One of the great swizzes of parenthood — the one you don’t find out until it is too late to remedy (except by cramming your uncouth 14-year-old hobbledehoy into a capacious handbag and depositing him in the ladies’ cloakroom at Victoria station — and don’t think I haven’t considered it) is that you never seem to get any better at it.
It took me a surprisingly long time to discover this, since I turned out, to everyone’s amazement, to be quite good at being the mother of a tiny baby, confounding myself and my friends with my unsuspected reserves of patience and tenderness for the howling, bright-yellow homunculus that was my infant son. But the rot had begun to set in even before he started talking (which he was surprisingly late in doing, though one friend remarked that it wasn’t so much a disinclination to speak as that he couldn’t get a word in edgeways that deterred him).
A study conducted recently at Nottingham University’s school of psychology undertook to determine the age at which children begin to develop a sense of knowing their own mind. Research from the 1960s put the age at which they began to be sceptical about their parents’ infallibility at about 11, but the Nottingham psychologists placed it much earlier, finding that children as young as 7 were conscious of knowing things about themselves of which their parents remained unaware. From my own observations, I’d place the age at which my son began to develop a sense of irony about the filial/maternal relationship at about 14 months, which was how old he was when he toddled into the drawing room, where I was conducting a tense interview with some healthcare professional who had burst in unannounced (as they had a habit of doing in Peckham, where I then lived, as though hoping to catch you in the act of reddening the baby’s skin, or feeding him gin in his sippy cup) and gently pressed into my hand the corkscrew.
Actually, now I come to think of it, it strikes me that I have perhaps been misinterpreting all these years: that the flourishing of the corkscrew was not an attempt to grass me up to the Social, but intended as a gesture of solidarity, contra mundum. Certainly that musketeer sense of all for one and one for all is what has kept us going all these years; the feeling that even though I’m not sure what I’m doing, even though I have a strong sense that I’m doing it badly, even though we are the smallest unit you can possibly be and still qualify as a family, a family is what we are.
Now, a sense of family solidarity is a wonderful thing. As glorious, at its best, as romantic love — and a good deal more durable. In good times it makes you happy and in bad times it makes you keep going when all your instincts tell you to give up. But what happens when one of you decides that the family is a club to which he no longer wants to belong, having outgrown it, like The Beano Club and other such childish follies? What if one of you, instead of laughing at the other one’s jokes, starts rolling his eyes to heaven and groaning, “God, Mother, you’re so old”, every time you ask if he’s got any homework and has he done his piano practice? What then, eh?
Well, the good news is that disqualification from one club (the omniscient parents’ club) automatically qualifies you for membership of another (the sad wrinklies’ society). What’s more, there is even a helpline for people like us. While our children are ringing Childline on their mobiles to complain of our frightful sadism in refusing to allow them to attend away matches in Birmingham and Newcastle on school nights, we can turn to Parentline Plus, a charity which, as The Times reported earlier this week, is working with the Government to help the parents of teenage children to come to terms with the arrival of the huge, malodorous cuckoo who has unaccountably invaded the nest that once contained their charming, loving child. “We felt like failures,” said one parent, interviewed by Parentline, of the arbitrary overnight demotion from being his daughters’ best friend to their worst enemy.
And while I’m privately convinced that the best thing with adolescents is to treat them like circus lions — fix them with a quelling glare and never let them see you’re scared — there is a certain comfort to be drawn from the idea that one might not be the only parent ever to have concluded a discussion on teenage swearing by screaming: “Alexander! Your language! For ****’s SAKE!” — a line which, needless to say, has passed instantly into family mythology. Lord help me. No wonder, these days, his text messages to me begin with the cheery salutation: “Hey there, bad mother . . .”
Mortification of the fleshy
And while we’re on the subject of family dysfunction . . . Mortifying though it must have been for that nice Mrs Prescott to find her husband, walrus-of-lurving it all over the papers (I’m guessing a sharp tap to the side of the head with a frying pan, to bring him to his senses, followed by a protracted exile to the spare bedrooms of their assorted official residences, until her heart is eventually softened by his mournful bellows of remorse), the spectacle of the Deputy Prime Minister and his secretary grappling at a party like — well, like a couple of well-built mastodons frolicking in a swamp — has at least one salutory effect, which is to nail the outrageous lie, much put about by the media, that only very young, thin, good-looking people get to enjoy interesting sex lives. As the front page of the Daily Star poetically put it yesterday: “There’s hope for fat old gits everywhere.”
Horse trade-off
I suppose that Mr Prescott may be casting at this moment a wistful eye across the Channel, where the idea that sex and politics ought not to mix hasn’t occurred to anyone and the hectic home lives of politicians from François Mitterrand to Nicolas Sarkozy are treated with more indulgence than censure: “As long as it doesn’t frighten the horses . . .” Only I’ve just learnt (from The Times, needless to say) that in Paris it’s impossible to frighten the horses, because they are banned from the city — a fact highlighted by 14 young women who rode down the Champs Elysées and through the Tuileries in protest — an action that casts London in an unexpectedly flattering light. We may be uptight about sex, but there is something very touching about a capital in which, despite the horrible tyranny of the motor car, the friendly sound of horses’ hooves echoes on the pavements, from the cavalry clattering through Hyde Park at dawn to the police horses patrolling Upton Park on a Saturday afternoon.
