Allison Pearson - I Don't Know How She Does It

TUESDAY, 4:48 A.M.There is a scream from Ben’s room. A Hammer Horror scream. Third time tonight — or is it fourth? Teething again. And we’re already over the legal Calpol limit. Will probably be exposed in News of the World as Monster Mum Who Doped Tot for Kip. They’re right to call it a broken night — cracked and unmendable. You crawl back to bed and you lie there trying to do the jigsaw of sleep with half the pieces missing. Perhaps he’ll go back by himself. Please let him go back. It’s always around now, when the dark is silvery with the first inkling of light, that you start cutting desperate deals with God. “Oh, God, if you’ll just let him go back to sleep, I’ll…”

I’ll what? I’ll be a better mother, I’ll never complain again, I’ll savor every grain of sleep I get from now until my dying day.

No, he won’t go back. Benjamin’s experimental are-you-there? yelps have given way to full-throated Pavarotti aria (“Nessun Dorma” means None Shall Sleep, doesn’t it?). The book tells you to leave baby to cry, but Ben hasn’t read the book. He doesn’t understand that after forty minutes or so of continuous crying, baby will settle down. The book says that Ben may have attachment issues; I think he’s just figured out that the Mummy who isn’t here in the day is available for nocturnal cuddles.

Brain is willing to get out of bed, but body lags behind like a morose teenager. Next to me, Richard lies on his back, hands folded across his chest, exhaling king-size sighs. Sleeping like a baby. (Where the hell did that expression come from?)

Climbing the stairs, legs feel encased in calipers. Through the landing window I can make out the terrace of houses at the bottom of our garden with their spooky sightless eyes. An early riser turns on a kitchen light and the room ignites with a saffron flare like a match. The windows offer a pretty good view of the wealth of the people inside: our area lies to the northeast of the City, so plenty of astute financial types like me have moved in here and ruined themselves doing up damp and peeling Victorian wrecks. Our houses are the ones with no covering at the window, their owners preferring to rely on expensively restored shutters while our poorer neighbors still comfort themselves with proper curtains or hide their business behind nets like veils. In the seventies, couples like us tore out all the old Victorian fittings — fireplaces, cornices, baths with a beast’s gnarled claw at each corner — in the name of modernity and now we, in the name of a newer kind of modernity, have paid a fortune to have them put back again. (Is it coincidence that we spend far more than our parents ever did on the restyling and improvement of our homes — homes in which we spend less and less time because we are out earning the money to pay for French chrome mixer taps and stripped oak floors? It’s as though home had become some kind of stage set for a play in which we one day hope to star.)

Upstairs, I find Ben rattling the bars of his cot. He grins and extrudes a thread of spittle that bungee-jumps off the end of his chin right down to the crotch of his sleep suit and shimmers there, twirling in the dark.

“Hello, you. What time do you call this, eh?”

I hoist him out and, overcome by the joy of our reunion, he tries a brand-new incisor on my neck. Ow!

I never wanted a boy. After Emily, I suspected my body could only make her kind, and anyway I was more than happy to have another girl — beautiful, self-contained, intricate as a watch. “Boys are like so over, ” Candy announced to a lunch for female colleagues this time last year. My bump was so big the wine-bar manager had to fetch a chair, because I couldn’t slip inside the booth with everyone else. We all laughed. Nervous, insubordinate laughter, but tinged with triumph — the laugh of the Celts when they knew the Romans’ time was nearly up. But then, three days later, they handed him to me in the delivery room. Him! Something so small, faced with the vast and implausible task of becoming a man, and I loved him. Loved him like a shot. And he couldn’t get enough of me. Still can’t. A mother of a one-year-old boy is a movie star in a world without critics.

He’s so heavy suddenly, my baby: that lithe body is filling out with boyness. Thighs as dense and plump as a boxer’s glove. I carry him to the blue chair, hold his hand and begin to croon our favorite song.

“Lavender’s blue dilly dilly, lavender’s green,

When I am King dilly dilly, you shall be Queen.”

Mothers have been singing this for centuries and still no one has the faintest clue what it means. The singing of lullabies is a bit like motherhood itself: something to be done instinctively in the dark, although its purpose feels magically clear.

I sense every part of Ben relax, his weight shifting inside the Babygro like sand until he is evenly distributed across my chest. You have to judge the moment just right; you have to guess when doze has deepened into dream. I stand up and move stealthily towards the cot, not letting him drop down until the very last second. There . Hallelujah! Then, just when I’m thinking I’ve got away with it, his eyes snap open. Bottom lip trembles for a few seconds like Rick glimpsing his lost Ilsa in Casablanca, then the whole mouth forms a tremulous O and the lungs fill for a reprise of the scream.

(Babies never extend any credit. They have a tyrant’s disdain for fairness. They grant no time off for cuddles received, no parole for long hours spent nursing in the dark. You can answer that cry a hundred times, and on the hundred and first they’ll still have you court-martialed for desertion.)

“All right, all right, Mummy’s here. It’s OK, I’m still here.”

We go back to the blue chair. I hold Ben’s hand and begin the sleep ritual over again.

5:16 A.M.Ben finally flat out.

5:36 A.M.Emily asks me to read a book called Little Miss Busy. No.

7:45 A.M.Paula back today and feeling much better, thank God. Ask her to remember Teletubbies cake for Ben’s birthday on Friday — oh, and candles. And go easy on the biscuits in case the other mums are crazy Sugar Ayatollahs. (Last year, Angela Brunt issued a fatwa on raisins .) Paula asks me for a large amount of cash, sufficient to cater Buckingham Palace garden party, but don’t dare query.

8:27 A.M.So out of it by the time I get to Broadgate that I pick up two double espressos at Starbucks and down them like vodka shots. I read somewhere that people suffering from sleep deprivation are in what’s called a hypnagogic state — a sort of purgatory between sleeping and waking, where surreal images drift across the brain. Like being permanently stuck in a David Lynch movie. This could account for the fact that Rod Task is ceasing to come across as a merely annoying Aussie bully and is starting to resemble unblinking Dennis Hopper with madman’s laugh. I sit at my desk wearing the old pair of glasses I keep in the drawer to give an impression of intense cerebral activity; then I select the most mindless task available, one where making mistakes will matter least. So long as I don’t buy or sell anything I should be OK. I have twenty-nine e-mails. Can hardly believe the first one.

To: Kate Reddy, EMF

From: Jack Abelhammer, Salinger Foundation

Katharine,

I can’t tell you how relieved I am to have worked out the problem we ran into over the holidays. Clearly it was a bad time for you too.

It’s great news about Toki Rubber and the patenting of the unbreakable prophylactic. Amazing recovery of stock. I admire your coolness under pressure. Maybe we can celebrate when you get here on Thursday? Terrific new lobster joint down the street.