Status Updates From Making It Up

It was because that is what history does to people. It picks them up by the scruff of the neck and puts them where they do not want to be. It scuppers them; it condemns them to national service and then throws them this, as an extra treat.

"I mean, in a sense I should actually be grateful to her. If she hadn't been the way she was, would I be who I am?
Look at it this way—maybe I needed that sort of kick-start. It's an old story, isn't it? Making good. I didn't exactly claw my way out of the gutter, but there's an analogy, don't you think?

By now, Chloe regarded her mother as simply a part of life's complexity. She could still be mildly irritated by Miranda but saw her as, essentially, the crucial directive element in her own struggle for fulfillment.

Chloe saw that a successful parent required the skills of an industrial arbitrator—the patience, the craft, the ability to identify and push forward a cohesive argument. Along with qualities of leadership and a taste for coercion. Well, she could supply all of that, given time and practice.

Beyond the intransigence of infants there lies the guile of childhood-the awesome powers of manipulation, the tenacity, the volatility, the flight from anything approaching consistency or rationality.

Second time round, Chloe was grimly prepared. She knew the battle lines, she knew the limits of her endurance, she knew that even in this ultimate test of the human spirit there is a little room for maneuver, even for some travesty of negotiation. When the third baby arrived, Chloe was ready and waiting-trained, hard-ened, a combat veteran. She knew how to do babies, insofar as that is possible.

Confronted with her first baby, Chloe was stopped in her tracks-scuppered, floored. This was the most intransigent being she had encountered, bar none. She faced anarchy, on a daily basis.
Nothing she had learned or experienced had prepared her for this- this collapse of all expectations of order. Sophie performed as babies do, and had her mother on the ropes, glassy-eyed.