Short Story # 22

GOOD ENOUGH

by Janice Day

My daughter is a Goth. No, I don’t know how that happened. I don’t know how we got from beautiful baby, shiny and clean, to this white faced, black haired creature, with piercings, and tattoos. Those at least are transfers - not real ones. I suppose I should be grateful for that.

I am sitting here, by the way, in my living room; all done up like a dog’s dinner, and waiting for my beautiful young daughter to make an entrance in her little black dress so that we can go to my mother’s 80^th birthday party. It’s a lovely picture, isn’t it? But what kind of little black dress will it be, I wonder. Will it be see-through? Or artistically ripped in embarrassing places? And what will my ancient relatives make of Abby with her little black dress and her piercings and her tattoos?

Do you see my difficulty? Everything is arranged. The caterers are primed, the cake is in place, the banner and the balloons are all up. Even the Great Aunts are coming. There’ll be a slide presentation of mum’s life, and then the grand and great-grandchildren will sing a song especially written for the event by my brother’s youngest, Janet, who’s on the stage. Nannie’s song, it’s called, and sung to the tune of ‘Little Donkey.’

Abby has refused to join in, of course. True to form.

And the whole evening will be videoed. The whole hideous debacle of my daughter’s little – and very probably obscene - black dress, will be captured on film for my smug siblings to snigger over in perpetuity. “What do you expect,” they’ll say, “with a mother like Flick.”

I was the black sheep of the family, you see. And I so wanted Abby to be different.

Oh, I know you shouldn’t see your children as an extension of yourself, but I do. How could I not? I grew her from a seed. And when she came out, she was so perfect: round and beautiful; shiny-eyed and sweet-smelling, so soft and fine. Her little head so fragile on her wobbly neck.

You can’t grab at a baby’s head and hold it firmly. It’s a sort of metaphor for bringing up children. You have to cup your hand over the skull; shape your hand to it; feeling the life pulse beneath your palm. It’s magical. And when you are gently holding your baby’s head in the palm of your hand, feeling your child’s heartbeat through its skull, you have no idea that it’s always going to be the same, and that underneath the angry words and the worry and the despair, you’re still after all just holding the baby’s fragile little head very, very gently in the palm of your hand.

When she was tiny, my Abby, I washed her in the sink. I’d sit her on a padded plastic changing mat – so she was comfy. And that felt like such a wild thing to do – wilder almost than my wild youth - because I was ignoring the health visitor’s advice on how to bathe a baby in a baby bath. That was sailing very close to the wind as far as I was concerned – close to getting Abby taken away from me. That’s what I feared at the time, anyway. I thought they’d take her away if I didn’t get it right.

As the youngest in my family I’d never had anything to do with babies before I had mine. So I was afraid. They were too, I think. I saw my notes in the hospital. They said, “Very unsure of all aspects of mothering.” That cut me that did. I wasn’t that bad. I breastfed. How many can say that, these days? And it only took me twelve days to get the hang of it. Twelve days of feeling like I had open blisters and had invited a poodle to nibble on them. My first experience of mother-love; breast feeding.

It’s true though - I wasn’t very confident. I thought they would take her away if the house wasn’t spotless; if she wasn’t dressed by ten o-clock; if they found out I wasn’t using the baby-bath.

I was torn between wanting to do it my way and wanting to do it theirs, for safety’s sake. Seems silly now. In the end you do what comes naturally and the babies survive. I bathed her in the kitchen sink, and as soon as she could stand I stood her up to change her nappy. I thought it was shaming for her to be laid on her back like that with her legs in the air, and I didn’t want that for her. I wanted her to be proud, to be able to stand up and look people in the eye and say “This is me. This is my life. I’ll do it my way.”

Well, I’ve got that haven’t I? Her and her piercings and her white face. That’s not quite what I was after. Still, what can you expect. You know what they say: “never work with animals or children.”

I did have a baby bath once. What happened to it? Oh, I remember. It ended up in the garage, all mildewed and mouldy. I tried to give it to the scouts for the jumble and the woman who came to collect it turned her nose up. “No one will want to bathe their baby in that,” she said. Well, I couldn’t argue with her, could I? I hadn’t wanted to, even when it was brand spanking new.

There’s no right or wrong though, that’s what everyone tells you and you have to tell yourself, there is no right or wrong to parenting. You can only do your best and be “good enough”.

The cult of the “good enough” mother is what my generation of parents have grown up with. Dr Spock is in the bin. They say it’s better to be good enough than to be ideal. They say that if you are perfect the baby will have overly high expectations of life.

What a load of rubbish. I was never taken in by that. Because when all’s said and done, being good enough is ideal. isn’t it? They think that just by messing about with words they can relieve that terrible, gnawing fear that every mother has to deal with - that she is not good enough; that she has failed her children; short-changed them; and, worst of all, not even improved on her own parents’ parenting. Because however much we forgive our parents, we all want to improve on the way they parented us. Else what would be the point of existence? It isn’t just about propagating the race or recreating yourself. It’s about picking up that ball and running faster and harder with it than anyone has run before. Or am I wrong? Maybe it’s just me.

Who am I to say, after all; I who had the mouldy baby bath in the garage and tried to give it to the scouts, who bathed my baby in the kitchen sink, who cares so desperately about what kind of little black dress my daughter is going to wear to the family ‘do.’

I once dropped Abby at the top of the stairs, you know. Yes, dropped her, and for an instant watched her flying through the air into a fifteen foot drop. You’re shocked to hear that, I expect. You might be asking yourself how I could do that, seeming to love babies as I do. But everyone can make a mistake, can’t they? Mine was to leave a towel across the top of the stairs. Stupid. Stupid.

I stumbled over it when I was carrying her down. I started to fall. So I let go of her. Actually, I say “so” I let go of her as if it were a conscious decision. It wasn’t. I only had seconds to react and my instinct made the decision for me. And the decision was to let go of her and save myself. Was that clever? Or plain selfish?

I still can’t talk about it without….my heart stops…..I can still feel the terror of it, paralysing me. It paralyses me now, but it didn’t at the time. My reaction was instant and perfect.

I let her fall, steadied myself on the banister, and then reached out and caught her by one dungaree strap as she somersaulted through the air. You couldn’t do that if you tried. If you were a contestant on a bizarre game show called Catch the Baby on the Stairs and the prize was a million pounds, you couldn’t do it. But I did.

And there’s the rub. Even though I know I did the right thing, because if we had both fallen I would have fallen on top of her, I still feel guilty, and I always will. Because I let go of her and saved myself.

Anyway, I’m not here to talk about babies. Although I wish…I do love babies. That’s the one thing that has kept me going all through these terrible teenage years. Soon there will be grandchildren. Babies in the house again.

That’s assuming anyone will marry her of course. Being a Goth. Oh, God, she might even marry one. And then they’ll have little fat, pierced babies all dressed in black. They’ll be like the Addams Family. No…no, it’s just a phase. It’ll pass.

Will it pass in time for my mother’s birthday party though? Somehow I doubt it. She’s going to come down those stairs with a bone through her nose, hair in some elaborate wild contraption that will keep poking in people’s eyes, chains hanging from her like Marley’s ghost and, of course, the little black dress.

“What’s it like?” I’ve asked her. I’ve begged her to tell me.

“It’s little. It’s black. And it’s a dress,” she says. She enjoys my misery.

What did I do? What did I ever do to that girl that she torments me so? I’m just her mum, I suppose. And she’s being strong, just like I wanted her to be.

It makes you wonder about karma, though, doesn’t it? My mind wanders back to my teenage years, I have to say, and the terrible fights with my mum. I was no angel myself – what they called a disturbed child, coming as I did from a broken home. And in those days that meant something. Nowadays they call it a dysfunctional family. I say, show me a family that isn’t dysfunctional and I’ll give you fifty quid.

In the late sixties, being from a broken home was…well…it had a stigma. You didn’t talk about it, and people didn’t know that kids could be psychologically damaged. We were seen and not heard in those days. We wouldn’t have dreamt of talking about our feelings, we didn’t know we had any. So we misbehaved instead. I used to get up at 4am and go for walks in the town. The police picked me up a few times, and drove me home.

“Keep her in,” they would say to my mum. But she didn’t say a word to me about it, ever. And I stopped doing it after a while.

Abby was a ‘runner’ too. There was a time – she was about six - when she kept leaving the house and running round the block. Just to jerk my strings. I ranted at her, taking a different tack from my mother, and she did it all the more. Once she slammed the front door so I would think she’d gone out and then hid in the house. I raced up and down the streets, coming back eventually to ring the police, and found her hiding behind the sofa at home, safe and sound. She was a demon.

I was at my wits end over it, and then one day I decided not to react. I used the positive attention technique I had learned at the parenting classes.

“How lovely to see you,” I said, and hugged her, though I felt like throttling her. “Thanks for coming back.”

She was impressed. She opened up to me.

“Why don’t you trust me, mum?” she said.

“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” I said. “It’s just that you’re only six. And if the police know that I can’t keep you in, they’ll think I’m not good enough to be your mummy, and they might take you away from me.”

She never did it again.

And come to think of it, isn’t that the same technique that my mum used on me? Twenty-five quid those parenting classes cost me, to learn what my mother did instinctively!

So. If I smile and say, “Don’t you look lovely,” maybe she’ll drop this Goth thing. Maybe next time she’ll wear a little black dress that is just that.

Uh-oh, here she comes now. She’s checking herself out in the hall mirror so I’ll take a peek.

Well, it is black, little and a dress. And it is completely see-through, but she’s wearing a slip, and I can’t see any nipples either – just the scary dominatrix corset underneath. Phew. Not too bad really. And her hair is….how on earth does she get it to do that, I wonder?

But, oh my God, her face! There’s…I can’t describe it…a sort of metal spear sticking out of her chin. Honestly. I can’t bear to look. It’s about two inches long; a pencil thin, shiny metal goatee in the middle of her chin. God, grant me the serenity…not to kill her. Okay, positive parenting. Here goes…

“Look at you! Don’t you look a picture? My little baby Abby, all grown up. Come and give mummy a big hug.”

There you go. Perfect parenting. Well…good enough, anyway.