Katyboo1’s Weblog

Today started very dramatically, which is good in literary terms.  Not so good when you’re full of snot and half awake.  Firstly Tallulah had a major temper tantrum about her school uniform yet again, and spent twenty minutes running around wearing just her pants and wailing and squeaking.  Luckily I could only hear this when she was facing me and in the same room, as my ears are now so full of snot I am partially deaf.  Unfortunately not selectively deaf or I wouldn’t have heard her at all.  I may feign selective deafness anyway.  It seems like an excellent plan.  I will start my search for an ear trumpet on Ebay immediately.

It’s quite depressing really, because I knew that the kids would be a little discombobulated this morning, it being the first morning they were back from their father’s, and I had a cunning plan to avert disaster.  Sadly it went wrong, for reasons which remain unclear and which I am too fed up to delve into as the answers would only depress me.  When I’m feeling stronger I might try to look it up on Wikipedia.  I am convinced that the answers to all life’s little mysteries are enshrined somewhere in the pages of Wikipedia.  It’s magic you know.

The girls’ dad codes the word ‘routine’ as synonymous with the word ‘boring’.  In his house they like to approach every morning in a new and creative way.  Well I say ‘they’, I mean the girls.  He isn’t so keen, which is why he usually comes round looking shell shocked and begging for coffee after dropping them at school.  He will invariably hold his head in his hands whilst woefully recounting what a hideous morning he’s had trying to shoehorn them into their school tights while they’re making papier mache models of the Eiffel Tower or wearing sub aqua flippers, or whatever crazy scheme they’ve hatched that day.

He once asked me how I get them to school in such an orderly fashion (Ha! Like that happens more than once a week, but let him live with the illusion).  I told him my routine, and he carefully wrote it down.  What happened next is anyone’s guess.  Perhaps he ritually burned it in a dustbin lid in a Voodoo style ceremony to get my life to be as chaotic as his (it could actually be working).  More like he put it somewhere safe, never to be found again.  Even likelier is the idea that the kids found it, thought ‘Sod that!  This is the only bit of unfettered freedom we get’,’ and ritually burned it in a dustbin lid.

My mother is a great one for putting things in safe places.  Her favourite place of safety is her bedroom wardrobe.  It isn’t very big, but I feel that it may actually be connected to Narnia, as the number of things which enter its hallowed portals never to be seen again, is staggering.  It’s either that, or she’s got a terminal case of the Borrowers, and they’re living a much finer life than the original Borrowers in the book.  They’re not creating stools out of conkers and matchsticks. Oh no!  They’ve got hand made Christmas stockings which went missing in the great purge of 85’ (and for which I still mourn), a piece of very expensive Poole Pottery which I foolishly gave my mother for safe-keeping (and therefore have nobody but myself to blame), and a bright red sledge, which they were clearly baffled by, because it reappeared as magically as it disappeared in April of 1983.  By that time it was about as useful to us as it clearly was to them… 

I’m all for creativity and allowing your children to flourish so that they don’t become repressed accountants and psychotic axe murderers (are there just regular axe murderers?  Surely they must all be a bit bonkers?), but just not at 7.30 in the morning with three children to dress and feed, and with school to go to.

Because I knew they would be at odds with the world, and because I was trying to forestall disaster I carefully washed and dried every single piece of school uniform they had last night before I went to bed.  All homework was done, all kit ready and waiting.  I was so organised I frightened myself.  I figured that this way there would be no moaning about being forced to wear unsuitable items of clothing etc, or cries of: ‘Well, why didn’t you know I was trying out for the World Hockey Olympics?’ etc, etc.  I went to bed feeling very smug (and full of snot) and impressed of me (Tallulahism).

To avoid any misunderstandings, the first thing I said when I got them up was: ‘Any uniform you can’t find will be in the kitchen waiting for you, so just come down and get what you need.’  I might as well have said: ‘I’m going to cut your heads off and scoop your brains out with a teaspoon, so just pop down when you’re ready,’ in French.  Despite saying: ‘Alright, mama.’ It was clear that they had heard nothing and understood less. Ten minutes later the shrieking started, and continued and continued.  There are good things about having hearing loss, and today I experienced one of them.

At times like this, which are frequent in our house, I always think of Linus’ teacher, Miss Othmar, in the Peanuts cartoons.  Linus loved Miss Othmar with a passion, and she had a starring role in several of the cartoon strips, but you never saw Miss Othmar and you never heard Miss Othmar when they televised the cartoon.

You would see him sitting at his desk asking her a question and her reply would be: ‘Mwaah, mwaah, mwaah, mwaaah’.  Apparently her voice was actually the noise of a trombone!  This is me. I have turned into Miss Othmar.  I think I am saying: ‘Please don’t wipe your nose on your sleeve,’ but what I am actually saying is: ‘Mwaah, mwaah, mwaah, mwaah.’  No wonder the kids just carry on wiping, spitting, dribbling and farting as usual.

Maybe I should use reverse psychology and take trombone lessons.  Every time I have to say something to the children I will whip out my trombone from its special trombone carry case and say: ‘Mwaah, mwaah, mwaah, mwaah.’ Whereupon they will hear: ‘Please don’t use your brother’s head to polish your apple with,’ and other such pearls of wisdom. I could be onto something there.  Particularly if I send Tom on that course in Alabama to learn to make a home made trombone.

I feel a little sad that I have graduated to become Miss Othmar, who despite Linus’ longing for her, never seemed particularly sexy or inspiring.  For a long time I identified strongly with Linus, as I read a lot of books and even had a comfort blanket. I remember a particularly lovely cartoon where he was reading The Brother’s Karamazov by Dostoevsky.  Charlie Brown asks him if he is having trouble with the Russian bits (Linus that is, not Dostoevsky - that would just be weird), and he explains how he just blips over the bits he doesn’t understand and joins up the gaps.  Rather like life really.

Nowadays I oscillate between being as bossy as Lucy and as incoherent as Miss Othmar.  It is the tragedy of growing old.  I suppose I should thank my lucky stars that I haven’t turned into Pig Pen.  I think that’s the kids job actually, particularly Tilly.  She comes downstairs looking pristine, and before she even walks out the door she looks like a bag lady.  Yesterday she was eating some cereal and didn’t even stop to think about what would happen if she held the bowl vertically with milk in it as she was walking round the kitchen.  I mean, why would you for heaven’s sake?  She covered the hem of her dress, her socks and my clean kitchen rug before she noticed something was awry. As you do.

I suppose I ought to get back to my dramas really.  We managed to forcibly dress Tallulah and get all the kids out the front door in one piece reasonably on time.  On the way to school Tallulah announced in her lovely way: ‘Mama. My teacher jumped out of an aeroplane and was just in the sky wearing yellow clothes. Yellow ones!’  I love that she does that.  It’s clear that she’s chatting away to herself inside her head, having a totally congruent conversation and she just forgets that you can’t look into her brain and do a Linus by joining up the dots.  We’re just treated to the edited highlights, apropos of nothing.  I’m also particularly impressed that it was the yellowness of her clothes that made the big impression, not the fact that her mild mannered teacher had hurled herself bodily out of a plane at twenty thousand feet.

I was very encouraging and decided to pursue the conversation to make up for my harridan like shrieking of earlier:

Katy: ‘Why did she do that?’

Tallulah: ‘I don’t know.’ (you weirdo).

Katy: ‘Did she enjoy it?’

Tallulah: increasingly irritated: ‘I don’t know’. 

Katy: Determined to get more information: ‘Why did she have to wear yellow clothes?’

Tallulah: Look mum, just drop it now will you: ‘I DON’T Know.’ 

Katy: Thinking to inspire some creativity in her: ‘Do you think it was like flying like a bird?’

Tallulah: In a tone of total incredulity: ‘NO!’

Katy: ‘Why not?’

Tallulah: adopts the classic hands on hips stance:  ‘Because she wasn’t in an alien space ship.’ (as any fule no).

Katy: Just go with it: ‘Right: ‘Well birds aren’t in alien space ships either are they?  They just flap their wings and fly.’

Tallulah: Is this woman mad? ‘Duh! Well, people don’t have wings do they?  I don’t want to talk about this any more thank you mama.’ 

Thinks: mother has clearly gone big time mentalist here with all her talk of flying.  I wish I’d never started this conversation.  I’ll change the subject and hope she goes back to normal.  It’s a long shot, but it’s all I’ve got.

By this time we had arrived at school.  I got her all settled in and decided not to talk to the teacher about sky diving, curious though I was.  On the way out one of the mums who is heavily pregnant had a funny turn and the school path suddenly turned into emergency ward ten.  We found her a chair, a box of tissues and a glass of water.  Sadly there were no biscuits or hot, sweet tea, which I think is a shocking indictment of moral society and our imminent decline into slavery half-witted beasts who tear each other asunder for fun.

Anyway,she sat there with tears rolling down her face apologising furiously for making a scene, bless her.  She kept saying: ‘Oh! I’m so embarrassed.  Oh! Everyone’s making a fuss. Oh! I’m so sorry,’ and apologising for being pregnant! I know how she felt.

I used to faint and have funny turns regularly when I was pregnant with Oscar and it was so embarrassing.  It made me dread going anywhere in case I collapsed in a big hippo-like heap and had to be winched home by lorry.  At the post office I had my own chair which they would rush to get for me every time I went in there.  I really ought to pay for a commemorative plaque.

When I was pregnant with Tallulah I collapsed in the cat food aisle of Safeway and my brother had to give me a fireman’s lift out to the car.  I was mortified when I came round. I told this cheering story to the lady, in the hope that it would put things in perspective for her.  I do appreciate that it’s difficult to have things put in perspective when you’re sitting outside the Early Years unit of the school with hordes of four year olds gurning at the windows because this is the most exciting thing that’s happened to them all week, and this is the week they’re rehearsing the school play!  It just gets better and better.

My best friend Rachel, had several such hideous moments when she was in the throes of having children.  When she was pregnant with her first daughter, Isobel, she had a bleed while she was teaching a class of recalcitrant teenagers.  She tried to be calm about it and created a distraction by shouting: ‘God! What’s that?’ and pointing to the window while she made for the staff room, trying not to bleed all over the newly polished lino.  She was hoping to staunch the flow with a tea towel and nip home before anyone noticed. Unfortunately she never made it that far before someone screamed: ‘You’re bleeding!’ (like she wouldn’t have noticed!) and insisted on calling an ambulance.  Much to her chagrin the ambulance men then refused to let her walk to the ambulance, and put her on a stretcher wrapped in a red blanket, just like in Casualty.  She was then paraded through the whole school like a scarlet mummy with everyone pointing at her.  So much for the diversion!

When she was pregnant with her second daughter, Maisy, she started bleeding and luckily was at home this time.  She went into coping mode, and so rather than call an ambulance and make a fuss she decided to drive herself to the hospital!  That’s so incredibly British isn’t it? ‘Well! I was bleeding out of my arm pits but I didn’t like to bother anyone, so I used some dusters and sellotape as a makeshift bandage, went home to change my vest, and came here on the 97 bus.  I’m so sorry.’

As an aside to an aside, this actually did happen to my granny.  Not the armpit bit, she actually gashed a great big hole in her leg, but all the rest of it.  She was at a cleaning job when she had the accident.  She made the duster tourniquet, finished cleaning, rode home on her bike, changed her vest, and the duster, and then got the bus to the hospital.  That’s the Dunkirk spirit! If it were me I’d have bled all over the furniture, screamed the place down and vomited into the sink before fainting in a big heap.  That’s the Glenfield spirit!

Anyway, back to Rachel and her gore fest. She strapped Isobel into the car seat and drove herself to the hospital.  When she got there her shoes were ruined, her footwell was full of blood and it looked like the Texas Chain Saw Massacre had occurred in a Ford Ka.  Lucky for her it helped get her bumped right up the triage list and they saw her right away.  They decided to deliver the baby and called her husband.  She says the last thing she remembers before they knocked her out was worrying that she’d left the front door open with trails of bloody footprints leading from the kitchen to the drive.  She was afraid some poor old biddy passing by would think she’d been murdered and call the police before having a heart attack from stress.  She didn’t want to live with the death of a pensioner on her conscience so she remembers asking Chris to promise to go home and mop up while she was being operated on!  Naturally he said yes.  Naturally he didn’t go! 

Anyway, back to this poor pregnant lady, who has now been sitting on her chair for hours.  Some daft girl who was clearly just delivering a niece or nephew to the school kept saying to her: ‘Oh! You’re so lucky to be having a baby.  I wish I were having a baby.  I really envy your baby bump.  You’re so blessed!’ Now to be fair to the silly bint, we all know what she means, but was this really the time to be saying it?

This desperate woman is due to burst at any moment.  She has to wear lumbar support for her aching back; giant bras made from camouflage webbing for her unfeasibly large chest; has probably got piles and acid heartburn twenty four hours a day; is being kicked to death by the alien possessing her innards, and has just collapsed in shame and mortification on the path outside her child’s classroom.  You can bet your life she was feeling neither blessed nor the object of universal envy.  Mostly she just wanted to let the ground open up and swallow her.

Eventually she was well enough to move and someone offered her a lift home so that she could cry in private and call the midwife without an audience.  I told her if this is it and she has the baby today, she has to name it after all of us.  Poor cow!

So, that was my exciting morning.  Now admittedly I haven’t climbed the Matterhorn, or rescued orphans from a burning building, but these things have to be put into perspective.  For a woman whose most exciting activity this week has been watching a mentally defective idiot burn the toast in the Co-op café, this is real drama.

I’ve got half an hour left before I have to pick up Oscar, so I’m going to sneak off and make a start on a book about Burma.  I’ve been slacking off naughtily on my studies in the last few days because I’ve been reading a really excellent book, and it’s been too hard not to choose that instead.  I finished it this morning, so there are no longer any excuses, dammit!

The excellent book, by the way, is; ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’ by Jonathan Safran Foer.  It’s about a nine year old boy called Oskar, whose dad was killed in the Twin Towers on 9/11.  He struggles to come to terms with the death, particularly as he seems to be partially autistic, and so has patterns and routines for everything.  This is one thing he can’t fit into his routines.  The book is about his search for meaning in such a great tragedy.  It’s interwoven with the story of his paternal grandparents and their experiences of the Dresden firestorm in WWII.  It’s awesome. It is sad, and it did make me cry, but it’s also funny and beautiful and not at all how you think it’s going to be.  It’s my recommendation of the week.  In fact, it’s one of the best books I’ve read all year.  Remember folks, you heard it here first…