A Proper Mum Nicholas Pierce’s small face was a study in concentration as he toddled across the playroom floor, presumably due to the effort of keeping his balance in footy pyjamas while also keeping his grip on a number of scraps of paper covered with crayon scribbles. Reaching his destination at last, he dropped all the scraps in his mother’s lap and crowed, “You mail!” with obvious pride.
“Thank you,” said Alicia, picking up a few scraps and pretending to peruse them. “But where is Mr. Owl?”
Mr. Owl was not, of course, a real owl - Alicia was disinclined to let even the best-trained one around the twins, who were not quite big enough to fully understand respect for things with talons yet. Since Nicholas had become obsessed with mail (of all things), however, Alicia had bought him a stuffy toy owl, enchanted to hoot and fly short distances very close to the ground. Mr. Owl had since been almost as frequent a companion to the boy as his brother or Maeve, never mind Thad or even Alicia herself.
Nicholas looked over his shoulder toward the bathroom door, then back at Alicia. “I hide my owl,” he whispered.
Alicia widened her eyes and leaned in close. “Why did you hide your owl?” she asked in a low voice.
Behind the door, Maeve said something and Alexander laughed and splashed water in his bath. Nicholas glanced over his shoulder in their direction again before he said, “Alanner, he get my owl. Then I get my owl. We - “ he became briefly incomprehensible before finishing with - “and then May, she say uh-uh - “ he waved one tiny finger at Alicia to illustrate - “then she say, ‘no!’” He pointed severely. “I hide my owl now.”
Alicia caught his little hand and kissed it. “You’re a very smart boy,” she said approvingly. “But we will have to talk to you and Alexander.”
Nicholas, however, had lost interest in his fight with his brother and was wrapping his other hand around hers and tugging her fingers down to a level where he could study them intently. “Mine not yours, Mama,” he said, tapping her fingernail with one of his pointer fingers.
“Nope,” said Alicia, also looking at her manicure. “What color is that, Nicholas?”
“It purple.”
“That’s right,” said Alicia.
She had tried a subdued, next-to-nude pink for a while after the twins were born, along with curling her hair, wearing pearls, and wearing lots of chintz and pastels and chintzy pastels. These, she had imagined, were the uniform of a Proper Mum, and obviously she had to do everything possible to be one of those, no matter how unnatural or even outright uncomfortable it felt. The boys had been so tiny when they were born, and had slept even more than her books said babies should sleep; she had watched them all the time, flinching if they twitched. It had not taken her long at all, however, to realize she couldn’t stand curling her hair and wearing necklaces around the house, plus the necklaces had proven really impractical when the twins were conscious, and the chintz, pastels, and chintzy pastels had only lasted until the first time the boys got ill. After their fevers broke, she had asked Thad if he had any particular thoughts on how a Proper Mum should look; upon receiving a response in the negative, she had thrown the hideous things as far back in her closet as they would go, redone her nails in her favorite Regal Orchid, and resumed dressing like herself.
“Why purple?” asked Nicholas, now running his fingertips over her fingernail.
“I put on nail polish,” said Alicia.
Nicholas thought about this for a moment. “I want ale ollish,” he said.
“No, no,” said Alicia, reclaiming her hand and using it and its opposite to sweep her son onto her lap. “You are a boy, and boys don’t wear nail polish. Mama is a girl. You are a boy like Daddy, so your hands get to look like his.”
Nicholas thought about this too. “No,” he said. “Daddy like yous. Big. Mine like Alanner’s.”
“You,” said Alicia, smiling, “are too smart for your own good. And I love you.”
“I love Mama,” said Nicholas.
“Who’s Mama?” asked Alicia, looking around as if expecting someone to pop out of the shadows, and Nicholas laughed.
“You mama!”
“I am? Why, you must love me too then,” said Alicia, feigning surprise, and Nicholas laughed again and buried his head in her shoulder.
“Poor boy,” she said, stroking his hair. “Just a minute until Maeve finishes Alexander’s bath, and then Daddy can come up and we can all read a bedtime story.”
Thad was less interested in the day to day of the boys at the moment - which did annoy her sometimes - but did make a point of participating in bedtime stories, as these were good for the children’s development. Alicia also thought it was good for promoting family unity. She wanted the boys to have a good relationship with her and their father; Maeve was invaluable, but she didn’t want her sons to love their nanny more than their own parents.
The Pierces had a nasty habit of disowning their sons, she thought - best illustrated by Druscella somehow having five children without any sign of a Grandfather Pierce - and while Alicia couldn’t totally object to the past incidents (one was, of course, the only reason Thad existed), she had no intention of allowing them to ruin her boys the way they had Derwent’s sons. The simplest solution was to simply bring the boys up well, so they didn’t displease Druscella or Derwent or Thesius or, to the extent possible under the circumstances, Marcus, but Alicia was not content with only having one plan in place. She had promised Thad when they got engaged that she’d solve or prevent more problems for him than she’d caused, and having backup plans which gave them exit options if they needed them and which therefore prevented his family from having too much power over them and their boys seemed a logical step in keeping that promise to her. And anyway, she was too much an Aladren - she slept better with the knowledge that she could get their family through nearly anything on her own if everything went completely pear-shaped and she had no other choice, and so she was working very, very hard to ensure that could be done on as little notice as possible.
Luckily, she had had wanted to ensure that for herself and Thad even before she had imagined she would ever have children, so she had twisted Jeremy’s arm into establishing her small income property as a wedding gift long before the twins were born. She wanted another, preferably abroad, both for a second backup revenue stream and so she and her family would always have somewhere to go - she wanted to be able to take Thad and the boys abroad at a moment’s notice if she needed to. She already kept a stash of gold and almost all of her jewelry - the only pieces she wore at home were her diamond earrings and her wedding rings - hidden in the secret compartments of her handbag, so they could always have something immediately to hand, but it wasn’t enough yet for her to feel completely sure she could handle anything life threw at them.
And anyway, she thought, still stroking Nicholas’ hair, even if life never threw anything too much at them - if it somehow turned out that happiness wasn’t some kind of trap, a false lull before an inevitable storm she’d need to steer them all through - it would be good to have something to leave whichever of her sons did not inherit the majority of the Pierce fortune someday. There was no shortage of circumstances to stay prepared for. How well she did that was, she thought, a much better measure of whether she was doing this mothering thing correctly than the colors of her wardrobe could be.
“You are very smart,” she informed Nicholas again. At that moment, Maeve emerged with a newly clean and pyjama-clad Alexander in her arms. “And here’s your brother! Let me go get Daddy - we must read our stories. Stories make us all even smarter.”
OOC: Thad’s thoughts on bedtime stories and what a Proper Mum looks like we’re previous discussed with his author.