15. Aug, 2020

'Being Mum'

Cath was feeling beleaguered.  Vic had retreated to the greenhouse, where he was nurturing tomatoes of a size which looked as if they might easily be turned into coaches at midnight.

“Look at him,” their son, Dylan, had commented earlier.  “In another era, he’d have had a flat cap on and be keeping  racing pigeons out there!”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Cath had replied, reacting as always to what she thought of as Dylan’s stockbroker belt pretensions. “In another era, you’d have been a carder in a mill like my father’s father before him.”

“Aye, happen,” Dylan responded in the mock dialect customary in these semi humorous exchanges between them.

They had named Dylan after Dylan Thomas, thinking his auburn hair and the thousand yard stare he had from early babyhood augured a poetic soul.  It turned out that it didn’t, Dylan becoming a sporting child and now a medic, with little interest in literature along the way but, as Vic used to say when Dylan was at school and they were laughing over yet another literal minded composition of startling brevity by way of creative writing, at least he isn’t an alcoholic, either, although, as he also said these days, darkly, now that Dylan was some kind of doctor, you never knew.  Both Cath and Vic remained as vague as possible about the grisly details of Dylan’s chosen field of expertise, because you didn’t want to tempt fate, did you?  Vic himself had been an optician and said to Dylan,

“You knew what you were looking for with that.”

“Yeah, hah, hah,” Dylan would answer.  “You’re both hopeless!” and he would leave talk about his own specialisation there.

Father and son each had outgoing, determined natures, always knowing what they wanted, which was a wonder to Cath, who could never quite decide on such things when presented with choices, or even a blank canvas.  As a child, she had dreaded being asked the question of what she wanted to do when she grew up, having no idea whatsoever and this sadly continued.  Her default position of archeologist, fine when you were young enough to be into fossils and the like, only took her as far as about twelve, after which tentative vacillation set in completely.

“For goodness sake, Mum, make your mind up!” had been a fairly constant refrain, in eateries about menus, when choosing days out or holiday destinations, and if defining what you might want to have on your wishlist.  Cath envied them their certainty while finding their need to be always doing something tiring.

Today, so far, she had been stalked by cold calls from con artists calling her ‘ma’am’ and purporting to be, variously, from Amazon Prime, the Inland Revenue, the bank alerting her to fraudulent activity and finally, and most persistently, a highly strung individual who only wanted to give her the best discount deal on her boiler and indoor pipes insurance which, according to him, was just about to run out.

This was before Dylan arrived with Freddie, their little grandson, whom they had agreed to have for the day so that Dylan and Becky could go dry slope skiing, or ‘dry humping’ as Vic had rudely put it, knowing full well he was within earshot of the neighbours when Dylan and Freddie were with them in the garden before Dylan had left.  Vic had no objection to showing himself or anyone else up in public.  In fact, he enjoyed it immensely, so that Cath had tried to learn not to flinch or remonstrate because it only made him proclaim, just as loudly, that it was all a great joke and where was her sense of humour, woman?

The paddling pool had been got out and filled with great ceremony.  Freddie splashed chubby legs in it for about five minutes before the novelty palled and he began to wail.  Vic had gone off to the greenhouse before that because, although he had been the one to say,

“Of course we’ll have him!  No problem!” when Dylan had rung to ask, he was always quick to absent himself from the duress of actually entertaining Freddie.

Cath looked at the toddler pumping fat tears out and bawling as he found that he didn’t like being wet after all.  Perhaps he was taking after her, Cath thought, never sure what he really wanted.

“Never mind, Freddie,” said Cath.  “Come on, let’s get you dry and dressed and we’ll go and pick some blackberries, see the squirrels in the park.”

She plucked him out of the water, surprised by how solidly heavy he was already.  He’d probably grow into one of today’s enormously tall young men, she surmised.  Towelled off and warm again (plugged back into the dummy which was like an essential battery charger to the child, sending him for a while into a ‘sleep mode’ of comatose sucking) Freddie didn’t object to being strapped into the stroller and wheeled off to where Cath knew there were plentiful blackberries, sugared by sunshine into a caramelised sweetness.

Parked up beside her while she picked and bagged (a zip plastic freezer pouch at the ready) Freddie was soon as covered in juices as a bibulous red wine drinker who had just tipped a glass down themselves would be, as Cath continually popped plump berries into his little red mouth.  Runners on the path alongside called out things like,

“You make the pie and I’ll bring the custard!” or,

“Look at the state of him!”  laughing at Freddie’s sticky predicament.

Cath cleaned him up with wet wipes as best she could and they trundled to the park, where an obliging grey squirrel or two put in an appearance, twitching about nearby and flitting up and down tree trunks.  Freddie kicked and gave little excited squeaks.  Then he wanted to reach out and touch them, so that they ran away and he was roaring with frustration again.

“Poor Freddie,” said Cath sympathetically.  “You’re going to be one who feels life’s disappointments more than its pleasures, aren’t you?  Now that is a pity.  Look, there are more squiggles over there!   Come on.”

But the magic had gone and Freddie continued his meltdown, while Cath waited for the storm, and the kicking and thrashing about, to pass.  She tried the dummy again after a while and, sucking furiously, he dropped off momentarily.  Cath rocked the pram, sitting on a bench.  The park was a very familiar place to Cath, where thirty years ago, she had similarly been wheeling the more sanguine Dylan about.  A familiar sensation stole over her, an echo of the desolate loneliness which she shouldn’t have been experiencing back then, or now, but had done and in a way, did again.

“You don’t know you’re born,” her dad had often said to her, coming from far harder times in his own past, and she knew that it was true.

It was just that, having Freddie, on her own, looking after him now as she so often did for his working parents, was a mirror of that early motherhood, when she had often been alone all day with Dylan and felt lost personally within the experience.  Her relationship with Vic had seemed fractured, the baby coming between them in bed at night as well, and yet she had also been happy.  It was a time which she remembered in a heightened way as bitter sweet.

“You babies,” she said to Freddie, who was waking from his exhausted nap, and she poked him in his plump middle making him wriggle and giggle, “you don’t know what you put us through, do you?”

Becky and Dylan, though, seemed a tightly unaffected unit, to whom parenthood perhaps came more naturally than it had to her and Vic, whom it had seemed to separate.  Besides, Dylan and Becky were both career specific people as a couple, whereas Cath, vaguely creative on the arts and music side of life, where she had shone at school, was not able  to find a niche in the newly Thatcherite world of marketing careers, and had drifted off track into things that were tolerable but uninspiring during her working life.

“It’s not that I mind you, Freddie,” she told him as they made ready for a go on the infant swings next, “it’s that I mind the expectation, just like I did back then with your dad, Dylan, that now there’s a baby about, I’ll naturally be the one to spend nearly all my time with him.  It’s not your fault, is it, lovely?”

Freddie gazed back with a beatific blue stare and, realising where he was, his unique little smile of delight at being on the swings dimpled one full cheek in his small, round face.  Cath pushed him patiently until, after a while, he tired of this too and it was time to take him back to find something else to do.

“Hello, love,” Vic (returned to the house now he had peace in it) greeted them when they came in.  “Had a lovely time?”

“Oh, yes,” she agreed, just as she always had done, it being as impossible now to express any peculiar and selfish dissatisfaction with her lot as it had been back then when Dylan was a baby.

Cath had always felt between times somehow, and really, she couldn’t say why.  She knew what Vic would tell her if she did try to express it.

“Well, what do you want to do?  You only have to say.”

But the smaller things in life encompassed by that suggestion would only ever go part way, she knew, to filling that nebulous gap.

“You don’t know you’re born!” her dad would have told her again scornfully and she expected that he was right, perhaps she never would.

“Come on then, Freddie,” she said, getting the child out of his pram.  “Let’s fix you some vittals and I’ll get you into some fresh duds.”

She often addressed Freddie as if they were in a Western together, something she had used to do with baby Dylan.  Occasionally she wondered why and would have a faint recollection of her dad doing the same with her when she was little.

“There’s tomatoes,” said Vic proudly, “ to go with whatever’s for lunch,” that being, tacitly, within her sphere of decision.

“Wonderful,” said Cath, looking at them respectfully and giving them their due.

 “Oh, you don’t need the car this afternoon, do you, since you’ve got Freddie?” Vic asked, so that Cath knew he’d be off out again after lunch. 

“No,” she said, “you go ahead if you’ve got plans,” and after lunch, she got ready to settle into the rest of her day with Freddie, until Becky and Dylan would return to collect him.

After all, as she told Freddie, getting out  a truckle of alphabet bricks, what else would she be doing, since she hadn’t told anyone there might be such a concept about her time?  Freddie looked dolefully back at her, as if he were only now asking himself exactly the same question of an empty prospect.

“Poor Freddie,” she said to him again.  “You are going to be  just like me, aren’t you?  We’ll settle for this game for now, shall we?” and she tipped the bricks out onto the floor before them, where they contemplated them as if both wondering if this were really all to life there was going to be.