Welcome to Mother’s Gonna Work it Out – a newsletter not just for mothers with children, but for everyone who cares for anyone.
It was a hot summer’s day when I took Dexter to an art class at a book shop in London’s salubrious Crouch End. With our childminders on holiday, I was seeking opportunities to stimulate his itchy brain with activities beyond visits to the park and eating chips at the pub.
We arrived, excited, and were ushered into an airless room to run smack into a wall of po-faced women with ungenerous mouths and immaculately dressed children. They ignored Dexter when he offered them his little fist to bump, and didn’t say hello to me either. I held him tight on my lap while we waited for the class to start.
The art teacher gave us a cursory greeting but her eyes were trained on this clutch of perfect women and children, apparently regulars at the class. ‘I saw you at the park the other day but didn’t run over to say hi because I’m sure you were probably busy!’ the teacher gushed breathily to the blondest mother, who responded with a suggestion of movement to her expertly painted red lips. It was like being back in school again, watching the outlier trying – and failing – to befriend the cool girls.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t our first encounter with the mean mums. They haunt way too many playgrounds and kids’ events for my liking. Once, at child’s birthday party, I felt to check in with the entertainment after the mother had complained loudly to her friends that she’d gone on for too long. The storyteller, a West End actor and mother of a toddler, wasn’t bothered. She told me she’d been kicked out of baby yoga earlier that week because her son wouldn’t stay on the mat, and another mother had complained. That had been harder to deal with.
Dexter hated art class. Rather than decorate his outline of a giant cupcake like all the other children were doing, he ripped off his apron and stomped paint, glitter and torn-up bits of paper all over the wooden floor. Afterwards, he refused to dance to a Eurovision-style version of the Hokey Cokey, and I did nothing to encourage him. The Housewives of Crouch End watched us from the corner, tutting, while their children did all the movements in time to the music.
The mean mums’ capacity for judgment is vast, yet extremely narrow. If you don’t behave like them, then what you’re doing is wrong. And if your child strays too, then both you and your child are wrong. What I’m realising is that you could read every parenting book in the world and still have no clue what you’re doing, which is why a more consistently collegial atmosphere among parents would be so much more helpful.
And when it happens, it feels wonderful. One morning I was at a local park after a night out and hadn’t yet had a coffee, and Dexter took a tumble in the sandpit. I was a few steps away but, according to the hoverers right at the perimeter, I was being neglectful.
’Whose is this?’ one asked sharply, pointing at my son. ‘This is mine,’ I responded, picking him up and brushing him off.
I looked up to let them know all was well, and found them whispering conspiratorially and shooting me intermittent evil glances.
I came dangerously close to getting Tourette’s syndrome that morning, but was saved by the kind eyes of a mum who was sitting on a bench while her son played in the sandpit. She beckoned me over with a tilt of her chin and told me that her son had come down a slide too fast the other day and bust his nose, and a posse of mean mums had moved away from her like she was diseased, rather then offering to help.
I admitted I had a hangover and she told me she wished she had a hangover, and described, in minute detail, the precise drink she’d have when she could, down to the clinking sound the ice would make on the side of the frosted glass.
I see this mum frequently now – we’d be friends even if we didn’t have children. The same goes goes for other lovely parents and carers I’ve met on buses, in playgrounds, and while changing explosive nappies at art galleries. The joy of these encounters is that you go deep pretty quickly, forming a connection in a world where, frequently, you feel lost at sea.
Perhaps I need to be kinder to the mean mums. For them, being confronted by disorder is like tugging at a loose thread for it all to unravel. Seeing Dexter roam free, and me allowing him this space to explore, is too confronting for them. Not to say that I’ll make him dance to terrible music next time, but I could endeavour to be a little less judgmental myself.
I can picture those mean mums perfectly. Shudder. Good job running about and spraying glitter, Dexter – it was precisely the right reaction.