The mother was fine. Her skin silky smooth, hair freshly coiffed, no postpartum depression, no sleep deprivation, she just basked in the glory of her newborn son, like soaking up rays of sweet summer sunshine in the early morning.
Her son was all she ever wanted. He was a precious being, too young to even smile, but he had a soulful warmth emerging from his doughy body as he nestled in her arms, and his mere presence brought her to the brink of ecstatic tears.
But one day, scrolling through some TikTok videos of families singing nursery rhymes while bouncing happily around on marital beds, or clips of kids cooking messy pizzas and cupcakes for lunch, then squelching in muddy puddles in the countryside, she found one reel that tore her heavenly bliss to shreds.
The fourteen second clip featured a heavyset young woman, with a frizzy red fringe covering her close-set eyes, and she screeched like a burns victim into the lens of a quivering camera phone.
“NEW MOTHERS, YOUR BABY IS IN GRAVE DANGER!!! BE AFRAID OF BEES, CUTLERY, WINDOWS, CARS, SLUGS—THEY WILL ALL KILL YOUR BABY!!! THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA HAVE LIED TO YOU, THIS IS WAR!!!“
And then the reel cut off abruptly, only to repeat again and again, ramming its furious point home like an axe swiftly chopping down an old willow tree. Despite the TikTok woman clearly being deranged—spitting with each syllable, banging her head at the end of each sentence—she exuded a strange charisma, and the mother was rocked to her very core.
The mother got to work immediately—there was no time to waste. To begin with, she plonked her baby on the vinyl recliner sofa, gathered up some velour teddy bears, and glued them to his soft bald pate, creating a protective layer. The baby looked like the elephant man. But this was not a fashion show and for now he was safe, or safer at the very least.
Next the mother tackled the windows. There was too much bright light streaming inside and at midday it was almost blinding. What if the baby’s supple skin contracted skin cancer? What if it bored holes into his precious little eyes? The mother slung her child around her back, then used thick black masking tape she found in her husband’s office and covered the windows until there was almost complete darkness.
Next up, the mother decided to secure the garden. All sorts of untamed wildlife and fauna threatened her son in there. She retrieved a pair of shears from the shed and unceremoniously lopped off every flower head she could find, from geraniums to snapdragons and lavender too—anything that could attract the bees, because they were an unpredictable menace, killers who wanted nothing less than to destroy her tiny bundle of joy. They had to be stopped. She found an explosion of daisies growing on a central patch of grass. So, she pulled out the lawnmower and mowed back and forth until the yard was pristine and bare.
A sunburned neighbour in a tank top and granny pants, chewing on a stick of celery while sipping a glass of ice cold Pimm’s, popped her head over the fence and yelled above the raucous noise, “Excuse me! But don’t you know that bees are vital to our ecosystem? What you’re doing is a crime.”
“Fuck off, Shirley!” cried the mother, and continued on.
The baby was still asleep but he would need a feed soon. He was sweaty and the soft toys around his head were beginning to chafe. However, there was one final task she needed to put right in the garden.
She scoured the patio and flowerbeds for slugs who might suck the baby’s vital fluids from his darling elbows and knees. She poured heaps of salt on every mollusc she could find, creating small mounds of white powder all over the garden, and then she went inside for a slug of gin and a snooze to settle her frayed nerves.
She was woken an hour later by the vestibule door crashing into the brooding portrait of a suicidal Hungarian peasant woman, alerting the mother to her husband’s drunken presence.
He tripped on the buggy folded in the hall, then shuffled into the dining room, fell onto a dining room chair, and gave a violent rolling smoker’s cough.
“Dark in here,” he muttered to himself. “Food! Where’s the food?!”
The mother leapt to her feet and rushed to the fridge. She pulled out a bowl of sour cream cucumber salad wrapped in cellophane and a homemade lasagna dish, with pitta bread and humus on the side. As she served the meal to her husband he grunted with satisfaction. He didn’t look into her red raw eyes, didn’t notice the straggly twigs wedged in her hair, didn’t see the dirt smeared on her dress. He did, however, notice an unpleasant body odour, but he was too wasted to care.
The mother left her husband’s side, and rejoined her son who was asleep in the sitting room, as peaceful as ever—not once during the day was he aware of his mother’s zealous mission.
She was satisfied with her day’s work, and yet there was much more to be done. She had to protect the front yard from the rampant squirrels who could pluck out her son’s eyeballs, and then there were the streets beyond, where kamikaze drivers roamed around hazardous potholes, veering onto the pavement, taking out pedestrians.
She fingered her cuts and bruises—the signs of her new existential crisis—then curled up in a ball on the couch and shuddered like a frightened hedgehog.
“Why is all the cutlery bent?” called the husband, clearly unaware that knives, forks, and spoons needed to be made safe, too. “And we’ve run out of salt!”