THE THING THAT people didn’t get when they accused Karen Bloom of being a tiger mother was that she wasn’t at all offended by it. Even when it wasn’t said in a jokey, leg-pulling kind of way. Even when it was meant as an insult.
Karen was a tiger mother, and she was proud of it. Why shouldn’t she be? Just because ordinary mothers had decided it was wrong to push their offspring, just because they took the easy way out, saying it wasn’t a mother’s place to mould a child into greatness, it didn’t mean Karen had to go along with it. Because they would say that, wouldn’t they? It was an easy way to justify their own lazy lives, their own acceptance of mediocrity. And Karen was very sorry, but she wasn’t having that for Brontë.
It was her responsibility – her duty, in fact – to prepare Brontë for the life ahead of her in the best way she knew how. Life was a competition. Only the best and the brightest succeeded, and if that meant Karen had to put her own hopes and dreams on the back burner while she invested everything she had in Brontë’s future, so be it.
She had tried it the other way, and Ewan was the result.
Lazy, disrespectful Ewan. She loved him, naturally. He was her son – of course she loved him. But she had failed in her parenting the first time around, and she wouldn’t do it twice. Not with Brontë. Not with such a remarkable child.
‘Don’t you think you should ease up on her scheduled activities?’ the other mothers would say. ‘A child needs to be a child, after all.’ And Karen would think: Here we go. Envy camouflaged as concern. Jealousy dressed up as self-righteousness. Karen would smile politely, saying that Brontë could cope. That she positively thrived on hard work. When really what Karen wanted to say was: All this input would be pointless with your child. Your child would remain ordinary – pedestrian – no matter what you did.
But Karen didn’t air those thoughts because Karen was a nice person. And nice people didn’t say things like that.
It was 5.20 p.m. and Karen was where she could generally be found: behind the wheel of the car, parked, waiting for Brontë’s lesson to finish; this time, it was piano. From five thirty they had half an hour to get from Grasmere to Windermere, to be in time for her tap class, and in this time Brontë also needed to eat and complete her reading homework. Which, if Karen was correct, was chapter twelve of Holes by Louis Sachar.
Karen had recently started to zone out when Brontë read, because Brontë could sound a little Dalek-like – something Karen had tried to work on. Karen would repeat sentences, emphasize particular words, trying to get some light and shade into her daughter’s delivery, but, alas, nothing had worked, so she was taking a short break. For now, she let Brontë read however she liked, as long as it got done; though she knew it was a problem.
A friend of Karen’s had enrolled her child in the Stagecoach Theatre Arts School because she felt her daughter was lacking in self-confidence, and Karen was looking into the idea for Brontë. The problem was, it clashed with her Saturday harp tutorial and Karen had promised herself that music would come first, no matter what. Music came before play dates, sleepovers, before friends’ birthday parties. Music came first because it had to. There was no point giving your child these opportunities if you were going to go at them in a half-hearted way. To excel took real commitment. On all levels. Something the other mothers at school appeared to be ignoring, if their appearance was anything to go by. Those women were not quite doing the school run in their pyjamas, but they weren’t far off.
But what if Brontë did grow up without adequate public-speaking experience? That was sure to hamper her chances of performing well at university interviews. So it had to be addressed. It was needling Karen more than she had realized. Perhaps she should make an allowance just this once and—
The car door opened and Brontë climbed in, telling Karen in a strained voice that she was starving and she really needed to eat something, ‘Straight away, Mummy.’
‘You’ll have to eat and read at the same time,’ Karen said, turning the ignition and checking her mirror before quickly pulling out in front of a learner driver whom she couldn’t take the chance of getting stuck behind.
Brontë took three fast bites of her cream-cheese sandwich before reaching into her rucksack to retrieve Holes. Then, without any prompting from Karen, she methodically thumbed through the pages until she found her spot and began to read.
She read as if there was a full stop after each bloody word.
Karen had to do something. She would speak to Brontë’s teacher first thing tomorrow. See if she knew of anyone who could tutor Brontë and get her out of this awful habit. It was actually quite embarrassing.
The traffic slowed. There were temporary traffic lights up ahead. Karen watched Brontë. Watched as she ran the fingers of her bad hand shakily underneath the words as she spoke them out loud.
Surely she should have stopped with that by now?