People LIke Her(7)

“The fact of the matter is,” Emmy would always say, “I knew from the moment I met Dan he was the man I was going to marry, so the fact I was seeing someone else seemed irrelevant. I had already broken up with Giles in my head; he was history. I just hadn’t got around to telling him that yet.” She would shrug sheepishly as she said this, offer a rueful smile, glance across at me.

I used to think it was all quite romantic, to be honest.

The truth is, we were probably both pretty insufferable in those days. I imagine most young lovers are.

I can vividly recall announcing to my mother over the phone (I was wandering around the flat in a towel at the time, wet-haired, holding a cigarette, looking for a lighter) that I had met my soulmate.

Emmy was like no one else I had ever met. She is still unlike anyone else I’ve ever met. Not just the most beautiful woman I have ever laid eyes on but the funniest, the cleverest, the sharpest, the most ambitious. One of those people you know you need to be on your best form to keep up with. One of those people you want to impress. One of those people who get every reference before you have even finished making it, who have that magic that makes everyone else in a room recede into the distance. Who have you saying things you’ve never told anyone within two hours of meeting them. Who change the way you look at life. Half the weekend we used to spend in bed, the other half in the pub. We would eat out at least three nights a week, at pop-up restaurants serving Middle Eastern small plates or at modern barbecue joints that don’t take reservations. We went out dancing on Wednesday nights and did karaoke on Sunday afternoons. We went on city breaks—to Amsterdam, to Venice, to Bruges. We dragged our hangovers out for 5K runs, laughing and shoving each other along when one of us started to flag. When we weren’t out in the evening, we used to spend ages together in the bath, with our books and a bottle of red wine, occasionally topping up our glasses or the hot water.

“Things can only go downhill from here,” we used to joke.

It all seems a very long time ago now.

Emmy

You know that thing that middle-class women do the day before their cleaner arrives? Running around the house, picking up the most embarrassing bits off the floor, giving the bathroom a wipe, putting stuff in piles, so the place isn’t quite such a mortifying mess?

I don’t do that. Never have. I mean, obviously, we have a cleaner who comes twice a week, but our house is usually tidy. It was tidy before we had children, and it is tidy now. Toys go away before bedtime. Storybooks are back on the shelf. Piles on the stairs are not allowed. No mugs on the countertop. Socks left on the floor get thrown away.

Which means the hours before a camera crew arrives for a shoot are always spent untidying. Don’t get me wrong, we’re not talking empty pizza boxes and unwashed pants—just a light dusting of knitted dinosaurs, Lego bricks and talking unicorns, a two-day-old newspaper lying here, a collapsed cushion fort there, and some single shoes in awkward places. It takes effort to calibrate just the right level of chaos, but dirty isn’t aspirational and perfect isn’t relatable. And Mamabare is nothing if not relatable.

I can only tackle the mess making, of course, after I’ve seen to my social media feeds. It’s not a routine Dan’s especially keen on, but Bear is his responsibility for the first hour of each day because I need both hands and my whole brain to catch up on what has happened overnight.

Prime posting time is after the kids go to bed, when my million followers have poured their first glass of wine and dived headfirst into a scroll hole instead of summoning the energy to talk to their husbands. So that’s when I schedule my seemingly off-the-cuff, in-the-moment, but actually prephotographed, already-written posts. Last night’s was a photo of me with a sheepish grin, standing against a yellow wall, pointing at my feet in trainers that were clearly two halves of separate pairs, with a screaming Bear strapped to my front in the sling that, for some reason, he hates with a passion. It was accompanied by a description of being so sleep-deprived I’d left the house that morning with my sweatshirt on backward and one pink Nike and one green New Balance on my feet, and a cool east London kid on the number thirty-eight bus telling me approvingly that I looked fresh.

It certainly could have happened. I write in the style of honesty, so it’s useful if there’s a small grain of truth in my posts. My husband is the novelist, not me—I just can’t seem to manage total fiction. I need a little spark from real life to fire up my imagination to craft an anecdote that sounds plausibly authentic. I also find it’s easier to keep track of my maternal misadventures that way, to avoid contradicting myself, which is important when I need to wheel the same stories out in interviews, panel talks, and personal appearances.

In this case, there was no cool kid, no mismatched trainers, and no public transport. I had just nearly nipped to Tesco with my cardigan on inside out.

I ended the post by asking my followers what their own most sleep-deprived mum moment is—it’s a classic engagement trick, pushing them to post a response. And of course, the higher the engagement, the more brands are prepared to pay you to flog their wares.

Overnight, I’ve got 687 comments and 442 DMs, all of which I need to acknowledge or reply to. Some days this takes longer than others—if there’s a depressed mother who seems dangerously unhappy, or one at her wits’ end with a colicky baby who screams nonstop, I take care to send something personal, something kind. It’s tough to know what to say in a situation like that, having never been through it, but I can’t bring myself to leave these women hanging when it seems like everyone else in their lives has.