How Hard Can It Be?. Allison Pearson

her. Why do women like her get to me? Probably because they get to play domestic goddesses on hubby’s Platinum Amex. Not a life I ever wanted – although, recently, I must admit the idea of being a kept woman has developed a certain appeal.

      Bit late for that, Kate. Most of the guys who could keep you in the style to which Cynthia is accustomed are (a) on Wife Number Two or (b) picking up debt-ridden students on Sugar Daddy websites so they can rub their slack, saggy bodies on prime young flesh. Uch. For Wifey Number One, hanging onto her position is a full-time job: gym, Botox, yoga, nutritionist, even vaginoplasty to get her pre-baby pussy back so hubby’s floppy dick isn’t wanging about in a wind tunnel that three babies’ heads have passed through. No thank you.

      And yet, glancing across the café at Cynthia and her gaggle of mums, I feel a corkscrew of envy in my gut. Always slightly dreaded the whole school-gate thing; in truth, I was dismissive of those women whose life revolves around coffees and playdates. But now that Ben is too old to be picked up any more, I miss the ready companionship that that ritual provided and all the pleasant, eager, worried women I could discuss my kids with. They were a bulwark against the loneliness of parenting, if only I’d known it. Anyway, need to get this magnificent CV finished. Just a few final points.

       Oversaw the establishment of a major hydro site. (Weekly laundry, handwashing Rich’s pongy cycling gear so it doesn’t ‘go bobbly’.)

       Provided sustainable nutritional support for staff in line with industry standards. (Always kept snacks for kids to eat in car on way home from school, thus avoiding total meltdown. At least one cooked meal a day for four people, making approximately ten thousand hot dinners in the past seven years, without any thanks or acknowledgement of what it takes to cater said dinners.)

       Turned around declining private company through regular programme of cuts and aggressive streamlining to offset threat of double-dip recession. (Went on Fast Diet and started going to gym again. Hopefully on track to fit into my old office clothes.)

       Strove for a consistent improvement in the bottom line. (Slightly smaller bum as a result of excruciating squats.)

      If any of the above strikes you as vaguely fraudulent or unethical, well, I’m sorry, but what are the words you’d use to describe the fact that women take care of the young and the old, year in year out, and none of that work counts as skills or experience, or even work? Because women are doing it for free it is literally worthless. As Kerslaw said, we have nothing of interest to offer, except everything we do and everything we are. I am not by nature a political person, but I swear I would march to protest the vast untold work done by all the women of this world.

      3.15 pm: Fighting the urge to go upstairs and sleep. Can hardly put ‘afternoon napping’ down as part of my skillset on application form, although it’s the one thing I excel at these days. Probably Perry’s fault. With my CV immensely improved (although I’m not sure I’d dare show it to my Women Returners group) I brace myself for a call to Wrothly Social Services. Sadly, it’s too early for alcohol.

      ‘Your call may be assessed for training purposes.’

      Here we go. You know when you’ve pressed five for one department and then you’ve pressed one from the Following Range of Options, although you think you may have misheard, and that maybe you needed three? And then you’ve pressed seven for Any Other Queries, and your hopes are getting up that you might be about to interact with an actual human being, when a recorded voice says, ‘Sorry. We are experiencing a high volume of calls. Your call is important to us, please hold the line’? And the phone rings and rings and rings and you picture a cobwebby office with a skeleton sitting in a chair at a desk and the phone on the desk it rings and rings and rings? Well, that’s what it feels like to be calling Wrothly Social Services.

      By now, surely everyone has figured out that these multiple options are not designed to be helpful; they are supposed to act as a deterrent whilst giving the illusion of progress and choice. Even ‘your call may be used for training purposes’ is basically a threat, telling you to behave yourself or else. A mere twenty minutes elapse until I get through to someone in the right department, who then asks if he can put me on hold while he speaks to a colleague, who may or may not have access to Barbara’s case notes. I am almost tearfully grateful for this basic courtesy.

      ‘Hello? Can I help you?’

      The voice does not sound at all helpful. In fact, she sounds as though she may recently have graduated from a bespoke Unhelpfulness training course – the one they send American border security staff on.

      I know, let’s baffle her with politeness and friendliness.

      ‘Good afternoon, thank you so much. It’s great to talk to an actual person.’

      No response.

      ‘So, I’m ringing on behalf of my mother-in-law, she has a burns injury …’

      ‘Barbara Shattock?’

      ‘Yes, that’s right. Great. Thank you so much. I spoke to my father-in-law earlier and he says that, unfortunately, there was a misunderstanding between Barbara and Erna, the carer you so kindly sent to help them.’

      ‘I’m afraid that your mother-in-law has been reported in connection with a possible hate crime,’ says the voice.

      ‘What? No. That can’t be right.’

      ‘Mrs Shattock racially abused one of our carers.’

      ‘Sorry? No. You’ve got that wrong. You don’t understand. Barbara, she’s eighty-five. She’s very confused. She’s not herself.’

      ‘Mrs Shattock accused her carer of not being able to speak English. At Wrothly, we take hate crime very seriously.’

      ‘Hang on. What hate crime? Erna is Lithuanian, isn’t she? She’s not a different race to Barbara. Do you even know what racism is?’

      ‘I’m not trained to answer that question,’ the voice says flatly.

      ‘But you’re making a very serious allegation.’

      There is an icy silence into which I burble and plead: ‘I’m really sorry if there’s been a misunderstanding, but it’s simply not in Barbara’s nature to upset someone like that.’

      That is a blatant lie. As long as I’ve known her, more than twenty years now, Barbara has been the princess of passive aggression, the empress of undermining. The world is full, as far as Barbara is concerned, of people who are Simply Not Up To It. The list of Simply Not Up To Its is long and ever-expanding. It includes news anchors with sloppy diction, women who ‘let themselves go’, tradesmen with dirty boots who don’t show sufficient respect to Axminster carpets, pregnant weathergirls, politicians who are ‘basically Communists’, and the fool responsible for a misprint in the Daily Telegraph crossword. A mistake in her favourite crossword and Barbara will act out the mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor, calling for the head of the idiot who introduced an error into Twenty-Two Across.

      As the lesser of her two daughters-in-law, it was established early on that I was Simply Not Up To It. I was hardly the girl Richard’s mother hoped her son would marry and she did very little to conceal her disappointment. Every time we visited, Barbara would ask without fail, ‘Where did you get that dress/blouse/coat, Kate?’ and not in a way which indicated she wished to go out and purchase one for herself.

      One Christmas, I was in the pantry looking for tinned chestnuts when I heard Barbara say to Cheryl, the preferred daughter-in-law, ‘Kate’s problem is she has no background.’

      It stung, not just the snobbery, but because Barbara was right. Compared to the comfortable, well-established Shattocks, my own family had a hasty, provisional feel. We were the Beverly Hillbillies, the supermarket’s basic range, and I know Barbara sensed it from the moment Rich first took me home. Luckily, he was so in love he didn’t notice her dig at my unmanicured hands. (I’d been decorating a junk-shop chest of drawers and the residue of grey-green paint looked like dirt beneath my fingernails.) I could put up with having my family patronised,