London - This is a short story: we have called it Mabel And The Sharpie. On Sunday, during the rare, blissful peace of a lazy afternoon spent on the sofa, introducing the children to the TV series Midsomer Murders, the smallest (and most challenging) of the four disappeared.
We didn’t notice she was gone for a while, preoccupied as we were with listing the celebrity names who’ve all made brief appearances at Badger’s Drift: Orlando Bloom, Hayley Mills, Emily Mortimer, Sir Steve Redgrave (I could go on).
I sent the bored eldest (11) in search of the youngest (two-and-a-half) when I realised her nap time was approaching. You may have heard the ear-piercing scream that shattered the peace of the family afternoon when she found Mabel. Naked and proud, the little tearaway raced through the front room, chased by her red-faced sister.
Fierce Mabel held a small, blue Sharpie marker pen aloft like the Olympic Flame. Her pale face was covered in indelible ink, like the random doodles of a mad person. Much of her blonde hair was blue.
Her tummy was covered in ink, the backs of her hands had been coloured in. But this, as it turned out, was the least of our problems.
In the sacrosanct “enter at your own peril” bedroom belonging to our pre-teen, it looked like one of the inmates from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest had set up camp. Pen on the walls, the carpet and the pony-covered bedspread.
Worse still, there was a demonic scrawl over each of her soft toys, my eldest’s last vestige of childhood, her fluffy friends clinging on to the last few months of affection before she considers anything that can’t text you back or take a selfie irrelevant.
“Mabel has massacred them, look at Brucie,” she wailed, hurling herself to the bed dramatically and clutching as many as she could get in her arms. I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of anything sadder than a small, mutilated, soon-to-be-abandoned soft toy.
Especially a much-loved, much-hugged, dog-eared Dalmatian. The scene was a poignant and symbolic reminder that everything at home is about to change.
The day before, a letter had arrived bearing unbearable news: Mabel has a place at nursery. In September, the baby years are officially over; my last baby will be spending the week with people who have not known her since the day she was born (which she does now).
By the end of the summer, those soft toys in my nearly-teenage daughter’s room will be destined for the loft. They’ve been neglected for months already. Apart from Brucie, I doubt she could even name them now (I can).
The Big Book Of Parenting doesn’t mention this, does it? The emotional rollercoaster of letting go that makes you hug them a tiny bit longer at each stage of growing up.
I feel a bit bruised by the forthcoming changes already — not least because I keep seeing pictures of cute Prince George every five minutes on the telly (a womb wobbler if ever there was one).
I heard myself telling another mum at the school pick-up that if I hadn’t started so late, I would have another. She looked at me, startled: “But you did start at the same time as everyone else,” she replied.
Did I, though? This week, I read that Girls Aloud singer Kimberley Walsh reckons that, at 32, she has left it too late to have a large family. And now she is pregnant with her first, she is going to let her career take a back seat and “dedicate my life to my baby”.
It’s dispiriting when young women’s role models like Kimberley make daft statements. It just feeds the fear of failure that stalks women around the subject of babies.
I had my first at 32 and my last at 43 — your 30s is not late for a larger family if genetics and circumstance coincide.
And I continued to work, “dedicating” myself to family and career. Loads of women do; you don’t have to choose one or the other.
There is no perfect time for a baby. You can’t plan when one will come along, or what happens when it does, because babies are unpredictable. Parenting is a series of out-of-control moments. Just ask Mabel: we never know what she is going to do next.
She refused to apologise to her sister for the Sharpie incident, so we put her on “the step” to think about what she’d done. Mabel managed to sit there squirming for two minutes, before reluctantly saying sorry.
We’ll never know why Mabel wreaked havoc with a marker pen. Most of what toddlers do is inexplicable. It is unlikely to be a reaction to the nursery news, which she took well when we confirmed cake was available there, too.
I only just managed to get her into her underwear before she fled into the garden for more antics, while we started the big clean-up.
I don’t know whether to warn the nursery or not. - Daily Mail
* LORRAINE CANDY is editor-in-chief of ELLE magazine.