Free Mummy Said the F-Word by Fiona Gibson Page A

fridge had to be preferable to Three Bears.
    Anything
was preferable to Three Bears.
    I re-read Ginny’s letter, trying to glean inspiration by breathing deeply, like bellows. I feel quite light-headed as I type a reply.
    My mind is racing when I set out to pick up the kids from school and nursery. I am hopelessly out of my depth with these problems, but isn’t it better to feel scared – to feel
something
– instead of muddling through each day with a head full of to-do lists and the various ways in which I could inflict pain on Martin and Slapper?
    I realise, with a small stab of joy, that I haven’t thought about them all afternoon.
And
I’ve managed to cobble a reply to Ginny’s letter.
    In the street, I spot Sam and hurry to catch up with him.
    ‘You look pleased with yourself,’ he ventures. ‘Something nice happen today?’
    ‘I’m not sure,’ I say, proceeding to fill him in on my dazzling new career as we stride towards school.
    ‘Sounds exciting,’ he says, grinning.
    ‘I think it could be.’
    Yes, I’m a fake, and desperately unqualified to meddle with strangers’ lives. I am also free from writing about tongue fur and the gunk that collects between toes.
    Which is a step in the right direction. Isn’t it?

7
    ‘You’re going to be a
what?
’ Rachel snorts.
    Whoops, I must have inadvertently said that I’m plotting a new career as a pole-dancer or an escort. Rachel is the only woman who talked to me at Three Bears toddler group, consoling me over Sugar-bowl-gate. So grateful was I to see her each Thursday afternoon, we fell into a friendship and soon decided to hang out in the park instead, where no one would tell us off. When Martin left, she invited the kids and me round for numerous suppers and picnics on her lawn. Pummelling some kind of dough on her kitchen table, she is a gleaming example of what might be achieved when I, too, become a Proper Mother.
    ‘An agony aunt,’ I repeat. ‘You know, replying to problem letters that people send into magazines …’
    ‘My God, Cait. That’s hysterical. No offence or anything, but who bothers to write to magazines?’
    ‘Desperate people who have no one else to turn to.’ The thought of all those Desperates out there is quite terrifying.
    Rachel shakes her head, causing her curls to dance around her shiny cheeks.
    I don’t expect her to understand. Over the years we’ve knocked around together, she has made it clear that she believes motherhood is something that comes ‘naturally’, and that it’d be a whole lot easier for everyone if mothers would simply stop whingeing and get on with the job. She has Eve, an eerily well-behaved six-year-old only child, plus a doting husband. I live in hope that a smidge of her sortedness will rub off on me.
    ‘What are you making?’ I ask, to swerve her off the agony-aunt track.
    ‘Oh, just pasta dough.’
    ‘
Just
pasta dough? You make your own pasta?’
    ‘Yes, it’s really easy. Flour, eggs, water … But never mind that. You, being an agony aunt …’ Her shoulders start quivering again.
    I gawp as she rolls out the creamy dough and proceeds to feed it through a steel contraption. Fresh pasta, I ask you. What’s wrong with the dried stuff in packets?
    ‘Don’t you think we make such a big deal of bringing up children these days?’ she muses.
    ‘It
is
a big deal,’ I protest. ‘It’s the biggest deal there is.’
    Rachel frowns. ‘We’ve never had
any
problems with Eve.’
    ‘What, none at all? Ever?’
    ‘Um, well, I do get a bit annoyed when she loses her gym shoes.’
    Bloody marvellous. In this family, that’s as bad as it gets. A mislaid elastic-fronted plimsoll. Sometimes I wonder if being friends with Rachel is actually good for my psyche.
    I tune into the chatter drifting down from Eve’s bedroom. Even Jake seems happy here, pottering about in the garden by himself. There’s a wooden sandpit out there that Guy, Rachel’s husband, knocked together in under an hour.