Monday 16th June – A Woman’s Work

Today I have emptied, refilled and put on the dishwasher.  I am on my second load of washing and have just emptied and refilled the tumble drier.  I know tumble driers are the environmental equivalent of crack cocaine, but I have three children, mountains of washing and I live in the Midlands.  It’s just about to piss it down and I haven’t got enough airers/radiators/deer antlers to cope. So there.  I have also stripped and remade my bed and Oscar’s bed, with help from a small child (this means it takes forty minutes instead of five.  It’s as bad as making a bed with the assistance of a cat for the benefit of those of you who don’t have offspring).  Oscar’s bed was fine until this morning when he gracefully took his nappy off, put it on his pillow and peed all over the duvet as a good morning gesture.

 

In amongst this I have built towers of bricks, played ‘boing a boing’ on our mattress, hidden a small child in a load of dirty washing and hilariously ‘found’ him at least twenty times.  I have watched Balamory (I’m convinced PC Plum is gay and is having an affair with Archie the inventor), played shops with my dry goods cupboard and a wheel barrow whilst trying not to wince at the fact that all my tins of chick peas now look like they’ve been used as ammunition in the Boer war, and conversed learnedly with the decking men about the ramifications of gaps in the fencing and small childrens’ heads.  We have also done ‘cooking’, me and Oscar, not me and the decking men, which this morning involves beating one of my metal bowls to death with a wooden spoon and shouting ‘get, set, go!’  Apparently this is the way that Gordon Ramsay always makes mashed potato.  I am expecting my Michelin star through the post.  I don’t like ceremonies and fuss.

 

I have also made four breakfasts, chivvied two small children to school, including dealing with a hideous, ‘I can’t find my summer dress mama!’ and many tears, countered with: ‘Tallulah, you have six summer dresses, you can’t have lost them all! Stop snivelling and get a move on!’  I have remembered to pay the office for hot lunches this week, checked homework and frisked a story sack.  I have chatted about the fact that it is not true that: ‘Babies are so small that their heads can’t hold two feelings at once, isn’t that right mama?’  I have caused a riot by refusing to let Tallulah take her jewellery collection to school.  I have discussed terrorism with Matilda, who is still convinced we are going to be invaded any time now.  Apparently my answers to the question: ‘What shall we do about it?’ have been singularly unsatisfactory up to now, and I must try harder.  Remind me never to let her watch, ‘When The Wind Blows’.

 

Yesterday evening’s meal was punctuated by discussions about the Second World War when Tilly asked me if I had been alive during the war and what was it like.  When I pointed out that even granny hadn’t been alive during the second world war, and Tallulah said: ‘So what? You still could have been.’ we also had to have a Stephen Hawking type commentary on the nature of time being perceived as linear, even though it probably wasn’t and was much more like one of those Mille Feuille cakes really (why? Why do I get into these things?)  Luckily the pull of the war was stronger for Tilly, who is still obsessed by bloodshed, so I managed to wangle my way out of discussing all things quantum for now.  She wanted to know why we went to war, which involved me having to explain about the nature of:

 

• Empire
• The arms race
• Arch Duke Ferdinand and Sarajevo
• World War One
• Reparations and the League of Nations
• German economic collapse, Christopher Isherwood and wheelbarrows full of money
• The rise of National Socialism
• The Nazis (in full colour, naturally)
• The Fascists
• Judaism
• Kristalnacht
• The holocaust

 

Tallulah now keeps wandering up to me and saying: ‘I don’t think it was very fair on the Jews do you mama?’ to which I can only concur that it was indeed very unfair on the Jews.  She tuts, shrugs her shoulders and wanders off to think about it some more and then comes back to say: ‘I don’t understand why they want to kill lots of little babies really.  That’s not very nice is it?’ to which I am again forced to concur.  Now she wants to know if the Germans are sorry, and if they have apologised.  I said that they probably were and that they most certainly had, and she said with great emphasis: ‘I should think so. That’s just rude!’  My feelings are that if Tallulah had been prime minister instead of that lily livered Neville Chamberlain, things would have been much more satisfactorily resolved about a week into the whole thing.

 

So, talking about how babies heads fit all their feelings in at once seemed like small beer this morning, and I was quite relieved.  It’s been a hard hitting week on the discussions front, what with sex education, terrorism, politics and warfare on the table.  Saturday night I was hoping to relax and chill out but ended up having to explain the concept of addiction and rehab to Matilda who had just watched Amy Winehouse protesting that she wasn’t going to go to ‘rehab’ and wondering what it was and the fact that Ms. Winehouse didn’t seem very well at all, and maybe she would be better off getting some help.  Very astute for a nine year old living with the conviction that she’s about to be called up any moment.  At this rate by the time they’re in their teens we’ll have run out of topical things to talk about and be discussing pension funds and false teeth.  It’s exhausting.

 

Getting back to this morning. I have conversed pleasantly with mothers and their small offspring, thankfully not about alcoholism or the correct use of bayonets in hand to hand combat.  I have stopped Oscar from eating all the beads at the counting table, and from being kissed to death by a bevy of five year old girls who think that a small, bullet headed child laden with snot is ‘cute’.  I have dragged him screaming from Early Years, where he has decided he is now old enough to stay, and have scraped shreddies off the kitchen floor. 

I have rescued the one dummy that we have in the entire house from the middle of the road where he threw it shouting: ‘Dunny! Go!’  We had about twenty of the bloody things last week and since the weekend we’ve got one.  I have no idea where they all go.  I expect he’s inhaling them in his sleep and if you were to take an x-ray of his lungs they would be choc a bloc with dummies.  I lost the only one we had left on Saturday night and spent an hour on my hands and knees turning the whole house upside down.  I even rang Jason thinking that if he had one in the car I would have to make him drive back from scamping just to bring me a dummy.  I know he needs weaning off them, but not now, not right at this moment, please God.  In the end I found one in the bottom of the toy box in the kitchen, in a jar of cotton reels.  I cried, I got down on my knees and thanked god.  I did a little dance.  I didn’t make a little love, but I did get down tonight.

 

It is now half past ten in the morning.  I just caught myself sitting down with a cold cup of coffee thinking: ‘Hmm! Haven’t done much this morning.’  Then I realised how ridiculous that actually was and smacked myself sharply round the side of the head with a bit of spare decking the men have left lying around.  I know it’s only stuff that most mother’s do of a morning, but when you write it down you realise quite why you feel so bloody tired all the time.  I bet Richard Branson hasn’t done all that this morning.  I bet he’s spent his morning stroking his beard, sharpening a few pencils and counting his moolah.  Tallulah would approve.