Fake Mum

By Jo Fairley

Nature abhors a vacuum. Which may be how come, I guess, that as a childless woman I ended up with a platoon of motherless girls under my wing. Nine, in all. (You’ve heard of men described as ‘babe magnets’? I’m some kind of weird orphan magnet. Or semi-orphan, at least.)

It wasn’t how I expected things to turn out. At eighteen, my biological clock was ticking loudly. I went so far as to fill a wicker picnic basket with vintage outfits purchased for my future Daisy, my future Orlando (who should be very grateful, unborn soul that he is, that he didn’t end up in a central London comprehensive, with a name like that).

But then a funny thing happened which diverted me from the path to motherhood. I got an amazing job, or rather a series of them, in journalism. I was sent to interview movie stars. I was dispatched on press trips, the glamour of which the world has never seen again. Day trip to the south of France, to launch the Sony Walkman? Tick. Dinner at restaurant-of-the-moment San Lorenzo with Jerry Hall and Yves Saint Laurent for the unveiling of YSL Opium? Tick. Party for Keith Haring’s birthday at New York’s Paradise Garage, with a little private performance by that hot new singer Madonna? Tick. And along the way, I got some notches on my bedpost shagging rock gods. (Sorry. Not telling. Or not here, not now.) The biological clock was drowned out by live music, noisy restaurants (on a generous expense account), the loud pop of champagne corks and the creaking of bed springs.

By the time I got to crunch time for my eggs, I’d met the love of my life – only he was secondhand. Came with baggage – lovely baggage, but teenage baggage. I soon realised that sleepless nights didn’t end with teething. They boomeranged back when kids were old enough to drink, take drugs and drive (possibly all at the same time). For several years, Friday and Saturday nights were spent rigid in bed, waiting for the slam of the front door that indicated we could stop worrying. ‘Make a lot of noise, just so we know you’re home,’ we’d beg – to no avail. Because who, as an invincible teen, can believe that your parents (albeit ‘step’ in my case) are actually taking it in turns to creep down to see if there’s a lump in the bed, before they can fall asleep themselves? The prospect of maybe 20 more years of sleeplessness was at that point very unappealing.

And I realised: the advantage of not being exhausted by having children of my own meant I could pour lots of time, love (and, um, dosh) into other people’s. The aforementioned adored stepchildren. Neighbours’ kids. Niece and nephew. Many goddaughters – which seemed like the perfect scenario: I got to take them out to tea, fill them with cake, and drop them back just as the sugar crash descended.

So far, so happy. Suited me down to the ground. There were no dark nights of the soul, worrying that my DNA would die with me, or weeping over my redundant womb. But sometimes, on the godparent front, shit gets unexpectedly real. Those promises to take care of a child’s welfare, so lightly taken at the font? Turns out that when their mother goes and dies, that’s quite a responsibility. Four girls. No mum. And their two closest friends, whose own mother dies a short while later.

Weirdly, because this is how the universe works, that tragic sequence of events happened to coincide with acquiring a rambling house in Hastings where that motherless platoon could let off steam for weekends and half-terms at a time, allowing their weary, perhaps broken fathers some respite. Where they could be their astonishingly creative selves. Dress up in the costumes I’d spent years collecting (was I psychic, or something?) and put on plays they’d written themselves, or reenact the entire Rocky Horror Show (I still have the videos to blackmail them with). Order mountainous takeaway curries on my credit card. Build shelters out of eiderdowns and upturned sofas. Jackson Pollock the kitchen ceiling making frothy hot chocolate. Swing on the swing. Stain my upholstery with felt-tip pens they’d lost the lids to. Ring porn lines, when they got a bit older, notching up a very impressive £100 of charges in a single night. And talk about their mothers, freely.

There’d be 10 or 12 of them, sometimes, their numbers swelled when they invited friends, often with my own little stepgrandchildren in residence. It’d take all week to get the house ship-shape again. Even now there’s still glitter in the crevices of my kitchen table and stains on the carpets that I’ve never managed to remove. Rewind to one particularly memorable visit, and the constant refrain from one goddaughter that someone had been sick in her room. Eventually, wearying of this particular conversational stuck needle, I clear the ankle-deep tangle of g-strings, vests, vintage dresses and school uniform which invariably explodes out of her holdall the minute she arrives, to discover a half-pound of Stilton, ground into the sisal. ‘YOU must have left it there,’ she says. ‘You know how I KNOW I didn’t?’ I counter. ‘IT’S NOT ORGANIC!’ She’s the one, the bright shining star we lost along the way, in a tragic echo of her own mother’s death. How affectionately I look at that stain, now.

Having grown up with a mother who wasn’t averse to taking in waifs and strays herself, I didn’t realise it was anything out of the ordinary. I thought it was what you did. But I realise that if I’d had children of my own, at that point, I probably wouldn’t have – couldn’t have – done it. I might not have had the space, or the patience, or the freedom to go up to London on Friday afternoon and collect them after school to chaperone them on the train, and do the same in reverse on Sunday night. And maybe not the extra love to go around, either, if I’d had my own Orlando and Daisy to take care of/feed/clothe/educate, 24/7.

Those motherless girls are grown now. Kids of their own. I’ve danced at their weddings (heck, in one case I’ve even hosted their wedding, and one of the best days of my life it was, too). At various times I’ve helped piece together broken hearts, mended torn frocks, baked pies, booked them flights home in real S.O.S.-es., given houseroom not only to them, for periods of time, but on an ongoing basis to ugly bits of furniture they ‘don’t have room for’. Many of them still make their way back here as adults, like the most exotically-plumed, exquisitely beautiful homing pigeons – or did, before #lockdown.

And the weird thing is: I’m still magnetising semi-orphans. The commonest denominator among many of the truly wonderful young women who’ve come to work for me has turned out to be that they don’t have a mother. I strike up new friendships with other (young) women, only discovering later that no, they don’t have a mum either. The most recent – to whom I remarked that she looks uncannily like I did in my early 20s – now calls me, simply, ‘Fake Mum’.

And that’s what I am. Entirely fake. But what I sometimes say to young women whose biological clocks are ticking, who lie awake at night weighing up the prospect of egg-freezing/sperm donation, or who may be distraught at having hit the snooze button on their biological clock till they’d effectively overslept, or just worrying that they’ll never meet their soulmate, is that there are lots of ways to mother.

They don’t all involve stretchmarks, stitches and sleep deprivation. But just like ‘the real thing’, they do require a capacity for bottomless love.