Motherwhelmed

‘So how come Phoebe is your boss if you’ve been at Mango even longer than she has?’

I thought about it for a moment and chose to tell the truth.

‘I think I just ran out of steam – something like that anyway – Phoebe has always been fiercely ambitious,’ I wanted to change the subject because I wasn’t quite sure how I’d managed to progress so little in such a long period of time. ‘Anyhow, let’s talk about this pet food presentation. I did a project a few years ago about scented cat litter so I could talk you through some of that?’

‘That sounds spot on. Did it have essential oils in it? Also I always thought there was a subtle relationship between cat litter and cat food. They look the same but culturally we don’t have the same amount of shame around faecal matter that we used to. Perhaps there’s a role for a product that fulfils two roles at the same time?’

‘An edible cat litter?’

‘Something like that yes.’

‘I haven’t heard of such a thing and I can see a few barriers but it’s worth identifying as a route forward.’

‘The client is open-minded and wants NEW ideas. Do you think the accompanied feeding time depths were the best method?’ he asked.

‘Yes but I might have added some follow-up phone interviews. And made sure I got a good spectrum of pet owners. Highly involved, less involved – that kind of thing.’

‘We don’t call them phone interviews anymore,’ he said. ‘They’re in-depth digital pow wows.’

‘Well those. You know, talk to the owners after they’ve used the product and get their feedback.’

‘I like that. I wonder whether we should frame it as a litter or a food? I’ll have to think it through.’

The turmeric was catching in my throat. I was tired. Perhaps I needed a supplement for women in their forties who struggled to be enthusiastic. I wished it was time to go to bed. The senseless back and forth. It was kind of enjoyable … sort of … like the sensation of peeling off old nail varnish from your thumb, and it coming off in one piece.

When you worked in market research for long enough you realized that whatever category you worked in the stories you told the clients were, more often than not, the same. It was all about finding some sort of human insecurity or lack, then addressing this lack with your product. For pet owners, the lack was usually a guilt that they weren’t spending enough time with their pet. It was the same for working parents. We all want to believe that we’re doing everything we can for our loved ones. In an unpredictable world, this sense of control was important. There might be a terrorist attack at any moment but at least your cat had a nice smelling bottom and your baby had eaten three vegetables. It’s the little things and all that.

I thought about Bella and what she might be doing right now. It was mid-morning and they’d probably be playing outside. I hoped she didn’t have any accidents today. They usually asked me to log into the portal to check on her progress. I could never remember the password.

Did this make me a bad parent?

As we were talking, Simon’s eyes scanned down to his phone screen to see if there was any fresh update on his news feed. He was continually showing me his screen to show some fresh horror that was kicking of – a primary teacher who was a rampant paedophile, a dead elephant with its tusks ripped out, a woman raped on a packed train, a terrorist chopping someone’s head off. When I’d been Simon’s age, I’d spent an inordinate amount of time listening to Radiohead and feeling sad but there was rarely a specific reason for this sadness (aside from the time I shaved my eyebrows off). I felt sorry for his generation because there were now so many reasons to feel unhappy. There was too much information on the stuff that was going wrong. If we’d been peasants we would have just muttered into our mashed potato whilst people far away were burned and villages pillaged. The culture of being constantly plugged in wasn’t healthy.

‘You look a bit pale,’ he said as we both stood up to go back upstairs. ‘Do you want to get a fish burrito later?’ he asked. ‘I’m walking down to Borough Market at twelve and they’re super tasty.’

I nodded. It would be good for me to do something different and get over my cynicism towards younger people and their food obsessions. I was saying YES to life today. Yes to a coffee with Bryony! Yes to lunch with Simon! We went up to our desks and put our headphones on. The blankets still seemed to be out in force, and I wondered why nobody said anything or just went home where it was warm. Wasn’t there a law about keeping employees at a comfortable temperature? It seemed today that they’d despatched with both air-con (which was a relief) and heating. Maybe the girls in the toilet had been right to worry that the soap wasn’t posh anymore. This was all symptomatic of a broader money-saving initiative. Perhaps being kept chilly made your brain less sleepy. There wasn’t enough time to worry about these macro things, and by the time I’d answered the fifty and then some internal emails about meetings, innovation sessions, new initiatives and brainstorms to land on the names for these initiatives, it was time for lunch.

Kath had sent me a text. She had three beautiful children who looked like they’d stepped out of a Boden catalogue. Back when I’d been romping around the capitals of Europe with my Top Shop blazer, and bag full of bad marketing ideas, she’d been bringing up kids, and being generally excellent at it. She thought my life was exciting and I thought hers was calmer and more authentic. We were both bored but she argued that at least I was getting paid for my time.

Hey high flyer? How’s things?

Fine, I replied. I might be coming down with something – feel a bit yukky.

There’s a lot of bugs about. Lara has an Instagram account. What do I do?

Lara was her twelve-year-old daughter, and I was surprised she hadn’t had an IG account for longer. We weren’t the first generation to have no real idea what our children were doing.

Just follow her and ask her to keep the account private.

I think she’s putting videos of her making slime on there.

I think that’s pretty normal.

Is Bella okay?

She won’t wear tights and keeps falling over.

I remember that phase too.

Ring me later.

Cool will do

Later Simon and I walked towards Borough Market. It was a nice day, the sun was out, and I had that momentary pop of happiness that comes with realizing that you’re not dead yet. Perhaps this was the thing. The small moments of happiness and nothing more.

When Bella squeezed me tight.

When I leant in and smelt her hair.

When the sun came out after a few days of grey.

The prawns being defrosted.

Leggings instead of tights – signalling a small parenting victory.

The market wasn’t busy, and I picked up a box of raspberries (priced at six pounds so I set it back down). I thought about how much Bella would enjoy eating these and picked them up and paid for them. If you’re a working mum, you basically have a child-ghost who follows you about all day, making you feel pain in your heart and angst about whether you’re doing the right thing. It wasn’t unusual for me to buy stuff for her to make myself feel better. I was sure we all did the same thing.

We ordered our burritos and I tried to eat mine but about fifty per cent fell on the pavement. I didn’t like this trend towards eating whilst in motion. It wasn’t enjoyable. It also made a mess of your clothes. Simon smiled. He had a wise face, and blonde hair that sprouted out the sides of his cap. He was wearing braces with his black skinny jeans and giant high-top trainers which had come back into fashion again. I had a feeling that he saw me as a benevolent granny type. Was he seeking some sort of mentor? I couldn’t recall the last time I’d been to lunch with someone. Usually the dynamic types were cliquey and didn’t want to come too close as they sensed I had a losing streak.

‘So, I read that report you wrote about “Scouting for Trends,”’ Simon said biting into his burrito. ‘It was cool.’

I was finding his interest in me quite curious. He’d never spoken to me before. There was also a side of me that felt suspicious. Was he a spy? Was he Darren’s spy?

‘Yes. We presented it at a “Global Youth Research Trends” conference in New York about ten years ago. It was fun,’ I said trying to retrieve a bit of lettuce from my teeth. ‘We met Thurston Moore at a bar in Greenwich village.’

‘Who’s he?’

I started explaining about Sonic Youth, and how important they’d been as a band, (in fact I’d never really been into them but I got exasperated when people didn’t know much Gen X popular culture). I stopped. It was hard trying to impress people with name-dropping if they had no idea who you were on about.

‘I will have to look them up on Spotify,’ Simon said. ‘Maybe I can send you a playlist and you can listen to some of my favourite music?’

I nodded but I’d had enough exposure to millennial music in the office. The speakers constantly played stuff that sounded like you’d heard it before. Where was New Order? The Smiths? The Cure? All the other great bands with ‘The’ in their name? Why did much of it sound like bad 90s dance music? I knew I sounded like my dad now but it really felt like everything was just regurgitated from the previous generation. It was impossible to create something new. But it was also clear that Sonic Youth wouldn’t give me cut through. Thurston Moore was probably claiming his pension by now and eating lettuce sandwiches, avoiding crusty bread so his dentures didn’t drop out, all that stuff. There came a time when you had to hang up those cool shoes and get down with the slanket-posse. I wasn’t quite ready for my stand-up bath but I wasn’t at the cut and thrust either. It was the mid-line. It was the pits.

Too young to surrender to old age and watch Inspector Morse all day long, and too old to be twerking and taking spice. I got back to my desk and re-read the fish finger research project brief that Phoebe had sent over. It would be an important project if it was part of a bigger frozen piece of business.

Everything about it filled me with despondency.

FISH FINGER INNOVATION BRIEF

Fish fingers have been a much-loved family snack for close to three decades but have recently faced challenges because of their lack of healthy cues. We want to reinvigorate fish fingers and position them in the ‘healthy, family, pleasure’ quadrant so that families feel like they’re making a healthy choice. Our ambition is to be the in the TOP THREE food brands in the next two years.

I underlined key phrases and thought about the possible challenges. Fish fingers were fine. Everyone loved them, even if they weren’t entirely fascinating. Generally people loved them because they reminded them of their childhoods. I started jotting some notes. We would need to do some research groups to find out what current consumers of fish fingers thought, and then maybe some with people who didn’t buy them to discover the barriers. I scribbled away some ideas and then added in a couple of ideas from the semiotics team (I still had no clue what they did but Simon had emailed me a few studies they’d undertaken previously on family brands), and in this way the afternoon passed by quickly. In this sense, work was good. It felt meaningless, but it was like doing an arrowword puzzle, and kept you from going senile. I sent the ideas to Phoebe so she could approve before I sent them to the client. When I looked at my phone it was five thirty and I hadn’t got up from my seat for more than two hours. It had been a productive day. I had eaten an overpriced burrito. I’d talked about popular culture with someone younger than me who wore braces and wasn’t a clown.

I managed to log into the nursery portal after three failed attempts. Bella had eaten chicken curry for lunch and made a kite out of an old washing up bottle and some string. There was a photo of her holding it, looking proud. I sent a copy to Pete with a text.

LOOK HOW PROUD SHE IS! X

I was missing these moments because I was trying to come up with a reason as to why people didn’t eat more fish fingers. I felt the head detaching sensation but it went away again. I had to fight to stay afloat. My life was okay. I was okay. The office was okay.

I just needed to finish the baby wipe presentation and things would be okay.

I phoned Kath on the walk back to the train station. I often thought it would be quicker to just create a moving pavement on the walk from Southwark to Waterloo. It was a waste of energy to do the same walk. It made me impatient. There were so many offices here that the moving pavement thing would come. Perhaps we’d sit on the pavement and have our phones attached to our eyeballs so we could really chill. There was a sea of people streaming out of the three glass and concrete towers. Everyone was smiling like it was the summer holidays. And everyone was on their phones, ordering pizzas, scheduling waxes, texting their spouses to say they were off to the pub. This was the best part of the day, the going home part where you shook your blanket off and felt a tiny glimmer of sun on your face. It was possibly worth going to work just so you could get this feeling regularly.

‘How’s things?’ she said. ‘Have you done any ‘blue sky thinking’?’

‘I feel so old,’ I replied, crossing the street and narrowly avoiding a cycle courier who had a boom box attached to the back of his bike.

‘The boy I was talking to today didn’t even know who Sonic Youth were.’

‘Well NEWSFLASH LADY. WE ARE OLD. Do you know that I have a walking stick? My back has seized up and I can’t walk!’

‘How?’

‘I was doing these HIIT sessions online, and I guess I was doing these burpees and going too hard and THWWAAKKK I heard something in my back. I’ve been told I can’t do any exercise for six months. I need to exercise. It’s the only thing that is mine and nothing to do with children and all that shit.’

‘Oh that’s sad. Mind you, any excuse not to exercise,’ I said.

‘But I like to exercise,’ she said.

‘You’ll be doing marathons next.’

‘Not with a sodding walking stick I won’t!’

‘Well you’d be proud of me. I did one good thing. I arranged to have a coffee with a local mum.’

‘A local mum! Wowsers! That’s uncharacteristically social of you.’

When had I got this reputation for being anti-social? Was it still a hangover from having a young child and being too tired to face going out in the evenings?

‘She’s called Bryony and she’s really nice and she’s much younger.’

‘Well that sounds promising,’ Kath said. ‘You need more local friends love. I rarely see you anymore. In fact I don’t think any of the old crowd see one another. We’re all too busy.’

It was true. The only good thing was that Kath and I spoke on the phone. We didn’t just text. It meant something. The people you spoke to versus those you typed to.

I thought back to our school days. They didn’t seem that long ago. We’d spent our time sitting in Kath’s bedroom, talking about boys, listening to music and smoking out the window. We’d started clubbing at fourteen, then everything was a blur of getting off with boys called Danny, Jody and Bobby, and then came university and quite a lot of parties and some drugs, then our thirties and Kath was popping out her children, and I was necking Nurofen Plus, and carrying enormous bags of ideas, before showing them to people who had no interest in them at all. The mudslide into our forties had come next and now we had walking sticks and no one had even heard of Sonic Youth FOR CHRIST’S SAKE.

‘I’ll ring you soon,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry about the Instagram. It’s just like that Talkabout phone line we used to use. Remember? It’s like that but with pictures.’

‘But that was moderated by adults wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, you’re right but do you remember those two ugly boys we went to meet in Clapham? One said he looked like Brad Pitt but he was actually very short with acne?’

Kath laughed.

‘I think we walked straight past and pretended we hadn’t seen them.’

‘Instagram is just a modern version of networking, that’s all.’

‘You’ve made me feel better. I need to see you soon. There’s a bottle of gin waiting.’

On the train home, my head ached and I felt it detaching itself from my body again and working its way down the carriage so it was moving towards the toilets. This time it happened without warning and I tried closing my eyes and enjoying the session. Wasn’t it nice to be detached from reality for a few moments?

I checked my phone. A message had buzzed up from the nursery but I’d not seen it.

Bella almost fell over today but she is now in good health. No medical intervention was necessary. Please log into the portal to see the latest update on her health.

Hadn’t I just logged in and she was fine? I would see her soon anyway. This was the problem with the continuous updates – there were too many ‘crying wolf’ occasions, so you became jaded and stopped worrying. What if something really serious happened?

After a minute, the sensation stopped and I opened my eyes. I felt normal again. I wasn’t going mad. I called Mum, and she said that Dad had come out to eat lunch but had then gone back to the shed. He hadn’t washed his hair in two weeks and was sleeping in his clothes. Apparently, he’d set up a makeshift bed in there. He was playing very loud classical music in the middle of the night and the neighbours had complained that it was keeping them awake.

‘Did you have some sort of argument?’ I asked. ‘What kicked it off?’

‘I’m worried darling. I think he’s sinking into his old ways. I don’t know what to do.’

‘This is his personality, Mum. He doesn’t like too much social activity. He likes to be on his own. It’s fine. Stop trying to make him do stuff.’

There were times when I suspected I was actually more like my dad – it wasn’t in my nature to be overly social.

‘But the hair thing is driving me crazy. What if someone sniffs him in the supermarket?’

‘There are plenty of smelly people, Mum. No one will notice. Just get him dry shampoo.’

‘Dry shampoo?’

I explained the concept in detail (I’d worked on a project recently all about it – it was one of those things that was doing well because we were TOO BUSY NOW TO EVEN WASH OUR HAIR) and she promised she’d buy some. I wasn’t sure why the head-detaching thing had come back because I was clearly being very successful today. I was solving problems, being social and managing to control the head-detaching feeling. If I could keep this up then maybe I’d get over this bumpy patch (if that was what it was) and start some sort of upward trajectory.

I looked out the window at the trees draped in plastic carrier bags and felt my heart sink. I then got my laptop out and spent fifteen minutes wrapping up my baby wipe presentation. We stopped for ten minutes so it bought me more time. YES, the IDEA of the baby-wipe-sleep-aid was flawed … but DESPITE these challenges it showed potential AS LONG AS it kept a focus on CLEANING benefits rather than SLEEP ENHANCEMENT. If the client was nice, and not too demanding, then things usually went well. It was only when they wanted innovative and weird methodologies (anything that had the word DIGITAL in it was usually a warning sign) that I felt out of my comfort zone. Perhaps I was going to be okay and wasn’t losing relevance with each passing day.

As I came out of the station, I looked down at my phone and right on schedule i.e. AFTER regular work hours, Phoebe had sent an email. She wasn’t happy with my ideas for the fish finger thing. She thought they were outmoded and showed a lack of strategic thinking. She just came out with her critique and didn’t mince words. I bit my lip and used words and phrases like ‘awesome’ and ‘thanks for the interesting feedback’ and ‘I look forward to collaborating on some interesting strategy’. I promised I would do better tomorrow. Then visualized her head being squeezed between the doors of an elevator. Her head would be hard and it would take a while to squash it completely but I tried to conjure up her expression, and how I would stand there with my turmeric latte in one hand just smiling (or maybe with no expression at all, which would possibly be more frightening). Just when I felt I was still relevant and could contribute, something would happen to tell me otherwise.

Pete had texted to say he’d collected Bella. As I turned into our street, I felt my blood pressure finally return to normal. We lived in a beautiful, leafy suburb. There were lots of families, a lovely park with swings and some climbing equipment, and it felt like the opposite of the glass monster I’d been freezing my ass off in all day. Our overweight tabby cat was sitting on the kitchen table. The early evening autumnal sun was coming through the French doors. Bella was playing with Pete upstairs. Dad would come out of the shed and wash his hair. I would write some more fish finger strategies. I had a beautiful daughter who would hopefully never work in an air conditioned brick like me. I also had breasts that were saggy, but not actually touching the floor. I could listen to Radio Four and understand about forty per cent of what was being discussed (less if it was the news but on Women’s Hour I could understand more, as it was trying to be more accessible). I ate burritos. Perhaps one day I would be more like Bryony and change careers. Like just change … it might be possible?

I had no idea who was in the charts but I was the SAME AGE as Kate Moss and younger than Kylie Minogue. I would always be younger than Kylie. I hadn’t seen any photos of her of late. Was she going to move into the Helen Mirren phase next? Or was she stuck in the middle like me? Not yet in the ‘it’s amazing that she can still speak and walk,’ bit.

Despite these positive affirmations – I am younger than Kylie. I ate a burrito. I am younger than Kylie. I ate a burrito – I felt confused. This head detaching thing was perplexing. If I’d been Mum I would have Googled ‘brain cancer’ or some such but I wasn’t a hypochondriac. Despite being self-obsessed (though, arguably, no more than your average modern woman), I didn’t go to the doctor until I needed stitches or a limb fell off. I avoided them at all costs.

I heard a shriek coming from upstairs. Bella ran down, her face flushed and rubbing her eyes. She was excited to see me. She wrapped her arms around my head and squeezed hard. Another moment noted. It was enough right? We sat on the small, stained sofa in the kitchen (I must replace it at some point), and she told me about her day (drawings, fights, cake for one child and not for her because she’d called another child ‘a bum hole’). Pete and I nodded at one another, and he went to fetch his iPad. I put Bella to bed (we chatted a bit first about unicorns and whether they were real and she told me how much she hated her the nursery grown-ups again). Then once she was asleep I sat stroking her hair, and when I came back down, Pete was still glaring at the screen. Technology wasn’t good for couples who were looking for excuses not to talk to one another.