When our two children were born, my husband Peter had a good job while I was a writer, with intermittent work and no financial security.
Stephanie Calman
Then, his good job turned into contracts which got shorter and shorter, until, when Lawrence was ten and Lydia nine, he became self-employed, like me.
My parents were both commercial artists and I grew up surrounded by pens, paints, drawing boards and a lot of paper. Deadlines ruled, and they’d sometimes work into the night. But Peter’s parents were the most traditional you could imagine: his mother knitted, sewed and baked, and his father went to work with his briefcase and pipe. So whereas I was used to being my own boss, he had to make a huge change.
Unlike most of us, who say we’re going to write a novel and do one paragraph before gazing at funny cat memes for ten years, Peter actually did. Then another, and another. But still, we spent carefully. No new car, telly or music kit; no replacing the carpets or fixing the shower that helpfully washed two people simultaneously – one actually in the shower, one in the room below. No credit cards. There was one essential we agreed to keep: our part-time helper, Katarina. She toilet trained them, taught them to share and even to count. Life without her was unthinkable.
We have two small rooms at the top of the house and as Peter had previously had a real office to go to, I’d already got the nicer one, leaving him little more than a cubbyhole under the eaves.
Michael Caine once said that the secret to a successful marriage is two bathrooms; for writers it’s surely two studies. You aren’t disturbed by each other’s phone calls and ‘comic’ ramblings (me), and when you yell that you can’t go and sort out some squabble or tantrum because you’ve just got the flow going – the other person can’t see that you are in fact browsing earrings and pasta bowls (me again).
His self-discipline was astonishing. While I watched sitcoms and old music videos, stuck for words, I’d hear him briskly tapping away, like the girls at school who always did their homework instead of going out with boys: in other words, a goody-goody.
Still, I could hardly complain.
Being a Morning Person he’d leap up at seven and whizz off with the kids while I was still under the duvet. And when Lawrence hit five - and we discovered that Nursery and Reception were half a mile apart – we took one child each. Whoever had the furthest away deadline would do the afternoon.
As for household duties, I’d become very keen on cooking when they were babies, as making supper got me out of putting them to bed. Even so, I was usually deadbeat by eight and often fell asleep mid-story on their bunks, leaving him to take over. Or Katarina would stay and read to them while he and I went for a drink together to reconnect as a couple.
Ten years on, not much has changed.
He’s in a choir, goes for twelve mile country walks with his friends, falls asleep in front of Netflix and still manages to produce more words than me.
Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years is published by Picador