Mad
About Bridget Jones?
Alex Davies | Mother & Baby - October 23, 2013
With
the release of the new book Mad
About The Boy, Helen Fielding
chats to us about Bridget and the world of modern parenting.
Proving that hold-in pants are a yes, sieving gravy is a no and that
nice boys really do kiss like that, the original
Bridget Jones remains a key staple on most of our bookshelves.
Now,
in the recently released third installment Mad About The Boy,
we see Bridget in her 50s, getting to grips with toddlers, Twitter and
toy boys (yes, we all now know Mark Darcy isn’t around *sob*).
Author and mum of two Helen Fielding, 55, chats to us about motherhood
– and how everyone’s favourite heroine takes parenthood on.
One theme I wanted to write about was the way parenting has almost
become another thing you have to be good at.
Maybe
it’s a product of women having children a little later in life, when
they’ve got out in the workplace, and they’re used to the bar being
quite high.
You’re playing your baby Mozart before they’re even born, you worry
about what age they say their first word… And when you apply all that
to Bridget and how she parents, you realise it doesn’t really matter.
The main thing is she loves them.
Having children can begin to seem like another thing you have to succeed
at, but life and love are what’s important.
Bridget’s always reading self-help books like French Children
Don’t Throw Food and Calmer, Easier, Happier
Parenting.
But
the moments where you most see it working with her as a parent are when
she just loves her children Billy and Mabel.
There’s a scene where she’s had botox and it’s all gone wrong. She
picks them up from school and she can’t talk and is drooling, but then
she puts her arms round them and just thinks how lucky she is just to
have them.
Anyone with two children who both start having diarrhoea and vomiting in
the night knows there are very comic elements to that situation.
If you have someone who is dealing with that on her own, as Bridget
does, it gets even funnier.
All the way through she’s thinking ‘I’ll just have a glass of
wine’ but then there are sheets with diarrhoea on, and she’s putting
one child down and then another thing happens…
With Bridget, it’s always about taking one thing and exaggerating or
making it a bit madder.
I wish I’d known that the parent equipment
would be more trouble than the baby.
You’ve got the stroller, the car seat, the
bottle warmer, the bottle steriliser, the nappy changing table, the
electronic mobile that goes on top of the nappy changing table…
Then when you actually get the baby you think I didn’t really need all
these things! They come home from hospital and all you want is a couple
of nappies and a cushion.
Social media and Twitter are fascinating for
Bridget.
When I wrote the first book, there was no
email and all that messaging with Daniel Cleaver was done through their
office messaging system.
So, all this new electronic communication gives a lot more potential for
Bridget making a mess of things.
My best “Bridget moment”?
I
had my daughter by C-section, and I had a plan that I was going to send
out a group email announcement because I knew exactly when she was going
to be born. So, I got the draft all ready – and then I accidentally
pressed send.
So then I had to send another one saying, ‘Look I’m really sorry,
but I haven’t actually had the baby yet’ and I got all these replies
saying, ‘Who does that?!’.
|