23 April 2006, 2 a.m.

Tonight, Michelle babysat while Mark and I went out for dinner. I didn’t have to negotiate about bedtime, how many stories, brushing teeth. I didn’t have to turn on the night light or leave the door open at exactly the right angle. All that was Michelle’s responsibility, and she was paid handsomely for it.

‘Mark’s taking me to the Bay Tree, the best restaurant in town,’ I told Mum on the phone earlier. ‘He thinks I’m stressed and need a treat to cheer me up.’ There was a touch of defiance in my voice, I’m sure, and after I’d delivered my news I sat back and waited to see if Mum would agree or disagree.

She asked her usual question, ‘Who’s looking after Lucy?’, her voice full of concern.

‘Michelle,’ I said. She always does, on the rare occasions that Mark and I aren’t too shattered to venture out at night. Mum knows this but still asks every time, to check I’m not going to say, ‘Oh, Michelle’s busy tonight, but don’t worry, I found a tramp on the street earlier-he’s agreed to do it for a bottle of methylated spirits and we won’t even have to give him a lift home afterwards.’

‘You won’t be back late, will you?’ Mum asked.

‘Probably, yes,’ I said. ‘Since we’re unlikely to set off till after eight thirty. Why? What does it matter what time we get back?’ Every time Mark and I dare to go out for the evening alone, I think of that poem I learned at school: on a dark night, full of inflamed desires-oh, lucky chance!-I slipped out without being noticed, all being then quiet in my house.

Mum said, ‘I just thought… Lucy’s a bit funny at night at the moment, isn’t she? This whole scared-of-monsters thing. Will she be okay if she wakes up and there’s only Michelle there?’

‘If you mean would she prefer to have me dancing attendance on her in the small hours, yes, she probably would. If you mean will she survive the night, yes, she probably will.’

Mum made a clucking noise. ‘Poor little thing!’ she said. ‘Mark and I could always just have a starter and a glass of tap water each and be back here by nine thirty,’ I said-another test for her to fail.

‘Do come back as soon as you can, won’t you?’ she said.

‘Mark thinks I need a break,’ I said loudly, thinking: This is absurd. If I took a half-hearted overdose, everyone would be quick to say it was ‘a cry for help’. But when I actually cry for help in the more literal sense, my own mother can’t hear me. ‘Do you think I need a break, Mum?’ For over thirty years I was the person who mattered most to her; now I’m just the gatekeeper to her precious granddaughter.

‘Well…’ She started spluttering and making throat-clearing noises, anything to avoid answering. What she thinks is that I shouldn’t even be aware of my own needs now that I’m a mother.

I didn’t enjoy the meal, as it turned out. Not because of Mum. I never do enjoy my breaks, long or short, from Lucy. I look forward to them intensely, but as soon as they begin, I can feel them starting to end. I feel the temporariness of my freedom, and find it hard to concentrate on anything other than the sensation of it trickling away. Proper freedom is the kind you can keep. If you have to buy it (from Michelle), and are only granted it by someone else’s kind permission (school, Michelle), then it’s worthless.

When I’m not with Lucy, it’s almost worse than when I am. Especially at the end of a period away from her, when ‘crunch time’ is approaching. I dread the moment when I first see her, when she sees me, in case it’s worse than ever before. Sometimes it’s fine, and then the dread goes away. I sit next to Lucy on the sofa and we hold hands and watch TV, or we read a book together, and I say to myself, ‘Look, this is fine. You’re doing fine. What’s there to be so terrified of?’ But other times it isn’t fine and I run round the house like a slave pursued by the master’s whip, trying to find the toy or game or hairclip that will pacify her. Mark says I set too high a standard for myself, wanting her to be happy all the time. ‘No one is happy all the time,’ he says. ‘If she cries, she cries. Sometimes you should try just saying, “Tough,” and seeing what happens.’

He doesn’t understand at all. I don’t want to see what happens. I want to know what’s going to happen in advance. This is why I can’t relax in Lucy’s presence, because there seems to be no law of cause and effect in operation. I do my absolute best every single moment that I’m with her, and sometimes it works and everything is fine, and other times it’s a disaster-I put on her favourite DVD and she shrieks because it’s the wrong episode of Charlie and Lola. Or I suggest that we read her favourite book and she spits at me that she doesn’t like that book any more.

When I do succeed in pleasing her, I sit beside her with a tense smile plastered to my face, trying not to do anything that might bring about a change of mood. I love Lucy too much-I can’t extricate my own mood from hers, and this offends my independent spirit. I can barely express how much I resent her when she puts the itchy hook of her discontent into my mind. That one tiny action is enough to shatter my good mood. I look at her face, contorted in dissatisfaction, and I think, I can’t separate myself from this person. I can’t forget about her. She’s got me, for ever. And then I think about how much she takes from me every day in terms of energy and effort and even my essence, even the bit of me that makes me who I am-she takes all that, without appreciating it, every minute of every day, and despite all this she chooses to make things even worse for me by whining when she’s got nothing to be unhappy about. That’s when I’m aware of the danger.

I’ve never really done anything. The only objectively bad thing I’ve done is drive away from Lucy once, when she was three. It was a Saturday morning and we’d been to the library. I didn’t particularly want to go. I’d have preferred to go for a sauna or a manicure-something for me. But Lucy was bored and needed an activity, so I silenced the voice in my mind that was shouting, ‘Somebody please shoot me in the head, I can’t bear any more of this tedium!’ and took my daughter to the library. We spent over an hour looking at children’s books, reading, choosing. Lucy had a brilliant time, and I even started to relax and enjoy it a bit (though I was constantly aware that people who didn’t have children were spending their Saturday mornings in ways that were far superior). The problem arose when I said it was time to go home. ‘Oh, Mummy, no!’ Lucy protested. ‘Can’t we stay for a bit longer? Please?’

At moments like this-and there are many when you’ve got children, at least one a day and usually more-I feel like a political leader wrestling with a terrible dilemma. Do I appease and hope to be treated leniently? That never works. Appease a despot and he will only oppress you even more, knowing he can get away with it. Do I steel myself for a fight, knowing that whether I win or lose there will be terrible devastation on all sides?

I knew Lucy would get hungry very soon so I stood firm and said, no, we needed to go home and have lunch. I promised to bring her to the library again the following weekend. She screamed as if I’d proposed to gouge out her eyeballs, and refused to get into the car. When I tried to pick her up, she fought me, kicking and punching with all her might. I stayed calm and told her that if she didn’t cooperate and get into the car, I would go home without her. She paid no attention. She shrieked, ‘I’m not happy about you, Mummy, you’re making me very cross!’ So I got into the car and drove away, alone.

I can’t describe how exciting it was. Inside my head I was cheering, ‘You did it! You did it! Hooray! You finally stood up to her!’ I drove slowly, so that I could see Lucy’s face in the rear-view mirror. Her angry screams stopped abruptly, and I watched the expression on her face turn from blank shock to panic. She didn’t move, didn’t run towards the car, but she threw her arms out in front of her, opening and closing the fingers of both hands, as if by doing that she could grasp me and pull me back. I could see her mouth moving, and lip-read the word ‘Mummy!’, repeated several times. Never in a million years would she have expected me to drive away without her.