Happy Families

End of an Era Stephanie Calman - 5 June 2010

We're coming to the end of an era. Well, the children are coming to the beginning of one, but where they see beginnings, we tend to see endings. From September we will no longer be walking Lawrence to school.

We only do it now because he lets us. The other reason is it's our only exercise: half an hour at a brisk pace past the chestnut trees. It's such a nice walk we fight over whose turn it is. There are two parents and only five days in the week so it can get nasty. We only walk in the mornings; at the end of the day, laden with geography folders, French textbooks and rugby boots, he gets a lift. And in September he'll not only be thirteen, he'll be going to a school which is so near he'll almost be able to leap from his bedroom window into the playing fields. So he will be at the beginning of adolescence, and we will be at the end of our morning walks.p>What we adults will miss, apart from the mild stretching of the legs, and the chance to get all the conkers before everyone else, is the conversation.

When you have children no-one tells you about the conversation. Well, my father did but I thought that was just him. He liked nothing better than to take a stroll to here, or there, or a cakeshop, talking about this or that. When I was three we went to Cornwall and walked along the beach discussing whether fish and chips tasted better with vinegar. It wasn't a very demanding theme intellectually, but he had to come up with something at short notice as he'd told me a witch lived in the cave near our rented cottage and I believed him. I was the less cerebrally developed of the two, and still am. So every other day, when it's my turn for the walk, Lawrence tells me stuff.

I went to grammar school and yet what I don't know could fill a line of skips from here to Mars. So I'm getting another education by proxy. I look upon it as being like new software that you're allowed to share with three friends. We pay for one for Lawrence ? well, ok two, as Lydia likes to go as well, and four of us reap the benefit. Strictly speaking I get more out of it than Peter does as I'm relearning Latin, which he never did. I can almost say: 'The man is telling the people who are coming into the city, to go out again.' It's just a question of finding the right moment to say it - possibly if I open the door to someone from Ukip. The first Latin sentence I ever learned was 'A whale approaches', so I am at least working towards something suitable for everyday use.

You get a fair amount of sky in our corner of south London, and sometimes on our walks Lawrence tells me the names of the various clouds. I'm considerably worse at clouds than Latin, and tend for example to get cumulo-nimbus mixed up with nimbo-cumulus so he often has to tell me again. Or he explains about noble gases and unstable compounds. When I hear that second phrase I tend to think of marriage, which is one reason why he is quite likely to go to university whereas I never did.

Or sometimes we just walk along designing our ideal house. We're both quite keen on energy saving features, like a magnetic force that could suck all the litter into an invisible bin behind the wall - or anything that would save us unnecessary bending.

Sometimes I think of something that I know, and tell him.

"Do you know why Goldfinger's number plate is AU 1?' I say, and he says,

"Yes. It's the symbol for gold.'
And then:
'You've told me that like, loads of times.'
'Oh. Have I?'br>'Never mind, Mummy,' he says. 'Let's think of somewhere to walk to when we no longer have to walk to school.'

Perhaps we are at the beginning of something after all.

The New Buddhism Stephanie Calman - 25 April 2010

Lydia has announced her intention to become a Buddhist. Yes: Buddhism, the belief system founded by Sid Arthur whose adherents divest themselves of all meaningless worldly goods. She's got the idea from Lawrence, whose interest I first became aware of when he asked if he could have the little wooden Buddha I brought back years ago from Bangkok. I'm not clear how else his faith manifests itself, though he claims to meditate - whether between, or during, time on the Wii I can't tell.

Just as peace was once defined as the gaps between wars, I imagine contemplation will soon be what we do between bouts of acquisition. Apparently one huge shopping centre actually has a 'Place of Peace & Quiet' amongst the retail outlets, presumably where you go when the full horror suddenly dawns on you of how much you've just spent and you have to sit down really fast.

I must tell the children this, I think, as I pass from room to room carrying armfuls of discarded clothes, half-read school letters and old newspapers. They are in the sitting room, Wii controllers at their sides, discussing their new faith.

"So where can I get a Buddha then?" says Lydia.

I refrain from leaping out to ask if she's thought beyond the shopping element of the religion.

"Get a Buddha?" exclaims Lawrence. "You don't even know the Four Special Signs!"

I do know the Four Special Signs, but only because they?' both done them in RE and Lawrence's, from Year 4, features a man being spectacularly sick. In case you don't have them to hand, the Four Special Signs are the Old Man, the Sick Man, the Dead Man and the Wise Man. Notice that 'wise' comes after 'dead', at least in the version we have on our wall.

"Lydia," I say. "Let's help you prepare for Buddhism, by tiding your room."p>This we have to do by excavating and tidying ve-ry slowly, like sweeping a crime scene, because of the many, many small things she has.

To keep up the momentum, or create some, I sit on the bed in the gap between leopards and try to make encouraging noises. The trouble is, she keeps stopping, like a Citroen we once had with dodgy electrics, so has to be constantly rebooted. And every time I do it, I become impatient and snap. Last time, she threw me out of her room after I told her once too often to Hurry Up. Come to think of it, she always throws me out.p>But progress is nonetheless made.

"You can now walk on clear carpet from the door to the bed," I tell Peter.
"Well done," he says. "Look what Andrew and Marigo have brought!"p>They have five boys and have given us a huge bag of their cast offs, a sumptuous haul of trousers, trainers and tops. The children dive into the mound and come out both clutching the same T-shirt, a 'humorous' garment featuring diagrams of the various mishaps caused by drinking too much vodka. I won't go into detail but there are nuns. They both want it and while Lawrence is out at a friend's, Lydia gets to work on me.

"It's completely inappropriate," I say. "And anyway, I can't give it to you just like that because that would be favouring one child."
"Yes, well," says Lydia. "If you ever get the feeling you do want to favour one child, favour me."

I let her take a different T-shirt from the bag and wait till she goes to watch TV, then hide the vodka one.

Lawrence comes back.p>"You've let Lydia take something from the bag,? he says.
"Only one thing."
"That stuff's for me. It's boys' stuff."
"It's one top. She tidied her room. Come on."

I remind him he can't meditate wearing ten tops, and give Lydia £2 for trying extra hard on her room. I'm not sure what Sid Arthur would say ? I hope, something like: The Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins When You Clear a Single Toy Off The Carpet.

The Lady Vanishes Stephanie Calman - 10 April 2010

I get a call from my sister. Mum is in hospital: not dying, phew, but with some kind of knee problem.

I ring the hospital, which has a telephone system designed to give you a nervous breakdown. And they keep moving her. Every time I ring the slow, expensive, individual patient number she's been moved again and it's answered by a different patient, or no-one at all. It's like The Lady Vanishes.

When I do finally get her, she says,
I sat down and couldn't get up again."
I have that sometimes," I say.
"Usually wine related."
Out of the corner of my eye I can see Lydia raising an eyebrow, something she's getting particularly good at. Pity you can't get grades in it, like the piano.p>Mum was at a book group when it happened. She does far more of these sorts of things than I do, but then I'm constantly looking for excuses to stay in. I was using the children as alibis before I even had them.

"Sorry, can't come to the door: I'm changing the baby," I would lie, to people selling tea towels or eternal salvation. Now the kids provide useful ways out of all sorts of unwanted social obligations. Invitations to quizzes, charity balls and fiftieth birthday parties have all been reluctantly declined on grounds of homework, Year 6 projects or nonexistent school concerts. Of course, there is the slight danger people will think we're marvellous parents, though once they actually meet us that misconception is quickly cleared up.

Eventually I have to turn into the Gestapo to get a doctor to tell me what they are planning to do with the Aged P, apart from leave her there indefinitely.

We're not allowed to tell you the doctor's name," says a nurse.
"Yes you are!" I say. "You must! Does he work in secret?"
It's Kafkaesque," says Mum, choosing an adjective with her customary precision.
"She's awaiting an MRI scan," a medic finally reveals. "The notes say 'patient informed'."
I duly report this to her.
"No I wasn't," she says.p>I know who I believe. Her memory is still excellent, and besides, any institution that forces the relatives of elderly patients to pay 49p a minute to speak to them does not get my vote.

I've been on the phone so long it's now suppertime, so I decide to visit the next day. There are no books in the hospital shop; she's had to resort to Closer magazine - 'Britain's Oldest Dad Says Bananas Secret of Fertility.' So I offer to bring her Seasonal Suicide Notes, a book of angry and hilarious tirades.

"Ooh yes," she says. "Just what I need. And a lipstick."

In a crisis we Calman females always put on the slap: it boosts morale.When I get there, she is quite cheerful. And she's in her own room which is lucky as it quickly fills up with her friends, all of whom have brought chocolates. With all the magazines and papers she's acquired, the place looks like a burgled newsagent's. The afternoon passes in gales of laughter.

"We must do this again," I say.br>"Though perhaps in a different venue next time," says Mum.p>When I get back, another member of the family is poorly - our dear old Alfa. Technically it's the same age as Lydia, but as Mark at the garage has explained,

It's about eighty - in car years."

In another words, the same age as my mother. Its gear lever is stiff and unco-operative, and going over speed bumps it creaks like Dracula's coffin. With my dodgy knee that makes three of us who are seizing up.

Well, I've hurt my arm," says Peter, who is clearly feeling left out.
"Shut up, Dad," says Lawrence.

I've had rather a nice afternoon. In fact, for someone who avoids most social occasions I've belatedly discovered one I really like.

"It's female company," says Peter.br>"Gosh darling, I think you're right!" I say.
I've waited years to hear you say that," he responds, as he goes off to collect the car.

Cover Versions Stephanie Calman - 27 March 2010

For a treat I go for lunch with Marc, an old friend from way back, who confirms that we are definitely now on the other side of the Generation Gap. He says:

"When a track comes on the radio, do you say, 'This is a just a cover version! I remember the original'?"

"All the time."

"And do they just look at you and say, 'Whatever'?"

"Yes!"

What a relief. The Old Farts Club is not one I intended to join quite so soon, but at least the members are friendly. Marc runs a company full of much younger people; where I see an attractive, high-powered executive they just see a middle-aged father of three.

"I spend my whole time explaining who Fred Astaire was and that sort of thing," he says. "And not just him: the other day it was John Lydon ? Johnny Rotten, for God's sake."

I was fourteen when the Sex Pistols did their first gig. I certainly never thought remembering that of all things would mark me out as past it. But then, Peter once had an assistant who said,

"Oh yes, the Seventies: we did that in History."

At least when our children make us feel old we can send them to their rooms.

Small comfort. But one must take succour where one can.

For example, not that long ago, Lydia said:

"I don't want you to die, Mummy," which was nice of her I thought.

And I said:

"I'm not planning to die for ages and ages yet. In any case, life gets nicer all the time. I'm enjoying myself much more now than I used to."

"Yeah," she added, "and in a while you can go into a retirement home and that's quite fun isn't it?"

Imagine residential care as seen through the eyes of an eleven year-old, where:

"You don't have to do any work, just sit around all day."

What's not to like?

She thinks being old is the same as being young but with even more TV watching ? if one can imagine such a thing. And of course, middle age isn't shaping up to be what I thought either.

I might have anticipated the stiff knees, forgetting why I've come upstairs and saying 'fudge' when I mean to say 'guinea pig', like a less offensive form of Tourette's; my mouth now so often says things I don't mean that I'm expecting it any day to devolve and become an autonomous republic. What I didn't foresee was pointing wildly at the iPod and babbling, "Cover version!" - yes, again - or interrupting the telly to say,

"Now, this was originally sung by ? ooh, hang on. . ."

Peter says that lately they've started to put it on pause when he comes into the room.

"What, because they're watching such unsuitable stuff?"

"No," he says. "I think they just don't want to watch it with their Dad."

"Hmm, well that's you," I say. "It doesn?t apply to me because I am so much younger."

That very evening Lydia pauses the TV when I come in, and gives me that raised eyebrow of hauteur you get from assistants in trendy shops, usually the ones where the music's so loud you wouldn't be able to hear them if they did deign to speak to you. Come to think of it, with the Top 40 on so often, our sitting room is beginning to feel just like them.

Later I find her poking around in the kitchen.

"Be careful with those jars," I say. "They were my grandmother's, so they're quite old."

"Ooh! Can I have them when you die?"

It's not quite the standard response when faced with a precious object; it's not one I've heard on Antiques Roadshow for instance, but it shows appreciation.And for once I'm going to take a leaf out of Peter's book and See the Bright Side. The children are so unable to imagine our demise that they can refer to it casually and easily - actually, perhaps too easily. But still, it suggests that to them at least, it still seems a long way off.

Farmville Stephanie Calman - 28 February 2010

You can tell what age people,s children are by the virtual vocabulary that peppers their conversation. Any mention of 'puffles', the round fluffy-looking pets in Club Penguin, and you know they're between five and eight. After that it's Tom Nook and red turnips: Animal Crossing, age seven to ten. And now we have otherwise cool, urban eleven and twelve year olds rushing away from the television muttering,

"Sorry, Mum: have to go and harvest my rice."

What with the glancing at watches and sudden dashings for unlikely destinations, they remind one of Robert Shaw in The Caretaker having to get down to Sidcup.

When other boys rush upstairs after school to play games like Call Of Duty, with its disturbingly realistic warfare scenarios, Lawrence joins his sister on Farmville, where the most dramatic event is an ugly duckling turning into a swan.

It's brought out a side of the children, particularly Lydia, that's remained pretty dormant hitherto. The biggest surprise has been not the appeal of ploughing and planting over raking foreigners with machine gun fire, but going downstairs at 6.45am to make the tea ? as Peter always does - to find Lawrence already there.

"Hi Dad! I'm just picking my raspberries," he chirps, tapping away at the family keyboard.

The various crops on their farms appear onscreen a set number of hours after they've 'sown the seeds', with a few clicks of the mouse. Looking at the rain coming down outside, it beats real gardening in one obvious respect. However the deadlines are more precise: after I spent two hours trying to persuade everyone to go to the park on Sunday, Lydia announced that she couldn't possibly leave the house at that time as it meant missing her onions.And she's now to be found up and dressed on schooldays at 7am, way earlier than usual, proving she is able to meet deadlines after all. If I'd known she'd voluntarily spring up at that time to pull up some online carrots, I'd have grown some years ago.

Meanwhile, the pansies we got her for window box grow on unregarded, though not for long I fear. And my attempts to interest her and her brother in the Real Vegetable Project are faring no better this year than last. If anything it's worse, because the real things don't even have novelty on their side.

Neither child took more than a cursory turn with the trowel last summer when our friend Katarina and I put in carrots, two kinds of beans, tomatoes, potatoes and strawberries ? on the balcony to hide them from the slugs. But I was taken aback by the fierceness of my attachment; I wasn't very good at bonding with my children in the early weeks but I really adored the courgettes. I kept breaking off other activities to rush upstairs and gaze at their gorgeous bulging greenness, retie the beans to their poles and check the anti carrot fly fleece hadn't blown off. It was like having an affair, only without the hotel bills and guilt.,p."And with real tomatoes," I tell Lawrence, "you get something you can eat!"
"It's not really about that," he explains, in a worryingly patient tone.
"What is it about then?"
"It's the satisfaction when the crops come up, you know, like when you finish a crossword."

I'm flattered but don't know, as I never have. The three of us sweated for an hour over an easy one the other day and still couldn't finish it. Mind you, I've been known to get stuck on an RS homework Word Search in which the longest word is 'miracle'.

But look, I say: it all just does seem a bit too easy. Surely the crops are at least prone to being blighted by pests or dug up by rabbits?

"Where, I ask him, "are the challenges?"
"It's not about challenges," he says. "It's about having fun."
He looks at me with a hint of a smile.
"Fun: you remember that, Mummy."

Just about, I think when he?s gone: just about.

Staying On Stephanie Calman - January 2010

News comes on the radio that this generation is likely to live to at least 100. Let's just consider the terrifying implications of that.With property prices - and rents, as they are, Lawrence and Lydia will never be able to afford to leave home. So if they do ever get as far as to marry and breed we?ll be back to living like my parents' generation. I anticipate not the support and comfort of older relatives on tap, but two - or God forbid three - women sharing a kitchen and pursing our lips at each others' alien cooking practices before scuttling up to our husbands to not have sex because the walls have ears.

At least, having bred late, I can be sure of dying off before becoming a great-grandparent and being outplaced to the shed, though that scenario isn't as hypothetical as it once seemed; Peter's nephew has just had a baby, making me a Great Aunt.

"I think we won't keep using that actual phrase, though," I tell the children as we admire at the infant's jpegs."Great Aunt!" they chant with relish. "Great Aunt!"
"I don?t mind being a Great Uncle," says Peter, in his annoyingly ingratiating way.
"It's different for you," I point out: "you?re already older."

In the freezing weather he has taken to wearing one of those padded waistcoats around the house over an ancient jumper he recently tricked me into repairing.

"I thought I was darning it for charity!"
"But then I tried it on and it's fine."
"If Care Home is the look you're going for."

He bobs up from his seat to get Lawrence a drink, something I abhor.

"No wonder half our friends are stuck with kids still there in their twenties, if they run around after them like you."
"And your parents never got you a drink, yeah we know," choruses Lydia.
"Well, I do think - "
"And you went down the mines and up the chimney at the same time."

Oddly enough, despite their merciless lampooning, the children show us far more affection than we ever did our parents; it's one of the major differences between ours and previous generations, that we and our children are closer. But we know that in a few years they must break out and live away from home, at least until their first divorce. I'm particularly anxious about this as I have a bad track record in this area. I didn't leave: my parents did ? though not at the same time, more in a kind of staggered retreat. Eventually Peter dragged me away from the old place as it crumbled about my ears, like a disaster movie in extremely slow motion. I was thirty-three.

"What if the children end up like me?" I asked him once.
"Darling," he said, deadpan: "there is absolutely no danger of them ending up like you."

Nonetheless I feel compelled to try and prepare them for Life in the Real World.

"This is where you get the other bus to come home," I say, as we go into town to look for winter coats.
"They don't go from the same stop."
"We KNOW," Lawrence responds wearily, while Lydia appears to take in nothing at all.
"You'll be doing this without me quite soon," I say.
"Yes, but not today. You say it every time!"

Do I? As we bump along I look at the two women opposite. Will that be Lydia and me in five years, the daughter slim and swan necked, looking about her in aloof awareness of her youth and beauty, the mother hugely fat.

Intercepting my gaze, Lawrence mouths at me: 'Don?t stare'.

"The trouble with the kids moving out," says Peter when we return, "is that I'll miss them."

Me too, particularly since they're the only ones who know how to change channels when the TV is set to Record. We once got Lawrence out of bed to do it when we were desperate, and in the morning made him promise not to tell the school why he was tired.

Water and Clouds Stephanie Calman - 19 December 2009

Lawrence and I are in a cafe ordering hot chocolates. As we wait, we notice the latest absurd kind of flavoured water. This one says on the label in large letters 'This Water' and underneath, in smaller type, 'is made from water and clouds'.

"Water and Clouds! Do me a favour," I say. "Look on the back. I bet you it's got sugar in it".

It has. My poor twelve year old is disillusioned.

"Do you have to crush my world?" he says.

Actually he wasn't that illusioned in the first place. Following a life-changing moment while watching a Channel 4 documentary about the sandwich business, he has been disturbingly well informed about the hidden evils of commercially processed food. His knowledge is impressive, though it has led to his snatching ketchup bottles from the chubby fingers of small children and exclaiming, "Twenty-eight per cent sugar: that's nearly as much as Fanta!" until they whimper for their mothers.

His sister reserves her scepticism for the cosmetics companies, exposing their venal motives by jeering at the TV when those chains of polybibbles and deeply cleansing fractalides come on to flog moisturiser. Admittedly this youthful cynicism is partly our own fault, since we did teach them from an early age about the science behind commercials, ie that there usually isn't any.

But in any case, though people bang on about children being taken in by advertising before they can talk, this generation is far more sophisticated than we were, let alone our parents. When Peter and I see An Education we're taken aback to be reminded of such innocent times. Not only does poor Jenny not guess her suave new lover is married, her parents don't either. And it being 1961, and a true story, they really didn?t.

"Imagine trying that on with Lydia," I say. "After five minutes she'd have him bang to rights: 'Why haven't we been to your house? You?ve obviously got a wife, der!' And that would be the end of that."
"Thank God," says Peter, who doesn't want her to get a boyfriend, like, ever.

Her knowingness has also been honed by her brother in daily masterclasses. Witness this exchange with her friend Daphne, after she was sprayed in the face with something by a Year 5.

"Blimey" I said. "Are you OK?" Lydia said,
"You could have been blinded!"
"Really?" said Daphne. "I don?t think so."
"Daphne, I'm your lawyer: I exaggerate."

Even growing up in Bloomsbury with divorced parents, it's something I at eleven could never have said. And take this, from the other night:

"6 o'clock," I said. "Time for The Simpsons."
"But I still haven't finished my homework."

She'd worked solidly since coming back from school; solidly that is if you don't count making toast, twirling a hairband round her pencil, glueing some ribbon onto her music folder, checking the weekend magazines for pictures of Lady Gaga and gazing.

"You've done enough," I said. "Go and watch."
"Hah! I did Reverse Psychology on you!"

I was left faintly tingling from the sensation of being outmanoeuvred by someone not yet in thin tights. The level of sheer knowingness displayed by this lot can leave you reeling, as does their already ingrained fondness for irony. If Lawrence wants to lend authority to some statement while simultaneously persuading you of the opposite, he'll deliver it in his deep advert voice. He recently designed a book cover for the Year 8 competition and I thought, the librarian is going to hard pressed to believe that the blurb on the back is his own. But the boy does actually think in trailers: A Man. With a Quest. Going Forward. Alone. And so on. When I came in the other morning, opened the fridge and said to him,"You've eaten the last piece of bacon," he didn't merely say, 'Well, I wanted it'. He said:"I am the future; I deserve the bacon."

This fresh, natural column has been hand crafted in our hardly-heated workshops from sugar, alcohol, artificial brighteners, anger and fat. And yes, the children did tell me to say that.

Almost Eleven Stephanie Calman - 14 November 2009

Lydia is soon to be eleven. She follows me around the house asking for a phone, occasionally bumping into Lawrence who is already shadowing me asking for the same thing.

"Hey, you're like those little aliens who follow Buzz Lightyear around in Toy Story," I say.
"That's not funny Mummy."

In my day, stages of maturity were marked by getting your own front door key, French kissing and learning to smoke ? in some cases all at the same time. Now they're signified by the acquisition of branded objects. Both our kids appreciate the gap between our basic standard of living ? only one car, two tellies and three computers ? and that of some of their friends. But that doesn't stop them asking for stuff.

"We can't be going skiing every five minutes and driving to school in a Porsche Cayman with an iPod in each hand," I say.
"I know," says Lawrence. "I don't care. Can I just have a phone? And it's Cayenne."
"I know," I say. "It was a joke."

He gives me the Look. Privately I'm leaning towards giving in on the phone, but I made a bet with a mate that I'd wait until they were 14 and I don't want to seem weak. Mind you, I said I wasn't going to get married or have children either, so my credibility is none too strong. I decide to use Peter's strategy and promise we'll return to the subject in depth just as soon as I can really focus on it. I can't help envying the government, who can play for time on all sorts of problems, knowing they're about to be voted out. We all need some other poor sucker to dump things on; I suppose that's why God invented fathers.

But whereas Lydia isn't changing yet, her brother is now a different shape: quite lifeguardish, if you discount the fashionable, shuffling walk. Then he goes off to a paintballing party and comes back on the Sunday morning with a moustache. Since I'm fairly sure he didn't have one yesterday, I'm hoping a mixture of dirt and paint has blown onto his upper lip; I've been using that excuse myself since 1974.

Still, even if not technically a real moustache, it immediately has an effect on his behaviour.

"Have you done your homework?" he asks Lydia sternly.
"Hello?" I say. "Peter, did you know there's a third parent in this family?"
"He's known for ages," says Lawrence.Peter, unhelpfully, laughs.
"I have to do most of the parenting," Lawrence continues, "since you don?t do it."

What he means is I don't tell his sister off as often as he wants."p>"I do do it, except when you won't let me. Now shove off and leave her alone."

He slopes off to the Wii, his walk also looking somehow older than it did before. I blame contact with the outside world. You send them off to a birthday party, in this case a simulated gun battle, and they return that bit harder, more confident. When I was young there were kids around who lived semi-rough from the age of six. They had homes and families; their mums just didn?t like them dirtying the place up. Then you had the other extreme, the ones who never left. Their faces remained soft and their dinner money was to be had easily, right into middle-age.

Later, when we all gather round to argue about whose turn it is to lay the table, Peter says,

"Nobody warns you how brief childhood?s going to be."
"Yes they do," I say. "They warned us constantly."
"A couple of years of The Jungle Book and it's gone," he says wistfully, even though we never had The Jungle Book. "And soon Lawrence's voice will break," he adds, gazing into the distance like Masha awaiting Vershinin.
"Pull yourself together," I say. "The whole time from when they were born up until now, all people have said to us is, 'Watch out: it goes by so fast.'"

And they're right. All we have to do is stop arguing and get the table sorted. Then we can all move on.

Population Explosion Stephanie Calman - 26 September 2009

The stick insects have been multiplying. They used to breed slowly, one at a time, by occasional cloning; males are rare, so you often get entire communities just of females, as on some estates. Then Peter realized he might be destroying their eggs when mucking out so he stopped. Now we have what the Americans call a 'situation'.

When the population count reached ten we collected a second glass tank from my mother, surely the only eighty year-old in the South-East who has a spare stick insect tank when you need one. But ten became fourteen and I found Peter outside the house one Sunday morning with two in a jar, trying to interest passers-by in taking them away.

"They're very low maintenance: they eat bramble!" he was saying.

But even among the churchgoers there were no takers, and now we are having to face the unthinkable: the bramble is running out.

As a result, the Stickies have succumbed to Malthusian panic and begun bolting. Last week the babysitter found two on the blinds, seemingly the entomological version of space exploration with a mission, now the home planet is full, to colonise other worlds. Some of those who'd chosen not to make the journey or been left behind, perhaps because they failed the medical, appeared to be eating each other.

"Urgh, Dad!" said Lydia.
"No, they're eating their own skin: it's their moulting season," said Lawrence who knows lots of Science, even the bits they haven't done yet.
"Oh, and that's, like, way less disgusting - not."

It's much the same in our bathroom. We do have a little shower room next to my study which is largely unused except as a repository for my extensive collection of vintage hair gel and hotel sewing kits. Since Lawrence has begun having showers, I've had to wait on the stairs in my dressing gown like a character from Rising Damp - though looking first thing in the morning less like Miss Jones than Mr Rigby - so I've tried to interest him in taking it over.

"This gorgeously appointed shower with private loo could be yours!" I plead.

But he insists on cramming into the other one with the rest of us: me with my facial routine that now takes as long as the event I?m doing it for, Peter, whose battle with nose hair means sessions with a machine that sounds as if he has a bee trapped in there, and Lydia, whose morning ritual is now 20% brushing her hair and 80% staring into the mirror to see if it?s moved. Like the Stickies, she sheds her outer layers with impunity. When she finishes with something - or grows out of it, she simply sloughs it off. To find her PE kit you have to count through the layers till you get to the day she last wore it, and below that are things she hasn?t worn for years. Dig down through the piles and you may find bootees.

You'd think, wouldn't you, that in a decent sized house there'd easily be room for the four of us. Even our friends who were foolish enough to have a fourth child recently managed to create a bit more space by bringing the dog to her parents' for the weekend and 'forgetting' to take it with them when they left.Meanwhile several of our friends are somewhat ahead of us and now waving their eighteen year-olds off to gap years in places such as Argentina.

"You see? You'll soon have the bathroom to yourself," says Peter, but he's wrong. I only recently discovered that parents actually pay for their privileged offspring to go and build schools in Uganda and so on. So unless our two suddenly develop an interest in real paid employment, along with some Alan Sugaresque gift for making money at a tender age, they're unlikely to be seeing Buenos Aires. On our current finances they won't get much further than Brighton. At least they won't be able to clone themselves, but we might play down the 'A' level Science option a bit, just in case.

The Look Sweeping the Nation Stephanie Calman - 12 September 2009

After just a couple of months' exhaustive ? and exhausting ? negotiations, Peter and I have given way, and both children now have a thick lock of hair hanging over one eye. Before you get the wrong mental picture, I'm not talking about the Veronica Lake Look, nor the complete curtain of Violet the intermittently invisible teenager in The Incredibles - well not quite. They've both got a sweep, a fringe that leans to one side as if pulled by an unseen string, which is The Last Word in cool coiffure. It is the Look, as it were, sweeping the nation.

Since Lydia got hers, a prickly forcefield has materialised around her which repels the slightest parental touch. When I lean across to put a bit back in place, she springs back as if I'm radioactive.

"Leave my hair alone!"
"But you've got a bit falling forward. I just want to - "
"Leave it! You've got no sense of - hair.
"I do: I have hair," I plead feebly.
"Well, you've got no sense of my hair."

She glares at me warningly. Lawrence is a bit less combative, though equally preoccupied. His new habit is to fall silent or even vanish in mid-conversation as he rushes to the mirror to push a stray strand into place. Even table tennis takes twice as long as it used to because he has to stop between each point to put back his hair. I know it's all part of the development of their autonomy. The moment a baby first realises it's a separate being from its mother is the first stage on this journey, then it's grabbing the food out of your hand so they can throw it all over the room, then pushing away the hand with the spit-laden tissue at the school gate, and now this with the hair. When he was about three, I remember being corrected once when I referred to him as "my lovely Lawrence."

"I'm not YOUR Lawrence," he said vehemently. "I'm MY Lawrence."

It all came back to me, just a month ago, when I first smoothed the dreaded sweep back from his forehead and he batted my hand away. The hair on both our children is now off limits, like fenced in MOD property; all I can do is gaze wistfully over the wire, remembering the days when their father and I roamed free among them, brushing and smoothing their golden curls and never imagining they would become so incredibly bossy.

At least we're lucky with Daryl, our hairdresser, who takes her position on the frontline of this battle calmly in her stride, waiting patiently, scissors poised, as we go tiresomely back and forth:

"A bit more off the back and sides than before I think."
"You're joking!! Last time I was practically shaved!"

Shaved is his term for anything off at all. By his standards James May is shaved.

"Well fine," I say. "You look like you're wearing a Terry Wogan wig."

It's true: his hair is so thick that, allowed to grow over his ears, it gives him the air of a Radio 1 or 2 DJ ? a young David Hamilton perhaps - circa 1975. All he needs now is a catchphrase ? that is, apart from:

"You make me do everything and never let me do anything."

The other night I was reading to Lydia, for the first time in ages so I was trying to make it a quality experience. But she was far more absorbed by her hair, whipping her head this way and that.

"Can you stop flicking your hair around?" I said.
"Why?"
"It's distracting. You can't listen to the book and do that at the same time."
"I can multitask," she replied.I waited for the ironic smile, but she kept a straight face. I went down and told Peter, and he said,

"Yes, and soon Lawrence's voice will break," gazing out of the window like a Chekhov character contemplating the onset of winter.

"Come on," I said. "He's asleep: let's go and move his hair."

Boxed in Stephanie Calman - 29 August 2009

I greet every new dawn with the hope that my daughter will ask me if she can make a stable for her toy ponies. Surely not, you say. Think of all that hay strewn about the place. I know, but then again think of the cardboard boxes. We have loads, and every time Lydia makes a stable, or a doll display case or a mini room-in-a-box with paper furniture and tiny pictures cut out of magazines on the walls, we reduce our collection by one.

Peter knows a faster way. He will, if I let him, gather them up, flatten them and put them in the recycling. He has become keen on it to the point of mania. But he has bargained without the Calman craft gene. Lydia uses shoe boxes, cosmetic boxes, the card stiffeners from packs of tights ? basically anything that he hasn't already whisked away.

"Look!" I say. "She's made a dolls' record player from an eye shadow box."
"Yes, very brilliant."
We've made tiny little album sleeves: look!"
"Very good."

His steely eyes sweep the room for empties, a cardboard Terminator.

So I hide them from him, spiriting them out like the resistance, before he swoops down on a gold chocolate box, or the frame-shaped one from the fettucine, and stamps on them. When he does, I'm sure I can hear them scream.

After I buy six tumblers in a divided white box like a groovy yet soulless dwelling by Le Corbusier, I sense him hovering.

"What's this box doing here?" he says in his ARP warden's voice. You can just hear him barking, 'Put that light out!'

"It's for Lydia," I say. "It?s got sections." His fingers are itching, but he knows that to take it is to Stifle His Daughter's Creativity.

To make sure, I keep it with me, moving it from the kitchen to my study and back again, as if on Witness Protection.

"Lydia, are you going to make the stables?" I plead, so I can finally put it down. But with the unpredictability of the true artist, she is making a bridle for her unicorn out of two hair bands instead. It's tricky. We need to use the boxes up in some way, but I just can?t seem to let them go.

My father had a similar problem with his magazines. Every spare corner was filling up with them, but he couldn't bear to bin them. So he created the illusion of throwing things out by means of limited redistribution. If you came round, he would give you one of his hundreds of New Yorker magazines, on the tacit understanding that you would keep it forever. So it was out of his flat but not gone forever, a bit like adoption.

And meanwhile I acquire more boxes. I bought a mug at John Lewis mainly because it came in a really great box covered with butterflies. I gave my Mum the mug and Lydia the box, and within a day she had made a little paper doll and presented it to me in the box, which was great. But now the box is back in the tiny room that's meant to be for books and general storage but is increasingly becoming, well, a box room. We need to start distributing them beyond the immediate family, but I have this fear that other people won't appreciate them. They may even ? awful thought - throw them away. I can't bear the thought of saving them from the Terminator's clutches only for them to end up, far from home, in some cold, forbidding recycling depot.

"You've got to get a grip," says Peter.
"But it just sits on a barge somewhere, in limbo."

It might as well be landfill. Then Lawrence comes in and asks what we're agonising about.

"Keep some," he says. "Keep the ones that are big enough to store things in, but not so big that they take up loads of space."
"Hmm," I say.
"Or," he says. "Just try and stay away from them in the first place."

Vice Versa Stephanie Calman - 15 August 2009

"Lunch is ready, Lydia," calls Lawrence up the stairs. "Come on! I won't tell you again."

"What did you say?" I demand. "Going on at Lydia is my job."

I realise that as he approaches his twelfth birthday, our elder one is seeking to widen the distance between him and childhood, as represented by his only slightly younger sister. It's also, mind you, what comes of letting them watch Freaky Friday, though I don't know how they took it in, as apparently I ruined it by interrupting.

"I'm just saying it's a copy of a much earlier book, Vice Versa," I pointed out. "Which is about a father and son and was written ages ago." (1882, would you believe.)

"Whatever. Just shut up, OK?"

"And I like Jamie Lee Curtis, but this really isn't very good."

"It isn't with you talking all the way through it!"

Vice Versa itself has apparently been filmed four times even apart from this, and you can see why the theme of adult-child role-reversal appeals. Who doesn't occasionally want to escape from their prescribed persona to enjoy the freedoms and privileges of the other side? My first memory of that thrilling sensation was on a family visit to a ruined castle when I was small. A sign in the moat said, 'Children not admitted unless in charge of adults', and so we decided to swap, with my sister and I being the parents for the rest of the day. Since we were only about six and three, this consisted mostly of saying, "Now, Mummy, don't run off," and "There'll be no ice cream for you, Daddy!" But it made the ruin much more fun.

In this household we don't need a sign. We role-reverse quite naturally, as you might imagine with people whose children are rapidly overtaking them in the social maturity stakes. When the children introduced a swear jar for me - the one that helped fund their first computer consoles, Lawrence had a go at swearing too. And without even thinking I found myself automatically becoming his child

"So you're allowed to swear," I said.
"Yeah."
"That?s like, so unfair!"

And of course you see that particular reversal all the time in families where the parents are scared of being grown ups and so continually ask the children what they should do. But they should bear in mind that 'authoritarian' is not the only style; there are different kinds of grown ups. My father once described himself as 'a large child in a suit', which meant not that he couldn't look after us, but that he knew when not to be serious, surely a vital requirement of being a parent, or indeed a human being of any kind.

I thought of him when I found myself at supper recently announcing to Lydia,

"If you don't eat your fishcake, you'll be in big, fat trouble!"

At which, not surprisingly, both children burst out laughing.

And suddenly I didn't care whether they finished their dinner or not because I was so grateful for a moment's respite from the awful burden of anxiety that goes with the role of parent. I realised some time ago, to my dismay, that I live most of the time in two modes: worrying about them, and telling them off.

So I think if I have a preferred altered state it's not 'Child', but 'Divorced Dad' - as in, 'parent with licence to ignore all the rules and spoil them with unsuitable treats'. Although my father was not a major offender, ie didn't bring us back on a Sunday night with homework not done, filthy clothes and on a sugar high, I sometimes like to become a DD when Peter's away. Only then do I feel able to stop nagging them to brush their teeth, and pick their clothes up, and get to be the Fun One.

"Hey kids, Dad's away! Let's watch four DVDs! Let's live on crisps!"

Mind you, I can't help noticing that Peter doesn't play the game. He never turns into me when he comes back, to say:

"Look at the state of this place."

Falling Standards Stephanie Calman - 1 August 2009

Only two weeks into the summer holidays, and standards in the Calman household are plummeting. The high faluting education they're getting seems to have been pouring away out of their brains from the moment term ended, until all they're good for is lying on the carpet in their pants playing on the DSI and eating Hoola Hoops. It's got to the point where I beg them to put on the telly as a step up.

The only evidence they've ever even been to school is this, which I overhear one night just before supper:

"Snot, phlegm and mucus; they are the same. We did it in Science."

I know they say that in the long break kids go feral, but they mean it in a broadsheet newspaper, climbing trees sort of way, not in a way that makes you fear you'll come in to find they've pierced their own ears during the night. Everything's been slipping since half term, actually, when I took them to a well-known burger chain, as - and I know this sounds bad - a reward after going to the dentist. Having a chain burger for people like us is like getting a tattoo or going to a wedding in a tracksuit, a sign that you've totally given up. And our two are far better informed than I was at that age, so as we went in Lydia said, in that beautifully clear middle-class voice of hers:

"We hardly ever have these, do we Mummy? Because they're really bad for you."

As I say, that was at half-term when they still knew the difference. Now, if they eat all their dinner they ask for crisps afterwards as pudding. And with the weeks stretching ahead and the gravitational pull of downward mobility, I'm losing the will to fight it. The other day, I bought one of those huge multi-bags of crisps the size of a duvet.

"Look! Eight different flavours!" I said.

The kids smothered me in kisses.

I keep worrying about what my father would say. My mother was always a moderate, ie we had to make our own Christmas cards but were often allowed chips. Dad, however, gave us regular doses of culture: a browse in the galleries of Cork Street; a quick nip into the Tate or the National Gallery. The year I was eighteen he took me to Edinburgh, and I saw Placido Domingo, Daniel Barenboim and Jessye Norman [Jessye not Jessie] in one week. How can I follow that? I put Radio 4 on, to try and inject a bit of arts programming into them, and when the news came on Lydia said,

"You know the beeps? I used to think they were because the presenter was swearing."

Saddest of all, though, is the folder.

I have a folder where I keep leaflets about activities at galleries and so on, not because we're ever going to do any of them, but because, to use a favourite phrase of Lawrence's, I live in a dream world.

Now and then I take out a cutting about the art trolley at the V&A, or live music on the South Bank and pathetically try to interest the children, who look witheringly at me. The whole thing looks like a Victorian painting entitled 'Futility'. I should get rid of the folder; it only serves to point up the gulf between my sad little expectations and reality. Still, I had one recent breakthrough.

After about two days of negotiating I did get them to come with me one weekend to an Open Studios day near where we live. They trundled round, making the odd appreciative sound which I counted as a triumph. I bought a picture, and as we came out onto the main road, I was hailed by a tiny, shrivelled woman perched on a bench.

"Here's 80p," she said. "Would you be ever so kind and go into that fried chicken place over there and get me some chips?"

"Of course," I said. But the road was dotted with people, and yet she chose me. Even though I was carrying a painting, she just knew.

Things I said I'd never do (which I am now doing) Stephanie Calman - 18 July 2009

Every week it seems I end up doing something I absolutely swore I would never do. It began with deciding not to get married, and pretty much snowballed from there.

Presumably people who don't have children aren't so prey to this. They can say, 'I will never cook four different breakfasts at 7am on a Monday morning,' and can pretty much guarantee they won't find themselves juggling sausage with beans, bacon in a bagel, eggs with nothing - aaargh, don't let the bacon touch them - and porridge.

At least supper is sacred. We did have a child once who looked at my spaghetti bolognese and announced,

"I don't want that: I'm a fussy eater."
"Are you?" I said. "Well, that's what we're having."

I can't tell you whether he ate the spaghetti because I pressed the button for the trapdoor and released him into the tank of piranhas. And I only mention my record on evening meals in an admittedly rather pathetic attempt to point up the one area in which I have not wavered. And until this summer holiday, there were two.

Not long ago we were having supper with some old friends. Suddenly, at about 9.45, the two other women got up and left - to collect their children - or rather, teenagers. I couldn't believe it.

"Oh, you'll do it too: just you wait!" said one of the mothers, when they eventually returned.
"I don't think so," I said. "You won't catch me ruining my social life. They can get the bus. I had to."

But even as I said it, I knew I won't be letting my two precious babies on public transport late at night. I just didn't want to back down. Sleepovers, I thought: that?s the answer.

Then we had some other friends round, and their phones rang intermittently with updates from their fifteen year-old daughter, who was at a mate's house somewhere in North London. We live in South London, a distance of roughly twelve miles, which is why I made a rather unattractive face when she demanded to be collected and brought home.

"Tell her to stay the night," I said firmly.
"Oh dear," said our friend. "She is actually meant to be. Darling, can't you stay there?"
"We've had an argument: I don't want to," came the reply.
"Well tough," I muttered under my breath before I could stop myself.

Actually maybe it helped. I'm glad to report that mother and father stood firm and we were able to finish our dinner. I was vindicated, and an air of quiet confidence settled over us as we cleared away the plates.

"You see?" I told Peter. "There's absolutely no need to pander to this absurd fashion for overprotecting children and transporting them around as if they were bits of rare porcelain."

Which is why I am somewhat embarrassed to inform you that this week, we are driving Lydia to Portsmouth.And we're not complaining. Why else did we send her to a good school other than so she'd be invited on nice holidays? Well, not too nice. Another girl was invited to the south of France, but they couldn't afford the airfare. At least it let them out of buying a cottage in Normandy just so they could reciprocate. Lydia's going to have four days with her friend Louisa at her grandparents'. Louisa's family is from the Isle of Wight and the grandparents, who are absurdly young and possibly a bit masochistic, have invited her to bring a friend. Louisa lives near us, so we will take the girls down and they will collect. The grandparents will do the last bit, the crossing, hence we 'only' have to go as far as Portsmouth, saving a good couple of hours and a small fortune on that ferry.

So instead of sailing quietly round the bays and pruning their roses, these nice people are going to be carting two shrieking ten year-olds up and down the island. But then, they probably said they'd never end up doing that either.

I am no longer Awesome Stephanie Calman - 4th July 2009

The unthinkable has happened. I can cope with having to dye my hair. I'm learning to accept that if the children say anything to me while the radio is on or anywhere near traffic, I can't hear. I've almost come to the terms with the fact that when I see a misplaced apostrophe, I tremble with irritation while no-one else cares. But not this: please not this.

Yes, it's happened. I came into the sitting room where Lydia was watching the Top 40, and said what I was thinking, namely,

"Gawd! Every song on this sounds the same."

And no I am not turning into my parents, because they were never like that. My mother played me Nina Simone LPs from when I was three and my father interviewed Dizzy Gillespie and many other jazz greats. They were actually quite cool. And I myself once worked a music paper. Now here I am, sounding like Harold Macmillan.

I once tried to tell Lawrence and Lydia about the time I was sent to interview Prince. I was 19. He was unknown, and hungry for publicity. But he hardly said a word.

"I had to fill two pages and he just sat there. It was - "

"Yeah, whatever. Can we go now?"

I might as well have been talking about Beethoven.

That's the other thing: the suddenness. One day it was CBBC, the next day, 40 identical videos of people doing that dancing with the jabby elbows. I thought there would at least be a transitional period, but no. Lydia responded to my comment calmly. Without turning away from the screen she said neutrally,

"You won't have heard of these people."

And of course I hadn't.

It's not that I'm desperate for my children to think I'm cool. Really. I'm not that sad. I just don't want to be this - person. I don't want my pulse to quicken when I walk past the ironmongers because they've got in some really nice buckets. And I don't want to find my hands automatically flipping past the fashion section to the gardening, because the only thing that looks good round my body these days is a shed.

Nonetheless I accept that I am neither cool, wicked nor awesome. What I can't handle is the feeling of being left behind, a hammer blow manifested by the devastating realisation that I am no longer the most fascinating person they know. It seems only yesterday that I told Lawrence people in Australia have breakfast at nightime, and he thought I was Stephen Hawking. Now, my insights are greeted with disdain because ? gasp - he would rather listen to his friends.

Lydia's the same. One night not long ago, she and a friend were doing their homework together. They were bent over their history books but my ears pricked up when I heard the name Paris Hilton. They were meant to be doing Henry VIII, so I said, in the dryly ironic tone beloved of parents and teachers everywhere:

"Henry VIII had many wives, but I'm pretty sure Paris Hilton wasn't one of them."

Hilarious!

"Er, we know?" came the withering response, along with that Look: the one that can freeze the magma on a volcano.

It's as if I've turned into my old boss, the one with bad breath and waist-high trousers who made David Brent seem like Oscar Wilde. Why don't they tell you parenthood is going to do this? 'You will experience shrinking of the wallet, and widening of the waistband, and suddenly begin to sound like someone with no friends.'

Peter and I both feel shocked, and frankly, a bit cheated. Just when the little creatures were starting to become useful, ie can wash the car and open a bottle of wine, they don't want to be here. Six hours after we got them back from their four day canoeing trip, they were scratching at the door. I once met a woman who resorted to bribery to get her kids to spend time with her, and I'm starting to come round to the idea.

Freedom Riders Stephanie Calman - 20th June 2009

Lawrence has gone to his friend Alex's house, to stay the night and - we hope - see X-Men Origins: Wolverine, so we don't have to. Alex's mother has offered to take them, but in the event she does something way more useful which is to instigate Lawrence's first adult-free bus ride.

Our son now has an age 11-15 Oyster card, the British equivalent of the keys to your first Cadillac. It sits by his bed at night, shiny with the promise of unaccompanied future journeys, although it could potentially bode ill for fitness. A neighbour's child is so smitten with her freedom pass she now takes the bus to the sweet shop, one stop away.

Lawrence returns from Alex's house looking unusually happy.

"So how was Wolverine?"

But clearly the film was only the supporting feature.

"Fine. Shall I tell you about our journey home? Alex's mother told us to get the 258 but it didn't go from that stop so we took the 227 instead and found our way from there!"

This is major. Not only has he taken his first bus ride without us, he has had to use his initiative, one of those parts of the modern child you feel sure has withered through disuse and become pointless, like the appendix.

"And," he adds, "we gave up our seats for old people."

"Oh, darling!" I fling myself on him for a huge hug, which he tolerates for about 1.2 seconds.

I tell my friend Lucy. Lawrence and her son Milo have been friends since they were two.

"Good," she says, "because Milo thinks we should let them go up to town together."

"Not town," I say, "with all those thieves and weirdoes?"

But Milo is an old hand. He has to get several forms of transport across the suburbs to school every day, and has really matured; he's now about forty in travel years. He reads the paper on the train and has opinions on everything. But has it made his parents think that he isn't twelve at all, but an adult in a slightly crumpled blazer? Is she now overestimating his capabilities?

"Hm. Where in town?"

"Oxford Street."

"With the huge crowds and pickpockets? That Oxford Street?"

"I know, I know," she says. "But it's OK because I thought we could shadow them. Possibly in disguise."

"What, in burkas?"

This is too absurd, even for me. On the plus side, it makes her sound far more anxious than me. My strategy is to promise freedom at every opportunity while actually bestowing very little - a kind of post 9/11, New Labour parenting.

"They wouldn't see us. Well, Milo wouldn't."

"Nor would Lawrence; he can't see a dark sock on a pale carpet."

Mind you, nor can anyone in this family. The whole place looks like the doorway of an Oxfam shop.

"Well, I suppose? " I say. "Maybe."

If they meet anyone dodgy they could always tell them the plot of one of their computer games; that'd see them off.

I manage not to make a decision. Then I realise half term is almost upon us and Lydia is going to join Lawrence on his school canoeing trip. I must go round the neighbourhood gathering wetsuits.

We roll them up with the sleeping bags, fleeces, tins and pasta. Amidst the chaos of her room, Lydia passes a milestone of her own: a bag packed with the right clothes and no cuddly toys. They're going to paddle, cook and camp out. And their father and I are going to a B&B on the South Downs. They've never both been away without either of us.

We wave them off in their minibus and drive down to Sussex.

"We're off the leash," says Peter. "We can do anything!"

So we go crazy, with a two-hour lunch followed by slow browse round the bookshops of Lewes, topped off by a fabulous dinner. The thrill is almost too much.

"You do realise this is the future," says Peter.

I'm excited and terrified. I guess we'll just have to take it one step at a time.

Crop Top/First Bra Stephanie Calman - 30th May 2009

"Why can't I wear a crop top?" Lydia wants to know.

"Because they're tarty."

"They're not!"

"They are."

She is ten.

"Why did you buy it for me then?"

It wasn't a crop top when I bought it: it was a normal vest. You grew."

"Well why can't I wear it then?"

"It's TARTY."

"I'm afraid," says my daughter coolly, "I know more about modern things than you."

"I don't care. You can wear it to bed, that's all."

"Going at this rate, I probably am going to hate you as I get older," she says neutrally, as she leaves the room.

In the morning she gets ready for school and among the PE kit and other essentials I see a pair of sunglasses.

"What d'you need those for?" I say. "The sun's not even out."

She gives me a coy look and perches them fetchingly on her head.

"OK, you can wear them," I say.

I'm playing the long game, giving way on the shades the way Hollywood lawyers do on minor clauses in return for bigger concessions. This way, maybe I can keep the crop top at bay for a couple more years.

A few days later, she says:

"I know it's a long way off, but when we go shopping for my first bra, don't embarrass me."

I smart a bit at this, as I pride myself on being rather good at this stuff. It was I, after all, who told them both about sex, clearly and calmly, during the ad break of Friends. Rachel had slept with her ex-boyfriend Barry the Dentist, and they needed to know what it meant. Admittedly I forgot the bit about making a baby, but I did only have two minutes.

"Well, I wasn't planning to embarrass you," I say. "And in any case you don't have to take me along, though it would be nice."

Again I have a strategy, which is to offer to let her go alone, thus ensuring she won't be able to go until she actually needs one. An outbreak of bra buying is currently under way in her class, causing those without to feel they're - behind the curve, as it were.

"How would I embarrass you anyway?" I say.

"You know, by holding it across my chest in the shop and saying loudly, 'Oh no, you'll need a C!'"

Give me a break. Even my mother managed to perform that ritual without humiliating me in public. Actually, it was at this sort of delicate procedure that she excelled. Mind you, bras were the least of it. At the first sign of Hair in an Embarrassing Place, she went to the chemist for the pungent bottles of ammonia and hydrogen peroxide to bleach my upper lip while I stayed at home behind a thick curtain.

"Anyhow," I say. "Who would say a thing like that?"

"Miss H's mother. She told us in PSHE."

Poor Miss H. My bust shrinks at the thought.

Back to tops: I have bought myself a new one, that should place me in the middle ground between Young Slapper and Old Bag. I've also bought a small wheely case. Last year Lydia's lot went on a school trip and she claims to have been the only one whose bag was wheel-less.

I had to carry it!"

"Listen to yourself! In my day, we had to stuff every piece of clothing we owned into a huge plastic bag and carry it to the laundrette."

"And you went up the chimney and down the mines at the same time," says Lydia, exchanging a smirk with her brother.

"Oh, ha-ha. Well, I've got you a wheely case now, so you can be nice to me for a change."

It's for me too, but I don't say this. Instead I admire my new top in the mirror while she unwraps the case. A sticker on the case says 'Expandable by up to 20%'. Lydia peels it off and before you can say 'tummy tuck', has stuck it to the front of my new top.

Peter and Lawrence laugh their heads off.

"Right," I say. "I'll take you to school in it."

Bunking Off Stephanie Calman - 16th May 2009

Saturday afternoon. Lydia has lots of homework, and I have to water the garden and find a safe haven for the bird feeder under seige by the squirrels. Plus there's a pile of paperwork on my desk the size of Mount Snowdon. We discuss which order to do our tasks in. Then we get some chocolate mini rolls, curl up on the sofa and watch TV.

We begin with Total Wipeout, but the new machine has only recorded the end: three minutes of people falling off inflatable things into water then Richard Hammond saying goodbye. So we move onto My Name is Earl, and an episode in which the reformed deadbeat visits a New Age community and hears about global warming. It's during a heatwave, and when he visits his ex-wife to warn her of the impending disaster, he finds her sitting in front of an open fridge. Dismayed, he says she should help prevent the heating up of the planet.

"What d'you think I'm doing here, dummy?" she says.

We agree that this is very funny. We decide to watch a couple more.

We have of course quite a few honourable antecedents who slipped their brains into neutral to discover that inspiration flowed more freely. Watson and Crick famously stumbled on the structure of DNA while playing tennis and flirting with girls, and a classmate of Lydia's has told me about Sid Arthur, who gave up striving for understanding, sat under a tree, meditated, gained enlightenment and invented Buddhism. He also came off his diet, which clearly helped.

I didn't always think this way. I used to be ambitious, hard working and miserable. I didn't take holidays and believed that all relaxation had to be earned; even having the radio on while doing the ironing was a privilege I only allowed myself if I felt I really deserved it. Then I had children and discovered fatigue. Once you've woken up on the floor with a one and a two year old crawling over you like ticks on a buffalo, you're less inclined to punish yourself any further. And in any case, with parenting you prove your worth by doing the really simple things: feeding a hungry baby; kissing a grazed knee; yelling, "For the last time, will you all shut up!" during a sleepover. Children are like automatic cars; you don't need to keep pushing them, just let your foot off the brake. As Lawrence said to me the other day, when we met a neighbour in the street and I - yet again - told him to say Hello:

"Mum, I think we can safely say I've passed the point now where you need to tell me to do this."

The 'say hello' thing is especially galling as it's one of the things I seem to be copying from my mother.

But I don't chill out with the children often. Being married to Mr Marvellous has pushed me into the role of Enforcer. Because of his refusal to be the bad guy I have no choice but to wield the big stick on things like teeth brushing and - whoops yes - homework. And it's even worse when like an opposition leader he makes wild promises, such as signing a contract agreeing to buy Lydia, for her fifteenth birthday, an alpaca.

"Don't worry," he confided. "It's five years away so she'll obviously have changed her mind by then."

He obviously doesn't understand children with long memories. Decades after my father took me to Paris, my sister - who'd been left behind because she was too small - was still reminding him regularly of his obligation:

"How are you?"

"Fine. Don't forget you still owe me a trip to Paris."

So don't come crying to me when you're scooping alpaca pooh off the carpet.

On balance, though, you could say that my enforcing role makes these off duty moments all the lovelier.

When Peter comes in with a bundle of work under his arm to find us in front of the TV, guilt rises in me. Then Lydia says,

"We're having a Mother And Daughter Moment."

And I know that Crick, Watson and Sid Arthur would approve.

Hairbrush Stephanie Calman - 11th April 2009

The children used to deploy various creative strategies to try and get to stay up later:

"Would you like a foot rub Mummy? You know you like them!"

"Oh, what's that book? I love books."

"Would you like another glass of wine? Shall I get it?"

And even the old standby:

"I love you, Mummy! You're the Best Mummy in the World."

A mere year or so on, however, they no longer need to. They are so energetic, and we are so worn out, that the unthinkable has begun to happen: last Saturday we fell asleep before them.

As with so many stages of child development, it's happened far sooner than we expected. As my mother used to say,

"The day the baby learns to roll off the bed is the day before you get to that bit in the book."

You are also invariably looking the other way. To paraphrase John Lennon, child development is what happens while you're watching out for them to grow up. We blunder around looking for voices breaking and bosoms burgeoning, deciding that if they haven't happened yet our kids must be the same as they were last year. But they're not. We're just missing the subtle indicators that show us the true picture. Eek, I sound like the government.

We had a classic example this week. Having hitherto enjoyed only a passing acquaintance with the hairbrush - leading to shouting matches on the doorstep every time we leave the house, Lydia fell asleep clutching the formerly reviled object. Her hair had been thoroughly brushed and was tied back - tied back I tell you - with the brush itself in her hand. I called Peter in and we stood transfixed together over her regal form like Howard Carter discovering Tutankhamun with his golden flail. Her previously favoured nightime companion, the disturbingly lipsticked Build-a-Bear, now lay on the floor with its skirt up like a binge drinking casualty.

"It brings a lump to the throat," said Peter.

And as pre-pubescent indicators go, it sure beats flouncing and door slamming.

We're not only starting to notice that internal and external changes may not happen in synch, but that there's a sort of zig-zag pattern to it. For example, Lydia's allowed to go to school by herself now if she wants to; it's a very short walk with one main road and a lollipop man. But she doesn't always want to. Or she wants to go on her bike, which is too small. When she pedals her knees practically hit the handlebars and she wobbles madly. But when I said,

"We'll consider it," she said,

"Well, I've considered it and I've said Yes."

You see where this is going? She may yet end up not just an adult, but in politics. It's a frightening thought.

In Lawrence's case, there's no sign of the mother-rejection he should be going through about now. I get the same amount of affection as ever, and even the odd bit of help. Mind you, communications between us are laced with a cheery sarcasm, interspersed with the constantly changing vocabulary of Year 7. So, when I called - admittedly without looking -

"Put your dirty plate in the sink!" he said,

"I already have. We call that 'putting it in the sink'."

And when he found the right channel for us on our fiendishly clever new TV recorder - sales slogan 'You can record anything in the known universe but you can't watch it' - I said,

"Tell us what you did! I demand to know!"

And he said, over his shoulder:

"Jog on."

"Is that some new phrase they're all using?" said Peter, sounding about 102.

Our friend Angela says one reason independence doesn't happen in a linear fashion is that the separation process is more of a long-term, evolving thing.

"How long term?"

"Well, one of mine still didn't want me to wave to him when we met at the theatre."

"How could you tell?"

"The way he stood, really, with his arms pinned by his sides."

They were celebrating his twenty-eighth birthday.

Good Mummy Stephanie Calman - 28th March 2009

With that uncanny sense of timing that the universe boasts when it comes to parenting, Peter goes off to a conference for a week and pretty much just as the sound of his footsteps has died away, the children start being sick. It starts with Lydia then passes to Lawrence, like a puke relay. Their father had been worried about how I would amuse myself without the constant stimulation of his thrilling personality, but now the problem is solved. I won't have to resort to watching America's Got Talent while eating the fuzzy chocolate left in the treats tin; I will be Being Indispensable.

Lyd was not 100% last term, when she was plagued by mysterious headaches which were not, as we first feared, a brain tumour, but evidently the result of going to sleep every night with two books, a unicorn and some knitting under her head. Then she had a sore chest, which I put down to too much shouting, being pulled along the floor on a blanket by Lawrence and eating large amounts of ice-cream very fast. Bucking my mother's dictum, that you didn't need the doctor if you were actually breathing, I finally took Lydia to the GP, who listened to her chest and said with some satisfaction,

"Ah! This is almost bronchitis."

This meant antibiotics and kudos once back at school; I could hear a hushed ripple of "Almost bronchitis!" go round the playground before I'd got out of the gate. But she was back, and I could get on with my life. Until this.

As for Lawrence, he'd had nothing wrong with him at all except extreme listlessness brought on by seeing his sister get three days off. That's the drawback of having brought them up expecting things to be fair. We should have treated them unfairly while they were small, and now we?ve made a rod for our own backs.

But hooray! He's got his wish. Lydia is awake all night throwing up copiously, and so is he.

Whoever's declared the sickest at nightfall is allowed to sleep with me, with the other on a mattress, so I can keep an eye. Unfortunately my age is taking its toll, and waking up five times a night is not the breeze it used to be. Thinking I must have gone mad and had another baby, my body shocks itself hourly out of sleep and lunges forward like Glenn Close at the end of Fatal Attraction. It feels like torture.

But there is a very considerable upside. Though it may not look it to the casual observer, this is a golden opportunity for me. Normally, their father is the Perfect Parent, the one who never shouts, who reads to them every night, makes fresh orange juice for us all in the mornings with eggs any style, and is constantly in danger of being severely harmed by me for being so bloody marvellous. As any married person knows well, whether a parent or not, once the other half has grabbed the Good Cop role, muggins is left with Bad Cop. It's just how it is. But now, thanks to this sicky turn of events, I have the chance to be the Nice One. All I have to do is wake up every hour to hold a sick bowl, get up to empty and clean it, stroke their hair and read another chapter of 'How to Train Your Dragon'?, their post-nausea favourite. And then - try to get back to sleep. I am at last Lovely Mummy, but I am also, by the end of Day Three, bonkers with fatigue.

Even so, I still manage to carry out the most vital task of the whole enterprise: to text Peter.

Now L's turn throwing up. Am coping brilliantly. Enjoy hotel to the full!

He is staying at a luxurious place in Derbyshire with big beds, crisp sheets and a pool. He has a fabulous week, but for once, I get to be Marvellous.

"Thank you for looking after me Mummy," says Lawrence in his tiny, unwell voice.

Hah! That beats the Five Star conference anytime.