The Sunday Supplemental – Rant, Rant, Rantety, Rant

Jason and Lee are outside, drinking tea and discussing the world of Larping (for those uninitiated, this is Live Action Role Play).  They have their first big event in a couple of weeks and they are getting terribly excited about the whole thing, much like boys faced with an electric train set on Christmas morning.  There is much talk of magical powers, fighting skills and the technical complications of putting up tents on a windy field in the middle of Derbyshire.  As discussed by me in earlier blogs, this kind of thing leaves me cold, so I have run away while I have the chance.  Oscar is having a snooze after an extensive morning of playing in the garden, and the girls are still playing in the garden.  I can just see them from the study window, but I know they won’t kill themselves because Lee and Jason are keeping their beady eye on them (unless side tracked by a particularly vexing question about a tent, in which case all may be lost).

Tallulah’s blisters are healing nicely, thank the lord.  She still managed to have hysterics today about the fact that she couldn’t get her nightie off (right!) and then, once she had miraculously managed to do it, she came downstairs in odd socks.  Normally I wouldn’t mind too much, but these were really, really odd. One came up to her thigh and one was one of those trainer socks which don’t even reach the ankle.  She looked like a mad old lady, so I sent her back upstairs to dress more elegantly.  She came back downstairs in thick wool tights.  At this point we had to have a few words, as she burst into tears yet again, claiming that it was wildly unfair of me to make her go up again and find a normal pair of socks.  Apparently she just doesn’t have any, despite the fact that we cleared her sock drawer out thoroughly before we went to Canada and she got at least twelve new pairs.  She didn’t go into the details of where they had gone, as she was too busy screaming and stamping her feet a la Rumplestiltskin.  I feel that she may have eaten them in her sleep.  Oddly enough when I said that she couldn’t watch Doctor Who today if she didn’t go upstairs and find a pair pronto, she was back down within three minutes with a perfectly matching pair of suitable socks, (i.e. not up to her nipples and lined with rabbit fur).

She already got banned from watching Doctor Who when it was on last night because she had so many tantrums when we got home it was untrue, and then she tried to push Tilly down the slide.  I really hate it when she’s like this.  I mean, she’s never a peaceful child at the best of times, but on a good day her random acts of evilness are at least broken up by times when she can be hilariously funny, cute and charming.  At the moment I’m really hard pushed to remember when that was.  She seems really, really tired all the time, which I think is a big part of it, but she’s going through one of those times where if you so much as mention the idea of an afternoon nap she is liable to have hysterics for two hours, and even with the light out in the evenings she makes herself stay awake by going to the toilet every five minutes.  What I really need is a tranquiliser dart.  I reckon if I can knock her out for a couple of days she will wake up a much, much happier person.  I know it will do the rest of us the power of good.  Thankfully we are supernanny trained enough not to let her rule the roost too much.  Invariably when she is in the middle of a paddy everyone gets up and vacates the premises, leaving her to it. It’s amazing what the lack of an audience can do to an attention starved, tantruming drama queen!  It does help to keep us all fit and healthy.

It’s so crappy when the kids are playing up.  I seem to spend my whole life nagging, disciplining and shouting at the minute, which makes them and me feel utterly horrible, and there is just never a moment’s peace.  It’s also a bit like a bush fire, once one starts doing it, the others catch it off them, presumably because they feel that they need their fifteen minutes of fame, and it has this horrible ripple effect where all of them are getting into trouble nearly all of the time.  I’m not a natural earth mother type parent at the best of times, being impatient and crotchety most of the time, so when these moments are upon us I tend to lose the plot quite easily.  I think it’s why I’m doing a lot of blogging at the moment.  Sitting in front of the computer is a respite from having to hear my own voice endlessly whinging on about the same stuff.  I do actually get sick of the sound of my own voice droning on.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t expect my children to be perfect.  They are children after all.  I’m not looking for them to turn into immaculately turned out fashion plates with never a hair out of place and a penchant for reading the bible and delivering morals at the end of every sentence.  One of the things that makes them so wonderful is all the totally daft stuff they do and say.  They are way more entertaining than the cinema, and I don’t have to smell popcorn while I’m watching them.  I just get bored of the endless grind of stupid stuff they do ALL the time.  Here are some examples that are driving me loopy at the moment:

1. They never, ever sit properly on their chairs at meal times.  This means that the chair covers need washing all the time because they are invariably covered in smears of dinner, and on some memorable occasions, snot where Tallulah has wiped her nose as well as her hands on the chair.  It also means that at least once a week one of them will fall off the chair and be utterly amazed when it hurts like hell, and that I’m not more sympathetic to their plight.
2. They invariably place their cups of juice/water/engine oil, right on the edges of tables and will then be amazed and/or mortified when these plummet to the ground soaking everything through and I go crazy because I have just cleaned the kitchen floor/table/walls.
3. They always whinge about putting away their clothes and helping with the laundry despite the fact that it is one of the only jobs we require them to do.  Ditto keeping their bedroom floor tidy so that I don’t kill myself on a roller skate, Bratz cup etc in the middle of the night.
4. They will do anything to wiggle out of a) flushing the toilet, b) washing their hands under any circumstances, c) brushing their hair and d) brushing their teeth (the two minute rule here is one they hate with a passion).
5. They never eat over their plates.  They never brush their teeth over the sink.  They sometimes object to actually sitting on the toilet seat to have a pooh/wee.  They can’t understand why it bothers me so much.
6. They never ever believe in the concept of being quiet.  They always talk at volume eleven, even though the dials don’t go up that far.  The only time they are quiet is when they are talking to you in the car, and if you ask them to speak up, they can’t.

They do however do some very funny things. Tallulah and Tilly were having a race down the garden this morning and Tallulah skidded over and went head first into the paddling pool full of water, which afforded us endless amusement.  They also made up an excellent song to that Calvin Hayes song ‘Girls’.  You know the really annoying one that goes: ‘I like them white girls, I like them black girls etc’? It was on the radio this morning and Tallulah lip synced perfectly, ‘I like them Trumpington girls’ paying homage to hers and Tilly’s alter egos, the Trumpington Sisters.  Then where he says: ‘I like them carrying a bitty weight girls’, Matilda sang beautifully: ‘Daddy likes them carrying a bitty cake girls,’ and winked at me!  So they’re not all bad, just mostly.

My friend Caron had her baby yesterday.  She did it beautifully and perfectly at home in hardly any time at all and with the minimum of fuss and bother.  She now has another gorgeous daughter.  I am very happy for her, and she sounded really elated when she rang us yesterday afternoon.  When I got to bed I laid awake for a while thinking about the fact that I suddenly felt really sad.  It was so odd.  I thought about what was making me feel sad and I realised it was the fact that I am now never going to have another baby. 

It was at this point that I thought I might be going mental.  After all, I chose to have my tubes tied up so that I wouldn’t spend another nine months vomiting, fainting and having high blood pressure.  I decided that three children was more than enough for any woman, particularly a woman as conflicted by the duties of motherhood as me (when they’re not there I miss them like crazy.  When they are here I want to stab them and jump up and down on them at least fifty percent of the time.  The rest of the time I love them so much I could vomit.  Even when I hate them I love them so much I could vomit.  It’s quite confusing really).  I decided I couldn’t go through another batch of miscarriages (I got into double figures by the time we had done), and yet I was really sad that Jason and I would never have a little girl of our own.  He’s a brilliant, brilliant father to my two girls.  I genuinely couldn’t wish for a better dad for them, and he loves them, and they love him, but it isn’t the same.

I am feeling broody.  I am feeling broody at the same time that I would pay someone to take Tallulah away for a couple of hours so that we can all have some peace and quiet.  I am feeling broody despite the fact that it has taken until Oscar is nearly two for us to have any unbroken nights of sleep at all, and they’re certainly not guaranteed.  I am feeling broody despite the fact that if I have to watch Findlay the Fire Engine one more time this week I am going to cut my own throat with a small, plastic model of Bob the Builder.  I don’t get it.  I’m thinking of going to see the doctor and asking him if I can have my hormones removed.  It’s doing my head in completely.

So there’s that, which is nice! I’m also feeling a bit cross because of something LearningWoman wrote about in her blog recently.  Not because of her, but because of what she was writing about.  I was catching up with my blog reading today and read her entry called Charlatans.  She went to a workshop which purported to be by a medium teaching people to deal with their issues through past life regression and got very cross with the guy running it, because he clearly didn’t have any real ability and was just preying on vulnerable people and taking their money and running.  You should read the entry, she puts it much more succinctly than me.

Anyway, it touched a nerve.  A friend of ours died recently in a horrible motorbike accident, and his wife was telling us that she knew it was going to happen because a medium had told her a couple of years ago.  I was really, really cross about this.  I didn’t mention it in my blog because my blogs are usually funny rather than serious, and I use them to escape from some of the more horrible moments in life, but I’ve already written my ‘funny ha ha’ blogs for this weekend, so I feel I can write a little more seriously with my other entries and you can either read ‘em or ignore them.  It’s up to you.

I used to work as a psychic, as those of you who’ve read my meme tag blog might know.  I don’t talk about it often anymore because people tend to have fairly extreme reactions about it, and I honestly can’t be bothered to deal with other people’s hang ups.  It usually goes one of two ways, either they think I’m in league with the devil (I’m not.  It’s hot, it’s sweaty. It’s hard work, I’m an agnostic, apathetic kind of person regarding religious beliefs).  Or they get really excited and immediately want me to tell them who they’re going to marry, what the winning lottery numbers are or can I get in touch with their mother/grandma/great aunty ethel.  No! is the answer to that.  Once they’ve got over this they then invariably make those utterly irritating jokes forever after with: ‘Why haven’t you won the lottery then?’ and ‘Ha, ha! Well you can’t be very good can you or you’d have known that already!’  At which point I am happy to kill them.

I stopped working as a psychic because I got sick of being associated with the kind of horrible people that LearningWoman describes.  I also got sick of clients coming to see me who didn’t actually want to know what I had to say.  What they wanted to know was that what they were doing was just fine, that they didn’t have to change a damn thing about their lives, but that everything would be marvellous and all their problems would go away.  When I wouldn’t tell them that, they invariably got upset about it.  I never understood this.  If you don’t want to know don’t ask, and if you don’t want to listen, don’t come and certainly don’t pay for it.  Also, if you just want someone to tell you what you already know, get a friend to do it for you.

I am here to tell you that there is something in this stuff.  What, I don’t know.  All I know is that one day I woke up and I knew things about people, things that people wouldn’t necessarily want me to know, things that only they could tell me, and often things that hadn’t happened to them yet.  It was very unnerving. It didn’t happen until I was in my mid twenties.  I can’t  tell you why, I can’t tell you how.  I don’t see ghosts, I don’t see auras, I just have the ability to read people.  At first it happened all the time, with everyone.  This was horrible. It’s like constantly eavesdropping on people.  It might sound cool, but believe me it’s not. I never really wanted to know what people really thought of me thanks.  Nor did I want to sit next to that lady on the bus who seems really happy and cheerful, only to know that she is unhappy in her marriage, or that she is ill, or that she cries herself to sleep every night and there’s nothing I can do about it.  It’s a burden.

Eventually it got too much for me and I went to get some help to learn to filter it.  You can’t turn it off, but you can learn to put some protection in place to make your life bearable and so that you can be way more selective about what you know.  It was a real godsend.  After that I started working with people.  I never gave messages to people who didn’t want them, and I always tried to tune out everyone except when I was working, because otherwise it wouldn’t be fair to my friends and family, or to me.

Everyone works differently in this field, but my take on it is, if you’ve got the gift/ability then you have it for a reason, and it’s not to make you feel important.  If you can’t help people you shouldn’t do it at all.  I’ve never understood the reason for telling someone they rode a red bicycle when they were five, great.  So what? It’s only useful if you can apply it to their life now, or something they will have to face in the future.  The other thing I found frustrating was the way people deliver information.  They are so thoughtless.  What made me so angry about this poor guy’s wife is that she had lived for two years with the fear that he was going to walk out that door and never come back.  Yes, it came true, but who did the news benefit? Certainly not her, and certainly not her husband.  It made the medium look good, and what use is that to anybody?

I think it’s a horrible thing to do to someone.  If you know something like that, the best thing to do is give the person you’re talking too as many tools and positive information as you can so that they can get through whatever hardship is to come, and never mention what is going to happen.  As it is, those kinds of people who deliver these doom laden messages are so often wrong it’s criminal.  Imagine if she’d got that message and it had never come true but that she had lived her whole life thinking that it might? Nobody needs that kind of anguish in their life.  Clearly it’s not an exact science or I certainly would be predicting the winning lottery numbers and raking it in.  It’s all subject to personal interpretation, and that’s the rub? Quite often the idea of death for example is as much to do with the death of an old way of life and the beginning of a new one rather than straightforward death.  Just as life is to do with a new start and not necessarily a baby.  You cannot, cannot be 100% sure that if you feel a death around someone that it isn’t just that they’re suddenly going to stop working at the deli counter in Tesco and become a world famous cellist for example.  I don’t care how brilliant you are, you just can’t be sure, and if you’re not sure, you have no right to say anything that will make someone unhappy.

People are so pessimistic.  I’ve done readings for people where everything has been positive, they will have an upturn in their finances, they will be happy with their family etc and I might just mention that I feel that they need to think about better nutrition because I feel that they’re a bit tired, and invariably that is the thing they will focus on at the end.  ‘When you say tired, do you mean ill tired? Do you think I should see someone? Do you think it might be cancer?’ etc.  It’s just the way people’s minds work.  Playing into those fears is not helping.  Acknowledging them is important.  People want to know that you know them, that you understand them and that you’re there to help them, but it should always, always be done with love, integrity and the best of intentions for them.

So, rant over.  I feel a bit better now.  Phew.  I’m going to thrash the children, but in a positive, heart warming way that will only make them better, stronger individuals in the future, cos that’s the type of warm hearted, giving woman I am!