This Is The Transcript Of A Real Conversation

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Person A: Guys I kinda need some help.

Person B: Why?

Person A: I parked in front of a car on the street beside the spar because it was too busy and now I can’t get my car to reverse without rolling forwards because I’m on a hill and I don’t know what to do.

Person B: Why can’t you just roll forwards?

Person A: Because the car is in front of me. It’s facing the other direction.

Person B: Then lift your clutch up higher.

Person A: I can’t do it on time without it rolling. I’m not used to this clutch yet.

Person B: Well I can’t help.

This is the transcript of a real conversation which took place on the instant messaging system known as WhatsApp between Person A and Person B who are not AI-generated chatbots with no soul but rather human siblings with not much love and approximately five years’ driving experience between them. And it is a digested transcript because there were at least 47,000 messages I had to scroll through when I pulled my mobile out of my handbag on a Friday afternoon in November.

I was having lunch with a friend. I was planning to show her a photo of my daughter who was neither Person A nor Person B, and this photo captured her rearranging stuff on a shelf in a shop that calls itself a department store when she was doing her first Saturday shift. And in this photo, she looks slightly startled because her younger sister who was also neither Person A nor Person B had decided it would be funny to pop in to laugh at her. “My fav worker” she said when she sent the image to the Sloan Family WhatsApp group. And this had precipitated another lengthy screaming-by-WhatsApp with warnings like “if she ever does that again, I will cut off all her hair in her sleep”.

My friend and I had been comparing notes. We were both exceptionally proud of ourselves because in between the domestic admin and the hormones, and the broken down washing machine and dishwasher which was me, which had made me wonder if there was a power surge or a poltergeist in our electrics rather than the more likely wear and tear due to 3,000 loads a week, and the new puppy which was her, we were both taking credit for securing employment for our sixteen-year-olds. We were CV-conscious mothers, keeping on top of the personal statements and heavily invested in their “I have no clue what I want to do” future careers. And so, I said “sorry I need to take this” like I was closing a massive business deal, and I entered the conversation as Person C. And in retrospect my contribution was negligible, but I was, in fairness, trying to spatially grasp the situation.

Person C: Which Spar?

Person A: Gilnahirk. Should I just leave my car and come back for it later?

Person C: Yes maybe best to come back later.

And I threw my phone back into my handbag and picked up my tuna sandwich and told her it was so serendipitous how I’d found this minimal wage job. I’d just nipped into this so-called department store for a pear and almond scone which wasn’t as good as I remembered them being, as I was sure they used to heat them pre-pandemic, and I’d noticed a sign by the till and I’d immediately leapt into action and pinned it to the Sloan Family WhatsApp and before you could say Happy Christmas, there was an application and an interview and a temporary seasonal role as a sales assistant. But my friend had been much more prolific. She had driven her child round the countryside and sent her into hotels and shops and other premises and eventually a restaurant and it was only when she realised she’d been waiting outside for fifteen minutes and had no idea who was inside, that she started to panic, but then her daughter emerged and said she was to come back at 6pm with a black blouse and trousers to try out as a waitress. And of course, like most mothers who still have PTSD re notes that said, it’s only navy leggings and a red t-shirt, I said where on earth did you get a black blouse.

It has occurred to me recently that our Sloan Family WhatsApp is not a good advertisement for my parenting. Whilst it’s a detailed record of life in the 21^st century and a testament to my typing, it could be triggering for those who prefer neat and tidy families who don’t respond to compliments with “Are you being sarcastic?”. It is full of metaphorical door-banging with everyone having left and been readmitted at some stage. It is relentlessly repetitious, littered with “landed” and “can you send me the code” and “what does everyone want in M&S” and “can you all collect your clothes from the laundry room” and “who walked Toby today” and “can someone order me more contact lenses”.

And for reasons which are too boring to explain, I found myself back in May and June on the Sloan Family WhatsApp, back in the warzone that was exam season when “there’s nothing for me to eat” and “what’s for lunch because I don’t see anything” featured heavily. “Do we have an egg thief?” asked my husband when packs of a dozen kept disappearing along with the avocados. No culprit ever owned up to “Who took the bite out of your mum’s wrap? We need a confession” nor the state of the bathroom. “I can confidently say I left no empty rolls and that I saw u using that towel to dry ur retainer,” said one blame-assigner. The fruitless search for suncream concluded with “it’s fine, if I burn, I burn”. And when I did a keyword search, there were 84 matches for suncream, 414 for flights, 602 for hockey, 1300+ for tennis, 367 for toilet, 181 for shut up, 140 for fighting and 722 for lift. “Lazy” and “ugly” and “literally” and “figuratively” and “your vocabulary is so limited” and “stop singing” and “who stole my straighteners” and “morning” and “night” were regular occurrences. And whilst we might have bookended our days acknowledging each other’s existence, we were not the Waltons.

And this was all on my mind in a week where I seem to have had excessive interactions with people who have small children. They have looked at me with fear and a deep longing for light at the end of the tunnel and asked me will it get easier, and I have been whistling through my teeth like a plumber and saying it will get different. And here’s what I really wanted to tell them. For many years, I tried to be the perfect mother, keeping on top of things, and I wanted life to run like clockwork, and I felt responsible for everything, and I never had any time, and it nearly killed me. And sometimes, I look down at my toes and I say I don’t have time to dry between you nor remove that chipped nail polish nor write a novel, and I don’t understand why because I have lost all control of my children and then I remember that the Sloan Family WhatsApp operates 24/7.

On Tuesday, I was chatting to a man in a sauna, and he was an excellent conversationalist and I was somewhat in awe as we moved from the weather to the price of gym membership to the joys of raising children and I was telling my husband about this and he said what did he look like and I said “young, full head of hair, fit” and I explained I could feel this nausea coming over me and it wasn’t the heat. It was when he mentioned the nativity play and the swimming lessons. “I couldn’t go back to that,” I said. And I wondered how a father of a two-year-old and a four-year-old had time to be in a sauna at 12pm on a Tuesday.

And when I finished my lunch and said goodbye to my friend and extracted my phone from my handbag on a Friday afternoon in November, there were another 3,000 messages and two missed calls and my heart skipped a little beat because this number was ingrained in my skull and I had this momentary dilemma about which communication mechanism to tackle first and then I decided it would be the Sloan Family WhatsApp because I’d find all I needed to know there. And I was glad to see Person D’s update spread across a trio of separate messages.

Person D: Guys have to let u know.

Person D: Everything’s fine apparently.

Person D: Cus if the Gatwick thing.

And when I rang the school back and the lady in the office said that they were contacting parents to reassure them that even though there was a security alert at Gatwick and the trains weren’t currently running and it was generally chaos, the teachers “are looking after your children”. And I said “thank you” with a wobble in my voice and I sat, and I held on to the steering wheel, and I grasped that I’d never been doing any of this parenting on my own.

Because there are people out there who will take your children and socialise them into workplaces, and accompany them on trips to Westminster, and help them learn words, and teach them to swim, and show them how to drive, and give them a chance, and turn them into real people who can have real conversations. And I was glad we weren’t a perfect family, that we were a real one, and we knew if we needed help we could always turn to WhatsApp because someone would always be there.