I Don't Know How She Does It

6 The Court of Motherhood

A DENSE CHURCHY hush fills the oak-paneled room. In the dock stands a blonde in her mid-thirties dressed in a white cotton nightie with a red bra clearly visible underneath. The woman looks exhausted yet defiant. As she faces the gentlemen of the court, she tilts her head like a gun dog that has got the scent. Occasionally, though, when she scratches behind her right ear, you could be forgiven for thinking she is close to tears.

“Katharine Reddy,” booms the judge, “you appear before the Court of Motherhood tonight charged with being a working mother who overcompensates with material things for not being at home with her children. How do you plead?”

“Not guilty,” says the woman.

The prosecuting counsel jumps to his feet. “Can you please tell the court, Mrs. Shattock — I believe that is your correct name — can you tell the court what you gave your children, Emily and Benjamin, for Christmas?”

“Well, I can’t remember exactly.”

“She can’t remember,” sneers the Prosecution. “But it would be fair to say, would it not, that presents approaching the value of four hundred pounds were purchased?”

“I’m not quite sure—”

“For two small children, Mrs. Shattock. Four… hun… dred… pounds. Am I also to understand that, having explained to your daughter Emily that Santa Claus would buy her either a Barbie bicycle or a Brambly Hedge doll’s house or a hamster in a cage with a retractable water bottle, you then went ahead and gave her all of the three aforementioned items plus a Beanie Baby she had expressed interest in during a brief stop in a petrol station outside Newark?”

“Yes, but I bought the doll’s house first and then she wrote to Santa and said she wanted a hamster—”

“Is it also true that when your motherin-law, Mrs. Barbara Shattock, asked you if Emily liked broccoli you said that she absolutely loved it, even though you were at that time unsure of the answer?”

“Yes, but I couldn’t possibly tell my husband’s mother that I didn’t know whether my child liked broccoli.”

“Why not?”

“It’s the kind of thing mothers know.”

“Speak up!” demands the judge.

“I said mothers know that kind of thing.”

“And you don’t?”

The woman can feel her throat constricting and when she swallows she gets no moisture in her mouth but a thin cardboardy coating. This, she thinks, is what it would taste like if you were forced to eat your words. When she starts to speak again, it is very softly.

“Sometimes I don’t know what the children like,” she admits. “I mean, the things they like change from day to day, hour to hour even. Ben couldn’t stand fish and then suddenly. . You see, I’m not always there when they change. But if I told Barbara that she’d think I wasn’t a proper mother.”

The Prosecution turns to the jury, his long vulpine face twitching with the addition of a tight little smirk. “Will the court please note that the defendant prefers to tell a lie rather than suffer any embarrassment.”

The woman shakes her head fiercely. She appeals to the judge. “No, no, no. That is so unfair. It’s not embarrassment, your honor. I can’t describe it. It feels like shame, a deep animal shame, like not being able to pick out your own hands or face. Look, I know there’s no way that Richard — he’s my husband — well, there’s no way that Richard would know whether Emily liked broccoli or not, but him not knowing seems normal. The mother not knowing, it feels unnatural. . ”

“Quite so,” says the judge, jotting down the words “unnatural” and “mother” and underlining them.

“Obviously,” the woman says quickly, fearing she may already have said too much, “obviously, I don’t want to spoil my children.”

We see her stop speaking. She appears to be thinking. Of course, she wants to spoil her children. Desperately. She needs to believe that, in this way at least, they’re better off for her not being with them. She wants Emily and Ben to have all the things she never had. But she can’t tell the men in the court that. What do they know about turning up on your first day at junior school in the wrong shade of gray jersey, because your mum bought yours at the Oxfam shop and everyone else in the class was in the new gunmetal range purchased from Wyatt & Moore? Nothing. She knows they know nothing about what it is to have nothing.

Clearing her throat, the woman attempts to find the cool unemotional register that experience has taught her the men will respect. “Why do I work so hard if not to buy my children things that give them pleasure?”

The judge peers stonily over his half-moon glasses. “Mrs. Shattock, we are not concerned here with the realms of philosophical speculation.”

“Well, maybe you should be,” the woman says, rubbing fiercely behind her right ear. “There’s more to being a good mother than an in-depth knowledge of vegetable preferences.”

“Silence! Silence in court!” says the judge. “Call Richard Shattock.”

Oh, no, please don’t let them call Richard. Rich wouldn’t testify against me, would he?

PART TWO

7 Happy New Year

MONDAY, 5:57 A.M. “Aaaannnd open the world. Aaaand close the world. Open the world aaand close the world.”

I am standing in the middle of the living room, legs wide apart and arms above my head. In each of my hands I hold a ball, one of those squidgy ones that feels like a giant octopus head. With the balls, I am required to draw a circle in the air. “Aaaand open the world aaaand close the world.”

The person telling me to do this is a loopily cheerful fiftysomething woman with a crystal on a chain round her neck; she probably runs a protection league for animals that everybody else would be perfectly happy to see run over: rats, bats, stoats. Fay is a personal trainer hired to help me with my intensive new year relaxation and exercise program. I got her over the phone from the Juno Academy of Health and Fitness. Not cheap, but I figure it will save me a lot if I can get back into my pre-pregnancy clothes. Plus, it must work out as less expensive than joining gyms I never have time to visit.

“The only exercise you ever get, Kate, is lifting your wallet with all those health club membership cards in it,” says Richard.

Unfair. Unfair and true. According to conservative estimates, my annual swim at the most recent health club, sneaked between lunch at Conundrum and a new business pitch in Blackfriars, worked out at &Bembo.xa3;47.50 a length.

Anyway, there I was expecting Cindy Crawford in pink Lycra and what do I find when I open the door but Isadora Duncan in green loden. A windblown faery creature, my personal trainer was sporting the kind of double- decker cape previously only worn by Douglas Hurd when Foreign Secretary. “The name’s Fay,” she said dreamily and, from one of those carpet bags that Mary Poppins keeps her hatstand in, she produced what she called “my Chi