How Hard Can It Be?. Allison Pearson

of the panic I feel. I will glide towards it serenely, no more sudden swerves or bumps in the road.

      Well, that was the plan. Then Emily woke me up.

       1

       BATS IN THE BELFIE

       SEPTEMBER

      Monday, 1.37 am: Such a weird dream. Emily is crying, she’s really upset. Something about a belfry. A boy wants to come round to our house because of her belfry. She keeps saying she’s sorry, it was a mistake, she didn’t mean to do it. Strange. Most of my nightmares lately feature me on my unmentionable birthday having become totally invisible and talking to people who can’t hear me or see me.

      ‘But we haven’t got a belfry,’ I say, and the moment I speak the words aloud I know that I’m awake.

      Emily is by my side of the bed, bent over as if in prayer or protecting a wound. ‘Please don’t tell Daddy,’ she pleads. ‘You can’t tell him, Mummy.’

      ‘What? Tell him what?’

      I fumble blindly on the bedside table and my baffled hand finds reading glasses, distance glasses, a pot of moisturiser and three foil sheets of pills before I locate my phone. Its small window of milky, metallic light reveals that my daughter is dressed in the Victoria’s Secret candy-pink shorty shorts and camisole I foolishly agreed to buy her after one of our horrible rows.

      ‘What is it, Em? Don’t tell Daddy what?’

      No need to look over to check that Richard’s still asleep. I can hear that he’s asleep. With every year of our marriage, my husband’s snoring has got louder. What began as piglet snufflings twenty years ago is now a nightly Hog Symphony, complete with wind section. Sometimes, at the snore’s crescendo, it gets so loud that Rich wakes himself up with a start, rolls over and starts the symphony’s first movement again. Otherwise, he is harder to wake than a saint on a tomb.

      Richard had the same talent for Selective Nocturnal Deafness when Emily was a baby, so it was me who got up two or three times in the night to respond to her cries, locate her blankie, change her nappy, soothe and settle her, only for that penitential playlet to begin all over again. Maternal sonar doesn’t come with an off-switch, worse luck.

      ‘Mum,’ Emily pleads, clutching my wrist.

      I feel drugged. I am drugged. I took an antihistamine before bed because I’ve been waking up most nights between two and three, bathed in sweat, and it helps me sleep through. The pill did its work all too well, and now a thought, any thought at all, struggles to break the surface of dense, clotted sleep. No part of me wants to move. I feel like my limbs are being pressed down on the bed by weights.

      ‘Muuuu-uuuumm, please.’

      God, I am too old for this.

      ‘Sorry, give me a minute, love. Just coming.’

      I get out of bed onto stiff, protesting feet and put one hand around my daughter’s slender frame. With the other, I check her forehead. No temperature, but her face is damp with tears. So many tears that they have dripped onto her camisole. I feel its humid wetness – a mix of warm skin and sadness – through my cotton nightie and I flinch. In the darkness, I plant a kiss on Em’s forehead and get her nose instead. Emily is taller than me now. Each time I see her it takes a few seconds to adjust to this incredible fact. I want her to be taller than me, because in the world of woman, tall is good, leggy is good, but I also want her to be four years old and really small so I can pick her up and make a safe world for her in my arms.

      ‘Is it your period, darling?’

      She shakes her head and I smell my conditioner on her hair, the expensive one I specifically told her not to use.

      ‘No, I did something really ba-aa-aa-aad. He says he’s coming here.’ Emily starts crying again.

      ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart. It’s OK,’ I say, manoeuvring us both awkwardly towards the door, guided by the chink of light from the landing. ‘Whatever it is, we can fix it, I promise. It’ll be fine.’

      And, you know, I really thought it would be fine, because what could be so bad in the life of a teenage girl that her mother couldn’t make it better?

      2.11 am: ‘You sent. A picture. Of your naked bottom. To a boy. Or boys. You’ve never met?’

      Emily nods miserably. She sits in her place at the kitchen table, clutching her phone in one hand and a Simpsons D’oh mug of hot milk in the other, while I inhale green tea and wish it were Scotch. Or cyanide. Think, Kate, THINK.

      The problem is I don’t even understand what it is I don’t understand. Emily may as well be talking in a foreign language. I mean, I’m on Facebook, I’m in a family group on WhatsApp that the kids set up for us and I’ve tweeted all of eight times (once, embarrassingly, about Pasha on Strictly Come Dancing after a couple of glasses of wine), but the rest of social media has passed me by. Until now, my ignorance has been funny – a family joke, something the kids could tease me about. ‘Are you from the past?’ That was the punchline Emily and Ben would chorus in a sing-song Irish lilt; they had learned it from a favourite sitcom. ‘Are you from the past, Mum?’

      They simply could not believe it when, for years, I remained stubbornly loyal to my first mobile: a small, greyish-green object that shuddered in my pocket like a baby gerbil. It could barely send a text message – not that I ever imagined I would be sending those on an hourly basis – and you had to hold down a number to get a letter to appear. Three letters allocated to each number. It took twenty minutes to type ‘Hello’. The screen was the size of a thumbnail and you only needed to charge it once a week. Mum’s Flintstone Phone, that’s what the kids called it. I was happy to collude with their mockery; it made me feel momentarily light-hearted, like the relaxed, laid-back parent I knew I never really could be. I suppose I was proud that these beings I had given life to, recently so small and helpless, had become so enviably proficient, such experts in this new tongue that was Mandarin to me. I probably thought it was a harmless way for Emily and Ben to feel superior to their control-freak(ish) mother, who was still boss when it came to all the important things like safety and decency, right?

      Wrong. Boy, did I get that wrong. In the half hour we have been sitting at the kitchen table, Emily, through hiccups of shock, has managed to tell me that she sent a picture of her bare backside to her friend Lizzy Knowles on Snapchat because Lizzy told Em that the girls in their group were all going to compare tan-lines after the summer holidays.

      ‘What’s a Snapchat?’

      ‘Mum, it’s like a photo that disappears after like ten seconds.’

      ‘Great, it’s gone. So what’s the problem?’

      ‘Lizzy took a screenshot of the Snapchat and she said she meant to put it in our Facebook Group Chat, but she put it on her wall by mistake so now it’s there like forever.’ She pronounces the word ‘forever’ so it rhymes with her favourite, ‘Whatevah’ – lately further abbreviated to the intolerable ‘Whatevs’.

      ‘Fu’evah,’ Emily says again. At the thought of this unwanted immortality, her mouth collapses into an anguished ‘O’ – a popped balloon of grief.

      It takes a few moments for me to translate what she has said into English. I may be wrong (and I’m hoping I am), but I think it means that my beloved daughter has taken a photo of her own bare bum. Through the magic of social media and the wickedness of another girl, this image has now been disseminated – if that’s the word I want, which I’m very much afraid it is – to everyone in the school, the street, the universe. Everyone, in fact, but her own father, who is upstairs snoring for England.

      ‘People think it’s like