In September 2013, I thought I was the most intelligent person ever to exist. By some masterstroke of family planning, I’d managed to have two children, spaced almost two years apart, but because the first was born in September and the second August, they were in adjacent school years. By my calculations, I’d saved two whole years of childcare, which back then was more expensive than the mortgage, but only because at that point Liz Truss was still in charge of childcare costs, and had yet to screw with everyone’s mortgage. And it wasn’t even intentional, my miracle! I was a genius at the level of the ovary.
Obviously, I hadn’t really thought through what the consequences would be, once they hit the meaningful-exam stage of life, which they still haven’t – at the moment I’m just observing other people. GCSE and A-level events are objectively weird for a household whatever its composition, because for the first time, the kid’s day has the highest stakes. You can pretend this is true for the preceding decade – big day, darling, you’re the narrator in Sinbad the Sailor and yes it is a big deal whether you get the crabs and the dancing squid in the right order – but now it is real. It doesn’t matter what your job is, whole human lives could be hanging off your performance; you still won’t come anywhere near the singular tightrope of the exam, that absolutely atomised space where you’re not allowed to ask for help, you can’t take a little more time, and you’ll be judged on the outcome, indeed that is all you’ll be judged on, until such time as you achieve anything else, which could be never.
The standard, in the nuclear family industrial complex, is to space your kids two years apart, which means the day will arrive when that problem is squared; GCSEs and A-levels are happening at the same time. Per ancient sibling tradition, one of them will be working neurotically hard and the other will be doing nothing at all. It is impossible to tell what’s really going on: is the slacker doing secret work? You have to hope so, because the alternative is that they’ve sacrificed their life chances just to make some obscure but universal point: “I and my sibling are not the same person, witness, in the matter of learning French vocabulary, we are in fact opposites.”
All the regular priorities and hierarchies are completely destroyed: whose turn it is to feed the cat, to use the bathroom, to be a dick. In normal times, you’d adjudicate on the basis of who was under the most pressure. But now they’re both under intolerable pressure, all the time. Ideally, you’d have foreseen this and had a third child, who could act as an emotional donor sibling, but you most likely didn’t.
They fight, constantly – nobody knows why, but we can all remember that hot indignation. My sister and I had a massive row on the way to GCSE physics (me) and A-level maths (her). She hit me in the face with a plastic bag. It didn’t really hurt – is “hit” even the right word, with plastic bags? – but I stormed off to get a different bus, which didn’t arrive. So she was on time and I was late, but for the first 15 minutes of her timed conditions, teachers kept going up to her and asking where I was. The reason I’m still telling this story 34 years later is that I did arrive, eventually, and I got an A and she got a B, which is why you should never flap someone in the face with a plastic bag.
Naturally, then, surveying this carnage in more or less every family I know, my thoughts turned back to my own genius. Then someone pointed out that, from 2024, I’ll have an unbroken run: four solid years of pure summer misery. The correct spacing of children is to fix it so that you can’t remember the previous one’s exams by the time the next set come around; so, 15 years.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
