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

Coco Chanel miniature Eau de Toilette (atomizer broken)

Little Miss Busy book which Emily pressed on me for the journey

Between my wallet and a wad of dried-out Pampers wipes, I find Jack Abelhammer’s card with home number and message scrawled on back: “Any time!”

At the sight of his handwriting, I get a sensation of claws scuttling across the floor of my belly: the sensation of far-off teenage crushes, of sex when it was still as much a puzzle as a thrill. Over dinner in New York, Jack and I talked about everything — music, movies, Tom Hanks (the new Jimmy Stewart?), the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth the First, Apollo 13, jelly beans, Art Tatum, Rome versus Venice, the mysterious allure of Alan Greenspan, even the stocks I am buying for him. Everything except children. Why didn’t you mention your children, Kate?

2:07 P.M.Back from Heathrow, dash into office to show my face. Create impression of intense activity by piling books and financial journals on my desk, then call my land line from my mobile and keep it ringing. Pick it up and have animated can-do conversation with myself about hot new stock before hanging up. Tell Guy I have to pop out and collect some vital research. Hail cab and get driver to take me to Highbury Corner and wait outside bakery while I leap out to pick up Teletubbies cake. Not bad: Po a little po-faced, perhaps, and Laa-Laa more mustard than yellow. Ten minutes later, pulling into our street, can see a blue balloon tied to the front door. As I walk into the house, Ben waddles into the hall, gives a yowl of recognition and starts to cry. Fall to my knees, gather him in and hug him tight.

This time last year, he was minutes old, naked except for a buttery coat of vernix. Today, dressed by Paula, he is in a red-and-white soccer strip with ADAMS emblazoned on the back. I do not let on how much this upsets me. Instead, when she leaves the kitchen, I calmly hand Ben a carton of Toothkind Ribena and watch as he upends it, drizzling purple flood from neck to navel.

“Oh, dear,” I say loudly. “Not juice all over your lovely football kit. Better go upstairs and get changed.”

Yesss!

4 P.M.Ben’s party is full of Paula’s nanny friends with their charges, many of whom I don’t recognize. They are part of his life without me. When these unfamiliar girls say his name and my son lights up with pleasure I feel a twinge of — what? If I didn’t know better, I’d call it remorse.

In the sitting room, a handful of nonworking mums are in animated conversation about a local nursery school. They hardly seem to notice their kids, whom they handle with an enviable invisible touch, like advanced kite fliers, while the Mothers Inferior like me overattend to our clamorous offspring.

There is an uneasy standoff between the two kinds of mother which sometimes makes it hard for us to talk to each other. I suspect that the nonworking mother looks at the working mother with envy and fear because she thinks that the working mum has got away with it, and the working mum looks back with fear and envy because she knows that she has not. In order to keep going in either role, you have to convince yourself that the alternative is bad. The working mother says, Because I am more fulfilled as a person I can be a better mother to my children. And sometimes she may even believe it. The mother who stays home knows that she is giving her kids an advantage, which is something to cling to when your toddler has emptied his beaker of juice over your last clean T-shirt.

Here in the kitchen, though, I find solace in the company of a handful of familiar women, the tattered remnant of my original postnatal mother-and-baby group. Amazing to think we’ve known each other for more than five years now. Judith, the plump brunette over by the microwave, used to be a patent agent. Went back to work for a couple of years, but then one day she discovered dog hairs in the back of the family Peugeot. Trouble was they didn’t have a dog. Told herself it was nothing to worry about, until the gnawing sensation in her stomach drove her to slip out of work. Parked outside her own house and trailed the nanny to a flat off the Holloway Road. Inside the unlocked door, she found Joshua fenced in a corner behind a fireguard, watched over by an Alsatian, while the nanny, Tara, amused herself in the next room with a boyfriend who had a Metallica tattoo on one of his pumping buttocks.

We all told Judith it was just incredibly bad luck, a single rotten apple in the wholesome nanny barrel. “But what if he saw something, Kate?” she sobbed down the phone.

“Josh didn’t see anything, Judy, he’s not even three. And they don’t remember a thing before they’re five.”

But Judith never risked child care again. We knew that she tortured herself with the thought of the dog’s jaw so close to her baby’s face because, back in those early days, we lacerated our consciences every time we got home and found a new bump or graze on our own infants. These things happened; it was the fact they happened off your watch that seemed to hurt. And then there was the secret never-to-be-spoken conviction that you would have got there sooner. Got to the table corner before her forehead struck, to the tarmac before his tiny knee. Awacs, isn’t that what the military calls it? Nature gives Mother an advance-warning system and Mother is convinced that no minder or man can match her for speed or anticipation.

Judith didn’t object when her husband Nigel said that, as she was no longer working, she could get up for the kids whenever they woke in the night. And, as he was under such pressure at the bank, he would need to take a skiing holiday while Judith got on with the relaxing business of being at home with three children under four. (The twins arrived soon after the nanny left.) The Judith I first knew would have told Hubby where to get off, but that Judith had long disappeared.

The rest of us held firm for a while to the conviction that we had been educated for something better than the gentle warming of Barbie Pasta. But then, one by one, we stopped. “Giving up,” isn’t that what they call it? Well, I’m not calling it that. Giving up sounds like surrender, but these were honorable campaigns, bravely fought and not without injury. Did my fellow novice mothers give up work? No, work gave them up, or at least made it impossible for them to go on.

Karen — she’s spooning jelly into Ella’s mouth — found herself sidelined at her accountancy firm after it was made crystal clear, by the opaque route of nod and wink, that after having Louis she was no longer considered partnership material. Taking her eyes off the Career Path for a few months, she had found herself on what they call the Mummy Track. (The Mummy Track has the appearance of a through road; you can travel for many hundreds of miles along it before you notice you’re going nowhere.) Karen thought she could do her job in four days, one of those days at home; her boss agreed, and that was the problem. If Karen managed, he said, it would create “an unhelpful precedent.”

Funny thing is, when you’re starting out you assume their babyhood will be the hard part, that if you can just butch your way through those fuzzy first weeks then everything will return to normal. But it gets worse: at least at six months of age they can’t tell you it’s you that they want.

Five and a half years after the birth of our babies, only three out of our original group of nine still have jobs: Caroline is a graphic designer in advertising but based at home, so she gets to squeeze all her work in round Max’s school times. She couldn’t make it today because she was putting the finishing touches to a brochure for IBM. Alice — cute face, raven bob, leather gilet, over by the sink — went back to being a director of documentaries that won awards for rooting out corruption in high places and a particularly plangent kind of sadness in low ones. Every night when she got in late from the editing suite, Alice carried a sleeping Nathaniel into her bed. When else would she get to hold him? It was only for a little while, only while he was little. But Nat didn’t grasp that his lease on paradise was short: soon he was lying across the width of the bed, forcing his mother and father into narrow coffins at each side. When Jacob came along, Alice took him into bed too. Soon afterwards her partner, Don, left home, citing a nineteen-year-old researcher and irreconcilable sleeping arrangements.