Читать книгу: «Motherwhelmed»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Acknowledgements

Read on for a Q & A with Anniki …

About the Author

About the Publisher

One

SOME SAY A SIGN that you’re having a breakdown is when you stop sleeping properly. Or get heart palpitations for no reason. Or overreact to something quite minor. The problem is, all these things were quite commonplace in my life, and had been for some time.

From the outside things looked okay. I had a beautiful child and a great husband (okay, our relationship was hard work, but long-term relationships are no walk in the park). I had a job which paid well. I ate a nice lunch most days. I laughed once a week – sometimes these laughs were tinged with hysteria, but that was okay. I cried often but thought this was possibly related to tiredness or the perimenopause.

Besides, did anyone feel happy these days? If I thought of the people I worked with, I’d have described the majority as ‘averagely content’. Others were clearly depressed. It was difficult to gauge. I sensed I wasn’t the only one who woke up in the morning with a feeling of dread. It’s horrible when you realise that the moment you clamber back into bed will be the best part of your day. It was work stress, yes … but it was heavier. A sense of time running out, that I had fewer good years ahead than behind (this wasn’t strictly true because I’d not really had many good years in the first place). Time was speeding past and I felt isolated. I’d fallen out of synch with the school friends that I’d seen every month during my twenties and thirties. They’d all had babies in their early thirties, and these kids were now entering secondary school. So when I had Bella they’d all moved beyond that small children stage. They were FREE and wanted to drink and re-invent themselves and PARTY! South London wasn’t a million miles away from Acton but it felt like it. It was easier to keep a low-level buzz of connection via social media. I could ‘like’ the pictures but didn’t have to listen to all the chat. They were embarking on new careers, getting divorced, or taking up marathon running. What was it with all the marathon running anyway?

And how exactly had I ended up moving from apathy and tiredness to a heart that thudded every morning when Bella screamed from her room because she needed a wee? Well work had been busy (it never wasn’t busy). Work had become a slog, and all slog and no fun makes Rebecca a dull girl. And there was the rub. The moments of pleasure, the tiny positive increments that you needed to experience in life to keep going seemed to have disappeared without me even realizing it. The truth was those old friends had been important. There’d been a sense that we were steadily moving towards some common end point, some positive evolution was happening.

I had Kath. At least I had one true friend but it was weird how much my social circle had shrunk down to nearly nothing. She was my oldest friend and I’d known her since school days – one of the few I’d managed to keep in touch with.

It was weird because in reality, once Bella reached about three, I could feel life was getting easier. Nevertheless, it was as if the fug of the earlier, chaotic days was lifting to reveal a vast, empty terrain. With babies, it’s easy to get lost in the sleeplessness, feeding, panic, angst and then discover that there isn’t much else going on once the mess has cleared. If it wasn’t the thudding in the morning, it was the booming noise in my ears in the middle of the night. The noise of my heart ready to explode. Then the thoughts would start up.

Does Bella’s nursery teacher hate me?

Have I filed the right version of the loo roll presentation for Friday morning?

Why hasn’t the client replied to my last email?

Where have all my tights disappeared to?

Why do I shout at Bella so much?

What is that lump on the back of the cat’s head?

Why have I eaten so many potatoes these past few days?

How does everyone else get through each day without giving up?

The only thing I could do to quiet my brain was watch a couple of episodes of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. These beautiful, yet strangely cold, women lived in a universe where life looked busy yet relatively easy (and seemed devoid of emotion, each face rendered immobile by Botox). I am sure someone at Mango-Lab, the market research company I worked for, would offer up a cultural context as to why this reality TV soothed me but I’ll just say that after watching an hour, I could usually go back to bed again.

‘I don’t want to go to nursery!’ my daughter howled up the hallway from her bedroom. It was a Monday. 5 a.m. Up and down the country, children were shrieking at their parents, and telling them they didn’t want to go to whatever childcare was lined up for that particular day. It always made me sad to see the drop offs, the weary stooped shoulders of the parents. The red rimmed eyes of the kids. In reality, nobody wanted to be thrust out of bed at some ungodly hour and sent somewhere they didn’t want to be – whether it was a jaunty room full of toys and tissue paper collages or a grey tomb, populated with young people hunched over laptops, the room pumped with freezing cold air.

I reached for my phone and saw there were already fourteen emails in my inbox. The temptation to read them was too much. I tried to ignore Bella’s cries for a few seconds longer.

MASSIVE PROPOSAL NEEDS TEAM – said the first. URGENT CLIENT QUOTE! IMMEDIATE ATTENTION REQUIRED – the second. CRAFT BEER CLIENT WANTS GROUPS TOMORROW EVENING IN SCUNTHORPE – the third.

The whole thing made me want to curl up into a ball. It would be a day of trying to bat these unpleasant demands away. It was like a depressing round of ping pong. The problem was there were only so many balls you could avoid. At least one would hit you between the eyes.

Also, since when had EVERYTHING been written in CAPITALS?

It no longer gave a sense of URGENCY to anything because it was used in all company communications these days.

The thing was it was hard to get everything done – having a successful career, a strong relationship, owning a home (well that was pretty much impossible), and having a family. And then on top of that, for me anyway, work had proven so stressful that it had kicked my reproductive prowess to the kerb for a good while.

The morning was a blur of soggy, uneaten cereal, then an alternative breakfast of boiled egg, which went uneaten. Leggings were put on and taken off.

‘I don’t want to wear tights,’ Bella said as I hunched over her tiny frame trying to wiggle her legs in. It was a bit like trying to get an octopus to stay still.

‘It’s cold outside darling. You need to stay warm.’

‘I want bare legs.’

‘You can’t have bare legs. It’s cold.’

She grabbed a fistful of my hair and I felt a sudden rush of anger. Should I let her go to nursery with bare legs? Was this a battle worth having when there were CRAFT BEER GROUPS THAT NEEDED TO HAPPEN IN SCUNTHORPE ASAP? I took a deep breath. It was all about breathing this parenting thing. And not smacking (though I had actually smacked Bella once and beaten myself up for weeks afterwards). And trying to be much kinder than you felt in that moment. I breathed in and out whilst she looked up into my face, puzzled as to why my lips were pursed together.

‘How about leggings instead?’ I said.

Bella smiled and wrapped her arms around my head, squeezing so tight that I felt my teeth would come out. This was a moment of happiness. Right there. I was trying to get better at spotting them but the moment you did, they flew off again. How could I bottle this emotion so it lasted the rest of the day?

Then a battle with a toothbrush and the blue toothpaste versus the orange one (one washed off and then the other put on the brush instead.) Then off to nursery and a kiss for Pete (we’d exchanged ten words that morning – chiefly about what we’d take out of the freezer for dinner that night). Then Bella was off on her scooter flying towards imminent death, and I was sprinting with my laptop in a rucksack on my back doing the tell-tale run of a parent, stooped stop-start run, walk, run, walk, shrieking – ‘STOP BEFORE YOU GET TO THE ROAD!’ Then alternating this with checking my phone to see if there were any new emails I needed to ping a response to, and – ‘STOP BEFORE YOU GET TO THE ROAD!’ And then more emails. Then some crying (Bella and I both).

On the train, I took out a small mirror and noticed with horror that another white hair had popped out on the bottom of my chin. These were becoming more common and soon I would resemble Rip Van Winkle. I licked my finger and tried to encourage the hair to lie flat but it wouldn’t play ball. Aside from the beard, I was okay looking. The thing is strong features do you a service as you age as it gives structure to all that sagging skin. It’s like a good scaffold. I also dyed my hair blonde every six weeks because whilst I knew grey was fashionable, I wasn’t sure if it really was or whether people were just being PC and were too scared to say it looked terrible.

I checked my inbox and it seemed that many of the emergencies had been resolved aside from the craft beer one, and I had a sinking sense that this would be the ball that would hit me and stick. I arrived at the office, which was eight floors up in a lifeless glass building in Vauxhall, and sat down at the nearest free desk. There was a lot of bustle, and it was obvious that many people had been in for some time. Mango-Lab, had changed a lot since I’d started back in 2003. It had originally been a company of ten, and now employed over four hundred (we had global offices too). I had no clear idea who most of the people were. On bad days, it felt like a factory; people came in, got their laptops out, plugged their headphones in, and you didn’t speak to them until they got up to leave (and then it was some trite comment about train delays or TV shows or dinner plans). During the day, you wanted to avoid making tea for everyone as you’d be stuck in the kitchen for thirty minutes sorting out the Lady Grey from the Jasmine Green and the builders with just a dash of milk etc.

I had the sense that people used to talk much more but this was now changing. When someone came up to your desk, the ideal outcome was to get them to shut up and go away. We emailed and texted one another as if none of us were in the same building.

Since returning from maternity leave, I worked three and a half days a week and whilst I’d like to tell you this arrangement worked just fine for me, it didn’t. I constantly felt like I hadn’t got a clue what was going on. There were new initiatives launched every two weeks. There was Monday Power Lunch (where an older person such as myself had to sit with a younger person and be told what was what). Wednesday Round-The-World Breakfast (self-explanatory – again the onus being on talking to one another and sharing our mutual passions for travel and eating diverse food types). Friday Fun Sessions – possibly the worst of all the initiatives as we were made to stay an hour longer and drink beer, when we (I) really wanted to get home after a long day spent collaborating, team-building and being generally enthusiastic. It takes more than a trolley laden with beer to shake off a week’s resentments and bitter rivalries. These initiatives combined with the heavy workload made life exhausting. You were either answering emails or being forced to bond with colleagues, which afforded very little time to sit in the toilet crying (though I managed this at least once a week anyway).

Still, the company was doing well. Or it was difficult to tell as one week we were told it was good and then two weeks later that it was dicey. They were hiring more people which felt positive. All of them unfeasibly young and fresh. These new hires contributed to the feeling that I was no longer at the ‘cut and thrust’ of the market research world. There were only a few of us oldies left now, and the three or four favoured ones had their own offices with proper heating, so you only spotted their grey hair flouncing past atop their haggard faces when they walked to the shared toilets. The thing is marketing is all about youth. Our job was to help clients sell stuff. People aren’t convinced if you have a face like Bagpuss and are wearing unfashionable clothes. We sold stuff chiefly through talking to people in group situations and showing them bad ideas. Not all these ideas were bad but the majority were. In my youth, I’d thought I was helping bring good things to the wider population but when I reflected more deeply, it wasn’t, of course, true.

Back when I’d started there had been more enthusiasm amongst the respondents who came to the focus groups – there was wine provided, the venues were nice and adverts were still seen as relatively entertaining. Now, all that had changed and people were savvy and resented just about everything about modern life.

Once you got people in a room, it became difficult to manage the conversation without it turning into a giant bun fight. Adverts were boring and manipulative. Products were full of salt and often faulty/dangerous. Marketing was to blame but then of course there were also parking tickets, rubbish collection, immigration, the declining NHS, school application processes, the rising cost of basic foods, pollution, the barren high streets … the list went on. One minute you would be discussing a dry packet sauce and the next you’d segue into something far more significant. It made moderating the whole shebang very tiring and you needed your wits. The objective was to steer the conversation, and emerge with something that sounded like a palatable answer for the client.

‘I know you hate the new rubbish collection system on your street, but can you remember the idea I showed you ten minutes ago for a new toilet spray that activates itself whenever you lift the seat? How would you describe that idea in three words right now?’

‘What’s the best thing about this idea?’

‘What’s your favourite word on this concept?’

‘Let’s think of all the things we agree with, yes?’

The thing was the respondents were right. The world was full of plastic stuff that people didn’t need. Happiness was not on the increase, in fact quite the opposite.

There had also been a time when I’d thrown myself into the travel that came with the job. I’d been to New York, San Francisco, Paris and Milan. The thing was it was lonely. You arrived at a hotel, checked in, went to a small, dark viewing facility, and listened to someone talking to a bunch of people about an idea that nobody liked.

The typical days back then went something like this:

5.30 a.m. – fly to Munich to research a new mustard sauce proposition

9.45 a.m. – arrive at hotel and schlep massive bag full of new mustard sauce packaging up in the lift, lie down on bed for half hour, look out of the window and then leave

10.45 a.m. – 6 p.m. – spend entire day at the viewing facility preparing for groups, looking through stimulus, reading documents that keep being changed by the client every two minutes

6 p.m. – clients arrive and change everything that you’ve been working on all day

8 p.m. – 10.30 p.m. – German colleague moderates groups, clients talk German so you can’t understand anything that’s being said. They also hate you on sight because you’re too young/blonde/British/tired/depressed. Sit behind a mirror manically typing up everything the simultaneous translator is saying, then try to make sense in terms of which of the dreadful ideas is the least negative. Tell client your thoughts whilst he/she looks at you with disdain. Leave for hotel and feel sad, wishing you were a pop star, novelist, playwright etc.

11 p.m. – 1 a.m. – order room service, send emails and start to get grumpy emails back from the clients who are unhappy because the people you spoke to were wrong and they are going to ignore everything you suggest anyway. Watch infomercials for strange vegetable slicing machines and exercise contraptions whilst brain ceaselessly whirrs around and around and you worry about whether you’re going to sleep through your alarm and miss your dawn flight home again

Okay maybe there’d been a couple of trips that had been fun. New York, for example. And you got some time in the day to walk around the city. It wasn’t all bad or if it was, why was I still here?

The last five years I’d stopped travelling – it made me too anxious. I was glad when I only had to get a train to Manchester or Leeds and if I was lucky, I could return the same night and sleep in my own bed.

Then Phoebe became my boss and things changed. The mood changed. It felt like things were even more accelerated. There was rarely time to sit down and eat lunch, and sandwiches were shoved down your neck whilst typing with one hand. It became permissible to take client calls in the loo whilst urinating. There was no down time or if there was you were called into a brainstorm.

Phoebe walked past as I was writing notes in my book. Writing notes was a good way of looking busy and avoiding her attention.

‘MORNING REBECCA!’ she boomed. ‘TRAIN TROUBLE AGAIN?’

I was glad that everyone was wearing headphones and couldn’t hear her.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I was on a client call and had to miss the first train so I could finish the conversation.’

‘A client conversation with whom?’ she said walking backwards towards my desk, and looking down at my notes which so far said: must get a scented candle for Pete’s mum’s birthday and pick up coat from dry cleaners.

‘Um it was that cleaning wax enquiry. Remember? The one from a few months ago?’

She raised an eyebrow and clearly didn’t believe me.

‘Well send the brief over so I can have a quick look before you make a start,’ she said dismissively and walked off.

She didn’t walk. She STRODE. She was Sheryl Sandberg (the famous female head honcho at Facebook), to the power of ten. Later I would need to invent a reason as to why the brief hadn’t arrived. I would drop her an email, and say that some other agency had got it instead.

The other problem I had with work was the fact that there seemed to be resentment coming from the younger generation. The previous Thursday during one of our ‘Share & Care Hours’ (you had to take a colleague you didn’t know out for coffee), a young man had informed me that Gen X were to blame for everything that was wrong with our country – the flagging economy, corporate greed and corruption, not enough cheap, good quality housing in urban areas. He listed everything about my generation that he despised, whilst I quietly drank my coffee and reassured him that I wasn’t personally responsible and weren’t these coffee brainstorms supposed to be uplifting for us both?

There was a part of me that felt that there was some jealousy perhaps – we’d had fun, it was true (the travel had felt exciting for a while) and we’d been hedonistic (yes, me definitely, from what I could remember) and raved and all that, and now this generation were spending their youth taking photos of their food. The only office banter seemed to involve food or food-related activities.

There was a new Korean street food shop opening.

There was a place that sold seaweed soaked in gin.

There was a stall selling kimchi that had been aged for four years straight.

I loved eating as much as the next person, but where were the wild nights spent getting off with strangers? Or losing footwear whilst moshing at the front of a gig? Food was for old people who couldn’t dance anymore. My generation had eaten chips and didn’t worry about their ‘carb-load’. We didn’t find food sexy. We avoided it and spent our money elsewhere – fags and booze, mainly. Every time I went into the kitchen I braced myself for a lecture on the best coffee beans to buy (Jamaican, £12.99 a bag) and why I couldn’t continue using Nescafé.

About seven years in, I’d started getting the itch to leave Mango-Lab. I had a few different ideas but none of them had much of a commercial angle. These included:

A Rock and Roll café, selling cupcakes inspired by seventies rock legends; a risotto takeaway business, with hot risotto delivered to your desk, ‘Risotto to Go for the Days When Risotto is too Slow’; a vintage brooch dealership, this was very niche but at the time I lived in Ladbroke Grove, and admired Portobello market. I wanted to be one of those cool, bohemian women in long fur coats who sold knick-knacks and nattered to one another all day. That was the thing with cool jobs. They were often poorly paid. Though some would claim my job was cool too, I guess.

Whilst it wasn’t as bad as some industries, marketing could still be a relatively sexist industry. If you were a woman, it made sense not to put your neck out or say anything too controversial. If you were a man you had to do the opposite. Early on in my career there’d been a male colleague (long gone now – he’d been head-hunted to work in advertising), who constantly scratched his balls whilst waiting by the printer. After scratching for a couple of minutes, he’d then lift his palm and sniff. It was a low-down, dog-like behaviour, but nobody said anything as he was seen to be a ‘creative genius’ and said ‘fuck’ a lot in boring meetings, which created a lot of excitement. I knew early on that this tactic wouldn’t work for me.

A woman scratching herself and swearing wasn’t the done thing. It seemed like men had more leeway to be themselves. Swearing became a bit of a trend. The ball scratching didn’t take off but instead there was lots of expansive body language that the men used to take up as much space as possible. The women who did well were of two ilks; pretty and hard-working to the point of nervous breakdown, or un-feeling and robotic. I had built my career on being sort of okay-looking (blonde, blue eyes, enormous arse), and saying ‘that’s interesting’ a lot. I made very high quality cups of tea.

I listened to boring men and told them they were right just so they’d shut up. I sometimes imagined what size penises they had. Other times I drew pictures of penises on my writing pad as they spoke. It was a small form of rebellion. It was a counterpoint to being so nice and not itching my fanny by the printer. Phoebe was different of course, because she had the stamina of a horse, and didn’t buy into the whole people-pleasing thing.

If people were thirsty in a meeting then their mouths could remain dry and their spittle stuck in the corners. If a man swore then she mirrored this language right back to him. She was the only woman I knew who could actually play golf (and enjoyed it). She was old school in that way and had gotten into it to infiltrate the old boys’ network (most male clients still loved golf). She also did long distance running. If I ever worked late (this was rare), I’d catch her running past with her laptop jiggling up and down in her rucksack, wearing a neon T-shirt that said ‘LET’S DO THIS.’

Overall at Mango-Lab, even if you set the sexism to one side, the priority was ‘high-quality strategic thinking’, which basically meant well-written decks on Pot Noodles, fizzy drinks and eye creams, peppering these presentations pulled together on PowerPoint, which we called ‘decks’, with one or two words that the client didn’t understand, so they came away with the feeling that you were cleverer than them and they were lucky to have listened to you for well over an hour.

Phoebe and I were the same age, but she came across as far more put together.

I really wasn’t happy this particular Monday. That wasn’t unusual.

I had a creeping sense of unease. I had become a ball of the stuff.