I Don't Know How She Does It

She shakes her head and the tinsel sends out prickles of light. “He was not. He was a fruit. Way I see it, we women have to claim all the guys in history with a strong feminine side as ours.”

6:09 P.M. Packing the car for the journey up north to my parents-in-law takes at least two hours. There is the first hour during which Richard pieces together a pleasing jigsaw of baby belongings in the boot. (Louis XIV traveled lighter than Ben.) Then comes the moment where he has to find the key that unlocks the luggage box that sits like an upturned boat on our roof. “Where did we put it, Kate?” After ten minutes of swearing and emptying every drawer in the house, Richard finds the key in the pocket of his jacket.

After Rich has told me to get the kids in the car “right now,” there follows twenty minutes of frantic unloading as he “just makes sure” he has packed the sterilizer, which he “knows for a fact” he wedged next to the spare tire. This is followed by a furious repacking, punctuated by fuck-its, when items are squidged on top of one another any old how and the remnants are jammed into all available foot space front and back. The Easi-wipe changing mat, the Easi-clip portable high chair with its companion piece, the vermilion Easi- assemble portacot. Bibs, melamine Thomas the Tank Engine bowls, sleep suits. Emily’s blankie — a tragic hank of yellow wool that looks as though it has been run over several times by a heavy goods vehicle. An entire bestiary of nocturnal comforters: Ben’s beloved Roo, a sheep, a hippopotamus in a tutu, a wombat that is an eerie Roy Hattersley double. Ben’s dummies (to be hidden from Richard’s parents at all costs). Emily’s surprise hamster is stashed in the boot.

Strapped into their seats in the back of the car like cosmonauts awaiting blastoff, Emily and Ben’s contented bickering soon gives way to hand-to-hand combat. In a moment of weakness — when do I have a moment of strength? — I have opened the chocolate Santa dispenser meant for Christmas morning and given them a couple of foil-wrapped pieces each to keep them quiet. As a result, Emily, who fifteen minutes ago was wearing white pajamas, now looks like a dalmatian, with a dark-brown muzzle around her mouth and cocoa smudges everywhere else.

Richard, who has a heroic indifference to the cleanliness and general presentation of his offspring for eleven and a half months of the year, suddenly asks me why Ben and Emily look such a mess. What’s his mother going to think?

Swipe at children with moist travel tissues. Four hours on the A-1 motorway lie ahead of us. Car is so overloaded it sways like a ship.

“Are we still in England?” demands an incredulous voice from the back.

“Yes.”

“Are we at Grandma’s house yet?”

“No.”

“But I want to be at Grandma’s house.”

By Hatfield, both children are performing a fugue for scream and whimper. Crank up the Carols from Kings tape and Rich and I sing along gustily. (Rich is the descant specialist while I take the Jessye Norman part.) Near Peterborough, eighty miles out of London, a small nagging thought manages to wriggle its way clear from the compost heap that presently comprises the contents of my head.

“Rich, you did remember to pack Roo?”

“I didn’t know I was meant to be remembering Roo. I thought you were remembering Roo.”

Like any other family, the Shattocks have their Christmas traditions. One tradition is that I buy all the presents for my side of the family and I buy all the presents for our children and our two godchildren and I buy Richard’s presents and presents for Richard’s parents and his brother Peter and Peter’s wife Cheryl and their three kids and Richard’s Uncle Alf, who drives across from Matlock every Boxing Day and is keen on rugby league and can only manage soft centers. If Richard remembers, and depending on late opening hours, he buys a present for me.

“What have we got for Dad, then?” Rich will inquire on the drive up to Yorkshire. The marital we which means you which means me.

I buy the wrapping paper and the Sellotape and I wrap all the presents. I buy the cards and a large sheet of second-class stamps. By the time I have written all the cards and forged Rich’s signature and written something warm yet lighthearted about time flying and how we’ll definitely be in touch in the New Year (a lie), it is too late for second-class mail, so I join the queue at the post office to buy first-class stamps. Then I fight my way through Selfridge’s food hall to buy cheese and those little Florentines that Barbara likes.

And then, when we get to Barbara and Donald’s house, we unpack the stuff from the car and we put all the presents under the tree and the food and the drink in the kitchen, and they chorus, “Oh, Richard, thank you for getting the wine. You shouldn’t have gone to all that trouble.”

Is it possible to die of ingratitude?

MIDNIGHT MASS, ST. MARY’S, WROTHLY. The grass on the village green is so full of ice tonight it’s almost musical: we clink and chink our way from the Shattocks’ old mill house to the tiny Norman church. Inside, the pews are full, the air dense and dank and flavored with winey breath. I know you’re meant to disapprove of the drunks who only come to church this one time in the year, but standing here next to Rich, I think how much I like them, envy them even. Their noisy attempts at hush, the sense they’ve come in search of heat and light and a little human kindness.

I hold it together, I really do, until we get to that line in “O Little Town of Bethlehem” when I have to press both gloves to my eyes:

“Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by.”

4 Christmas Day

SATURDAY, 5:37 A.M. WROTHLY, YORKSHIRE. It’s still dark outside. The four of us are in bed together in a sprawling tentacular cuddle. Emily, half mad with Santa lust, is tearing off wrapping paper. Ben is playing peepo with the debris. I give Richard a packet of wind-dried reindeer, two pairs of Swedish socks (oatmeal), a five-day wine-tasting course in Burgundy, and How to Be a Domestic Goddess (joke). Barbara and Donald give me a wipable Liberty print apron and How to Be a Domestic Goddess (not joke).

Richard gives me: (1) Agent Provocateur underwear — red bra with raised black satin spots and demitasse cup over which nipples jut like helmeted medieval warriors peeking above parapet; also, a suspender/ knicker device apparently trimmed with trawlerman’s netting, and (2) Membership of National Trust.

Both fall into category of what I think of as PC presents: Please Change. Emily gives me a fantastic travel clock. Instead of an alarm, it has a message recorded by her: “Wake up, Mummy; wake up, sleepyhead!”

We give Emily a hamster (female, but to be called Jesus), a Barbie bike, a Brambly Hedge doll’s house, a remote-control robot dog and a lot of other stuff made out of plastic that she doesn’t need. Emily is thrilled with the Peacekeeper Barbie I snatched up in Stockholm Duty Free until she opens Paula’s present: Baby Wee-Wee, which I have expressly forbidden.

Risking hysteria, we try to get most of the kids’ gifts unwrapped upstairs so that my parents-in-law will not be appalled by reckless metropolitan surfeit (“Throwing your money about”) and the outrageous spoiling of the younger generation (“In my day, you counted yourself lucky to get a doll with a china head and an orange”).

Some things are harder to keep quiet. It’s difficult to pretend to grandparents, for instance, that your child is just an occasional video watcher when, during breakfast, she gives a word-perfect rendition of every song from The Little Mermaid, adding brightly that the DVD version has an extra tune. At the table, I sense another source of conflict when I remind Emily to stop playing with the salt.

“Emily, Grandpa asked you to put that down.”

“No, I didn’t,” says Donald mildly. “I told her to put it down. That’s the difference between my generation and yours, Kate: we told, you ask.”