How Hard Can It Be?. Allison Pearson
average menopausal male can generally be relied upon to purchase a leather jacket and the services of six-foot Russian blondes. Mine buys a book called Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Accessing the Calmer, Kinder You. After being let go by his ethical architecture firm, he decides to take the opportunity to retrain as a counsellor and starts fretting about the health and safety deficiencies in Bolivian tin mines when we can’t even staunch the pong from the soil pipe in the downstairs loo of our Tudorbethan hovel. (How I wish I’d never heard the term soil pipe, which is basically Victorian for ‘shithole’.) Honestly, it’s hideous. I’d rather he got a Harley-Davidson and a girlfriend called Danka Vanka.
Richard is so het up about the global epidemic of inappropriateness that he has no idea what is going on in his own home.
‘We put those parental controls on the kids’ phones and iPads, didn’t we?’ he asks me.
(Please observe the tactical use of the marital ‘we’. Richard doesn’t mean did ‘we’ put parental controls on the kids’ electronic devices. He wouldn’t know a parental control if it punched him on the nose. What he means by ‘we’ is me, the wife, who gets shared credit so long as things are going well. As soon as things go wrong, you can bet the question will be, ‘Did you organise those parental controls?’)
‘Course we have parental controls, darling. Fancy a bacon butty?’
Richard looks down at his Lycra-sheathed six-pack before capitulating. ‘Go on then, won’t say no if you’re making one.’
Over twenty years, the bacon sandwich has never failed as distraction, bribe or tranquilliser dart for my partner. Given a choice between a blow job and a bacon butty, let’s just say Rich would definitely hesitate. If he ever goes vegetarian, or even vegan – as looks increasingly likely judging by the tragic woven bracelet on his left wrist – our marriage is doomed. Anyway, I am telling the truth for a change. The kids do have parental controls on their technology. What I’m not telling Richard is that after Emily’s bottom went viral I called Joshua Reynolds, the village computer prodigy who is now in his late-twenties doing postgraduate work in physics at Imperial. (His mother Elaine told our Women Returners group that the infant Josh could re-route the US Navy from his buggy or something.) One of those disappointed, mousy women who only lights up in her offspring’s reflected glory, Elaine was thrilled when I called to ask for Josh’s number, explaining that I needed help with some Internet problems. I figured Josh was young enough and, let’s face it, sufficiently on the spectrum, not to think it was at all weird that I wanted to spy on my own daughter, or that I needed his help tracking down and destroying evidence of her naked backside wherever it might have got to.
In fact, on the phone, Josh was gratifyingly unsurprised, which instantly made me feel better. He said he would see what he could come up with regarding social media but, in the meantime, he told me how to get into the history on Emily’s laptop. I scrolled down the recent purchases and found that Madam had used my credit card to download ‘How to Use a Proxy to Bypass Parental Control Filters’. I mean, what are you supposed to do? It’s like I’m a Stone Age person living with Bill Gates.
7.23 am: Emily is upset. I made the mistake of pointing out that to produce one pint of her green juice she creates six miles of washing-up, presently still festering, unwashed in the sink. There is a heap of vegetable waste – apple cores, feathery celery stalks, bleeding beetroot carcasses – that would feed a drove of pigs for a week.
‘It’s such a mess, darling. Could you at least put the juicer in the dishwasher?’
‘I know,’ she snaps, ‘I know. I’ll do it, OK?’
‘And you can’t live just on that green juice, sweetheart. You need some solid food inside you. Please at least have some eggs. I’ll make them for you.’
‘What part of juice diet don’t you understand, Mum? It’s a seven-day cleanse.’
‘But you can’t get through a school morning on a glass of slime, love.’
‘You’re on a bloody diet permanently, but when I do it it’s not healthy. I don’t need any more of this crap …’
There are tears in her eyes as she veers away from my outstretched hand and checks her phone.
After the belfie catastrophe, I did confiscate her mobile for twenty-four hours, exactly as Candy suggested, but it was as if Em had been bereaved. Removal of Internet access seemed to distress her even more than her backside going viral. She sobbed inconsolably and begged me to give it back. I know I should have stuck to my guns, I know, but I couldn’t bear to cause her yet more distress. Take away a teenager’s phone and you remove the threat of dangers which are invisible to the maternal eye, plus the constant pressure on a girl to peacock herself for the peer group, then get crushed when she doesn’t get enough Likes. Unfortunately, you also take away their life, or the only part of their life they care about. I couldn’t do that to her, not when she’s still so churned up.
Storming out of the kitchen, Emily slams the door into the hall with such ferocity that the old brass lock shudders loose and hangs there, dangling from two nails. I go over and try to press it back in, but the wood is so badly splintered that the nails have nothing to hold them in place. (‘Roy, please add a locksmith to my to-do list.’)
This is the way our relationship has been for the past eighteen months. The little girl who was desperate to please, who was so angelic she looked like she’d tumbled out of a Pears Soap poster, the poppet who invited me for tea in her Wendy house: that little girl is no more. Instead, there is this exasperated and exasperating young woman who is aggravated by my every suggestion – sometimes, it seems, by my very existence. She tells me I am ‘Soooo annoyyyingg’. I need to ‘Back off’. ‘Just chill, will you?’ ‘Stop worrying, Mum, I’m not a baby any more.’
Stop worrying? Sorry, darling, I’m your mother; that’s kind of the job description.
As my own hormones recede, my daughter’s are surging in. She is buffeted about by them and we all have to surf that tide with her. This belfie business has made it ten times worse. Emily has barely spoken to me for the past three days; any time I try to raise the subject she runs upstairs, like she did just now, and locks herself in the bathroom. When I knock on the door, she claims her period’s started and she feels sick, or her tummy hurts, but close observation of Tampax supplies tells me she’s only just finished her period. I haven’t even told Em that I’ve hired Josh Reynolds to carry out what he calls a ‘seek and destroy mission’. I just wish I knew what the repercussions have been for her at school, but I can’t find out unless we’re talking, can I? Obviously, I am to blame for the entire sixth form, the school choir and three million people on Facebook having seen the photo she took of her bare bottom, complete with its very own hashtag: #FlagBum. I understand that she is taking out her distress and anger on me. As my Parenting Teens in the Digital Age book says, my daughter knows that I love her unconditionally, so I am a safe place to put those feelings. Intellectually, I get that. Doesn’t make her behaviour towards me any less hurtful though. Emily can wound me like no one else.
7.30 am: When she comes back down for breakfast, Em is wearing full Cleopatra make-up, her eyes given raven wings by flicks of kohl. She either looks amazing or like jailbait, depending on your point of view. Pick your battles, Kate, pick your battles.
‘Mum?’
‘Yes, darling.’
‘Lizzy and some of the other girls are going to see Taylor Swift for her birthday.’
‘Any relation to Jonathan?’ asks Richard, not bothering to look up from his iPad.
‘Who’s he?’
‘Jonathan Swift. Famous satirist during the eighteenth century. Wrote Gulliver’s Travels,’ says Rich.
‘Mum, puhlease can I get a Taylor Swift ticket? She’s so cool, she’s like the best singer ever. Izzy and Bea are going. Everyone’s going. Mu-um,