Free Making It Up by Penelope Lively

maneuver, even for some travesty of negotiation. When the third baby arrived, Chloe was ready and waiting—trained, hardened, a combat veteran. She knew how to do babies, insofar as that is possible.
    But this was only the beginning. Beyond the intransigence of infants there lies the guile of childhood—the awesome powers of manipulation, the tenacity, the volatility, the flight from anything approaching consistency or rationality. Chloe saw that a successful parent required the skills of an industrial arbitrator—the patience, the craft, the ability to identify and push forward a cohesive argument. Along with qualities of leadership and a taste for coercion. Well, she could supply all of that, given time and practice.
    It is of course an uneven contest, in every way. Adults dictate, in the last resort, but children hold the insidious card of vulnerability. Chloe had normal maternal instincts: she beheld her offspring at their most appalling moments, and loved them, quite against her better judgment.
    There thus ensued a precarious balance of power, with the upper hand swinging from one side to the other depending on the age and capacities of the child in question or on Chloe’s stamina at that particular moment. And, indeed, as time went on, it seemed to Chloe that although she would sometimes have to concede an individual battle, the long-term offensive had on the whole been won. She did not like to think about parental life in those terms, but they seemed distressingly apt.
    She came to see her own contests with Miranda in a different light. Except that “contest” was not the right word. Since Miranda had made no rules and set no behavioral parameters, there was nothing to fight about. And Chloe had not wanted to ride a bike on the main road, or consort with undesirable friends, or stay at a disco till after midnight. She wanted regularity, on a daily basis; she considered her mother’s friends undesirable. There had been a sense in which the situation was reversed, with Chloe the sweet voice of reason and Miranda the force of anarchy.
    Nevertheless, by the time the children were all into adolescence Chloe felt that it was possible to be fairly confident that home life would proceed on an even keel. The children might be occasionally mutinous, but by and large they did what was expected of them. Their school performances were entirely adequate; the boys were into sport but not to excess, Sophie played the violin rather well and was wondering about music college.
    Miranda parted from the Spanish woodcarver and came back to England, where she set up in a tiny terraced cottage in a Cornish fishing village inhabited almost exclusively by painters and potters.
    â€œWouldn’t you know?” said Chloe, on a visit. “Get me out of here! The sense of déjà vu . . . I feel as though I were ten again.” John had been rather enjoying the local fish restaurants, but piled uncomplaining into the car and drove her back to normality. Miranda had given them a cheery though slightly abstracted welcome; she was much involved with the local community arts group and was learning how to weave. She asked tenderly after the children but had rather forgotten their ages. She was quite shocked when told. “I have grandchildren that old! Ssh . . .” She was in her late sixties and resented the fact.
    By now, Chloe regarded her mother as simply a part of life’s complexity. She could still be mildly irritated by Miranda but saw her as, essentially, the crucial directive element in her own struggle for fulfillment. “I mean, in a sense I should actually be grateful to her. If she hadn’t been the way she was, would I be who I am? Look at it this way—maybe I needed that sort of kick-start. It’s an old story, isn’t it? Making good. I didn’t exactly claw my way out of the gutter, but there’s an analogy, don’t you think?”
    John, who knew what was