Always and Forever

‘Yes, but if we were promoted, we’d have to stay even later in the office in the evening and be even guiltier about it. So why even try to break the glass ceiling? Sorry, the guilt ceiling!’ Vanessa laughed, remembering their joke.

The promotion ceiling wasn’t made of glass for working mothers, they’d decided – it was made of maternal guilt.

‘Or possibly a gilt ceiling,’ Mel added thoughtfully. ‘Looks great but is fake close up. Like false boobs.’ She looked down at her own now-modest 34B cup. ‘I wish I had the money and the courage to get them done.’

‘Oh, stop going on about your boobs,’ Vanessa groaned. ‘They’re fine.’

‘Yeah, if fine means they droop down to my knees, then they’re perfectly fine,’ Mel grinned. ‘Anyway, we’ve got to stop using the word “fine”. Do you know what it stands for? Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional.’

‘Sounds just like me,’ said Vanessa. ‘Next time anyone asks me, I’ll say “I’m fine”.’ Hearing about struggles with Vanessa’s son made Mel feel sorry about how easy she had it by comparison. She had left having children until she was that bit older, which meant she was ready to settle down into motherhood when she became pregnant at thirty-five. Vanessa had found the double blue line when she was twenty-four.

Plus, Mel had a husband to share it all with. Vanessa had an ex-husband who had a new wife, a new family and no real interest in the mistakes of his youth apart from trying to weasel out of his maintenance payments for Conal. Sure, the washer/dryer was a mystery to Adrian, and he still laboured under the impression that elves filled the fridge at night by magic. But despite all that, he was there, another grown-up to share the parenting burdens. Nobody who’d seen him painstakingly doing jigsaws with Carrie or making dinosaurs out of Plasticine with Sarah could deny that he was a brilliant, incredibly patient dad. Mel’s own dinosaurs always looked like giant slugs.

She was lucky with childcare too. The Little Tigers Nursery beside Abraham Park on one of Carrickwell’s prettiest tree-lined roads was a fantastic place for children. Mel had heard such horror stories about day care: babies who were allergic to dairy products being given milk; toddlers getting gigantic bites from other children…There had never been any such problems with Little Tigers. But what would it be like when Sarah went to school? Mel wisely decided that she’d worry about that later.

She counted her blessings. Look at all the people who’d kill for what she had – a great job, a great husband and wonderful kids. OK, so there was never much time for herself, but there was some. And she was working, something she’d sworn she’d never give up when she had her babies. She was living the modern woman’s dream, wasn’t she?

An hour later, Edmund Moriarty was still going strong. ‘We care,’ he intoned now. ‘That’s the message we have to deliver to each and every one of our customers: Lorimar cares.’

Mel nodded along with everyone else: We care – message received, O glorious leader.

When Edmund’s laser gaze swept past her, like prison camp searchlights seeking out escapees, she went back to writing diligently on her notepad and sucked in her pelvic floor as she’d been shown in her one and only Pilates class. Might as well get something from the meeting.

Suck and hold for a count of ten. Pilates was the way forward and was even featured on the company’s health website – which Mel was involved in – as a way for people to get into shape. Mel still wished she’d been able to manage more than one class after childbirth but she’d been back in work three months after Sarah was born, two after Carrie, and there just hadn’t been the time to fit in Pilates. Her pelvic floor would have to stay as droopy as her boobs.

Finally, Edmund shut up and Mel was able to escape back to her desk. There were seventeen messages on her voice mail. They were all work-related except for the last one: ‘Hi, Mel, this is Dawna from Little Tigers. Just to remind you that tomorrow’s the zoo day for Sarah so she’ll need extra warm clothes, and that Carrie can go if you’d like, but if it rains we won’t take the little ones. I know it’s a bad time of year but the Siberian tigers are only going to be there for another week and we’ve promised the children we’d go. It’s fifty euro for both children – that covers the bus hire, entrance fee and lunch. Or twenty-five euro if it’s just Sarah. See you tonight. Bye.’

Mel added another note to her list. ‘Zoo day for girls. Leave money out for Adrian.’

Wednesday was Adrian’s morning for taking the girls to Little Tigers. Mel did the nursery run the other four mornings before getting the train from Carrickwell into the Lorimar offices in Dublin, but on Wednesdays there was a breakfast meeting of the marketing and publicity departments, so Mel had to be in work early. She remembered when getting up earlier on Wednesdays had been a total pain because she had to set her alarm clock for seven instead of half-past. That was before the children had come along, and before they’d moved to Carrickwell. Seven was a lie-in these days, now that Carrie woke up bright and breezy at six every morning.

‘Heyyo, Mummy,’ she’d lisp when Mel hurried into the darkened, Winnie-the-Pooh-papered bedroom, showered but sleepy. It was hard to be grumpy when that little smiling face shone up at her, eyes bright with anticipation of the day ahead and small, fat hands outspread to be scooped from the cot. Although she was two and a half, she still didn’t like to clamber out of the cot on her own, unlike her older sister, who’d been doing it from the age of two, but Mel knew it would happen any day now.

Early morning was one of Mel’s favourite parts of the day. The pure unadulterated joy of being with her children, them kissing her hello, their childish pleasure at another day – it was what kept her going.

No perfume in the world was as beautiful as the morning scent of baby skin, a magical smell of toddler biscuits, baby shampoo and pure little person. Carrie loved being cuddled and wanted at least five minutes of snuggling before she’d consent to being dressed. Mel was usually torn between wanting just as much cuddling but knowing that the clock was ticking on.

Sarah was a morning person, all questions at breakfast.

‘Why is Barney purple?’ was her current favourite.

It was Mel’s job to come up with funny reasons as she raced round the kitchen, sorting out breakfast for all of them.

‘He fell into some purple custard and he liked it so much he didn’t wash it off. Now he jumps into purple custard every day.’

‘Mommy, that’s silly!’ Sarah had giggled that morning.

Carrie, slavishly adoring of her big sister, giggled too.

At her desk in the tiny cubicle on Lorimar’s third floor, with its stunning views of Dublin’s docklands, Mel reached over and touched the shell photo frame with Adrian, Sarah and Carrie’s faces beaming at her. The three people she loved most in the whole world. The three people she did it all for.

Mel spent two hours working on the website with the help of two coffees and a Twix bar. Lunch was for people who had time to make sandwiches before they left the house in the morning, or the money to buy the overpriced ones from the guy who came round the office every lunchtime.

As she drank her second coffee, Mel looked at her list and idly circled the word ‘zoo’. She and Adrian had taken Sarah to the zoo for the first time when she was two. Showing your child real tigers and elephants after so long looking at them in picture books was one of those parental milestones. How many parents never got to do things like that any more? she wondered. How many mothers missed the actual trip and instead got to read the nursery school diary: ‘Carrie saw lions and seals, and piglets in the petting zoo. She had an ice cream and got upset when she saw the monkeys because of the noise. She was a good girl!’

Lunch over, Mel went through the most recent pages for the website, scanning every line and photo like a hawk. The previous month, a huge error had occurred when a paragraph on new procedures for hip replacements had slipped into an article about erectile dysfunction. There had been much giggling in the office at the idea that ‘innovative keyhole surgery under local anaesthetic may do away with the need for painful replacement operations and would mean that patients will be back in action in just twenty-four hours’.

‘I’d say a lot of male customers vowed to keep away from the doctor when they read that bit,’ Otto from accounts had teased, as he’d delivered the expenses cheques. ‘Willy replacement isn’t exactly what every man wants to hear about when he’s having trouble in that department.’

Mel’s boss, Hilary, had been less amused, and completely uninterested in Mel’s explanation that the error had surfaced mysteriously when the web designer was working on the page. Mel was responsible, end of story.

‘This is an appalling mistake,’ Hilary had said in that cold tone of disappointment that was far more scary than if she’d actually screamed at Mel. Hilary was Olympic standard at making people feel as if they’d failed. ‘Maybe someone in design did it as a juvenile joke, but you should have spotted it. I’d bet my bonus it’s going to be in all the Sunday papers’ quote of the week sections.’

Hilary hadn’t said that Edmund, who noticed everything, would undoubtedly blame Mel and that this would not look good on her file. Mel knew that herself. And mistakes on the file of a working mother were multiplied by a factor of ten. Being a working mother was like being a marked woman in Lorimar. Once a woman had children, no matter what sort of ambitious powerhouse she’d been beforehand, she was living on borrowed time afterwards. One child was seen to be careless, two was asking for trouble.

The fact that Hilary herself had three children was not a help. In all the years Mel had been working for Hilary, she’d never seen her boss either leave early over some child emergency or take a sick-baby day off.

‘How does she do it?’ Vanessa used to ask in September, when she was up to her eyeballs getting Conal sorted out with school books and uniform, desperately trying to take half-days here and there, while Hilary was at her desk at all times, mercilessly watching out for people skiving off.

‘They can’t be kids, they’re robots,’ Mel decided. ‘That’s the only answer.’

‘Or is it having a husband who works from home and a nanny who gets paid more than the chairman of Microsoft?’ asked Vanessa.

‘You could have something there,’ Mel agreed.

By five, Mel had returned all her phone calls and was finishing a batch of letters. There was still a report on the month’s publicity activity to write for Hilary but she had to be out the door by five fifteen or she’d miss her train and be late to pick up the girls. She’d have to take the work and do it on the journey home.

Twenty minutes later, Mel swapped her heels for her commuting flats, filled her travel Thermos with coffee, and raced off into the cold. With luck, she’d be home by seven.

It was ten past seven before Mel parked the car in the drive and she helped Sarah and Carrie out and gathered up all their bags. It was a relief, as always, to be home.

‘Carrickwell is such a gorgeous, mellow place,’ their friends had all agreed when Mel and Adrian had given up their apartment in Christchurch to move to the country. Sarah was still a bump beneath Mel’s ‘Under Construction’ maternity T-shirt then. ‘Perfect for bringing up children. And the schools are great.’

Mel and Adrian had agreed and, catching each other’s eye in the almost telepathic way of a couple who knew each other inside out, had said nothing about how they’d muddled their way to their decision.

Both of them were city people, born and bred, so the idea of this country idyll wasn’t as appealing as everyone else seemed to think. There were other factors involved.

Mel’s parents had moved out of the city ten years before to a small house halfway between Carrickwell and Dublin, which meant Mel’s mum would be nearby to help take care of the bump.

In Dublin, they wouldn’t have been able to afford a four-bedroomed semi in such a pretty road. And both of them felt it would be good for the children to have the countryside on the doorstep, perfect for family picnics. Or that was the theory. In reality, all Mel saw of the countryside now was from the confines of the train to and from work.

The clincher had been the local schools. However, they were now made to feel they had missed the boat there. Sarah and Carrie were down for all the best Carrickwell schools but the local Mummy Mafia had it that they should have had their names listed when they were embryos to guarantee a place in the very best, the Carnegie Junior School. Not to mention the fact that learning the recorder wasn’t a part of the curriculum at Little Tigers. Serious mummies had their four-year-old poppets playing Bach on their recorders to impress the panel at the Carnegie. Sarah could play the television remote pretty well but Mel suspected this wasn’t the same thing.

It was the large back garden at Number 2 Goldsmith Lawn that had really sold Carrickwell to them.

‘We could have apple trees in it,’ Adrian had said as they flicked through the auctioneer’s brochure and saw the long, narrow swathe of lawn with a shabby green shed at the end.

‘And we could put a swing on the cherry tree,’ sighed Mel.

They’d smiled and she’d patted her burgeoning belly, conveniently forgetting that neither of them was able to so much as hammer in a nail without bringing down a shower of plaster.

Five years later, there were still no apple trees in the garden and the weeds had declared an independent state over by the shed, but there was a plastic swing under the cherry tree. Sarah loved it.

She ran happily ahead of her mother to the front door now, holding her pink and white spotted rucksack, while Mel struggled in behind with her briefcase, Carrie, and all Carrie’s belongings.

The front door of Number 2 was a glossy green, flanked by two dwarf conifers in matching green wooden containers on the step. When they had moved in, Mel and Adrian had spent two months’ worth of weekends sorting out the front garden so that it was maintenance-free and would fit in with their neighbours’ beautifully cared-for gardens. The tiny sliver of grass had been replaced by beige gravel with various ornamental grasses and plants grouped in the two planting areas at either end. It all looked well cared for but this was a clever illusion.

Once Mel opened the front door, reality prevailed. The hall looked tired, the peeling paintwork and battered wooden floor badly in need of a month of DIY enthusiasm. Everything in their house needed work – don’t we all? Mel thought grimly. There was never enough time. Adrian worked in IT in an industrial estate thirty minutes’ drive from their home and since he’d been doing a Masters degree at night, he never had a moment for anything as mundane as Destroy It Yourself.

‘Hi,’ yelled Mel as she dumped her load onto the hall floor and kissed Carrie on the forehead before putting her gently down on her chubby little legs.

No reply, but the kitchen door was closed. With yells of delight, Sarah and Carrie erupted into their playroom. Mel felt that you needed somewhere to keep all the kids’ stuff or it just took over the house, so the dining room was now the playroom, with the table shoved up against the wall and toys spilling out of all the big pink and purple plastic storage boxes. In the rigid tradition of children’s colours, everything for little girls was lurid pink and purple. Mel longed for some subtle colours to take over.

‘The dishwasher’s broken,’ announced Adrian as soon as she walked into the kitchen with the gym bags of dirty clothes from Little Tigers.

Sitting with his course books spread out over the kitchen table, he looked up at his wife and gave her a weary smile. Adrian had Scandinavian colouring, with short blond hair, pale blue eyes, and skin that reacted to a hint of sun so that he always looked golden, unlike Mel, with her Celtic complexion. Sarah and Carrie both had his fair hair and skin, but their mother’s fine bones and lovely eyes. When Mel had first met Adrian, he’d had the build of a marathon runner, despite living off Chinese takeaways and pizzas. But over the years, lack of exercise and a fondness for the wrong sort of foods had made him more solid. Cuddly, she said.

‘Needing to go to the gym,’ Adrian would remark good-humouredly.

If they could afford the gym, that was.

Mel patted him affectionately on the arm on her way to the utility room to get a wash going.

‘Are you sure the dishwasher’s really broken?’ she asked.

Broken appliances meant organising someone to come and fix them at a time when someone would be in, a task on a par with choreographing Swan Lake on ice.

‘The dishes are dirtier now than when they went in,’ Adrian said. He gestured to the worktop, where a white mug speckled with food particles sat.

‘Sure there isn’t a spoon stuck in the rotor?’ asked Mel hopefully.

‘’Fraid not.’

She set the washing machine going, emptied out Carrie’s juice cup and snack box, then tackled Sarah’s spotty bag of equipment, her mind whizzing through all the tasks she had to complete before bed. Then she stuck the mushroom and pepper chicken for the girls’ dinner in the microwave, put a pan of pasta on and got out a new wiping-up cloth, flinging the old one into the utility-room washing basket like a basketball pro.

‘Will you keep an eye on the girls while I change?’ Mel was halfway out the door as she spoke.

‘Yeah,’ replied Adrian absently.

Upstairs, Mel ripped off her work clothes and pulled on her grey sweatpants and red fleece. She removed her earrings quickly – Carrie loved pulling earrings and Mel had lost a really nice silver one already this week – and was back downstairs to finish the children’s dinner within three minutes.

The girls were already on their father’s lap, his college books shoved out of the way as they told him all about their day.

‘I did a picture for you, Daddy,’ said Sarah gravely. She was a daddy’s girl and could cope with any childish trauma as long as her father’s arms were around her.

‘You’re so clever,’ said Adrian lovingly, and kissed her blonde head. ‘Show me. Oh, that’s wonderful. Is that me?’

Sarah nodded proudly. ‘That’s Carrie and that’s Granny Karen and that’s me.’ From beside the cooker where she was stirring pasta, Mel looked over. Like all Sarah’s pictures, it was in the crayon triad of pink, orange and purple, with Adrian, Mel’s mother, Karen, and Sarah all big and smiling. Carrie, whom Sarah had never quite forgiven for being born, was a quarter the size, like a dwarf stick-person. There was no sign of Mel.

‘Where’s Mummy?’ asked Adrian.

Mel, who’d read plenty on separation anxiety, wouldn’t have asked, but her breathing stilled to listen to the answer.

‘She’s on another page. At work,’ Sarah said, as if it were perfectly obvious. She produced another picture, this time of a bigger house with her mother outside with her briefcase in her hand. The briefcase was nearly as big as Mel herself, but she had to admit that Sarah had got her hair right: half brown, half blonde and frizzy.

‘Oh,’ Adrian said.

Mel could feel him looking at her sympathetically over Sarah’s blonde head, and she flashed him a comforting look that said that she was fine. And she was, if the definition was Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional.

‘But Mummy is only at work sometimes. The rest of the time she’s here, looking after all of us. She’s a super mum,’ Adrian insisted. ‘She should be the star of the family picture, shouldn’t she?’

Sarah nodded and snuggled up to her father, one delicate finger tracing her granny’s lurid yellow hair. Granny was in the family picture but not Mummy. Mel felt another stab of bitterness, this time directed at her mother.

An energetic sixty-one-year-old, Karen Hogan was both Mel’s secret weapon and the source of enormous resentment.

Karen was ready to leap into the breach if the girls were sick so Mel didn’t have to take time off work, and unwittingly ready with remarks about how they’d sobbed for their mummy – or hadn’t.

It wasn’t that Karen didn’t support her daughter’s decision to work. She did. But without her, the whole show would have fallen apart, and somewhere in Mel’s head was the notion that this wasn’t quite the way it was supposed to be. She was supposed to be ultimately responsible for Carrie and Sarah – not their grandmother. Take Carrie’s tonsillitis a month ago. Mel had taken her to the emergency surgery at the weekend, but when she hadn’t improved by Monday, Granny Karen had taken her to their regular GP.

‘The doctor says you might have to consider getting her tonsils out,’ Mel’s mother had reported on the phone that morning, as an anxious Mel stood outside the health forum conference that she just hadn’t been able to miss. ‘He says he needs to see you if you have the time.’

Mel bridled at the tone. If she had the time. Who’d sat up with Carrie all Friday night? Who’d driven to the emergency surgery and sat in anxiety, singing Bob the Builder tunes for two solid hours on Saturday until they saw a doctor?

‘How dare he?’ she snarled. ‘I bet he never thinks how he can go out to work because he has a wife at home doing everything for him.’

‘Mel, love, he didn’t say it that way.’ Her mother was defensive. ‘You’re a great mum; we all know it.’

Do we? thought Mel. And who’s ‘we’?

‘He just meant that you should have a chat about the possibility of getting Carrie’s tonsils out while she’s still so young. Now that she’s over two, they can do it and you wouldn’t want to leave it too long. The older they are, the harder the recovery is.’ Her mother knew everything. Where does this maternal wisdom come from? thought Mel. And when was she going to get it?

‘That’s a lovely picture, Sarah,’ Mel said evenly. ‘Will we pin it up on the fridge?’

Sarah nodded happily and Adrian smiled up at his wife.

Another difficult moment over, Mel thought. Everyone thought she was managing everything so well. What would they say if she revealed that sometimes she felt she barely coped?

The bathtime routine took for ever that evening. Carrie loved her bath and always played with her plastic duck as if she’d never set eyes on it before, gleefully pouring water into the head so that it poured out of the bottom, making the plastic wings flap.

‘Mama!’ she squealed delightedly as the wings worked faster and faster. ‘Mama!’

Mel laughed too, feeling some of the tension of the day subside. How wonderful toddlers were – always excited, always ready to be happy. In contrast, Sarah was miserable and sat amid the lavender-scented bubbles looking like an abandoned child, her big blue eyes filled with sorrow.

‘Will you come to the zoo tomorrow, Mummy?’ she asked as Carrie splashed in frantic excitement.

Mel felt her heart constrict. Poor Sarah.

‘You know I can’t,’ said Mel brightly. ‘Mummy has to work but she wishes she could be at the zoo with you.’

‘I want you to come.’ Sarah aimed one of Carrie’s floating fish at the duck and threw it. The fish missed the duck but landed on Sarah’s foot, making her squeak with surprise and hurt. Her bottom lip wobbled precariously.

‘Would you like to go to the farm with Mummy and Daddy at the weekend?’ wheedled Mel, in desperation. The farm, complete with goats, sheep and a couple of Shetland ponies you could pet and feed, was a few miles away on the slopes of Mount Carraig, and both children loved it. Needless to say, going to the farm wasn’t part of Mel’s plan for the weekend, but they could manage it if she did the grocery shopping late on Friday instead of Saturday.

‘Don’t want the farm.’ Sarah’s damp head shook obstinately. ‘Want Mummy and zoo.’ She reverted to more babyish speech patterns when she was tired and fed up.