When I was seven, a favourite toy was my two-year-old brother's tractor. I was far too big for it, really, but I would wriggle my bottom into the too-small seat, grab the wheel and push the vehicle along the garden path with my too-long legs. The tractor was my large car and the invisible people who rode in the back and to whom I talked, soothed, sang to, were my children. I was driving them to school.
I was the old woman who lived in the shoe. I had so many children and I knew exactly what to do. I was expert at parallel parking, I baked perfectly risen Victoria sponges and I never told my children to shut up. When asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always replied: "A mother."
"But have a career!" my mother said, diving into her seventh daily load of laundry with visible lack of enthusiasm. She wanted me to have what she did not: financial freedom and a life not dominated by everybody else's demands and dirty pants. But I was obdurate about my plan and didn't listen, didn't question my motives much at all. I just wanted a baby.
As soon as I could (after doing people-pleasing things such as learning to touch type, living up north, getting a degree), I got pregnant and decided to keep the child. I was not some 16-year-old who didn't know what she was doing. I had, however, been unsure of myself from the beginning of life and felt useless at most things. A baby seemed to be a neat little parcel from which all my talent would be unleashed and a happy future would surely, inevitably, spring forth.
Of course, I see this idea as laughable now, but I'm not hard on myself for once having thought like that. I came from a chaotic non-nuclear family. I wouldn't say my childhood was always unhappy, but it was not filled with laughter. There was love, and that has seen me through to where I am today,but there were gaping holes of doubt, uncertainty and silence in my childhood that in adulthood I was sure I could fill with new life.
Getting pregnant is easy, I thought. It is not an achievement, so I can succeed. Find a man, have unprotected sex, then worry about all the rest later was the plan. I didn't think about the future. I thought my initial dream would always stay the same; that my desires would not change; that being a mother would be enough.
At 22, with a bump and a temp job that paid by the hour (and a man who was not ready to commit to fatherhood at all and is still very much absent in my first child's life), my ways of thinking about love and creating life were inchoate, and my ideas of what it meant to be a parent were not without thought for the child, but more importantly without thought for how I wanted to be a mother to this child. I was emotionally immature.
"You haven't really grown up," was something I accused R of regularly after we married, when he behaved irresponsibly: when he failed to come home at night, switched off his phone so he couldn't be traced, and spent all the money we didn't have. "It's like living with an errant teen," I said.
But R never accused me of being juvenile, of failing to face the glaring realisation that perhaps our family was not the contented little love cluster I had willed it to be. That perhaps I needed to re-evaluate what my initial goals for life had been and start learning how to behave in a way that would benefit my own growth. I was too busy complaining that I didn't have a life: "I'm always at home, looking after the children!" I was the self-abnegating parent, the person my mother had warned me against becoming.
My dream didn't go to plan and that is neither surprising nor a bad thing because now I am a good enough mother and have a clearer vision for my future. I don't drive a tractor, and my cakes – those I don't buy from the supermarket – are hard enough to knock someone out. My children aren't always happy, and my husband and I are separated. I still find parenthood hard, but trying to maintain the veneer of perfection would have been harder.
Most of my friends were under no illusion that parenthood would be easy, that marriage would be a doddle. Perhaps they had more forethought and wisdom than I did, or perhaps they knew that no one else would be a proxy for their happiness. They saw growing up as a process of learning, one that couldn't be arrived at overnight. Love was organic, not a product of desire. Children would not fulfil or sustain their dreams or, indeed, suffocate all future ambition.
But I'm still very fond of the seven-year-old me. There are parts of people's souls that can never be erased and I am grateful to have been given the chance to be a mother. The girl I was, who once dreamed of being Barbie and finding Ken and having children, has thankfully had a feminist makeover and a contraceptive coil fitted. But in lots of ways, my fairytale worked out. I met an equally confused prince, R, along the way and we did create a clamorous, chaotic, but mostly loving family together. We may not live in grandeur, or even in the same house, the children may fight and I still moan, but life is lovelier now than I ever imagined it would be.
