eye of newt

“Couldn’t you make me sound caring?” my mother said.
Ever a slave to the truth, I was bound to pause.
“Well, there is the stuff about the hamster,” I said, floundering, as if in an interview when asked to discuss my achievements and finding that particular folder marked empty. “And the bird.”
The pause sounded sad this time.
“It just doesn’t sound quite enough,” she said.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said, dizzy with the unaccustomed sensation of being granted the upper hand. as rare for me as an unsupervised go on the TV remote control.
I put down the phone (firm but fair) leaving my poor mother to totter to her kitchen and mash her destroyed gnashers on an omelette. For the last 30 years she has battled with her teeth. A serious design flaw, we have decided, that bridging bit between body and inside. And now her sine qua non is root canal. If she’s not going to the dentist forking out £200 a time, she has just been or is going tomorrow. There are operations and in between there are check ups where her regular dentist peers and winces and pats her shoulder. Big money exchanges hands: one way as usual. Leaving my mother the choice of soup, yoghurt or soup. Or yoghurt. Or if she’s feeling defiant, an omelette.
But she’s very caring. Very very caring.
Have I said that she is very caring?
And while I’m in penance land, I should point out that the Daisy Loves a Chicken type of books my brother was buying for his 7 year old are to help her in her third language, English. She’s doing Sartre in the original back home in Paris, and saves her native Dante for bedtime. Who can deny her kung fu unicorns in the face of that expertise? Not even me, though God knows it hurts to say so.
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Meanwhile, when not momentarily alert to my duty of playing fair by my family, I have been busy multi-tasking. Not a concept I embrace naturally, finding deadly onerous the notion of chewing gum AND walking simultaneously. Heaven forbid.
No, my multi-tasking is of the maternal kind where I don’t actually have to do anything but react.

At one polar end is T11, newly endowed recipient of about 85 Grade 5s at SATS and fine Bottom of this parish who has just acted his mismatched little socks off in the school version of Midsummer’s Night Dream. An abridgement fashioned predominantly around the mechanicals thereby rendering his part the most important.
Oh yes.
And all those lines! None of which you can fudge (being the real thing, not kiddyfied), nor sort of make up on the hoof, not with all the “ousel cock so black of hue” and “O dainty duck, O dear, thy mantle good ..” and “stolen hence” etc. No, he had to learn them all. And did. And made them charming. Jack Sparrow does Bottom.
Now, normally, I am not one to enjoy Species Child Actor, finding it a stiff and stilted little breed in urgent need of a slap and, normally, moreover, I am a fierce judge of my own children, wishing to protect them from a wider criticism by being the first to notice it myself. But, as Bottom, dear T11 found his zenith.
"Of course," my mother said, "He's far too pretty to play Bottom."
I contemplated in peeved silence how the role of Titania should indeed have been his, flowing robes and lots of lace, rather than ass's ears and a colander on his head.
We went in with scant expectation – and who would have thought it, a Shakespearean comedy which was actually highly amusing? The audience chortled and clapped and I was all but mobbed at the end by admiring parents.
Friends, I wafted, Cloud 9 was mine and on this happy day, my inner Mrs Clooney rose magnificently to the challenge as I kindly nodded modest acceptance of his fine turn. (Incidentally, quite why the mothers of stars don’t have more of an on-going role escapes me. Surely people are more than interested in hearing what Johnny Depp’s mother might have to say on any given subject? I certainly have respect for the fine woman given now that we have more in common.) while gracious enough to boom, very Margot Ledbetter, how Simply Marvellous all the children had been. Smiles all round. I fumbled discretely for a pen ready to favour one or two grateful random souls with an autograph, should they be so lucky. Goodness I could warm to some Lady Mayoress type role. I am wasted on housework.

In the corner, something sawed away at my contentment. F9, indulging in his very own Gene Kelly: his penguin umbrella not being employed as Fit for Purpose but trespassing into dangerous weapon land as careless of its spokes he spun beneath its private glow oblivious to all around him.
My antennae bristled as shades of glory passeth onto the fog of despair. We scooped up the miscreant before true damage was done, and went home, only very slightly cross.

Today at breakfast, F9 growled, “Oi ‘ate B9.”
As do we all, I thought, a stranger to the idea of loving all children as mine own, particularly with regard to the odious B9.
“What’s happened now?” I asked, shrill, buttering the muffin with a little more desperation, the knife clutched tight (“Is this a dagger that I see before me…).
“He said to all the boys at lunchtime to put up their hands if they hated me. They all did. Apart from A9 and J9.”

Reader, hell hath no fury like a mother scorned, my blood boiled as pain and fury surged my arteries. Long have we suffered at the hands of this troll-like runt, this hateful little toad, this herder of pathetic sheep, larding our days with discontent. A brutal creature is he, hewn from sub-standard stone and laced with aggressive swagger. His nostrils flare disdainful, a Flashman for our days in idle search of a Tom Brown to plague. His Tom Brown, my F9, resists, but still B9 does not tire of his torment.
It does not help that his mother virtually lives at the school, forever "helping"and Queen of the PTA. They are the stuff of nightmares. The child sees himself as inviolable.
“He’s not,” the headmaster was quick to say.
For F9 to tell me about it meant that it hurt. He is a brave little soul, not easy, but brave. I said that, too.

Nothing comes of nothing, so I approached the headmaster at the gates.
“Still glowing with pride?” he asked.
“Yes, no, well, didn’t they all do marrrrvellously,” I heard Mrs Clooney purr, slipping easily into favoured character, touched by T11’s success. Then, frailty took hold of the vocals, part harridan, part insipid soul on the brink of tears, a lean and hungry look for justice on me. I burbled out the new discontent.
He looked concerned and promised to investigate. I think he thinks that he is a detective.

On my way from school I was accosted by J9’s mother. Worse was in store: she filled in more details of yesterday’s “incident” giving the brutal tale more flesh, none of it nice and most of it below the belt.
“I hope you don’t think I’m tittle-tattling,” she said, her tongue sliding out between her teeth.
I called back into school and blurted out the whole sorry story, apologetic but fretful. There was an onslaught of Inappropriates and Unacceptables and Procedures. Something is rotten in the state of the system but he still says, he’ll see what he can do.

Wish me luck. I’m about to sally forth for the update.
And tonight, my carrot of reward luring me through to sanity: one last bask at Bottom, where Mrs Clooney will film the entire MND, the final performance. Leaving me something to drool over when age has withered me. When I have but dim memories of painful times featuring penguin umbrellas, when the name B has lost its power to hurt, when I am old and grey and signifying nothing.