Why can't I say no?

I took to my bed this week. After 10 days of frenetic activity, my body went on strike. Exhaustion had set in, along with a temperature. There was no way out: I had to retreat to the cool, white space under my duvet. And so I lay there, racked by the knowledge of everything I needed to do - and couldn't do. Even as I popped some painkillers, I was calculating how long it would take before analgesia set in so that I could answer a few emails in bed and possibly put on another load of washing.

Timesick? 
© Captainzz | Dreamstime.com

This is modern life for the middle-aged. Somehow we can never find the pause button. Whether we go out to work or 'stay' at home, we fill our lives to the nth degree. Was it always like this? Did the ladies of Jane Austen's era drill their needles through their embroidery, scribble a few letters before luncheon and then gallop down to the Assembly Rooms to gossip about the Dowager so-and-so? Possibly, although I suspect our time-pressed routines have more to do with the advent of technology and modern child-rearing, than any innate need to rush through life.

Ironically technology was once heralded as a panacea to reduce hard work and long hours. Back in the 1950s, Winston Churchill believed that the proliferation of machines would eventually "give the working man what he's never had - four days' work and then three days' fun". Quite clearly Mr Churchill never anticipated the power and stealth of the smartphone. As well as fostering a culture of 24/7 working, the small screen also feeds our addiction to online gaming and social media. In any spare moment, my husband is either concocting his next move on Wordfeud or checking stocks / emails on his Blackberry.

Add children to the blend and you're sunk. Running small lives, as well as your own, pretty much mops up any spare time. Someone wise once told me there are three main elements in life, but if you want to stay sane, you can only accomplish two of them well:

• Work
• Family / children
• Social life

I persist in the belief that I can just about manage all three to varying degrees, until my body gives out and shouts STOP! 

Apart from physical collapse, there is one other solution: taking a holiday. For a few weeks a year, we cease working and can (if we choose) turn off the social flow. For once, we actually allow ourselves time to relax and reflect more deeply on life. Mr Churchill's three days of fun might never come, but thank God (or the state) for holiday entitlement. It may yet save us from mental overload.

Right! All I need to do now is squeeze in a visit to the gym, organise picnic food for the weekend, dash out another 500 words of my novel, do some ironing and then trot down to my kids' school for the summer production this afternoon... Someone please pass me the Nurofen!

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"The key to any good family saga is to create characters the reader will care about, family secrets that will be solved eventually but aren't immediately obvious, and a setting that makes interesting reading. This novel scores on all points..." 
- 5* Amazon review, June 2013

My book, A Sister for Margot, is now only £1.99 / $2.99 on Amazon!

Move over old boy

When I was at school, people used to talk about the old boys' network. Last week, I decided that women have finally put the old boys out to pasture. After spending two days at the Britmums Live conference in London and a night with the women's group Hub Dot on Regent's Street, it struck me that women are uniquely gifted at forming connections. Whatever the medium - parties, families, work or social media - women seem to have an instinct for nurturing the network.

Kirsty Allsopp tells Britmums
she is "neurotic" about helping out
at her sons' school

At the Hub Dot event, Nell Gifford, founder of the wildly popular Giffords Circus, told us, "The best thing women do is start families." She believes growing a "work family" and having children derive from the same "strange instinct". 

This might explain why Britmums has become a phenomenally successful community of 5,000 parent bloggers, who are predominantly mums. Susanna Scott, über-blogger and co-founder, opened this year's conference by telling us it was all about the community - laughing together as well as supporting each other through illness and bereavement. 

Women blog for all sorts of reasons: some struggle with being a stay-at-home mum and are looking for an outlet; some have found the kind of popularity online that eluded them at school; others just want to reach out. Award-winning blogger Mummy Barrow, who has nearly 6,000 followers on Twitter, said the kind of tweet that elicited the biggest response was: "Who wants a cup of tea?" She clearly has the knack of bringing in followers from the cold.

At the Hub Dot, any mention of children was left discreetly in the background. "This is about celebrating female qualities and showing that business can be done in a different way," said Simona Barbieri, part of the team behind the Hub Dot. These were polished, career women looking to help each other and form connections. 

Guest speaker Lulu Guinness, the handbag designer, told us that when she started in the fashion business nobody helped her. "I have always maintained I wanted to help people," she said. "Many girls have worked for me and I'm very proud when they have got fab jobs somewhere else."

So whether it's volunteering at the school fair, reading a bedside story or tweeting to a thousand followers, ladies, take pride. We are the glue that holds our societies together. We don't need cigars and we don't need a London club. Go forth and network!

FREE novel: Sister for Margot

My novel, A Sister for Margot, is FREE to download on Amazon this week for three days only. This is your chance to load up your Kindle (or ipad) with a relaxing summer read! Escape the good old British drizzle with a few balmy days in Ibiza, wartime romance and a mystery to unravel. The book has been rated four stars (out of five) on Amazon with fifteen reviews. On Goodreads it scored 4.4 out of five.


Free days:
Monday 24th June, Tuesday 25th June and Wednesday 26th June. Visit the Amazon page and 'buy' as normal. The price will be £0.00 / $0.00 and you won't be charged!


A Sister for Margot

In a seaside theatre, with Hitler’s bombs raining down, the actress Maud falls in love for the first time. She dreams however of seeing her name in lights and part of her resists getting embroiled in an affair. But she can’t fight her feelings forever.

Forty years later in an English suburb, Margot is on the brink of divorce and depression after losing her sister in a tragic boating accident. Her orphaned niece Ruby is sent to live with her grandfather in Ibiza, and develops a morbid fascination with the past. Rattling the family skeletons will unearth a secret that touches all of their lives. 

In this debut novel, Emma Clark Lam writes a compelling family saga that examines the themes of wasted potential, sibling rivalry and romantic love. Three generations of women struggle to find their niche, while challenging the taboos of their time. Clark Lam’s forte is her vivid characterization – the three main characters continue to live with you long after you have finished the book. Underpinning the whole story is the cycle of life, with all its associated emotions of loss, grief and renewal.

Click here for more information
Download from Amazon.co.uk
Download from Amazon.com
Reviews on Goodreads


When you have read the book, I would really appreciate a review on Amazon or Goodreads.


Thanks so much,
Emma x

"This was such an enjoyable read and the quality of the writing was what made it so. I could not put it down as the plot was so meaty with so many twists and turns." -- Amazon review December 2012

The seductive fairytale

Review: Pretty Woman (1990)

I have been indulging myself this week. My husband was away at the weekend so I sat down to watch one of my favourite, feel-good films: Pretty Woman. For two happy hours, my teenage years of 1990 - the year the film was released - came flooding back. The soundtrack alone transported me to a wistful era of adolescent heartbreak, experimental outfits, thick eyebrows and endless daydreaming. At the time, my family lived in Oman and I vividly remember cruising along desert roads in our 4x4, watching the goat herds at work, with Wild Women Do belting out from the tape-deck. 

I confess that I saw the film at the cinema three times - twice

Pretty Woman made Julia Roberts a star 
© Featureflash | Dreamstime.com

with friends and once with my mother!  Evidently I was not alone: the film was one  of the highest-grossing romantic comedies in history. When I sat down to watch it yet again on Saturday night, I feared that I might have outgrown this Hollywood fairytale, but no! I was caught up in its charm once more, delighting in a script I knew embarrassingly well ("I'm a safety girl... I appreciate the whole seduction thing you've got going on here, but let me give you a tip: I'm a sure thing" etc). 

Time travelling

Hidden in a dark corner of our kitchen was a time capsule disguised as a milk carton. We discovered it behind a cupboard a few weeks ago when we ripped out the old kitchen as part of our house renovation project. It took some dexterity, but we managed to fish out a photo of the house's previous owners with their first child, particulars about the house sale and some newspaper pages from November 2002. The capsule had been collecting dust for more than 10 years, waiting patiently to deliver up its cache to a citizen of the future.

Remember Angus Deayton's fall from grace?

In the grand scheme of things, a decade is not a long stretch of time, and yet the front page of The Telegraph on November 3, 2002, spoke of a distant past. In personal terms, this was the era of my youth, pre-offspring, newly married and still wrapped up in my career. On the front page, Victoria Beckham had just escaped a foiled kidnap plot, while Angus Deayton, host of the news quiz Have I Got News for You, faced public disgrace.

More significantly, Saddam Hussein was still in power and - as The Telegraph reported on that day - he was allegedly instructing his security officials to bump off Iraqi opposition leaders in Britain, with the help of Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi. Strange to think that the last decade has been dominated by these two men and their different legacies. Efforts to quell their regimes have re-shaped the Middle East and altered the course of so many lives.

Our milk carton ran the gamut of human experience - its cargo included personal, public and geopolitical stories. But for all their prominence in 2002, at least two of those stories have become less important with time. As author M. L. Stedman writes in her novel, The Light Between Oceans:

"Years bleach away the sense of things until all that's left is a bone-white past, stripped of feeling and significance."

So we pass away and time kicks over the traces. On the face of it, it is a depressing thought, but there is also something liberating about our inconsequence. What most of us achieve (or don't achieve) during our little lives is largely irrelevant. It took a dusty old milk carton to remind me that I should worry less about future accomplishments and more about enjoying the moment in all its transience. 

We are planning to deposit a time capsule behind the cupboards in our new kitchen. Does anyone have any ideas as to what to include in the capsule? Let me know in the comments box.

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"I found A Sister for Margot thoroughly absorbing. The story had all the elements to keep me gripped: family saga over three generations; wartime background; strong characters; different locations and a mystery in the background that ties the story together." - Amazon review

I would welcome more reviews of my book on Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com!

Bath-etic tragedy

Hermaphrodite Mum

Three kids and a single mother

Last week I made the mistake of throwing away the bath toys, a ruinous act that prompted my six-year old son to say he could never forgive me. The drama that ensued contained elements of a Greek tragedy: mother-son ructions, moral failings, hysterics and even some soul-searching. Who would have thought that a string-bag of decaying bath toys could have sparked such a crisis? Such are the vicissitudes of family life. One minute it's plain sailing and the next you are caught in the eye of the storm.

Reprieved at the last hour

It all started with a spot of belated spring cleaning. In a rare fit of enthusiasm, I went through the house like Kim and Aggie on speed. Jigsaws were dispatched to Oxfam, wardrobes were ransacked for old clothes and dogeared drawings from school 'mysteriously' found their way into the recycling. 

So far so good. Then my tyrannical eye alighted upon the bag of bath toys, each covered in a veneer of black mould. Middle child (my son) barely noticed them anymore and the mould, I decided, presented a health hazard to Non-walking toddler. Into the wheely bin went Thomas the Tank Engine, stacking cups, one puffer fish, a pink squirty tortoise and several yellow ducks.

Fast-forward to bathtime. Middle child was lying stretched out in the bath, refusing to wash himself while I rubbed Non-walking toddler dry.

"Mum, where are all the bath toys?" he asked languidly. 

"Oh, I threw them away. They'd gone mouldy."

"What?" He sat up.

"We'll get some more."

"You mean you threw away my squeezy Thomas the Tank Engine?" he wailed. "That was my favourite!"

"Darling, they were covered in mould! It wasn't even worth cleaning them."

"And what about Torty? Please tell me you haven't thrown away Torty!"

"Who?"

"The pink tortoise - that was my absolute favourite. I can't believe you've done this!"

Inevitably tears and lots of shouting (from him) followed... and persisted all the way until bedtime. Never mind, I thought as I switched off his light to the sound of distant sobbing under the duvet, he'll be over it in the morning.

Bathtime, day two, continued in much the same vein. He even muttered the immortal words: "I will never forget this, Mummy, not ever." On day three, he told me, "I can't believe what you have put me through." (See earlier reference to Greek drama.)

Needless to say, I was losing my nerve and sought advice from friends and family. One advised that next time I should "transition" the toys, in other words park them in a cupboard until their absence has gone safely unobserved. My mother advised, "Don't give in - you need to let him know who's boss." Hmm... 

Day four found me rifling through the wheely bin in the front garden, only to discover a now fetid bag of bath toys, coated in dead leaves and the entrails of the hoover bag. After half an hour of scrubbing them with hot water and Dettol, I returned them to the side of the bath. As soon as I picked Middle child up from school, I told him I had a surprise. His reaction was euphoric and he has been playing manically with the toys ever since. 

"Do you forgive me now?" I asked tentatively.

"Sort of."

"Sort of? After every thing I did to get them back..."

"Alright, keep your hair on, I forgive you," he said, giving me a magnanimous hug.

When I told my mother, she was outraged, but I still think I made the right decision. Knowing Middle child as I do, the purge of the bath toys would have become a stain on his childhood. I also had another (self-justifying) motive. By returning the toys, I showed Middle child that if you want something bad enough, and you are willing to persevere, you might just succeed. Not such a bad life lesson. What's more, Torty and Thomas lived to see another day. Now that's a happy ending.

Hermaphrodite Mum is a fictional creation of Emma Clark Lam

Previous posts by Hermaphrodite Mum:

Brother vs. sister

Growing Pains

Favoured chicks

Prehistoric parenting