Mummy Needs a Break

We wandered in. The noise from the kids’ area filtered through, past the reference books, the magazines and the shelves of online orders waiting to be picked up.

‘Can we go and look?’ Thomas pointed at the children’s section and smiled in what I knew he thought was his sweetest way. In truth, it looked as if the dentist had just asked him to show him his gums.

It was some sort of ‘music of the world’ class, led by the same guy who did his best to wrangle a range of kids’ music sessions through the week.

I had started going to one because, in the haze of terrified-new-motherhood, I had been convinced that if I did not have a full week of classes set up for my son by the time he was six months old, I would stifle his mental development. I pictured a thirty-year-old Thomas pipped at the post for the Nobel Prize, demanding to know why I had skimped on baby yoga.

At the music class, parents dutifully, self-consciously, sang the songs and did all the actions – some of the regulars were quite enthusiastic while reluctant stand-ins barely moved their lips.

The teacher was one of the librarians, and he was the one reason I persisted past the initial visit. He was about forty, with dishevelled short, dark hair that was starting to acquire a smattering of grey at the temples and rimless rectangular glasses that slipped down his nose when he launched into a song with particular gusto.

At the beginning of the class, I had not thought much of him. But the longer I watched, the more impressive he became. It’s so easy to seem forced and condescending when you try to make kids laugh, but he had perfectly mastered the magical vocabulary of weird sounds and silly songs that would always get a giggle – even from the adults. He was perennially happy, but not in that fake way that lots of people deploy around kids, and his smile seemed to light up every bit of his face. I would bet the loose change in the bottom of my handbag that he’d never ‘developed feelings’ for someone while his wife was pregnant.

He’d won my devotion completely one morning when Thomas decided he did not want to be there. Rather than being awed by the chirpy music and enchanted by the books, he balled up his little baby fists, threw back his head and started to wail. And wail.

The teacher had stopped, and I’d thought he was going to suggest we leave.

‘We’re having a great time trying out these instruments,’ he’d told the children, ‘but the best noises are the ones that really convey an emotion.’ He’d then pointed at Thomas. ‘Can we all try to make the funniest noise you can think of to help this guy feel a little bit better?’

The older toddlers had responded with raspberries and popping sounds, and it wasn’t long before Thomas was chortling his delicious baby giggle.

This time, the teacher was channelling Elmo for an assembled group of bored preschool-aged kids and a smattering of parents who were trying not to be spotted checking their phones. He brandished a collection of what looked like traditional Mexican musical instruments – bashing out a rhythm on one, waving another in the air. Thomas was transfixed. I tried to guide him to a seat on one of the flashing stairs.

We squeezed into a corner, next to a woman who seemed to be wrangling triplets – three little girls of about four, dressed almost identically, with blue bows in their brilliant blonde hair. She was trying to get them to pay attention but they were more interested in poking each other’s eyes and whacking each other with books when she wasn’t looking. Thomas was clapping to the music and nodding his head out of time. Such is the toddler way. I tried to maintain my zen and pull my best supportive smile – inwardly pleading for the noise to end.

I exhaled heavily as I leant against the glass wall, hoping my top was long enough to meet my leggings at the back. It was unlikely the rest of the library patrons wanted a detailed view of my underwear making a break for freedom over the top of my pants.

I was at peak pregnancy. My legs had ballooned with fluid, as they always did by late morning, and most of my shoes no longer fit. Even my maternity leggings were struggling to cover my bump and the singlets I had bought – that claimed to be perfect for pregnancy and breastfeeding – looked set to be able to cope with neither. I would have taken my wedding rings off, but my fingers had swelled too much. My breasts had leaked through two sets of breast pads, and I already had that distinctive old dishcloth air about me, which surrounds lactating mothers. I know people say pregnancy is beautiful, and I still held out hope that I would turn into some kind of Earth Goddess soon. But, at thirty-eight weeks, I was still waiting.

Thomas stood up and started to edge down the stairs, shaking his arms to the beat as he went.

I pocketed the phone on which I had been tapping out a text telling Stephen exactly what I thought of him. I reached down to put my arm around Thomas to try to draw him back up close to me. I could feel his body zinging with energy. Soon he had ducked out of my grasp and was edging still further forward towards the Very Attractive Man. I tried to shuffle along behind the seated parents to get closer to him, but while the audience seemed happy to let a two-year-old through, they were not so keen on having his barrel-like mother follow.

‘Excuse me,’ I whispered as I stepped on one woman’s handbag. ‘Sorry.’ I ducked my head as a man grabbed his child out of my path.

But soon Thomas was a good couple of rows ahead of me, and still progressing. ‘Thomas!’ I hissed. ‘Come back here, darling.’ Some of the mothers in front of me turned and glared. I rolled my eyes apologetically. Thomas kept working his way forward. Soon, he was in the front row.

The teacher smiled at him as he stamped and clapped, getting closer and closer. Then Thomas’s arms were in the air, trying to grab the instrument in the teacher’s right hand. I attempted to push my way down the side of the crowd to where the man was trying to continue his show, grinning as he stretched to hold his instruments higher and higher out of Thomas’s reach. But Thomas wouldn’t be dissuaded.

The stares of the other parents were boring into the back of my head. I stretched over the row of children right at the front and grabbed Thomas, throwing him over my shoulder in a movement that sent a wrench of pain across my stomach. He shrieked. One of the girls who sat in a perfect cross-legged position in the front row covered her ears and scowled. ‘We are going home,’ I muttered.

‘Don’t feel you have to go.’ The man taking the class had finished his song. ‘Stay, if you’d like to. It’s nice to see someone getting into my warbling.’

I turned, grimacing. ‘He’s a little disruptive.’

‘He’s fine, aren’t you, little man? A bit of enthusiasm is what we like to see. Do you think you could give me a hand? I don’t want you to take my instruments, but I’m sure I can find you some of your own.’

He shuffled over and reached for another stool, pulling it beside him. A woman handed him another set of maracas. Thomas was spellbound. ‘I help.’ He wriggled up. I reached for my phone to snap a picture as he joined in, at the top of his lungs, with a rendition of ‘Wheels on the Bus’. I must have looked puzzled because the librarian caught my eye and grinned. ‘Not exotic, sorry. Finished the song sheet a bit too early.’

I became aware of a woman standing at my elbow, watching them. ‘God, he’s gorgeous, isn’t he?’

‘Thanks, I think he’s pretty lovely.’ I turned to look at her. Her gaze was fixed on Thomas and the teacher. Thomas’s cheeks were flushed from the exertion of bashing along, wildly off-beat. The librarian was monitoring his movements and looked to be biting back a laugh.

‘Oh no,’ she put her hand on my arm. ‘Not him, he’s cute, I mean Luke. I never miss his class.’

It was almost time for dinner by the time we made it home, complete with seven new library books inside the weekender bag I suddenly found I needed to use every day. My breath caught in my throat as we rounded the corner before our house and I saw Stephen’s truck parked outside. What was he doing? Only a couple of days ago he would not pick up the phone. Now he had decided to turn up?

I kept my foot steady on the accelerator. The last thing I wanted was for him to think I was rushing to see him. As we came to a stop, Thomas whooped. ‘Daddy’s home!’ he shouted and started wiggling. I manoeuvred to the edge of the car seat and inched myself out, one hand on each side of the doorframe, in case Stephen was watching. Of all the things that become difficult when you are very pregnant, getting in and out of a car is the most noticeable.

Stephen appeared from around the side of the house, plodding towards us. He would not meet my eye but jiggled on the spot, his hands in his pockets, as I helped Thomas out of the car. Thomas ran for his leg and twisted himself around his father. Stephen reached down and ruffled his hair. Waffle snuffled around our feet.

‘Sweetheart, why don’t you grab your bike and show us how fast you can ride around on the grass?’ I nudged Thomas in the direction of his new toy.

He climbed on, hopping from one foot to the other. ‘Watch me, watch me, Daddy!’

Stephen and I followed him, so we were standing side by side under the porch that ran along the front of the house. A few scraggly pansies were fading in the flowerbed opposite. We never had discovered how the irrigation system worked. Not something we were ever likely to solve now. Stephen cleared his throat and swallowed. His voice was strangled with the effort of not attracting Thomas’s attention. ‘Where are my clothes?’

I shrugged. ‘I didn’t think you were coming back.’

He grabbed my arm. ‘That’s ridiculous. I need my stuff. What have you done with it?’

‘Chucked it. You’ve got money. Get her to buy you some more. Bet she’s got better taste than I have, anyway.’

He grimaced. His hand was in his pocket – I knew he would be squeezing the stress ball on his key ring. I had bought it as a gift for him when he first started his business and was struggling to stay calm in difficult conversations with suppliers. We’d run through it together: ‘I’ll pay you (squeeze) on the twentieth (squeeze), but I need a line of credit (squeeze) until then.’

He was grinding his teeth. He looked away from me, at the overgrown lemon tree he had been promising to prune. He was off the hook there, at least. ‘I want to see Thomas. Alexa says I have a right …’

I spluttered. ‘You want to talk about rights?’

A bird took flight from the tree in surprise. ‘I think I have a right not to have a husband cheat on me when I’m about to have a baby.’

Stephen stepped back as if my anger shocked him. ‘I’m just asking if we can arrange for me to have Thomas, maybe a Saturday afternoon.’

Thomas was still zipping happily around the lawn. For the first time, I could understand the urge to spit with disgust.

‘Is that enough for you, is it? Take his dad away but give him just enough to let him know what he’s missing out on. Every Saturday afternoon to show off your awesome parenting to the world. Get some good photos for your Facebook feed.’

‘No one is taking away his dad.’

‘Maybe not, but it’s not going to be the same, is it? You’re not going to be around when he wakes up in the morning and wants someone to rest his head on when he watches cartoons. You’re not going to race around with him on his bike after work. You’ll have your Saturday, or whatever you decide you can fit into your new life, and the rest of the time who cares about us?’

He whirled around, and the fury in his face was shocking. His cold, angry eyes and clenched jaw could have belonged to a stranger. ‘You can feel sorry for yourself,’ he hissed, darting a look at Thomas. ‘You keep making me the bad guy if that makes you feel better. You chuck out all my clothes if you don’t want to look at them anymore. But don’t pretend that this is all my fault.’

Thomas was scooting away down the far end of the lawn.

‘What the hell do you mean?’

‘Okay, Alexa and I started seeing each other. I’m sorry, all right? That was a crappy move.’ Stephen crossed his arms. ‘But you’re not perfect, are you?’

I looked at him, open-mouthed, as he blustered on. Not perfect? Probably not – but who could blame me?

He was gesticulating at me in much the same way Thomas did when he was mid-tantrum. I watched him. Was this what I wanted to hold on to? Maybe he was actually doing me a favour.

‘You just want someone around to help pay the bills.’ Stephen was still talking. ‘We never spent any time together. And it was all just going to get worse once this one comes along. I sometimes wonder if you can even remember my name.’

I had to suppress a snort of laughter. He had no idea what it was like for me. Sometimes I could barely remember my own name.

I had assumed that Stephen would pick up more of the parenting as Thomas got older but it had not happened. I had learnt how to respond to a work message on my phone, sliding around the corner of the door so Thomas wouldn’t know I wasn’t paying full attention to his bath-time display. But Stephen would arrive home from work and if we didn’t give him ten minutes alone on the couch with his beer before Thomas requested that he play, he’d look aggrieved. While I worried about finishing meetings and interviews in time to pick Thomas up from nursery, Stephen would casually inform me the night before a trip that he was going away and wasn’t sure exactly how long he’d be.

He was still speaking. ‘What have you got planned for when the baby arrives?’

Did he mean the actual birth? He had rolled his eyes about every antenatal appointment I’d asked him to come to. I could not see why he would suddenly be taking an interest in my birth plan.

‘I still want to be there.’ He folded his arms obstinately.

‘Why would you want to do that? Why would you think I’d let you do that?’ The feeling that I was in an alternate reality was growing stronger with each breath I took. Everything felt so unreal.

‘I’m this child’s father.’

‘Yeah but I’m the one who’s going to be naked, in pain – what makes you even remotely think I want someone there who doesn’t even want me around anymore?’

Giving birth to Thomas had been the time of my life when I had felt the most exposed. There are not many instances where you basically perform every bodily function imaginable on a table in front of a room full of people.

The idea of having this man who was becoming more like a stranger every second watch me go through that, and then go home to someone else, made my skin crawl. Thomas was scooting back towards us on his bike, his eyes wide. I gave Stephen the most withering, dismissive glare I could muster. ‘We will talk about this later.’

I reached out for Thomas and lifted him off the saddle. Avoiding Stephen’s eyes, I pushed past and strode around the side of the house to the front door. His footsteps crunched behind me, but as soon as we were across the threshold, I shut the door and leant against it. It was not long before I heard him whistle for Waffle. His truck door slammed and he drove away.

CHAPTER FOUR

How to make a parking garage for toy cars

What you’ll need:

A box

Some tubes (paper towel rolls will do)

Cardboard

Sand down your box to get rid of any rough edges. Cut the tubes until they are just long enough to reach from the back of the box to the front. Glue your tubes on top of each other in rows, and stick the sheet of cardboard on to the back of them so that the cars do not fall out. Now your only challenge is getting your kids to store their cars in the garage and not on the floor where you will trip on them when you are too pregnant to get back up again, leaving you stranded like an upended cockroach on the floor. If you’re suddenly single-handedly parenting, you might consider setting up a playpen in the middle of the living room and sitting inside it. The kids can then create havoc all around your peaceful island of serenity.

It was some time after 1 a.m. when I opened my eyes and saw a shadow standing next to the bed. I squinted. The shadow was short, wearing pyjamas and had hair half-flattened from sleep. ‘Thomas?’

He put his hand on the side of my face. His skin was clammy. I shuffled across the bed. ‘You can hop in with me, honey. Can’t you sleep?’

He put his arms around my neck and squirmed in, searching for the cool spot on my pillow to lay his head. The duvet was almost over his nose when he stopped twisting. ‘Did something wake you?’

He rested his head on the top of my arm. ‘Noise.’

I kissed his forehead. ‘It’s probably just the wind in the trees. Try to go back to sleep – it’s still really early.’

I closed my eyes and focused on my own long, slow breaths. It wasn’t long before I felt him become heavier as he succumbed, my arm pinned awkwardly under his head and his body pressed up against mine. I watched his little chest rise and fall and his eyelids flutter with dreams, in the light of Stephen’s old clock radio. At some point, as the dark gave way to the insipid grey of the first shoots of dawn, I must have fallen asleep for real because he was soon shaking me awake.

‘Mummy,’ he hissed. ‘Daytime.’

I reluctantly opened my eyes and felt for his pyjamas. ‘Do you need to go to the toilet?’

He shook his head.

‘I’ll give you a treat if you do …’

He regarded me for a minute. ‘Okay.’

We tumbled out of bed and into the en-suite bathroom. It was the one room of the house that Stephen hadn’t yet finished renovating – the bath and shower had been replaced but the toilet was still dingy avocado, and the new plasterboard was patiently waiting for its paint. I helped Thomas on to the toilet where he perched, looking at me expectantly. ‘All finished,’ he proclaimed a second later, leaping off in mid-stream.

‘Good work, honey.’ I hastily dabbed at the mess on the tiles as he took off out of the room, back towards the kitchen, where he would wait for me to turn on the Saturday morning cartoons while I made our breakfast.

I sat, hands cradling my coffee, as he spooned porridge into his mouth, eyes agog as a cartoon Peppa Pig schooled him in several different ways to be impertinent to your parents. Whoever wrote the series must have had issues similar to mine, I thought as I loaded the dishwasher. You couldn’t trust Daddy Pig with anything.

A bicycle bell trilled in the driveway. I grimaced. There was only one person I knew who would be riding a bike around at that time of the morning with enough enthusiasm to ring a bell about it – my best friend, Laura. I know all the films tell you that the first thing you should do when you’ve been wronged by a man is down a couple of pink cocktails and bitch about him with your girlfriends before pashing an absurdly attractive stranger. But I was still firmly in If-I’m-not-talking-about-it,-it’s-not-really-happening mode.

She knocked but didn’t wait for us to open the door, sliding her own key into the lock and pushing the door open. ‘Thomas, darling?’

‘Auntie Laura.’ He let out a whoop and barrelled across the floor to her. She stooped to kiss his cheek. A pixie-like little girl appeared from behind her long, Lycra-clad legs, fumbling with the clip on her own purple bike helmet.

‘Lila wanted to come over to play.’ Laura nudged her in Thomas’s direction. ‘Why don’t you show her the blocks you were telling me about the other day?’

Laura had a bag of pastries over one arm and a steely look in her eye as she advanced towards me. I discarded my first impulse to convince her that everything was normal. She had once told me that I had distinctive ‘tells’ when I was trying to pretend nothing was wrong. It was when I didn’t want to admit to her I hadn’t been able to get Thomas to sleep more than two hours in a row for six months, while the rest of our antenatal group seemed to be operating on a perfect schedule. One of those giveaway signs was the jiggling from foot to foot that I knew I’d started as soon as she spotted me.

‘I’ve brought you breakfast. I didn’t ring, because I know you’d tell me not to come. You’re not rude enough to tell me to leave now I’m here.’

She was right. I motioned for her to follow me into the living room, where the kids quickly tipped the contents of Thomas’s toy box out across the floor. Both of us pretended that we could not see a pile of Thomas’s energetic artworks that had fallen across the floor and a teetering stack of washing waiting to be folded in the corner of the room.

‘I don’t know what’s happened.’ She sat, back perfectly straight, on the edge of the sofa and stared at me. ‘I saw Stephen at the supermarket last night, and he introduced me to Alexa McKenzie, that designer person …’ She bit her lip. ‘It was all a bit awkward.’

I cast about for something to stall the conversation while I caught up. I could feel the heat rising in my cheeks. Stephen was introducing Alexa to my friends? Already? But he had not outright admitted that Alexa was his girlfriend. I could not decide whether that made me feel better or not. Generally, he went out of his way to avoid talking to Laura at all. He and her husband, Mark, sometimes worked together and, unless she turned up with him, he usually found an excuse to do something in another part of the house whenever she came to visit me.

I had to avoid her gaze. ‘Yep, for some reason, he’s decided he’d rather be with a young, fit interior designer than with his heavily pregnant, hormonal wife.’ I tried to smile. I wanted to be self-deprecating, but I just sounded bitter. Which, I might add, I was perfectly within my rights to be.

Laura pulled me towards her and kissed my cheek. ‘I am so sorry. I didn’t want to believe it.’

We sat in silence for a minute, watching the kids roll around on the carpet together. Thomas was pushing a toy car around Lila, who was trying to land a plane on it.

‘What is he thinking?’ Laura spluttered at last. Her words were staccato as she bit back her anger to avoid sparking the kids’ attention. ‘You’re about to have this baby and he’s off ladding about with someone who probably doesn’t even do her own laundry. What a selfish, narcissistic …’

She was talking too quickly, as she extended her arms in my direction. One of her deliberately mismatched earrings scratched the side of my face as she hugged me. ‘It’s so unfair. Being a parent is so … optional for them, isn’t it?’

Laura and I had met at our antenatal classes three years before. Five wide-eyed, unsuspecting new mothers had assembled on plastic chairs in a hospital meeting room, where graphic descriptions of how our pelvises would have to move to allow our kids to get out into the world caused at least one of us to faint. Laura, a nurse who had spent years in the emergency department, just rolled her eyes.

Laura had been trying to fall pregnant for six months when she insisted on being sent for IVF. She was only twenty-eight at the time but managed to get Mark to do a sperm test the day after he had suffered a particularly high fever. It meant he had no swimmers to show for it, and the doctors bumped her to the front of the queue. She was pregnant with Lila after the first round.

Laura impressed me in class with her immaculate wardrobe and always-done make-up, the kind of clothes I would much rather have been rocking as I bumbled around in maternity jeans and oversized shirts. But it was not until Laura and I locked eyes, trying to quell a giggle when an instructor told us she had been qualified at the National Institute of Baby Massage, that we became friends.

‘I’ll cry mascara on your top.’ I pulled back from her. ‘I’m sorry I’m such a mess.’ I twisted a strand of oily hair around my index finger. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d washed it.

‘I do not care about that one bit. What I care about is how hideous this situation is.’ She rested her head against mine. ‘If you want to kill him, I’ll help you.’