to go away. But none of these items – pan, toilet, roof – fall into acceptable gift category.

So what do we want?

Well, Valentine’s day is a bit cheesy, so there’s probably no point in fighting it. A home-made cake with a heart wonkily piped on it, or funny drawing with a joke only a partner will get – these kind of gifts can give your day a lift. They make you smile. They’re probably the trigger for giving your partner a kiss, which can all too often fall by the wayside when your lives are all about family and work. I once asked a friend if she still kissed her husband. ‘Ugh, no!’ she exclaimed. ‘That would be weird.‘

That year we opted out of Valentine’s day, Jimmy asked me, as we climbed into bed, ‘So, did you feel okay about us not giving each other cards?’

‘Yeah, fine,’ I barked. All we all know what that means.