Free Confessions of a Bad Mother by Stephanie Calman

just GO? But that was before I discovered how hard it is to leave the
room.
    I try wedging him in with the cushions. He whimpers. I pick him up, then
try to put him back down again, v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y so he won’t notice. I
take a step or two. He cries. He doesn’t want me to go. I try again. As
with trying to walk past spiders, I take small steps backwards and forwards for
what seems hours before giving up in defeat. He cries. I pick him up and sit
down with him again. The loo is only on the landing. Look! I can see it, twelve
stairs away. I sit down again. I don’t need to go that badly.
I’m sure I can wait until Peter comes home; it’s only another six
hours.
    With Lawrence on my chest facing me, the way he sometimes sleeps at
night, we both fall asleep. The feeling of drifting away is like a fantastic
drug.
    I wake up with a terrible ache in my bladder, and an idea. I could bring
him with me! We go upstairs together, and he lies on the carpeted landing two
feet away from me, while I pee.
    ‘Wow! That was wonderful!’
    We go back to the sofa again. I’m hungry, but the kitchen is
downstairs. Come to think of it, this isn’t a good house to have a baby
in. Everything is on another floor. Why didn’t we just move to a
lighthouse? I pick him up, and go gingerly down the horribly steep staircase,
at about one step a minute. It has definitely got steeper since we moved in.
Now what? There’s a loaf of bread on the counter, but unsliced.
I’ll need two hands to cut it.
    Like the great explorers sailing through unchartered waters in the quest
for El Dorado, I’m driven forward by the thought of Toast. Eventually,
after about four false starts, I hold Lawrence very tightly against me with one
arm, and use that hand to steady the bread while I cut it with the other.
    ‘Better have two slices,’ I tell him. ‘Don’t
know when we’ll be able to make it back, do we?’ I have butter and
Marmite on it. It is the best meal I have ever had.
    After a week of this, I start to feel – as Withnail put it – unusual .
    Shelley, my neighbour opposite, has also had a baby. She rings me and
says: ‘Shall we push our prams down to the swings?’ To my fevered
brain it sounds like: ‘ Shall we cross the Arctic Circle in
    white stilettos and no tights? ’ But it’s only September, and
still sunny out there. The swings are in the little square at the end of the
road. There are roses. I’ve had a lot of flowers in bunches recently; it
would be amazing to see some growing in the ground.
    We do even have a pram, from a friend of Peter’s. It’s a
nice turquoise colour, but very low . I’m not tall, and I have to
bend down to reach the handle. Semi-crouched, like a cartoon of a burglar, I
follow Shelley down to the square. The colour of the flowers nearly sends my
retinas into spasm.
    YELLOW!
    RED!
    PINK!
    Conversation is beyond me; I sink onto a bench and stare. She
doesn’t say much either. But a thrilling new vista has opened up. We walk
home in triumph.
    ‘Hello, sweetness. How was your day?’
    ‘I went to the square! With Shelley! It was brilliant!’
    ‘The square—’
    At the end of the road!’
    ‘That’s – wonderful.’
    ‘Yeah! We just – took the prams and went! It was
great!’
    ‘Well done!’
    Looking back on it, I probably should have got out more.
    That evening, I tell Peter about my adventures in the next postcode,
while he gives Lawrence his SMA. Having forgotten to heat the first bottle,
we’ve simply carried on with it at room temperature – breaking
another of these so-called ‘rules’.
    ‘And now …’ he says, eyes gleaming, ‘I have a
present for you.’
    ‘For me?!’
    ‘Well, kind of.’ He pours me a glass of wine and opens a
flat cardboard box. Inside is a baby chair, made of cloth stretched over a wire
frame, like a ‘V’ on its side. ‘I’ve heard of
these!’
    ‘This,’ he says, ‘will give you your arms back.
Lawrence,