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

The train shudders and groans from its berth and I spread my stuff out on the table: for once I have a chance to sit down in peace and relax with the papers. Headline on page 2: WHY A SECOND BABY CAN KILL YOUR CAREER. Definitely not reading that. Since Emily was born, I swear to God that every month there’s been some new research proving that my child wrecks my work prospects or, more painfully, my work wrecks my child’s prospects. Go back to your job promptly and they say, “What kind of mother are you?” If you take your full entitlement of maternity leave and ask to go part-time, they say, “What kind of an executive are you?” Every way you look, you stand condemned.

Turn to Women’s Page instead and start to fill in something called a Stress Quiz.

Do you find you suffer from any of the following?

a. Sleeplessness

b. Irritability

For God’s sake, what is it now? Damn mobile. It’s Rod Task from the office.

“Katie, I hear the final with Moo Moo went great.”

“Momo.”

“Right. Think you girls should stick together, go after some more ethical accounts.”

Rod says he needs to access a Salinger file but he can’t get into my computer. Wants my password.

“Ben Pampers.”

“Pampas? Didn’t know you had a thing for the Argies, Katie.”

“What?”

“Pampas. South American grasslands, right?”

“No. P A M P E R S. It’s a kind of — er, cosmetic.”

When did you last find time to read a book?

a. Within the last month

b. Not since—

Mobile again. My mother. “Is it a busy time, Kath love?”

“No, it’s fine, Mum.”

I lie back on the headrest and prepare for a long conversation. Can hardly tell my mother that busy no longer means what busy meant in her day. Busy isn’t a morning with the washtub and a cheese sandwich for lunch before collecting the kids from school. Busy has got busy since my childhood; busy has gone global.

My mother thinks some disaster has happened if I don’t return a phone call from her within twenty-four hours. It’s hard to explain that the only chance to return the call will be when a disaster isn’t happening, stormy being the prevailing climate, with surprise outbreaks of calm.

Mum says she just rang to check how Emily’s getting on at school since her friend Ella left.

Bad moment. I had no idea Ella had left. Haven’t been in to school since I started preparing for the final. “Oh, fine. Really, she’s been great about it. And she’s doing brilliantly at ballet.” Enter a tunnel. Line cuts out.

The tightening knot in my stomach makes it hard to focus on the Stress Quiz. When did I start lying to my mother? I don’t mean the obligatory daughter-mother falsehoods—“Eleven at the latest; never tried it; three Cokes; but everyone’s wearing them; he slept on the floor; yes, a friend of Deb’s; no, not overdrawn; in the sale, yes, an absolute bargain; fine, couldn’t be better.”

Those lies aren’t really lies at all but mutual protection. When you’re young your mother shields you from the world because she thinks you’re too young to understand, and when she’s old you shield her because she’s too old to understand — or to have any more understanding inflicted on her. The curve of life goes: want to know, know, don’t want to know.

What I’m talking about here is the lies to my mother about being a mother. I tell her Emily has coped well with the departure of her best friend, even though I haven’t heard about it. I’d rather Mum thought I was a failure at work than a stranger to my children. She thinks I have it all and she’s so pleased for me. I can’t tell her, can I? It would be like finding out that after Cinderella got to live in the palace, the Prince put her back on hearth-cleaning duty.

7:47 P.M. THE CLOISTERS HOTEL, YORK.I ring my mother back. She sounds breathless. With a little gentle prompting from me she admits that, yes, she has been feeling a bit under the weather lately, which, translated from Motherspeak, means she has lost all feeling in her limbs and her vital organs are shutting down. Oh, God.

I don’t even bother to replace the handset before keying in the number of my sister, Julie, who lives just round the corner from Mum. Steven, Julie’s eldest, answers the phone. He reports that his mum’s watching The Street , but he’ll get her.

Julie’s tone still takes me by surprise: the adoring lisp of my little sister has been supplanted in recent years by something tense and grudging; whenever we speak these days, she seems to be spoiling for a fight about a grievance that’s too painful to have a name.

I got away and Julie didn’t. Julie fell pregnant and got married when she was twenty-one and had three kids by the time she was twenty-eight and I didn’t. Julie’s husband is an electrician and mine is an architect. Julie lives a mile away from our mother and tries to look in every other day and I don’t. Julie, who is good with her hands, brings in a bit of extra cash by making tiny curtains and bits of furniture for a local dolls’ house company and I, who am good with my head, don’t. (In fact, I probably invest my clients’ money indirectly in the Far Eastern sweatshops that are driving Julie’s employer out of business.) Julie has been abroad once — Rimini, unlucky with the weather — whereas it is not unknown for me to go twice in a single week. And none of this is anybody’s fault, but we exist now, my sister and I, in an atmosphere of guilt and blame.

I ask Julie if she thinks Mum should go and see a doctor, and her sigh blows across the Pennines, flattening trees in its path. “Mum won’t listen to me,” she says. “If you’re that bothered, why don’t you get up here and tell her yourself?”

I’m explaining what my schedule has been like when Julie jumps in: “Anyway, it’s not physical. She’s had some bother with men coming round to the flat. Said they were after money Dad owed them.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

From my sister’s living room floats the mournful theme tune of Coronation Street . Julie and I both loved that soap when we were kids; there was a period when we fought furiously over the affections of Ray Langton, a mechanic with dark wavy hair, until he got squashed under one of his own cars. I haven’t seen it in twenty years.

“I’ve left a couple of messages on that machine, Kath,” says my sister, “but you’re never there, are you?”

8:16 P.M.The conference is for dot.com entrepreneurs, or what’s left of them. The guys who persuaded the City that they could read the future turned out to have been talking crystal balls. You wouldn’t believe how much venture capital has been thrown at firms who were going to sell designer clothes on the Net. But guess what? People prefer to go to shops and try stuff on. Women fund managers were a lot less badly burned in the meltdown: as always, we were better at evaluating risk — reward; we spent far less on untried stock than our male colleagues. People said we were lucky; I don’t agree. I think it’s innate. Women like to have some reliable staples in the cupboard, to keep those small mouths fed when the saber-toothed tiger is blocking the entrance to the cave.

Unpacking my suitcase before going down to dinner, I find a large envelope marked DO NOT OPEN TILL SUNDAY! in Richard’s handwriting. I open it: my Mother’s Day cards. One is a print of Ben’s hands in red paint. I half-smile half-grimace at the thought of the mess that must have attended its making. Emily’s has a drawing of me on the front. I am wearing a crown and holding a green cat and I am so tall I dwarf my nearby palace. Inside, she has written: I love my Mummy. Love is speshal it makes my hart sparKle and tresha appea.