We had our children when we were quite young. All three were very much planned and wanted, and I was lucky enough to have three easy, euphorically uncomplicated births – boy, girl, boy. Bliss. For the first decade or so of their lives, their father and I were deeply contented – maybe even a little smug.
We really liked being parents. Not only that but we also thought we were rather good at it. OK, so Eddie’s teething phase seemed to go on for ever. And there was a brief, wobbly time when it looked like Becca would never learn to read. But these moments passed and, by the time they were 8, 10, 12, even 13, we’d look at these three lovely children of ours and think what bright, funny, naughty, happy, deliciously well-balanced individuals they were. Was it all down to our incredible parenting, or was it just good luck? It didn’t really matter. All we knew was that family life was great.
Then, one by one, they turned into teenagers.
When you’re right in the middle of a particular stage of parenting, you tend to assume that it must be the same for everyone. So when, at ten months, Eddie hadn’t slept for more than a couple of hours in the whole of his short life, I innocently – exhaustedly – assumed that this was normal. It wasn’t, I discovered. But at least it passed.
For a while, the same was true of our teenagers. As they shape-shifted into unrecognisably angry monsters, as they swore and growled and fought and told us where to go, we thought it was probably par for the course. Teenagers were supposed to be impossible, right? And friends whose kids were older and had come through the tunnel and out into the sunny uplands of their twenties reassured us: “They really do come out of it and turn nice again, we promise.” But then again, less reas-suringly, there were the other parents. Parents whose teenagers seemed to be clean, calm, reasonable, proto-adults who helped around the house, took an interest in current affairs and saved up money from their Saturday jobs to buy their own gig tickets, CDs and clothes.
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Parents whose teenagers brought their (clean, calm and reasonable) girl- or boyfriends home for supper (but never to bed), who did their schoolwork without being shouted at, and only seemed to be rebelling in the mildest possible ways. Parents, in fact, whose teenagers really did seem to be much as I’d imagined that ours would one day be: simply larger, gruffer, spottier versions of their benign childhood selves.
Most bafflingly of all, these were parents who did not seem to have done the baby and child part any differently from us. In fact one or two of these kids had even been at primary school with ours and, as my husband pointed out with a disbelieving crack in his voice, had been rather more challenging in their behaviour than our little ones.
So if we’d been smug back then, we certainly weren’t any more.
Because at home, the insurgency was raging. Were we really alone in this, we won-dered? Could I really be the only mother whose kids regularly swore and shouted at her just because she tried to cook them breakfast? Did no one else have teenagers who incessantly demanded money yet never saw the need to lift a finger around the house?
More than that, where had all the good-will, good humour and generosity gone? Child Eddie had been a gentle and sensitive boy who showed real concern for anyone, animal or human, in distress. Teenage Eddie seemed to have unscrewed the empa-thetic lobe of his brain and chucked it out of the window, along with the cigarette stubs that he seemed to honestly believe we wouldn’t notice strewn all over the lawn.
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Same with Becca. Once so sharp, sweet and funny, suddenly just a female vortex of scowling fury. But fury at what? What exactly had we done to her? How could she appear to loathe us both so much? And Jack. The placid child who enjoyed painting and Lego had turned into a delinquent who treated parties and late nights as his full-time job, school as a trifling hobby. Jack lost everything – watch, hoodie, Oyster card, money, school tie, Oyster card, tie, watch. Some of these things didn’t matter much, but others – especially the fifth Oyster card – really did. It wasn’t that he lost it, it was that he didn’t care that he lost it. And didn’t see why he should have to queue at the post office to replace it.
Their father and I tried everything. Strict rules and nasty consequences. Long, painstakingly careful supper-table arguments. We tried treating them like the adults they claimed to be and we tried treating them like the toddlers they actually were. We tried just about everything and in the end, sometimes – often – we just poured ourselves a triple and despaired.
And then, one day, instead of fuming about the latest incident, I simply went and wrote it all down, word for word, exactly as it had just happened. I did what the therapists tell you to do and tried the writing cure. Writing it down slowed my pulse, literally. And reading it back made me laugh. At their ludicrous behaviour, but also at mine. Hindsight – even an hour or so of it – is gold dust in Parent City.
Reading back over these weekly dispat-ches now, I’m struck by the fact that both everything and nothing has changed. Eddie has left home. Kind of. For the moment. But most of his stuff is still here and he popped back just the other night for a bath, a meal and to sleep in his “old bed” and see his cat.
Becca has definitely changed. The angry, explosive girl we were all living with a few months ago has somehow swapped places with a person who is tender, careful, wise and (occasionally) vulnerable. Yes, she can still be unspeakably rude, and yes, her new pickiness about food drives us all insane, but there’s a new uncertainty there, as well as a warmth, a generosity and responsibility, all of which hint at the young woman she’s on the edge of turning into.
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And Jack. He was a sweet, placid third baby. You could plonk him in any corner of any room and he’d be happy. A couple of years ago, Jack was still pretty much that same child – easygoing, friendly, careful to demand only whatever he was likely to get.
But hormones erased all that. These days Jack is a force to be reckoned with. I have this sense of my Jack out there in London, learning to survive in a city that isn’t always kind to teenage boys (but then it’s mutual). Some days, with his uneasy combination of fury and vulnerability, Jack breaks my heart. His father and I haven’t quite yet worked out how to help him to turn into a man. And maybe we can’t. Maybe all we can do is stand back and watch and hope. Because along with the responsibility, parenthood also brings its own special sense of helplessness – something I’m still struggling to come to terms with.
The other day, Jack asked me if I ever wished I’d never had kids. I thought about it. “I can see why you might ask that,” I told him truthfully, “but the funny and wonderful thing is, I don’t think anyone ever regrets becoming a parent. It’s like, you have a baby and something in you just changes.” He scowled as if he didn’t believe me.
“It’s like the bit of you that used to look out only for yourself kind of shrinks to make room for someone else. Someone you care about even more than that self.”
“I’d so hate that,’ he said.
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“The funny thing is, this makes you happier than you ever thought possible. Well, happier and sadder, actually.”
“You mean how you cried so much when Eddie was born?” said Becca, who’d been listening carefully.
“Did I cry?”
“Said you did. You said that when you realised how much you loved him and how you couldn’t bear anything to happen to him and all that, you just burst into tears.” An image floated back to me. Eddie, wrapped in a white baby blanket, asleep on our vast bed. Eddie, eyes and fists tight shut, smaller even than the pillow.
“That’s true. I did. I wanted to be Eddie’s mum, but a part of me almost couldn’t stand the responsibility – the full-on loving feeling of it. It was exactly the same feeling I have now about all three of you. It never stops, the love feeling. I can’t stop thinking and caring about you. Even when I’m away from you, you’re so completely in my mind.”
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“That sounds like such f***ing hard work,” sighed Jack, who always looks for the easy way through everything. “What I don’t see is why you and Dad didn’t just have one child? I think when I’m older I might just have one, then I’ll get some time for my own life too.”
“But that’s just it,” I said. “They’re not separate. Your child – your children – they are your life and anything else you want to do or be sits alongside them. And that’s fine too. It’s hard to explain, but it doesn’t feel like any sort of sacrifice.”
“I’m going to have at least five kids,” Becca said. “I want three girls and two boys.” “That’s only because you like thinking up names,” said Jack. “Anyway, you could never look after five. If you can’t even take the dog out for one single f***ing walk.”
“Oh well, the idea of you as anyone’s Dad just makes me want to burst out laughing!”
That was what she said. But actually, I was the one who was laughing. Because I was about to say something else, but I realised there was no point. You don’t get many windows for serious talking with teenagers and this one had passed.
What I was going to say was this: having children is an optimistic act. Isn’t it really the most optimistic thing a person can do – make another person and try to love them enough and keep them safe, then send them out into the world, to live and love and maybe make children of their own?
There are no certainties, no guarantees. All you really have is the comfort of knowing that life is fluid, that tricky phases pass and other, differently tricky ones begin. And as teenagers turn into adults, maybe the balance of power shifts. But the burning, wake-you-up-in-the-night sense of responsibility never fades.
So if you’re one of those lucky parents whose calm and reasonable teenager is at this very moment voluntarily emptying the dishwasher before going quietly up to his room to finish his geography coursework, then what you’ve just read here isn’t going to chime with you. But if, like us, you’re right in the thick of it, staggering back each day on to a bloodied, muddied battlefield, then take heart.
Remember all those books we read and all those classes we did, studying the world inside our wombs, learning to breathe, preparing for those few brief hours when we would finally push our babies out into the world? Did we really, honestly imagine that this was the bit we had to worry about, the bit we could influence, the bit where careful preparation was going to make any kind of lasting difference?
When the time came for our children to be born, my body knew what to do: it pushed them out. But when they turned into teenagers, we found ourselves alone and adrift with no books, no breathing classes and only this great big wave of unconditional love to get us through.
It’s almost funny when you think about it.
Father and daughter
I find Becca now on the landing, pale and furious. “What is it, Becs?”
“It’s him.” “Eddie?”
“No, not Eddie. Him. That stupid man you’re married to.”
“What’s Dad done now?”
“Only refused to let me have the one piece of software I need to complete my f***ing homework, that’s all. So petty! So babyish! I can’t believe it. He needs his head sorting out.”
I think about this. “Were you rude to him?”
She throws her head back in disbelief. “Why the f*** do you always have to side with him? He’s so f***ing unreasonable. I really don’t know how you can f***ing well live with him.”
Downstairs I find her father at the kitchen table with his head in his hands.
“Do you know what she did?” he says. “I asked her to empty the dishwasher and she refused. And when I said I was sick of her laziness, she threw the white jug across the room.”
I take a breath. “Did it smash?” “What do you think? How can she be so destructive?”
I go to the bottom of the stairs and call up. “Rebecca! Come down here right now!”
Rather surprisingly, she trails downstairs, morose and shadowy-eyed in jeans and slippers. “What?”
“You smashed a jug.”
“So?” “We don’t throw objects in this house.”
She raises an eyebrow.
“Now, empty the dishwasher, please. You’re the only member of this family who’s done nothing to help so far today.”
She folds her arms. “I’m not doing it till he says sorry to me.” She eyes her father and he looks up wearily.
“Sorry for what?”
“For speaking to me like that.” “Like what?” “Like . . . like I never do anything around the house.”
We can’t help it. We both laugh. “But you don’t,” we say.
She stifles a small scream. “There you go! There you both go! Oh, forget it. I don’t need the disk. What does it matter? I’ll just go and fail all my f***ing GCSEs and you can both enjoy seeing my whole life in ruins!”
She marches back upstairs and we wait for the customary double-door slam, and sure enough it comes, followed by a third for good measure.
I empty the dishwasher.
Two hours later, I find the two of them in the sitting room, socked feet up on the sofa, shoulders touching, thick as thieves, drinking Coke together in front of one of their beige urban programmes.
This time I don’t offer food, I don’t offer anything. Instead I think how much I would have given to have such a relationship with my own father. I never argued with him – I never dared, I feared him. And maybe if I’d been allowed to smash a few jugs, or even just watch some crap TV with him, I might have felt more when I held his hand as he lay dying.
Extracted from Living with Teenagers – 3 kids, 2 parents, 1 Hell of a bumpy ride is published by Headline Review tomorrow at £12.99. It is available from Times BooksFirst at £11.69, free p&p. 0870 1608080, timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst