Page 24 of So Thrilled For You

‘No, no. You can’t sleep. Not yet. Not until I’ve got you back in the car seat.’

I check my phone. I am, madly, somehow, still on time. I left a 45-minute buffer for Woody to ruin timings, and it seems like my ‘paranoia’ – according to Tristan – is once again, paying off. According to our new sleep schedule, Woody was supposed to be asleep 20 minutes ago, and stay asleep for the length of the car journey. If he can drop off now (in the car seat, not attached to my breast), he’ll still not quite get long enough, but it’s not the end of the world. I switch him to the other side and he essentially dream-feeds until he empties thatbreast, while I see Steffi’s message saying she’s got the train on time. That’s one of the many things I love about Steffi – she’s always punctual. The goldilocks of the Little Women. Charlotte always arrives way too early. I’ve seen her loitering outside my house a full hour before she’s due around, checking her phone for when it’s not ‘too’ early to knock. And Nicki’s always late with an air of slight grandioseness.

I unlatch Woody and burp him to wake him. He starts wailing as I put him back in the car seat, but I can’t stay in this side street forever, so I take a deep breath, get into the front and start driving again. He cries for another ten minutes while I ride an adrenaline rollercoaster, twisting around as much as I dare without crashing, to offer assurances and to half chuck toys at him, hoping they’ll land on his lap. Usually, Tristan drives and I sit in the back to placate him with songs and Melty Sticks. It’s still so hellish we stay roughly within a mile radius of our home thinking it’s not worth the stress.

Woody finally sleeps as Google tells me we have fifteen minutes to go. As I watch his eyes droop in the mirror we installed on the back seat, my shoulders loosen, and my grip gets lighter on the wheel. I’m alone again. For fifteen blissful minutes. I am just me, and this car and this traffic jam. A gasp of freedom and myselfness.

So, of course, I use this precious time to run through the horrid fight I had with Tristan just before I left.

‘Where’s his lunch?’ I’d asked, returning from the bathroom where I’d spent ten minutes cleaning up my ruined lipstick mouth. ‘You’d said you’d pack it?’

Tristan was throwing Woody in the air and catching him while he gurgled in delight.

‘I wasn’t sure what he was having,’ Tristan said, rolling Woody down for a raspberry blow on his stomach. ‘I didn’t want to pack the wrong thing.’

‘So you decided not to bother at all?’

‘I just knew you’d get angry if I packed the wrong thing.’

I stormed over to the cupboard, flung the door open, and wrenched out a spaghetti bolognese pouch, a prune pouch, and a half-open packet of the maize Melty Sticks that are so expensive they must be made of saffron or something. I tossed them into the nappy bag with two spoons – one to feed Woody with, one for him to hold to gaslight him into thinking he’s feeding himself as that’s the only way he’ll eat.

‘What makes me angry,’ I said. ‘Is you’re his actual DAD and you don’t know how to feed him.’

Tristan, sensing trouble, put Woody down, who crawled off to probably stick his finger in a plug socket while necking a small battery. He got up off the floor, holding his hands up like the Melty Sticks in my palm were a loaded pistol. ‘I know how to feed my own son, thank you very much, Lauren. Just not to your very precise standards.’

‘Oh, so it’s my fault? For being too controlling? How convenient.’

‘You know I always get it wrong when I pack the food.’

‘And you’d have thought you’d get it right by now!’

He’d sighed and pinched the top of his nose. ‘The rules change every day.Yourrules change every day.’

‘They’re not my fucking rules, Tristan. They’re the fucking NHS weaning guidelines. And, you feeding him actual human food, full of salt, and not cut small enough so he might choke to death, like last time, isn’t me being controlling. It’s literally justtrying to ensure our child doesn’t die of heart disease before he’s two.’

‘A tiny bit of salt wasn’t going to give him heart disease.’

‘Oh thank you, Doctor and Qualified Nutritionist. I didn’t know marketing managers were so multi-disciplined.’

We never used to be sarcastic with each other. Never used to get caught in the loop-the-loop of ‘you’re controlling’, ‘no, you’re useless’cliche of The Married. I sometimes hear how I talk to Tristan and words float into my head.Henpecked. Nagging.Before I got my break in kids publishing, I was an admin assistant in some start-up full of macho-geek IT workers, who every Friday would tease each other if they were allowed out that night from their wives. ‘Have you a pass?’ they’d yell over the desks, all red and jeering, and applauding when the men gave a thumbs-up. Oh, those awful marriages, where men have toask permissionbefore they could go out and have fun and get drunk and live their life to the fullest. Oh, those awful, controlling wives, watching the clock, and asking ‘when are you getting home’ and ‘I can’t believe you’re too pissed to look after the kids now and too hungover to look after them tomorrow.’ Such killjoys, these women. I used to shudder at the thought of becoming like them.

No, scrap that.

I used to shudder at the thought of anyoneperceivingme to be like that.

Now, I don’t give a fuck. I’m too desperate.

Since Woody, now, yes, I do expect Tristan to have the common courtesy of asking if it’s OK for him to stay out and have fun, leaving me alone to put his own child to bed, leaving me alone in the house all evening, not having fun. We’ve had somany fights about him staying out late without asking, leaving me to wrestle Woody’s bedtime by myself, then stumbling in and waking me up at midnight, pissed and stinking, wanting to fuck me roughly in my prolapsed vagina, and then acting wounded when I push him off because I’m so angry and bitter about him waking me up, when sleep is so precious and I know I’ll have to take Woody all tomorrow morning too, while he groans and complains about his hangover like it’s not totally self-inflictedANDselfish because it means I can’t get a break on a Saturday morning, when the weekend is the only escape from this relentless motherhood grind.

Anger pulses through me like a heartbeat while I sit in the traffic jam, having a thousand arguments with Tristan in my head – saying all I want to say. Then, before I’ve even finished my imaginary dramatic closing speech, the shame arrives, beating me around the face for not being a nicer and more self-sacrificing wife and mother.

Cool Mum doesn’t mind when her husband goes out and leaves her alone all night. She’s just glad he’s having a good time.

Cool Mum doesn’t need to instruct her husband on how to wean the baby. She’s already got a weekly meal plan of organic baby-led weaning recipes that she batch-cooked on a Saturday morning, while her baby played quietly on the floor, and her happy husband slept off his hangover and morning blowie. She’s put them into cute little pots and labelled them for each day.

Cool Mum doesn’t argue with her husband all the time. They are a perfect family unit, romping around a beach somewhere, throwing their child into the air to the backdrop of a sunset, sneaking in great fucks during their baby’s four-hour nap.

I can feel suburbia arriving as I drive closer to the station. The dense housing either side of the A road is now being punctuated by fields, further punctuated by little puddles of new-build complexes that I remember from GCSE Geography being called ‘urban sprawl’.Once I pass two Land Rovers, I know we’re almost there. I visited Nicki’s hometown a few times when we were students and stayed at each other’s during the long holidays. It was always so strange seeing my uni friends out of that context, and Nicki would give me an autobiographical tour of every passing pub or school or streetlight.‘That’s where I got drunk for the first time and pissed myself in the carpark. That’s where my friend, Mary, went to primary school but I couldn’t go because it’s catholic. That’s the streetlight where I kissed this guy called Harry who played bass in this terrible punk band called We’re Not Criminals.’

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