The Unmumsy Mum Diary Read online

  Tuesday 5th

  07:15

  Why, in the name of all whys, are kids always ill on the days you so desperately need them to be well? I know there’s never an ideal time for illness, but if I were to draw up a spectrum of terrible days to get ill, today would be at the high end of terrible. I am scheduled to start recording the Unmumsy Mum audiobook this morning and the audiobook’s producer has travelled down to Devon and will be waiting for me at the recording studio in approximately one and a half hours’ time.

  So of course today is the day Jude has woken up tired and teasy after developing a nasty bout of croup overnight. Not yesterday, when I could easily have cancelled the yeasty meeting; not Sunday, when we were all at home and could have made it a cosy family film day; no, it had to be today.

  I was already feeling moderately anxious about the prospect of reading out the ‘Post-baby Body’ and ‘Sex after Kids’ chapters in front of a male sound engineer named Digby, and this anxiety has only been exacerbated by my panic over nobody being willing or able to look after a toddler who is barking like a sea-lion. (If your child has never had croup, it’s actually pretty terrifying, and resulted in James and me taking it in turns to sleep on Jude’s floor so we could keep an eye on his wheezy breathing.)

  I want so badly to stay at home and cuddle Jude better but I can’t let the audiobook team down on the first day and, actually, he seems a lot brighter this morning (he’s eaten some Weetos and stolen Henry’s Fart Blaster), so the show must go on. Praise be for my dad and step-mum, Tina, who sensed the urgency of my this-is-not-a-casual-work-thing-I-can-just-reschedule crisis call and are on their way to ours now. James is waiting for them to arrive before he leaves and I have just made my exit, having done nothing with my hair and feeling hideously underprepared for what I’ve agreed to do.

  I’ve never done anything like this before. What if I get all my words in a muddle? What if my voice isn’t well-to-do enough? I really ought to practise talking aloud so I don’t make a total tit of myself. But right now I need to stop at the garage and buy some chewing gum, because I’m not sure if I brushed my teeth and I need to text James because I forgot to tell him to get some bread out of the freezer in case Dad, Tina and the boys want sandwiches.

  At least my brain being clogged with these usual worries has prevented me from dwelling on the fact that at some point today I will have to narrate the bit where James milks me from behind. Perhaps I should be feeling more concerned about the swearing frequency? F-bombs somehow seem much less severe written down, and now I’m wondering whether I should henceforth replace all the ‘fuck’s with ‘fudge’s in this here diary, just in case it ever becomes an audiobook. I can’t bring myself to do it. ‘Fudging hell’ just isn’t as punchy.

  20:23

  By the time I’d got home and we’d all had some tea, the boys were in a foul mood. This was a shame, as I was in a fantastic mood – to my great surprise, the first day of recording turned out to be the most fun I’d had at work in a long time. After leaving the studio with a spring in my step I took full advantage of the thirty-five-minute solo car journey home by listening to One Direction and daydreaming about various scenarios where we’d all be at a party and I’d have the whole band spellbound by my humour and overall allure.

  Back to the reality of toddler bedtimes. Henry did not want to put his pyjamas on (‘No!’) or clean his teeth (‘I won’t!’). My suggestion that it might be a good idea for him to try for a wee before bedtime was clearly akin to asking him to boil his favourite teddy alive, and none of this was aided by the background whinge of an over-tired Jude, who is thankfully now less croup-ridden but couldn’t find Mummy Pig so was roving desperately around the living room shouting, ‘Pig! Pig! Piiiggg!’ Most days, James and I start the bedtime routine in good spirits, a clear division of childcare labour mapped out (‘Which one do you want?’), but the running around and the mess and the crying almost always closes in on us until the kids’ shouting is outdone by one of us yelling, ‘For God’s sake, will you pack it in!’ while the other secretly feels relieved that they haven’t had to assume the role of Bad Cop. Tonight it was my turn to be Bad Cop, and after an intense day and a longing for some peace I snapped, ‘I am sick of the pair of you! For once, can you just do what you’re told!’ (And then I felt terrible for being sick of them when I’d barely seen them all day.)

  After finally wrestling them both into bed and settling down with our cups of tea and biscuits – two for me, four for James (the porker) – the guilt set in, as it always does.

  ‘I can’t bear the screaming. Why do they battle everything?’ I moaned, as James flicked through the channels and settled on some drab TV programme about Americans who bid on storage units.

  ‘Because they’re tired. And when they’re tired they’re knobheads.’

  I will love this man forever.

  Friday 8th

  Dramatic scenes in the Turner household this evening when all hell broke loose over a snail. It was all my fault, naturally, even though I was trying my hardest to be Fun Mum. That’s the problem with being a parent: sometimes you say or do things and, despite them being said or done with the very best of intentions, they turn out to be the wrong things.

  I found said snail in the living room. I have no idea how it got there. On any normal day, I would have picked it up and put it back in the garden (or possibly redistributed it to the unclaimed wasteland behind our back fence, to protect my only surviving pot plants from getting eaten). Today, however, I made a fuss over the snail, and I did this solely for the benefit of the boys.

  ‘Look, boys! Come and see this snail who’s found his way inside!’ Cue Henry and Jude discarding their toys and trundling over to get a better look. ‘Do you want to help me put him back in the garden?’ I sensed from the frown on Henry’s face that this was not at all what he wanted to do.

  ‘Can I hold him? Can I give him a name?’ he asked.

  On reflection, this was the point at which I should have stepped up to the sensible-parent plate and said, ‘No, let’s put him back where he belongs, darling.’ Instead, I looked at their inquisitive little faces and the way they were momentarily so focused on the snail, and I replied, ‘Great idea! Of course you can hold him. What shall we call him?’

  ‘Mr Snail,’ Henry said proudly, holding out his hand.

  ‘Snail! Snail! Snail!’ chanted Jude.

  We then proceeded to have a chat about snails, me doing my best lively CBeebies presenter impression, talking about how interesting it is that the snail, a gastropod mollusc (God bless smartphone googling and snail-world.com), appears to carry its house on its back, though really its shell is protection against predators. ‘Can you imagine carrying your house on your back?’ I asked them, which Henry thought was hilarious and which I thought meant I was doing a pretty good job of kids’ TV presenting. Snails have an average top speed of fifty yards per hour and can see but not hear, I continued, convinced this was by far my finest educational-parent hour in a long while.

  Then alarm bells started ringing. I remembered with great panic that Henry gets attached to things. He even gets attached to inanimate things like broken pens, toilet-roll tubes and anything else he can weep over when it comes to chucking them out. We’ve had to give him an old shoebox he can use as a ‘Bye-Bye Box’ for all the damaged toys he can’t bear to part with (as seen on Bing bloody Bunny) and you wouldn’t believe the shit that ends up in there – at the last count there were three popped-by-accident balloons. I knew I had to sever the bond with the snail before it became too deep.

  ‘Right,’ I said, carefully lifting the snail out of his hand. ‘Time to pop him back outside,’ and I walked as casually as I could towards the door.

  All at once, just as I had feared, Henry started to cry, proper, sad sobs, until Jude joined in (he’s an empathetic crier, is our Jude; I’m not even sure if he knows why he’s crying most of the time) and I wanted to kick myself in the face.

  ‘He belongs outsi
de, pickle, he wouldn’t be happy here.’

  ‘Nooooooooo! I want him to stay!’

  ‘Come on, H, it’s just a snail. He can’t stay here.’

  ‘He’s not just a snail,’ Henry said, so quietly it was almost a whisper. ‘He’s Mr Snail.’

  For crying out loud.

  After Mr Snail had been prised from his palm and relocated to the safety of the plant pots (I couldn’t bring myself to redistribute him over the fence) and when more than half an hour later the tears were still falling, I was left in no doubt that I’d once again cocked up with my poor parental judgement, by handling Snailgate all wrong. What’s more, to calm the hysteria I resorted to promising the boys that they would see Mr Snail again in the morning. Only now I know he can slime his way along fifty yards in an hour (and bearing in mind that our back garden is not even fifteen yards long), he could be halfway down the road by the morning. I’ll have to get up extra early and hunt down a snail doppelgänger, which is just the sort of desperate thing I imagined I’d end up doing for a pet hamster named Nibbles, not Mr bloody Snail.

  Tuesday 19th

  All the panic.

  Somebody asked me today what our plans are for Henry’s birthday and I basically just stood there looking startled with my mouth open, ‘catching flies’, as my history teacher used to say. Henry’s birthday is in three weeks, which I thought still gave me loads of time, but apparently kids’ parties are often booked up months in advance nowadays. The mum who asked me has already pencilled in a July party date with a venue for her child, so she doesn’t have to worry, and of course the World’s Slackest Mother over here hasn’t booked anything yet. If Henry ends up not having a party, the crushing disappointment will be on my shoulders. I won’t let that happen; slackness aside, I would never let him go without. I promised him his first proper party for the Big 4, and I will make it happen. I will phone our local church hall later. I’ll phone all of the local church halls later. Hell, I’ll sleep with a vicar if I have to. He will have a party.

  Thursday 21st

  We’re midway through some fairly extensive house renovating, which started last year. The plan is to get a new kitchen but there’s a whole heap of ripping stuff out and fixing crumbly walls to do beforehand, and I’m getting so fed up with having workmen in the house. (I probably shouldn’t say ‘workmen’, should I? ‘Workpeople’? ‘Tradespeople’? Ours have, to date, only ever been men, so I shall stick with ‘workmen’ for now.) Anyway, I simply cannot relax with them in the house. I’m on edge all day, with the constant opening and closing of doors and the sound of gruff manly grunting as something gets erected. It’s bad enough when the boys are around (‘What’s he doing, Mummy? Can I speak to him? Can I show him my Star Wars T-shirt?’), but it’s actually far worse when I’m at home on my own and the work I’m trying to do (already on borrowed time) is constantly interrupted by questions I never know the answer to, like: ‘Does the living room have its own circuit, love?’ and, ‘Are you looking at the twelve-mil-depth skirting board or the fifteen-mil?’ No idea. What difference is that three mil going to make to my life? And heaven forbid I need to go to the toilet. As soon as I sit down, I hear heavy work boots starting to ascend the stairs and have to cough loudly or hum, like you would in a public toilet, to indicate occupancy – only this isn’t a public toilet, this is my house.

  Admittedly, there are days when a burst of conversation is a welcome distraction from looming writing deadlines, and I’d be lying if I said I don’t occasionally get a bit lonely working from home on my own, so sometimes I relish the small-talk opportunity. Conversation generally centres around the weather or my biscuit offering, with me usually apologising for only stashing the boring ones like digestives. Unless Jason the tiler comes. On Jason days, I just happen to have a tin of luxury shortbreads or double-chocolate cookies lying around. I momentarily stopped writing then to consider whether I should perhaps cross out any reference to Jason the tiler and my upgraded biscuit offering, but I’ve decided to chance it. If, in the unlikely event that he reads this and I bump into him in Aldi, I’ll just say we had another tiler in called Jason. Let’s not make it a big deal, anyway – it’s not as if I play with my hair and giggle every time we converse about floor grout, or I have nicknamed him Fit Jason. That would be disrespectful. He’s not a piece of meat.

  Saturday 23rd

  I still haven’t seen to 99.9 per cent of the items on my ever-multiplying list of Things to Do. My roots are still so abysmal I’m unintentionally rocking the dip-dye look a good twelve months behind the trend. Plus, we still have no blinds in our bedroom, after the fittings dropped out of dodgy plaster, so I’m having to put my underwear on by crouching out of view of the window like a sniper. But today there has been a small breakthrough, as I have at last booked the local church hall (no prostitution needed) and sorted a bouncy castle for Henry’s birthday. Skanky hair and the risk of flashing my tits at Brian from No. 37 are nothing compared to the nightmares I’ve been having about not pulling a party out of the bag.

  Obviously, that already weighty list will now start buckling further under the pressure of party-related matters, but I have decided that we will be keeping things simple. There will be nobody arriving in a Peppa Pig costume to lead a chorus of the ‘Bing Bong Song’, no magician, no face-painting, no ludicrously extravagant party bags and nothing that involves other parents parting with any cash (unless they want to bring Henners a present, which would be ace). This will be old school. Triangle sandwiches and kids off their faces on Ribena, bouncing on a castle until they are sick. I can’t wait.

  Thursday 28th

  We’re nearly at the end of January and it’s safe to say almost all of my resolutions have nosedived. The demise of the health-and-fitness-based ones has not exactly been unexpected and I’m starting to think the underlying problem with those every year is that I just don’t care enough. I momentarily think I care, like the other day, when I got my phone out to take a picture and the camera was still on front-facing selfie mode, so I was greeted with my zit-scattered chin at close range. In that moment I decided I should probably cut down on eating crap, drink more water and head to bed earlier (and sleep, not lie there browsing my phone for two hours) but, day in, day out, how spotty I look in surprise selfie mode is pretty far down my list of concerns.

  I do care about the parenting pledges I keep making on what seems to be a rolling basis, and that’s exactly why I keep making them – if I could wave a magic wand and boss the entire list, of course I would do so in a heartbeat.

  But in the absence of that wand I’ve been putting some thought into what my priorities are when it comes to parenting and it’s actually proved a pretty helpful exercise. Helpful mainly because it’s made me feel better about not delivering on all the stuff I keep vowing I’ll do/stop doing where the boys are concerned … Anyway, hear me out – I’ve come up with a pyramid. (I feel like I should be drawing this pyramid on a flipchart with marker pens like you do on work courses, but I’ll just have to try and explain it. Bear with.)

  At the base level of the Parenting Priority Pyramid (catchy), I reckon priorities are pretty universal across parentland – the foundation simply has to be the kind of primal stuff centred around keeping our children alive and well. But as the pyramid builds I think it’s only natural that our priority layers start to differ from those of Linda-down-the-road’s.

  For example, ironing is not a priority for me. I don’t iron anything the kids wear (or, in fact, anything at all). I give wet washing a quick shake and flatten it between my hands when I hang it out to dry, then I hope for the best.

  My kids not watching more than an hour of television every day is not a priority for me. Sometimes they watch two hours (four). One time they watched Madagascar, followed immediately by Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, and it wasn’t even raining. Couch-potato culture is not something to be celebrated but, sometimes, you just have to steal time where you can to crack on with all the boring stuff that adulthood b
rings, like cleaning the toilet and phoning the council to tell them they missed your bin.

  Organic, home-baked goods? Also not a priority for me. I don’t actually make any home-made snacks for the boys. I appreciate that they would be far better off eating lemon and poppy seed muffins that I have freshly rustled up than they are snacking on Hula Hoops, a Breakaway and a token side-helping of grapes, but we are where we are. Life goes on.

  Yet there are certain things I won’t compromise on, even when I am pushed for time. Some of these are safety related (so I’m probably not alone in deeming them a priority), but even with these I have at times wondered if I’m over-obsessing. The token grapes? Always cut in half, lengthways. If we’re out and about and presented with grapes, I would sooner bite them in half than I would hand them over whole, knowing the choking hazard. I interrogated Henry at least three times about his preschool’s grape-cutting policy. (I needn’t have worried, they cut them lengthways as standard nowadays.)

  Whenever we are running late somewhere and it would be so much easier just to drag Henry by the hand as I steer Jude’s pram between stationary cars sitting in rush-hour traffic, I don’t. I make him hold my hand and look both ways or walk us all further down the road to the pedestrian crossing. I tell him that, however rushed he is feeling, he must never take risks when crossing the road, and I echo what my mum once told me when I was about to hastily dart between two cars: ‘It’s better to be late than dead, sweetheart.’

  And our bedtime routine might be chaotic, I might lose my rag and mutter, ‘God fucking dammit’ under my breath when Jude deliberately spills his bottle of milk on the floor, but when I’m putting the boys to bed I almost always read them a story. Sometimes my mind drifts from the page and gets caught up with all the work I should be doing and the dishes that need washing and oh God it’s been a month since we had sex, when the hell is that going to happen? But I keep reading. And even if I have to skip a couple of pages (Jude never realises, as long as it ends with a dramatic ‘The End!’ as the book closes), I always feel better that they’ve been read to. Perhaps I’m making up for the brain-rot TV marathons but I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s just that stories are a priority for us.