Free Confessions of a Bad Mother by Stephanie Calman Page B

pushchair on the tube. But it isn’t
hell at all – it’s fine! All you have to do is make sure you have a
man with you at all times, to carry the whole lot up and down the stairs.
    Olympia is bristling with ultra-blokes, most with cameras. We sit down
for lunch on the Honda stand, and Lawrence immediately wakes up and cries.
    ‘Hungry,’ says Peter, perceptively.
    I look round for a suitable place. I’ve seen the loos already, and
they’re cold and concrete with no chairs. It’d be like
breastfeeding in an underpass.
    ‘Come on,’ says Peter, ‘it’ll be
fine.’
    ‘But …’ Then Lawrence ups the volume, and I get my
next taste of that thing I thought only Proper Mothers had: instinct. I stick
him on, and we continue to chat about this year’s models. No one from
Honda tells me to put them away, or that in Japan, a woman doing this in public
brings shame on her ancestors. A man shares our table. He has a notebook, a
tape recorder and a huge backpack containing – a toddler. My God:
we’re not unique! As we walk round, people on various stands – male
and female – admire Lawrence and stop us to talk.
    ‘Ah, makes me miss my little boy,’ says a bloke from
BMW.
    ‘Ooh, can I hold him? Here, you go and get yourselves a cup of
tea,’ says a woman from Rolls-Royce. While Lawrence is passed round,
Peter and I get in and out of the new TVR Cerbera, the new Ford Ka and the new
Alfa 156 with concealed rear-door handles.
    ‘Hey, look at this!’
    ‘You think it’s only got two doors, but it’s actually
got four.’
    ‘It doesn’t look child-friendly—’
    ‘But it is!’
    We put our names down for one, and go home thrilled.
    Then one morning, a funny thing happens. It’s been an average
night. We got up about three times; I barked at Peter’s boss when he woke
me by ringing at 10 p.m. Anyhow, I pick Lawrence up, shuffle downstairs to the
kettle, and feel something is different. Not the room: it’s still
littered with the same mess as the night before. When I look at him,
there’s a new feeling, quite strong. It isn’t like the pain I felt
in hospital, when that nurse wouldn’t take him out of the incubator, and
it’s not like the guilt when he didn’t put on weight. All the other
feelings I’ve felt so far – pride, triumph, outrage, contentedness
– have had to break through an overweening layer of fear: fear that
something bad is about to happen all the time, and fear that I have Made the
Wrong Choice. But today, a normal day with nothing new to look forward to, no
prospect of novelty – the fear has subsided a little. I am experiencing a
sensation that is new. Yet it’s also strangely familiar. Is it
merely the absence of fear? No, something more. Suddenly it clicks.
    I’M IN LOVE! WHOOPEE! This is AMAZING. Ooooooh. Wowwwww! I wonder
if anyone else knows about this? I must tell them. I must tell everyone. I must
spread the Good News, so that all personkind can worship this heavenly –
uh-oh. OK, I get it now. Stand down the angels and shepherds. Cancel the star
in the east.
    ‘Hey, husband!’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I think I’ve just bonded.’
    ‘There, you see? I told you not to worry.’
    ‘No, no: you don’t understand. I think I’m in
love.’
    ‘What about me?’
    ‘You’ve served your purpose. Tell you what,
though.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘You’ve got lovely DNA.’
    It has taken me twelve and a half weeks. Can’t find that in the
books either. Can’t find the bit that says: ‘ You may bond
    quickly, like superglue, or you may be the slow-acting kind, where the
     two parts must be held together for some time until they stick. ’
    Weirdly, at around the same time, I am beginning to think it might be
nice, now and then, to have a break. I am clear that I love this baby
I’ve had for nearly four months, but I’m also rather missing my
Self. And the space that used to be around me when I was detached. I wonder if
I could – no, I