Not that kind of mother

Or am I?

Hi friends,

And welcome if you’re new here (hi!) I’m Lindsay, and this is my weekly(ish) free post for all subscribers.

Sometimes, these posts are personal essays on parenting and post-therapy, perimenopausal midlife like this one; sometimes they’re video podcast episodes where I chat about caring and creativity with folk at the intersection of the two; sometimes I dig into goings-on in this reading and writing life. This week, parenting girls…

Not that Kind of Mother

Afternoons are – suddenly – slipping into bare-armed, open-doored evenings and impromptu late-night giggle-sessions. The house (and my hands) are full.

Post-school and at the weekends, a seemingly-endless stream of girls has been over the door and I’ve been on taxi duty across the city. It’s what I always imagined the tween and teen decade would be like. I fantasised about our house being the one they’d all flock to. Want to hang out in.

So far so good.

The wee ones are brilliant and have been in our lives since toddler-times. The older bunch are newer: only picked up when my elder daughter moved to high school last autumn, though I’m quickly getting to know them and their various quirks.

They’re a brilliant bunch: an energetic whirlwind of right-on zero-fucks-given happy girls. They know my daughter in all her technicolour glory and not only accept her for everything she is, but celebrate her. Satirise her. She does the same to them, having slotted into the role of ‘relationship fixer’ and ‘emotional support companion’ (her words) for some of them as they navigate friendships and first boyfriends, while crafting bonkers group-chat names with others.

It’s cheering and hilarious and I am so glad of it all. Sit me down with a gang of 12 and 13 year old girls and the incessant crush chat they unguardedly let me in on and I am happy.

It’s especially brilliant seeing her able to be her whole self with them. As far as I can see (and hear on midweek early-morning getting-ready group-calls), there’s not much minimising or masking going on, despite her recent autism diagnosis. It’s a massive relief after a sub-optimal experience of primary school and her best friend emigrating to Canada last June.

Except… this fizzing delight of mine really struggles to manage her oppositional defiance no matter the audience and this perimenopausal mother is struggling to keep a lid on her reactions, too.

Take a midnight near-sleep announcement from across the landing of ‘We’re just getting a glass of water, Mum,’ which I know is anything but. This swiftly followed by a catching-out minutes later when I happen upon them making noodles on the stove.

“But it’s a SLEEPOVER, Mum! Seriously! A frickin’ SLEEPOVER!”

This, I know. For it’s the fourth in as many days. My patience is shot. We’re already deep in conflict territory and I haven’t even mentioned phones and iPads.

Cue my attempts to derail an almost-inevitable autistic meltdown because I hate for her to be seen losing her shit in front of a friend. I hate to be seen losing mine, either. It’s not fair, and would undo all that nice-making. But if I give into what could be mistaken for sass if this was a neurotypical exchange, do I look like a pushover? And does my daughter lose a bit of her friend’s affection? More pressingly, do I pull them up on not having yet honoured the pre-agreed device confiscation or do I pick my battles?

I have to ask: What do you do?

Because you don’t want to be that mother. That mother-of-a-friend who is exasperated and angry in a way that makes a sleepover companion uncomfortable. The mother who catches out not only her daughter but a girl who is not her daughter when they’re sneaking around, shaming them both.

And before you say it, I know this is entry-level stuff. I know that there’s yet more to come, and that – as

Emma Simpson

said so well in a recent piece – I may well be fucking raging at their future antics but I’d rather know. I'll always answer the phone and always go and get them and/or their pals in a moment of crisis. I’d far rather they were safe than in my good books.

But for now, what these sorts of moments are reminding me of are a couple of incidents from my own young adolescence where I was the friend. Situations that were markedly different to the one I’ve just described, but that have stuck with me maybe as a warning for what’s to come as we navigate more than midnight noodles. My home was all blind eyes and benign neglect, unlike some of the ‘good’ Catholic homes I hung out in around the start of high school. The sort with an ever-present mumsy mum and a mostly-working dadsy dad. The sort with framed pictures from Munro-bagging expeditions on the living room wall and Jesus on his cross above the kitchen door.

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Both of these happenings occurred roughly within a year of one another. Unlike what’s going on with my daughter and her pals, both were of their time and to do with a fear, I think, of developing bodies and latent adolescence. They involved mothers of friends who were not able, because of their own conditioning, to accept that wee girls would soon no longer be wee girls and that their daughters’ bodies would suddenly be gazed upon in ways that made them feel hot shame. Terror, maybe?

The first incident. A ceilidh in a town hall in Ayrshire one Friday evening. I loved ceilidh dancing and had been excited to be the friend picked to go along since I’d landed in a secondary class with not one soul from primary school and had been desperate to find my people. I’d been round to this particular girl’s house for tea a couple of times in that first term and sensed the friendship could have legs.

The outfit I was wearing that night was a dress my aunt had bought me from Debenhams for my 12th birthday the previous May. I fucking loved it. It was tight and black with dungaree fastenings, metal buttons down the front and stripes on the sides. I can’t remember, but imagine now putting it in my school bag that morning along with my sleepover things, no doubt excited to swap my uniform for a wee t-shirt and that dress. I had a pair of Adidas Sambas in royal blue suede that I’d picked because they matched the school’s gym pants and hockey skirt colours. Yes, I was that child and it was a brilliant outfit.

We went to the ceilidh and we danced. Drank lots of Irn Bru, ate crisps and sweets and danced some more. But at one point the evening was completely spoiled and I never went to that girl’s house again.

Was it during a Gay Gordons or a round of Strip the Willow? A Canadian Barn Dance or a Dashing White Sergeant? Doesn’t matter. But during one of the dances, I felt a sharp tug-tug-tug at the back of my dress. I turned to find the mother of the friend – her tugging hand retracting – looking at me with what I understood in that moment to be disgust.

The spell was broken. I felt dirty. With a wordless act and that face, she was suggesting I’d wanted my ridden-up dress to creep up higher and higher.

I hadn’t. I’d just been having a really nice time dancing with my friend.

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OK. Memory two. This time on a sleepover with my oldest friends from childhood. I had started developing breasts (puberty – following an initial flurry of excitement and activity – came to an abrupt end shortly afterwards but for a brief time I was a trailblazer). I had recently graduated to a lacy training bra with covetable hook-and-eye fastenings and adjustable straps while they still wore cotton pull-on crop tops. It was all very Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. Boobs or not, we were united in our fascination with the lingerie pages of the mail order catalogues their mum got and – on this particular occasion – we had stripped to our underwear in their shared bedroom to pose like the models. Crop tops and training bras were stuffed with balled-up socks and the lotion was out. We wanted shiny arms, legs and pretend cleavages that – if you squinted – looked real enough.

We were deep in play when their mother burst in.

I can still conjure her face as she stood in the doorway – dishcloth in hand – our necks whipping round to face her, our bodies immediately frozen in various suggestive poses.

“Get your clothes on right now and if I ever see you doing that again, I’ll tell your mother!”

She did an about-turn, we emptied out our crop tops, hauled our clothes on and never was it spoken of again.

Unlike the fledgling school friendship – one that would likely have burnt out quickly anyway – this happened in my home from home with the family who had looked after us the night of the fire. In an instant I was no longer the girl this woman had ferried to and from nursery and later fed and looked after without question when her own mother couldn’t.

The Glasgow Garden Festival, June 1988 and I can still remember every one of these children’s names

I felt suddenly defective in my curiosity.

Though of course, it wasn’t only mine. It was theirs, too, and is still the curiosity of every girl and every boy who ever lived as they innocently explore what it means to inhabit rapidly changing bodies and minds. And I wonder now, looking back, why it felt like her scorn was directed only at me? As though the only explanation for that kind of play could be that I’d brought it into that good Catholic house?

Do we other these children that aren’t ours as a way to defend against viewing our own children for the latent sexual beings they will undoubtedly become?

And in my current situation, is a reversal of sorts in play? An over-compensation whereby I’m in danger of reacting in a way that further ‘others’ my child in order to protect the feelings of one that isn't mine?

Big questions… And a reminder to respond and not react, I suppose.

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As an aside, the following summer Mum sent me off on a two-week minibus pilgrimage to Lourdes with one of those sisters, her older cousin, his pal and their uncle (a priest, driving the minibus). We collected a family of three somewhere in the south of England and swiftly nicknamed the man ‘Pockets’ because his hands never left them. The woman took nothing to do with the two of us, and their son was maybe only seven or eight. We concocted all sorts of vile theories about the three of them, as you do when there's little else to occupy you.

on that pilgrimage

Perhaps partly for that reason, I embarked upon my first holiday romance with the cousin’s friend – a 17-year-old from the north east of Scotland. Not one of the adults attempted to break up this questionable fling between teenagers on either side of the consenting divide. In fact, I have a mental image of being disturbed by the priest and him chuckling as he left us to it. Did I dream that? No. I’m quite sure I remember it as clearly as the many holy water stalls and all the nuns.

Upon our return, I recorded in my scrapbook that the highlight of the whole trip was snogging in a hot tent after a day at Lac de Lourdes.

I never told my mother. And my friend never told hers.

So perhaps the issue is far bigger than midnight noodles or imagined underage drinking emergencies. Perhaps the question really is, what do I need to do to make sure that my girls (and maybe their pals, too) never stop talking around me?

And that I never stop wanting to listen to them.