The Best Policy

Just weeks after having the Very Small Boy, I was dropping the Small Girl off at playschool one morning when her lovely teacher remarked to me “You’re looking great by the way, how are you feeling now?”.

“Well, make-up is a wonderful thing” I joked. “You should have seen me before I put it on. Actually, I feel terrible”.
“Oh. Well at least you look good” said the teacher consolingly.

I questioned afterwards whether I oughtn’t to have just accepted her compliment graciously and been thankful that my complete exhaustion wasn’t as obvious to the outside world as I had assumed. Driving home, I wondered why it is we all feel it’s so important to present a competent front to the world even when in reality we feel as if we are barely coping. I mean, I’d been up since five o’clock that morning, I’d had less than five hours’ sleep in two-hour stretches, I’d had a baby three weeks earlier and the Small Girl had just thrown a challenging breakfast-related tantrum: surely people would understand if I looked a little jaded? But I still stopped to put on my make-up and assume a cheery smile before I dropped her off at playschool.

My younger brother, Hugh (the Small Girl calls him “Uncle Queue”), is one of the few people I know who don’t bother with this façade; if he’s feeling rubbish, he tells you. I was talking to him on the phone the other day: “Hi, how are you?” I asked at the beginning of the conversation.

“Well. I’m still alive”, he replied, with his usual candour (he was having a bad day). And although he often replies in a similar way, it throws me every time, because convention dictates that you say you’re fine, thanks, no matter how you are actually feeling.

I decided to try Uncle Queue’s line of truthfulness myself. One morning last week, I bumped into the father of one of the Small Girl’s friends on the playschool run.

“Hello” he said in passing, “How are you?”. I thought for a minute.
“Oh you know” I replied “This baby’s kept me up all night and I feel like throttling his sister”. The Small Friend’s father looked slightly taken aback and remained silent, lost for words at this unconventional breach of etiquette so early in the morning.

Being a parent is a bit like gaining acceptance into a secret club, the other members of which being the only people you are allowed let your guard down with. A friend of mine recently said of her new status as a mother “No one ever tells you beforehand how hard it’s going to be” and I wondered, should I have told her? When she said she was thinking of having a baby, ought I to have said “Look, are you sure you want to go through with this? I mean you’ll be in for a lifetime of worry and guilt. And as for the sleepless nights… it’s a form of torture, you know!”.

Perhaps that would have been going a little too far. But maybe if I had been a little less evasive and a little more truthful about my life in general with children, she would have realised how tough it can be at times.

In the end though, I think I put on my make-up and my cheerful smile and gloss over the challenging bits because despite driving me at times to the brink of sanity, my children are the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened to me: two small people for whom I am filled with a remarkable sense of pride. So I owe it to them, really, to show the rest of the world how fulfilled they make feel, even on the bad days. And that’s the truth. Honest.