When left holding the baby isn’t (as much) fun anymore

MY fortysomething friend’s twentysomething daughter has just had her second baby.

My fortysomething friend, although overjoyed with her grandchildren, is not quite as ecstatic at being a grandmother. Not because she has issues with being called ‘nanny’, but because she has issues with being called upon on a Sunday morning to take the children to the park so that her twentysomething daughter has some space in which to argue energetically with her partner, then have a long lingering reconciliation. My friend was happily doing the very same with her own boyfriend before the phone rang.

Youthful nanny meets up with older mummy – they are the same age — at the park. Older mummy, until quite recently serenely groovy and laid back, has become something of a train wreck in the past two and a half years. She has been repeatedly run over by a toddler. “Jesus,” she whispers, half to herself. “If I had known it was going to be this hard I would have just got another cat.” Her once glossy hair hangs limp, and her face is baggy with fatigue; she doesn’t even realise that her t-shirt is inside out, or that there is a Ben Ten sticker on her collarbone. Luckily for her — and her toddler — her oxytocin levels bathe the shock of late mummyhood in a mildly rosy sheen. Otherwise the kid would be on eBay.