Dear Mother

After having read Bring up the bodies, I could not wait to get my hand on another novel written by Hilary Mantel. Earlier this year, I had placed an order for her debut novel with  a local independent bookstore and was glad that my copy of  Every day is Mother’s day arrived in May. The timing  was  perfect in that Mother’s Day was celebrated a couple of weeks before  and I  had just posted an essay about how some men might not be too thrilled with the idea of parenting, as described by  John O’Farell through the sentiments expressed by the protagonist, Michael Adams who live a double life in The Best a Man Can Get , a satire written by O’Farell.        http://lifang-leehong.blogspot.com/2015/05/parenthood.html

Similarly the mothers in the debut novel by Hilary Mantel do not seem to  cope well with their parenting jobs either. In Every day is Mother’s day, Evelyn Axon is a medium by trade and her daughter, Muriel is a half-wit by nature but she is devious. Young and inexperienced social worker, Isabel Field meet Colin Sidney in a creative class and start an affair that is doomed from the start as Colin is married to Sylvia who is now expecting their fourth child. Evelyn and Muriel live next door to Colin’s sister, Florence. Colin and his wife, Sylvia do not seem to be able to  manage their three kids well. Colin habitually enroll  in courses and classes after work  to get away from his wife , Sylvia who has grown into a highly strung lady. Poor Sylvia.

Mantel writes,

‘Colin moved and took her by the arm. A corner of the vegetable rack caught him painfully on the shin.

“ This is what I stay for,” he said.” They’re your children, you wanted them. Can’t you manage better than this ? Do you realize this is what I stay for?”

“Stay?” Sylvia gaped. “And where are you planning to go? What are you talking about ? Who else in the name of God would want you?” Her mouth quivered like Karen’s , in disbelief, and suddenly tears plopped out of her pale blue eyes and ran down onto her housecoat, Christmas or no Christmas, the first in years.’

Both Colin and Sylvia have been invited to dinner and at the last minute, their baby- sitter has decided not to turn up as her grandpa is visiting and when Colin tries to persuade her about earning her pocket money, she responds with this:

“Well, it’s only one fifty, isn’t it, and if Grandad sees me he gives me a fiver.”

Here is part of the exchange between Colin and Sylvia when they have to figure out who they can entrust  their children with as they are due at their dinner host’s place in forty-five minutes.

Mantel writes ,

“ You phone her,” Colin said. “ You got us into this mess.”

“I’d like to know why it’s always my problem to fix up a babysitter. You always leave it to me and then you criticize. It’s you that wants to go this dinner, not me.”

“ All right,” Colin said, “all right. Then I’ll just phone up Frank and say we can’t make it, shall I ? Frank goes to a lot of trouble over his dinner parties. He’s very interested in cooking and he goes to a lot of trouble, trying to select the right guests.”

“ And I go to trouble every night of the week. You don’t think about that.”

In Every Day is Mother’s Day, two stories run parallel and the characters  are intertwined. A horrible secret lurks in the darkness of the Axon household as Isabel the social worker feels duty bound to investigate, the result is  terrifying and at the same time hilarious. Mantel is a very good story teller and you can  visualize  the characters and the surroundings as you read all the descriptions  through her prose.

‘Click, click, click, said the mock-cros. They were Mrs Sidney’s shoes. She passed without mishap along the Avenue, over that flagstone with its wickedly raised edge where Mr Tillotson had tripped last winter and sustained his fracture; they had petitioned the council. Mrs Sidney's good legs, the legs of a woman of twenty-five, moved like scissors down the street. Her face was white and tired, her scarlet lips spoke of an effort at gaiety. She had carried the colour over the line of her thin lips into a curvaceous bow; she had once red in a magazine that this could be done.’

I will have to get the next novel Vacant Possession by Hilary Mantel  as the story continues with the same characters.

Parenthood

We do not necessarily know the stuff of thought others carry in their heads no matter how close or chummy we are with them unless they talk to us. When two people get married, becoming parents and raising children seem to be the natural order of things. When the child is born, often both parents if not one  parent has this all consuming obsessive love for the little one that the entire relationship takes on a different dynamic where attention is shifted to the baby. What if parenthood is thrust upon a man or a woman when he or she is not quite ready for it or worse they are  just never cut out to be parents ? Maybe due to biological make up, a woman seems more ready to  valiantly take on her role as a mother coping on her own even in the absence of a man who is away due to work and various commitments.  It is commonly known that after a day’s work, some married men  unwind themselves by taking part in activities such as golfing and drinking with friends. Some of these men are probably keeping scores that  their work stress is so great that it is perfectly legitimate for them to hang out with friends to de-stress and re-create those carefree days or that they are networking and looking for opportunities  to  a better future. If they  assume  that the children will form the substratum of their marriage, they will sooner or later find out that such a notion is a misconception. They must know that their  children will grow up and they might just have  missed their chances of caring and nurturing them. 

The Best a Man Can Get written by John O’Farrell tells a story about  a man who shares a bachelor pad with three other men in their twenties in order to escape from the exhausting life of a parent to  a two year old , a baby and a  third one  is  on his way. Michael Adams is living a  double life. He  is a jingle writer for adverts so he tells his wife, Catherine that he has to pull all-nighters  when in fact he escapes to a bachelor pad where he spends his days lying in bed , playing computer and musical trivia games and occasionally  gets some work done and when he is up to it, he crosses the Thames and goes back to his real life. During the antenatal classes that he attends with his wife for their third baby, he starts airing the reality to the crowd of fathers-to-be who are new parents. He allows himself a private chuckle at all the naïve enthusiasm of the first – time parents who are all completely consumed by their child before it had even been born. He wants to say to them, ‘don’t keep coming to these parenting classes , go to the cinema together instead, go out for dinner, just do things for yourselves while you still can.’

The story is told in the protagonist’s voice.

‘They were as eager to hear about my experience as I was to recount them. No other man in the room had yet become a parent and they looked to me as the war- scarred veteran, back from battle, full of horrific tales from the front line of fatherhood.

Millennium Bridge,London

    “But the thing that really disappears overnight is your youth. Suddenly your youth is over. I tried to artificially recreate mine,” I said enigmatically, ’but it hasn’t really worked. As soon as you become responsible for someone very, very young, it suddenly makes you feel very, very old. For one thing you are exhausted, both physically and emotionally, and if you have time to still do any of the things you did as a young man, you will find yourself struggling to tackle them with the weary foreboding of an overwhelmed pensioner. By the time the children start to be less physically demanding you’ve aged ten years in he space of two or three, so it’s too late to get it back anyway. You will look in the mirror at the graying hair and sagging face nd you will think, Where the bloody hell did he come from? But you don’t just look old and feel old in your bones, you think old. Your fuss and your worry about your children, but you don’t realize or care that you’re walking down the street with odd socks and your hair sticking up. You become fretful and sensible and organized , and if you ever do anything carefree and spontaneous together it’s because two weeks ago you set aside an hour to do something carefree and spontaneous together. The day that baby comes out it’s over. Your independence, your youth. Your pride-everything that made you what you were. You have to start again from scratch.’

The protagonist laments,

‘In all the adverts that I’d arranged the music for , the families always had such fun; they always looked so comfortable with each other. Even though I worked in the industry I still hadn’t seen through the lies.’

‘ The adverts told us we could have it all , we could be great dads and still go off snowboarding and earn lots of money and pop out of the business meeting to tell our children a bedtime story on the mobile phone. But it can’t be done. Work, family and self; it’s an impossible Rubik’s Cube, You can’t be a hands-on, sensitive father and a tough ,high- earning businessman and a pillar of your local community and a handy do-it- yourself Mr Fixit and a romantic, attentive husband- something has to give . In my case, everything.’

Mike feels guilty about his deception though he tries to justify that it is for the sake of the marriage. When Catherine comes to know about  Mike's double life, he  almost loses it all. In fictions things are usually okay at the end. Nonetheless the book is a satire that  gives insights into the psyches of men and women and the demands of contemporary living. O’Farell’s observations about parenthood and his descriptions about the power play and dynamics in a couple are very real and often hilarious. It is candid and funny.

Monaco