A few of my friends have had babies this year. It’s a bit of a shock to see how small they are -I still think of Alice as pretty much new-born and she’s just gone to secondary school.
It’s nice to be able to give them the benefit of my ten years as earthmother, but sometimes I wonder about the pearls of maternal wisdom that I’m sharing with them.….
“The first six months are the hardest.” What am I talking about? That’s up there with Childbirth doesn’t hurt, You won’t go off sex, and Your jeans will still fit you....
Sure, we all try to convince ourselves that life will be so much easier when they’re crawling, walking, weaned, or pottie-trained.
But then they’re out of nappies, and next thing you know they’re wearing thongs and you have a whole heap of more complex childcare issues to worry about ….. like sex and drugs and rock n roll.
Then you have to decide where you stand on this. Do you tell them you met their Dad at a Salvation Army cake sale? Don’t do as I have done.…. trust me, I tried it, and look what it got me, three children, a hangover and 24 hours of Bruce Springsteen on my i-pod
How do you simultaneously maintain your authority and your coolness?
I worry about drugs. I’ve taken the precaution of bringing them to live far away from the Big City, to a sleepy little Basque fishing village. One thing I didn’t take into account was the fact that apart from being on the “Route de Fromages”, Guethary is also on the “Route de Cocaine”, between South America and the rest of Europe. Drug traffickers dump so much of it in the Bay of Biscay you could develope a habit just by breathing through your nose when you swim crawl. When we arrived the tramps in Bayonne were selling it to pay for their rosé, which ended badly when the Colombians came to get it back...
“Oh sorry I sold it. Glass of rosé? Anchovy stuffed olive?”
From time to time paranoia sets in. I find a blue pill on my daughter’s bedroom floor while I’m hoovering. I guess I’m a bit bored or I wouldn’t be hoovering anyway. I panic, what is it? I know nothing about drugs, for me to recognise it, it would have to be labelled with letters big enough to focus on without my reading glasses. I toy with the idea of eating it to see what happens, but this seems like a risky strategy. So I decide to cut it in half, a fairly futile gesture with my limitted knowledge of designer drugs of the 21st century. But as it turns out this is one banned substance I am familiar with ….. it’s a blue Smartie.
Technically speaking, my ban on blue Smarties has never been lifted, so I could give her a hard time. Oh, no I couldn’t because she clearly hasn’t eaten it. I could eat it myself and see if it makes me hyperactive, but it looks a bit old so I chuck it away .
But there is an even more worrying prospect than your kids going wild. Your kids not going wild.
This idea hits me later in the day when I go on a “date”. I use the word loosely.….. my potential new boyfriend is so elusive I sometimes wonder whether he exists at all, or whether he’s just a figment of my imagination. I’ve only seen him once in the last couple of months, and on that ocassion, after about fifteen minutes, or one and a half beers, he had to leave suddenly because his son had got in a fight, been thrown through a window and needed a lift to the emergency room.
When I arrive at the bar he’s looking gloomy. Damn, my lipstick's smudged? Wrong flip flops?
“What’s up?”
“Its my son again.” The last incident wasn’t too serious as it turned out.
“Another fight?”
“No, worse. He wants to get married.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. Have another beer.”
I can see how this would be worrying. He’s been married and divorced three times ….. to the same woman. She’s the boys mother, so he obviously isn't genetically disposed to making it last.
Friends think I should watch out, the guy is commitment-phobic, I think he might be commitment-aholic. Maybe, but not with me. He goes off to discuss bridesmaids' dresses or something and I haven’t seen him since, I guess he got caught up making the royal icing .
A few days later I’m sorting though the junk in my basement.
“No-one minds if I give the baby lego to little Lina do they?”
“Oh. no, you can’t give my Duplo Zoo away!” Daisy is mortified.
I feel a little black thundercloud forming over my head.
“Why not?’ I ask sharply.
Yes, if there’s one thing more scary than the idea of them going wild, it’s the idea of them settling down, being sensible, getting a mortgage, getting married .… and making me a GRANDMOTHER.
Okay, they’re only 17, 14 and 11, but I see the nightmare scenario looming somewhere down the road.
I had the decency to wait until my mother was 65 before I provided her with her first grandchild, but even so she didn’t consider herself old enough.
“I don’t think it would be appropriate for her to call me granny.” Why on earth not?
Nicks mother was only fifty, and so glamourous that when she came over, I had to hiss at male friends, “She’s my mother-in-law.” in case they started hitting on her.
“I’ll think of a name she can use.”
In the end I comforted them with the thought that Daisy wouldn’t actually be able to talk when she was born, so they’d have a couple of years to get used to the idea.
But then I remember my own grandmother, and that cheers me up a lot. She was a great inspiration to me, I adored her, but I dread to think what she would have done to me if I’d called her Granny.
She was one of the first woman dentists in Britain, she rode a motorbike in the twenties, and did Greek dancing in a toga for her admirers. When she met my grandfather, she gave up dentistry, because, as she told me, having proved her point, she realised that she “didn’t want to spend the rest of her life looking into strangers’ mouths.”
She lived until she was a hundred, sustained on a diet of cheddar cheese, water biscuits, weak tea and strong gin and tonic. It was only in her nineties that she would occasionally refuse her her cocktail hour G & T.….. in favour of a Margarita, a drink I introduced her to when she was ninety five.

©Wilma 2008