After about five minutes of my stepmother’s company, I’m always in a good mood. It’s not because of our beautiful harmony, though please think that too if it makes me sound good. In her 80s, and feeling the ravages of time ever so slightly, she makes a constant litany of benevolently envious remarks. There’s a lot of general observation about the condition of being me, and how fabulous that must be: “Oh to be 50 again”; “It must be wonderful to have an appetite”; “I wish I could still sleep in”. Ordinarily I don’t give much thought to the singular pleasures of human maintenance activities – eating, sleeping, having a shower – and when you really look at it, it isn’t a bad life, to be 52.
Admiring My Skills
Then she’ll move on to admire my particular skills: “Look at that!”; “What?”; “Look how fast you got out of the car.” It’s a fact, I’m incredibly good at this: I don’t grunt while I’m doing it; it doesn’t take 17 minutes. I’m pretty good at all sitting to standing manoeuvres. “That’s nothing,” I think. “You should see me get out of a squat.”
Everyday Tasks Become Feats
Pairing a phone to a Bluetooth speaker; getting a printer to work; rewinding live radio; for these acts and more, I am basically Clive Sinclair. Strength-based activities, mainly unscrewing lids, picking things up and putting them somewhere else, unleash a torrent of enjoyable plaudits. Sometimes I’ll heave a plant pot into the air and set it down again nicely, just showing off. Today I opened her front door, which is a bit stiff, by kicking it and she simply said: “Marvellous”. I can keep my ego in check for as long as a lunch, but if we spend a couple of days together, I basically think I’m magic.
Schadenfreude and Balance
Sometimes my stepmother will think I can do something that I cannot – read a menu without glasses, remember the name of a person we were just talking about – and because she’s only human and schadenfreude never gets old, that puts her in a good mood. So that makes two of us. Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist.
