The Unmumsy Mum Diary Read online

  4. You’ll unnecessarily worry whether all the parents are having a good time. Has anybody offered them a cup of tea? Does she know anyone here? Why isn’t the bloody Disney CD working? The reality is that no adult is expecting to have a blast – it’s Sunday morning in a church hall making small talk with a friend-of-a-friend’s-friend, not Glastonbury.

  5. ‘Happy Birthday’ will start feebly at least twice before somebody has the gusto to sing it like they mean it. Colin the Caterpillar cake will make a guest appearance at this stage.

  6. Kids in superhero costumes and princess dresses will overheat, becoming red-faced and sweaty (but no, they wouldn’t like to take any layers off). Instead, they will down a plastic tumbler of squash as if they have spent a fortnight in the desert, before wiping sweat from their brows and charging back towards the inflatables.

  7. At some point during the celebrations (or shortly after) the Birthday Boy or Girl will have a meltdown over something ridiculous (somebody stole their yellow balloon and although there are four more yellow balloons they need that exact yellow balloon back or they will go batshit crazy). People will nod in agreement that they are ‘just over-excited’. You will then need to read out the riot act about ‘not showing off’, concluding with ‘We’ve had such a lovely day, don’t spoil it.’

  8. Cards and presents will get separated and you will end up back at home opening presents from anonymous benefactors. Having started off with the intention of writing thank-you cards, you will soon realise you don’t know what you are thanking them for and end up sending a generic thanks via WhatsApp instead.

  9. The sugar and e-numbers high (which I recently read is mythical but I’m standing by it or my entire childhood belief system based on the legend of the Blue Smartie is a lie) will crash before teatime. The witching hour or two before bed with zombified staring and/or moaning will prove particularly painful.

  10. Finally, you will eat leftover cocktail sausages and mini-Scotch eggs for tea and find yourself grinning at the happiness of your child, who won’t go to sleep without a chosen birthday toy or two (usually the biggest and noisiest toy, which will go off in the night and make everybody in the house shit themselves).

  We are living the onset of stage ten right now, having just said goodnight to our four-year-old (sob) who has gone to bed with Transformers stickers on his pyjamas and an array of presents by his pillow. He’s a lucky boy; and we are lucky to have him.

  Happy Birthday, Henry Bear.

  Wednesday 17th

  There is nothing quite as terrifying as the fear brought about by losing all sight of your child, even if just for a second. For us, these heart-in-mouth occasions usually happen when we’re playing hide and seek at the park and, after years of the whole ‘Hmmm, where could he be?’ pretence (said as I try to ignore limbs poking out from behind the tree), things have evolved to actual hiding, which means that, at times, Henry really is ‘out of sight’ – though I always peek through my hands to check which tree he’s heading for, which lessens the severity of my heart attack.

  Today, though, I experienced a level of sheer panic far greater than I have ever felt playing hide and seek with Henry at the park.

  I lost Jude.

  The environment was already pretty stressful because we were at soft play on a rainy Wednesday during half-term. I know, what in God’s name was I thinking? The thing was, I had arranged to meet up with my friend Emma and her two girls, a kind of ‘safety in numbers, better than being stuck at home’ exercise and, in all honesty, we just hadn’t thought through the whole half-term wet-weather thing – half-term means so much less when your kids are not yet at school.

  It was hell in there – worse than hell, because we had to queue for more than half an hour just to get into the bloody place, and waiting in line with fifty whinging kids, all desperate to be let off their leads, is exactly how I imagine the deepest depths of hell to be.

  After finally negotiating our way in and finding a table that hadn’t already been claimed by discarded kids’ shoes and mum cardigans, we realised that our own kids were getting hungry and that our best bet was to head back out of the play zone to the restaurant on the other side of the signing-in desk. I am probably doing a terrible job of setting the scene for anybody who is reading this and trying to picture the circumstances, but all you need to know is that the soft play in question is part of an entertainment complex arranged over several floors, with the play zone and restaurant being at opposite ends of the first floor. So Emma and I headed back out through the gate to the restaurant, plonked our collective offspring on a comfy sofa and took it in turns to order some food. Of course, small kids don’t sit still on sofas waiting for food for very long and in no time at all the four of them had started running around, up to the end of the restaurant and back again. This was actually fine because the crowds were still packing in to play, leaving the restaurant surprisingly quiet. As I stood in line, ordering two lots of overpriced sausage, chips and beans (more fool me, as I know full well my children only eat the chips), I kept glancing over at the four little heads whizzing back and forth.

  Back and forth.

  Back and forth.

  Until suddenly, just as I completed the debit-card transaction and headed back to the sofa, it dawned on me that I could only see three little heads whizzing back and forth. Jude.

  ‘Where’s Jude?’ I asked Emma, working hard to keep my voice casual.

  ‘He’s—’ she started, but I could see from the way she was searching the restaurant that she wasn’t sure either. ‘He was just here, a second ago. Right here.’ And she was right, he had been. I’d seen him just a second ago. Don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic. He can’t have gone far. My brain went into anxious search mode and I flew around the restaurant.

  ‘Jude? Jude? Judy? Where are you, pudding?’

  No sign. Shit.

  My heart racing, I ran back out the way we came, and the first thing I saw was the double doors. The double doors to the stairs. The double doors to the stairs to the road outside. No, no, no, no, no.

  ‘Jude? Jude? JUDE?’ I was shouting his name by this point, Henry following me in absolute silence (unheard of; he sensed that I was frantic). I ran down the stairs and straight back up again because there were loads of parents mingling in the stairwell and surely somebody would have seen a one-year-old bum-shuffle his way down the stairs and totter into the road? They’d have stopped him. He can’t have got that far in seconds.

  Unless somebody had snatched him.

  Unless somebody had spotted a small boy on his own, unguarded by parents, and carried him out of the building – a crying child would hardly have looked out of place leaving soft play on a rainy Wednesday in half-term. Loads of kids were crying. What the hell was I going to tell James? Where the hell was our baby?

  Back through the double doors, I turned right into the soft-play zone and immediately wanted to cry at the noise and the chaos which was hitting me from all angles. Cackling small children whizzing around and juice cartons being spilt and time-outs being threatened. So much screaming, so many people. Bedlam.

  And then I saw it. The unmistakeable mop of strawberry-blond curls and a chubby arm holding hands with a girl in a staff T-shirt. Jude.

  ‘Thank God,’ I blurted at her. ‘He just ran off!’ Luckily, she was far too young to judge me for my child neglect and instead explained that she had seen him sprinting towards the area designed for ‘the bigger boys and girls’ and concluded he was probably too young to take himself down the drop slide. As I mumbled further guilt-fuelled gibberish about how quick he is and how I’d honestly only turned my back to pay the food bill, Jude started crying. At first I thought that maybe he was overcome with the anxiety of the separation or the fear that he’d lost his careless mother for good, but as he tugged at my hand and stuck out his pouty bottom lip the penny slowly dropped: he was only anxious to climb the squashy steps to the slide and, rather than waiting for his sausage, chips and beans, he’d
clearly thought, Sod this, where’s that ball pool? and taken himself back to play.

  Jude’s a runner; at home, he bolts for the stairs, the door, the bin – anywhere he isn’t supposed to be – and today he bolted for the massive play labyrinth filled with hundreds of screaming kids. I can hardly blame the lad but, Jesus Christ, my heart rate. It has taken me all day to stop feeling sick and process the relief that he wasn’t abducted or run over.

  I think my panic levels may have been slightly disproportionate to the event itself. From the moment I realised I could no longer see him to the moment I spotted his hair, I’ve calculated that no more than a minute and a half could have passed. (I’ve been going over everything I said and did in those moments, and the mental replay tells me the shouting and pointless stair-climbing would have taken ninety seconds, tops.) Yet, still, I’m feeling a bit edgy. Perhaps it’s the memory of the panic? Or the shame that I took my eye off the baby ball and allowed him out of my sight. Lesson well and truly learned. I know now that sometimes even two pairs of eyes can blink and miss a fugitive toddler and, more importantly, I know that I shall have to keep him on his reins until he’s at least twenty-five.

  Thursday 18th

  Another surreal evening just unfolded as friends and family turned out for the official launch of my book at our local Waterstones here in Exeter. The whole event reminded me of my wedding day. It wasn’t that I was sporting a posh frock and a secret garter, and nor was there any requirement for James to do the slow-dance sway with me to Madonna’s ‘Crazy for You’, but trying to get around to speaking to everybody and not quite being able to just enjoy it was much like our big day. As was the random fusion of people: it’s quite overwhelming (and just a bit disconcerting) to see your friends from an old job sitting next to your boss from an even older job, who is speaking to your aunty, who’s just had a chat with someone from your publisher’s. Everybody there was there for me, and that is something I struggle to get my head around. At least with a wedding they’re there for two of you.

  The stand-out moment has got to be when Henry, who by this point had shaken off any shyness and settled into his usual role as a comedian, made his way over to me, climbed on my lap and, just as I had started saying ‘a few words’ about the book, proceeded to make really loud snore noises over everything I said. This was funny the first time, maybe even the second time (‘Haha, see what I have to put up with!’), but after the fifth or sixth loud snore (‘Henry, sweetheart, Mummy’s talking a minute’) I was forced to give James the friendly-with-an-undertone-of-‘sort-your-son-out’ stare, and he obliged by carting a still-‘snoring’ Henry upstairs to the first floor of the bookshop to calm down his amateur dramatics. Henry later came back down to sit on my lap to ‘help’ sign some books and even had a bash at signing an ‘H’ in a couple of copies. His ‘H’ is pretty decent, which filled me with pride until I was told that, come September, he’ll be discouraged from using any capital letters until he has mastered his lower case; so it looks like there’s something else we’re doing all wrong already.

  I thanked a lot of people at tonight’s do but, as I’m sat here reflecting on a fab evening, I can’t help but feel that there was somebody I should have paid more attention to: my absolute bestie, Mary-Anne, who has come down for the night from Brighton and is sleeping on our sofa. She’s been having a really rough time after her brother died in a climbing accident and I never expected her to make the trip for this evening. But she did. I can count on one hand the schoolfriends I’ve stayed close to (beyond exchanging the odd Facebook message, I mean), but she has been a constant in my life for a good fifteen years. We have made all the important mistakes in life together, like plucking our eyebrows into tiny squiggles and gelling the front two strands of our hair. We don’t see a lot of each other these days, what with four kids and 177.6 miles between us, but she has always been a friend in the truest sense of the word and I’m going to make an effort to plan something later in the year for the two of us. (I’ve written it down, so now it has to happen.)

  I’ve also started writing a little something for James. About James. I’m not ready to share it yet but when it’s more eloquently put together I’ll set it free in this diary. He will be mortified, I’m sure, but he shouldn’t be. It’s not as if I’m going to mention anything about the deformed toe on his left foot looking like it belongs to a troll. That would be unkind.

  Tuesday 23rd

  If there’s ever a time I’m reminded just how outnumbered I am by boys, it’s the daily half an hour before bedtime, when the very fact that they are boys is staring me in the face. It’s probably important to note that I’m not including James here, before the following picture gets out of hand. It’s true, there are a great many things I imagined about having children which have subsequently come to pass, but I can safely say that, in all those motherhood imaginings, there was never a scene where I chased two small bottoms around the living room shouting, ‘Stop playing with your willies!’

  I swear to God, they are obsessed! I know I shouldn’t be surprised that two small males are fanatical about their small male willy-tackles (I have met other males, after all) but I never expected this love affair to begin so early in life. Their fondness for their bits tends to reach its peak when I am treated to ‘the willy show’. Yes, you read that right. The willy show represents both the best and the worst of their obsession – the best because they are running around joyfully and not fighting; the worst because it sometimes prompts me to put a cushion over my head and faux-sob over the lack of females in the family. The willy show is something Henry came up with (if you ever read this, my darling, I do hope you’re not too embarrassed; you were only four, and not fourteen, at the time) and largely involves him standing, de-clothed, jiggling his pecker from side to side in a kind of Ricky Martin dance move as his brother doubles over in laughter and tries to imitate the whole performance. Many a day concludes with a gleeful chant of ‘Willy show, willy show, willy show!’ before James and I coerce them into ‘putting their willies away’ and try to restore some calm before bedtime.

  I saw an internet meme the other day which had ‘Parenting boys: not for the faint-hearted’ over a stereotypical ‘boy’ scene where two boys caked in mud were trying to climb over a fence. It made me laugh because all I could think about being ‘not for the faint-hearted’ was the willy show. Is this normal? Is this going to be one of those really awkward parenting moments when you start chuckling about something hilarious your kids have done, waiting for someone to join in with a similar tale, and instead you are met with tumbleweed and a wall of silence which reads, ‘Okaaaaay.’ Whatever, I’ve said it now.

  The truth is, I’m actually pretty thankful for the willy show and other equally berserk moments of our routine. The familiarity of the chaos makes me feel settled in a way that eases those ‘this doesn’t feel like my life’ moments that work has been throwing my way.

  The kids parading naked around the living room is a brilliant life and it is mine.

  It’s bonkers.

  It’s home.

  Wednesday 2nd

  Today I had a VIP entourage for my library book-tour event as both the boys came along for the ride. I had been desperately trying to source childcare for the day but as it drew closer it became apparent that nobody was available to look after them and it struck me as ridiculous to cancel a mums and babies’ library gathering because I didn’t want to take my own babies.

  So off we went, sixty-six miles up the M5, with a whole host of snacks. I missed the turning for the library (and the free, allocated space they had saved me) so drove on a bit further and parked in the first pay-and-display car park I came to.

  The event itself was fine. Well, the pair of them ran in loops around the library for the entire time I was answering the librarian’s questions, but they didn’t kick off at any point and were supervised by Sophie, who came along to give me a hand (and who is getting very good at placating my children in public spaces).

&nb
sp; On the way back, however, I had a bit of a crummy-mummy moment and, as per usual, this was down to a lack of foresight on my part. After I said goodbye to everybody (and Henry had dropped his daily poo in their staff toilet) I realised with mild panic that we were just a couple of minutes off being late back to the car. It was also lunchtime by this point and I had packed nothing by way of substantial food in my bag so I decided we’d have to hotfoot it back to the car and grab a sandwich or similar en route. Whatever we did, we’d have to be super-quick.

  As I did the ‘hassled parent walk’, dragging the boys behind me, the first foodie place we came to was a bakery and the pair of them were quick to stop and point out the absolutely ginormous iced buns in the window.

  ‘I’ll get one of those for you both, but what else do you want? Something savoury?’ I asked them, which was met with a ‘Nothing!’ from Henry and a primal chant of ‘Cake, cake, cake!’ from Jude, who can’t yet comprehend waiting and calms down only when the desired unhealthy food item is in his hands. So, against my better judgement, I bought them both one of the enormous iced buns (plus one for me), which I let them carry back to the car in their individual paper bags. At the car park, our time was well and truly up and a parking attendant was prowling, completely scuppering my plan for us to eat our buns on the nearby grass before hitting the road. We had to leave immediately and there was absolutely no way I could tell the boys to wait until we got home to eat their cakes. You know what’s coming, don’t you?

  Yes, bad planning and an unwise decision in the bakery left me driving back down the M5 with a one-year-old and a four-year-old demolishing iced buns in their car seats. The sound effects were astounding. Jude was practically inhaling his at one stage, snorting like a pig as he ploughed through the icing with both his mouth and his hands, as if he’d never been fed. Henry was almost as bad, only he had the vocabulary to tell me, mid-mouthful, that he was also really thirsty. After a quick stop for petrol (plus two bottles of Fruit Shoot) and just a few miles later, I caught sight of Jude in the rear-view mirror. I’m amazed I didn’t crash. His entire face, including his ears and his hair, was encrusted with icing, like a kind of Father Christmas icing-beard. In his equally sticky hand he was holding his Fruit Shoot bottle, upside down, and casual as you like was shaking it over his legs and on to the car seat in a kind of sugary-squash rain shower – much to the delight of his brother, who was also caked in icing but knew better than to deliberately spill his drink on the car’s upholstery.