Mummy Needs Help by Susan Edmunds

Author:Susan Edmunds [Barlow, Christie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-02-10T17:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Tricia Mullane, 8:37pm : ‘How do you teach your kids to have a filter? We were out for dinner tonight and a man walked in with an eye patch. Mr 5 audibly gasped and literally yelled, ‘Look, Mum, it’s a pirate!’ I could have crawled under the table. Same day he told someone in a wheelchair that they were too old for a stroller.’

Nick

Age: Seven months

I once told a group of friends that I’d rather be single than be the type of guy who has to beg for permission for a night out. Surely relationships are built on mutual trust and understanding, I’d ranted to the group assembled around a big wooden slab of a table at a rundown pizza joint. I was barely past my mid-twenties but already thought I knew everything – as you do before you realise how dumb you really are.

Then I grew up and had a baby. I felt less than useless at home most of the time, Renee and I were still barely talking and I was more like a third wheel than that time my mother made me entertain my cousin and his wife when they were on honeymoon from the US. But I still felt pressure to be home every minute that I wasn’t working, unless I had an extremely good excuse.

It turned out that the next excuse I would get came from Sam. This was a guy who shared motivational posts online like ‘live to work, don’t work to live’, but he was sitting at his desk at six o’clock on a Friday evening, literally shuffling paper. In a gym. Where he expressly asked that his job include ‘no paperwork’.

I looked at him. ‘What are you doing?’

He glanced up as if I had caught him in the act of stealing something from the work kitchen fridge. ‘I’m just tidying. Paper mountain …’

I cut him off. ‘You are not. What’s up?’

He put his face in his hands. A minute passed before I realised, with horror, that he was crying. The sort of weird quiet tears that men produced when they haven’t been in the habit of crying for many years.

‘It didn’t work,’ he spluttered at last then looked up. ‘Sorry, man. Pathetic.’

‘Don’t be an idiot.’ I slid into the chair opposite him. ‘You mean the baby stuff. It didn’t stick or whatever?’

He nodded. ‘She’s so upset. We had a month on those pills that are meant to get things moving but nothing doing except making her grumpy and sick. So, so grumpy. I don’t even know what to do next.’

‘I’m sure you’re doing a good job. Not much you can do, I guess?’

‘I feel so powerless. Like I just want to fix it, you know?’

I nodded. I did. When I heard Renee waking for the fourth or fifth time in the night for Holly, or puzzling over why she just threw on to the floor all the food Renee had cut up and arranged into pretty patterns on her plate, I wanted to come up with a solution for all the problems.

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