‘Score another black mark for being a terrible mother,’ Mel liked to joke to her col eague in marketing, Vanessa. They joked a lot about being bad mothers although they’d have kil ed anyone who’d actual y cal ed them such.
When you were a working mum, you had to joke about the very thing you were afraid of, Mel said. Her life was dedicated to making sure that two-and-a-half-year-old Carrie and four-year-old Sarah didn’t suffer because she went out to work. If she could possibly help it, nobody would went out to work. If she could possibly help it, nobody would ever be able to describe Mel Redmond as lacking in anything she did.
She loved her job at Lorimar, was highly focused and had once vowed to be one of the company’s publicity directors by the time she was forty.
Two children had changed al of that. Or perhaps Mel had changed as a result of having two children. Like the chicken and the egg, she was never quite sure which had come first. The upshot was that she was now forty, the publicity directorship was a goal that had moved further away instead of closer, and she was struggling to keep al the bal s in the air. As motherhood made her boobs drop, it made her ambition slide as wel .
‘When I grow up, I want to be a business lady with an office and a briefcase,’ the eleven-year-old Mel had written in a school essay.
‘Aren’t you the clever girl?’ her dad had said when she came home with the essay prize. ‘Look at this,’ he told the rest of his family proudly at the next big get-together, holding up the copy book fil ed with Mel’s neat, sloping writing. ‘She’s a chip off the old block, our little Melanie.
Brains to burn.’
Mel’s dad would have gone to university except that there hadn’t been enough money. It was a great joy to him to see his daughter’s potential.
‘Don’t you want to get married at al ?’ asked Mel’s grandmother in surprise. ‘If you get married you can have a lovely home, with babies, and be very happy.’
Mel, who liked the parts of history lessons where girls got to fight instead of stay home and mind the house, simply asked: ‘Why?’
Her father stil thought it was hilarious, and regularly recounted the story of how his Melanie, even as a child, had her heart set on a career.
Mel loved him for being so proud of her, but she’d grown to hate that story. As a kid, she’d assumed that being smart meant you could have it al . She knew better now.
These days she had two jobs, motherhood and career, and even if everyone else thought she was coping, she felt as if she wasn’t doing either of them right. Mel’s standards - for herself
- were staggeringly high.
The third part of the trinity, marriage, wasn’t something she had time to work on. It was just freewheeling along with its own momentum.
‘How does a working mother know when her partner has had an orgasm?’ went a recent email from an old col ege pal.
‘He phones home to tel her.’
It was the funniest thing Mel had heard for a long time, funny in an hysterical, life-raft-with-a-hole-in-it sort of way. But she 8 couldn’t share the joke with anyone, especial y her husband,
Adrian, in case he remarked how accurate it was.
In their household, lovemaking occupied the same level of importance as time spent with each other (nil) and long baths with aromatherapy products to reduce stress (also nil).
Mel’s fervent hope was that if she kept quiet and jol ied the house along, cheerily smiling at Adrian, Carrie and Sarah, then nobody would notice the places where her love and attention were spread thin.
‘Delegate, have some me-time and don’t let your family expect you to be superwoman,’ cooed magazine articles about the stress of the working mother.
After her years working with journalists, Mel knew that these articles were written by one of two types: glamorous young women in offices for whom the notion of children was a distant one; or working mothers who were freelancing at the kitchen table in between picking up the children from school, having long since realised that you couldn’t do it al , but were making a decent living tel ing people you could.
Me-time? What the hel was me-time? And how could you delegate the housework/weekly shop to a pair of underfives and a man who didn’t know how to check can labels for sodium content or benzoates?
She ripped her laddered tights off and stuffed them into her bag before struggling into the new ones. With one last tug at the tourniquet-tight bit cutting into her thigh, she smoothed down the fabric of her plum-coloured skirt - last season Zara, designed to look like Gucci - and raced out of the loo to the mirrors, where she hastily combed her short blonde hair with her fingers. Her roots had grown beyond the boundaries of good taste and were teetering on the line between funky and couldn’t be bothered. Another task for her list. At least she didn’t look forty yet, which was handy, because she had neither the time nor the money for Botox.
Looking younger than she was had been hel when she was eighteen,
looked four years younger and had to produce her student card to get into grown-up films. Now, two children and endless sleepless nights later, it was a blessing.
Nature had given Mel a smal face with a pointed chin, pale skin and arched brows above almond-shaped eyes the same clear blue as the sky after a storm, with hints of violet around the pupils. Maybel ine New York had given her thick black lashes and kiss-proof cherry lipstain that would survive a nuclear attack. A sense of humour meant she had plenty of smile lines around her mouth and she didn’t think she could stand the pain of doing anything about them.
After her second labour, the one that had required the rubber ring for a week, she’d gone right off the idea of any sort of delicate stitching.
She looked at her watch. It was five past ten. Damn, damn, damn. Late. Too late for the lift. She gal oped up the stairs, managing to find her lipgloss as she ran.
Edmund Moriarty, the chief executive of Lorimar Health Insurance, had just taken his seat at the top of the big conference room but there was stil a mild hum of conversation, al owing Mel to slip in and make her way to a free seat on the left.
One of the biggest health insurance companies in the country, Lorimar had been a market leader for twenty years, but lots of new international firms were now on the scene and business was tough. Today’s gathering was a strategy meeting about how Lorimar could face the increased threat of competition. Normal y, strategy meetings were for high-level executives, and someone like Mel, who was one of the company’s four publicity managers, wouldn’t have been invited. But this was a ‘cheer up the team’ meeting, ‘to remind us that we’re stil tops,’ as Hilary said, so lesser beings were there today with the firm’s big-hitters. Privately, Mel thought that the only things that would cheer up the Lorimar team were a pay rise and bringing in that Calvin Klein underwear model as post boy. She just thanked God it was merely a meeting today instead of paint-bal ing in the back of beyond, which had been last year’s concept of team-building. Those paint bal s bruised like hel . Edmund Moriarty tapped his microphone to gain everybody’s attention and al heads snapped round in his direction.
‘How do we go forward? - that is the question,’ he began, his voice gravel y. ‘Lorimar is the market leader but stiff competition means we must keep striving.’
The seventy people in the room listened careful y. Mel took a pad of paper from her attache case and uncapped the onyx and gold pen her parents had given her for her fortieth birthday. Although she dated the top piece of paper and kept her gaze on the boss, her mind was on the second sheet of paper. The top sheet was ready to be covered with gems of wisdom from the chief executive so that it looked as if she was paying attention. The other was the list of things Mel had to achieve that day - a day that was diminishing as Edmund pontificated to everyone about what they already knew. The list read: Speech for Publicity Forum lunch.
Go over brochure photos with fine-tooth comb.
Phone Sentinel journalist re psychiatric case.
Pick up nappies, wipes and vegetables. Chicken, beans and kids’ yogurts.
Talk to Adrian about Saturday. His mother? Can’t ask mine.
Buy tights!!!
Fairy costume - where to buy?
Multitasking - a way of life, Mel knew, so that working mothers could hold on to their jobs and stil keep the home fires burning. She could see her female col eagues concentrating - or at least pretending to be - on what Edmund was saying. Hilary’s face wore that serene expression that said she was listening intently, but Vanessa was staring glassy-eyed at where he was standing and simultaneously trying to text on her mobile phone. Vanessa had a thirteen-year-old son, Conal, and apparently, thirteen-year-old boys were even harder to control than two underfive girls.
Vanessa was divorced and was Mel’s best friend in the company. They were nearly the same age, they had the same sense of humour and they’d both admitted privately to each other that balancing work and home life was ten times harder than doing the actual job at Lorimar.
‘If management knew just how good we were at doing four things at once - like organising to get the washing machine fixed, sorting out after-school activities, remembering to pick up groceries, and fire-fighting in the office, then we’d both be promoted like a shot,’ Mel had said the week before, when they were enjoying their once-a-month blow-out lunch at the That restaurant with the handsome young waiters.
‘Yes, but if we were promoted, we’d have to stay even later in the office in the evening and be even guiltier about it. So why even try to break the glass ceiling? Sorry, the guilt ceiling!’ Vanessa laughed, remembering their joke.
The promotion ceiling wasn’t made of glass for working mothers, they’d decided - it was made of maternal guilt. ‘Or possibly a gilt ceiling,’ Mel added thoughtful y. ‘Looks great but is fake close up. Like false boobs.’ She looked down at her own now-modest 34B cup. ‘I wish I had the money and the courage to get them done.’
‘Oh, stop going on about your boobs,’ Vanessa groaned.
‘They’re fine.’
‘Yeah, if fine means they droop down to my knees, then they’re perfectly fine,’ Mel grinned. ‘Anyway, we’ve got to stop using the word “fine”. Do you know what it stands for?
Fucked up, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional.’
‘Sounds just like me,’ said Vanessa. ‘Next time anyone asks me, I’l say “I’m fine”.’ Hearing about struggles with Vanessa’s son made Mel feel sorry about how easy she had it by comparison. She had left having children until she was that bit older, which meant she was ready to settle down into motherhood when she became pregnant at thirty-five. Vanessa had found the double blue line when she was twenty-four.
Plus, Mel had a husband to share it al with. Vanessa had an ex-husband who had a new wife, a new family and no real interest in the mistakes of his youth apart from trying to weasel out of his maintenance payments for Conal. Sure, the washer/dryer was a mystery to Adrian, and he stil laboured under the impression that elves fil ed the fridge at night by magic. But despite al that, he was there, another grown-up to share the parenting burdens. Nobody who’d seen him painstakingly doing jigsaws with Carrie or making dinosaurs out of Plasticine with Sarah could deny that he was a bril iant, incredibly patient dad. Mel’s own dinosaurs always looked like giant slugs.
She was lucky with childcare too. The Little Tigers Nursery beside Abraham Park on one of Carrickwel ’s prettiest treelined roads was a fantastic place for children. Mel had heard such horror stories about day care: babies who were al ergic to dairy products being given milk; toddlers getting gigantic bites from other children … There had never been any such problems with Little Tigers. But what would it be like when Sarah went to school? Mel wisely decided that she’d worry about that later. She counted her blessings.
Look at al the people who’d kil for what she had - a great job, a great husband and wonderful kids. OK, so there was never much time for herself, but there was some. And she was working, something she’d sworn she’d never give up when she had her babies. She was living the modern woman’s dream, wasn’t she?
An hour later, Edmund Moriarty was stil going strong. ‘We care,’ he intoned now. ‘That’s the message we have to deliver to each and every one of our customers: Lorimar cares.’ Mel nodded along with everyone else: We care -
message received, O glorious leader.
When Edmund’s laser gaze swept past her, like prison camp searchlights seeking out escapees, she went back to writing diligently on her notepad and sucked in her pelvic floor as she’d been shown in her one and only Pilates class. Might as wel get something from the meeting.
Suck and hold for a count of ten. Pilates was the way forward and was even featured on the company’s health website - which Mel was involved in - as a way for people to get into shape. Mel stil wished she’d been able to manage more than one class after childbirth but she’d been back in work three months after Sarah was born, two after Carrie, and there just hadn’t been the time to fit in Pilates. Her pelvic floor would have to stay as droopy as her boobs.
Final y, Edmund shut up and Mel was able to escape back to her desk. There were seventeen messages on her voice mail. They were al work-related except for the last one: ‘Hi, Mel, this is Dawna from Little Tigers. Just to remind you that tomorrow’s the zoo day for Sarah so she’l need extra warm clothes, and that Carrie can go if you’d like, but if it rains we won’t take the little ones. I know it’s a bad time of year but the Siberian tigers are only going to be there for another week and we’ve promised the children we’d go. It’s fifty euro for both children - that covers the bus hire, entrance fee and lunch. Or twenty-five euro if it’s just Sarah. See you tonight. Bye.’ Mel added another note to her list. ‘Zoo day for girls. Leave money out for Adrian.’
Wednesday was Adrian’s morning for taking the girls to Little Tigers. Mel did the nursery run the other four mornings before getting the train from Carrickwel into the Lorimar offices in Dublin, but on Wednesdays there was a breakfast meeting of the marketing and publicity departments, so Mel had to be in work early. She remembered when getting up earlier on Wednesdays had been a total pain because she had to set her alarm clock for seven instead of half-past.