Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years by Stephanie Calman (Picador, £8.99)
Seldom, I imagine, do readers of books look at the author’s “Acknowledgements”. And never with the keen interest I brought to Stephanie Calman’s round-up of characters at the end of her book. It turns out they are all real, from down-to-earth, northern husband Peter — and his name really is Grimsdale — to Lawrence and Lydia, the temperamental teenagers of every hysterical encounter between the pages. Even Stephanie’s mother, whose death forms a heartbreaking part of Calman’s book, is the real deal. She is thanked for resistance to “the fads and commercially driven scaremongering, which have increasingly colonised the field of parenting”.
For the book, part of a series, is about the battle to bring up children without the pressure to be perfect. Advice on this is ubiquitous and Stephanie Calman is hip to it all. From Attachment Parenting, a book which advises mothers to “wear the baby on you until you no longer exist as a separate entity” to Contented Baby, whose title Calman interprets as “Miserable Everyone Else”, with its lists of endless goals she translates into “hey, here’s another thing for you to fail at!”
Relentless worry over what your children do, and how it compares to others, can dominate, and wreck, relationships. Glancing at Dailygreatness (yes, it is one word) — “A guide to the amazing experience of being a parent” — Calman responds: “But a lot of the parenting experience is not amazing; it’s exhausting, unrewarding and very boring. Plus, now, it’s a minefield too”.
The teenage phase begins very early in the Calman/Grimsdale household. We first meet Stephanie and the vocal, very precocious Lydia in a shouty stand-off over a wedding outfit in BHS. Lydia is only seven . The author reflects: “Instead of paying attention to signs of how soon it all starts, we cling to the belief that our children are sweet innocent creatures.
Teenagerhood is a distant destination. “So, meanwhile, we are in a reverie, a version of a creation myth.” Most of us, of course, like Stephanie Calman, cherish the illusion that after “eleven or twelve years of ‘normality’ comes a catastrophe like the meteor that destroyed the dinosaurs – and our hitherto nice children metamorphose into teenagers.”
Certainly, Stephanie and Peter are not prepared for Teenagerhood, however early it starts. And much of that is rooted in their own pasts. It is a deeply intriguing feature of the book that these parents are so different. Peter, a stoic lad brought up in Sheffield, yards from the gorgeous craggy landscape of the Peak District, accompanied his father on mountainous walks. Stephanie is an urban Londoner, who bonded with her irascible, volcanic Jewish father in the darkness of the National Film Theatre.
In one scene, Peter takes the family on to the precipitous Stanage Edge and poor Stephanie has to look away every two minutes as she anticipates one of her children tipping over the edge of the rock face. It is a great image of their conflicted but hugely successful marriage .
Where Peter is calm, Stephanie is panicky but then Peter can be smug and Stephanie realistic. And, when, at eight- and nine-years old, the children are off on outward-bound holidays, their father cheers them on and their mother worries back at home.
Between the lines, it’s clear to the reader of this fabulous family saga that this balance is a huge advantage to their family’s development but, close-up, it is hard to see.
I loved this book. It has interesting layers of which even its author appears unaware. She is brutally honest and more or less incapable of writing a stuffy or self-satisfied line. What a reader can see and she seems not to, is that she is just as bright and intelligent as her children as they grow, and possessed of a sweet nature and a brilliant sense of humour.
I particularly like her when she goes into ranting mode on the evils of modern mores: “Take transport. Four-wheeled drives once the preserve of farmers, white Kenyans and the Queen, are now the default huge vehicles with off-road traction to storm the compound of a mid-level Afghan warlord while sipping a huge container of boiling liquid and texting the violin teacher.”
Such comic fire-power makes this book a delight.
Anne Garvey is a freelance journalist - and mother of four.
