The Unmumsy Mum Diary Page 6

  I told him, without shouting at him, about the work/kids tightrope that I have been walking. How I have been taking work calls at soft play because ten minutes standing by the ball pool is the only ten minutes I can find to have a telephone interview with a newspaper. That I am then having to deal with the boys’ kicking and bickering while feeling the eyes of other parents burning into the back of my head because they have observed my soft-play-supervision negligence and have concluded that my poor kids are just craving some attention – which they are.

  I answer, ‘Hmmm’ and ‘Yep’ and ‘Fine’ to everything my kids say because I never hear the question. I’m not listening. I’m preoccupied, distracted, and they know it. They play up most when they feel ignored and I need to fix it by paying them more attention but I don’t know how to, because giving them attention doesn’t get articles written or chapters submitted or emails responded to.

  I told him that I feel ill. That this is making me ill. That something’s got to give because this isn’t working and that, actually, despite trying to find a way to do it all, to have it all, I can’t. I told him that this diary I’m writing is more than likely going to become my second book and that, if I am to have a hope in hell of writing it without being sectioned (which was not me making light of mental-health issues, it was me trying to tell him that I am on the verge of having mental-health issues), then changes will need to be made. That, all things considered, I need to work more days and he needs to work fewer.

  And then I stopped crying and went to bed. When James came up he put his arm around me and said, ‘We’ll sort something out,’ and I had the best night’s sleep I have had in months.

  Which is why this morning’s shitty tweet was a shame. Perhaps I should take it as a warning not to check Twitter first thing in the morning.

  Tuesday 29th

  I put my work to one side today and spent a very rare afternoon with Henry while Jude was at the childminder’s. I took him to the museum, and it was wonderful. I forget sometimes how much his constant questions and zest for learning new things make me laugh. I bought him a chocolate muffin from the café and, midway through my cup of tea, he slid his plate across the table towards me and said, with the straightest of faces, ‘Do you wanna smell my muff?’ Seeing me trying and failing not to laugh, he cottoned on to the fact that ‘muff’ must be funny and kept repeating it. This will no doubt prove interesting at preschool. Still, it’s less worrying than the time he said, ‘Fuck’s sake.’

  On the way home, hand in hand with my little buddy, I asked him what his absolute favourite thing about the museum was. I could see him deliberating on it, going back through all the displays and exhibits, and then a smile lit up his face and he replied, with great certainty, ‘The café!’

  That’s my boy.

  21:07

  I am crying with laughter at a comment thread on my Facebook page – as in, proper tears and the onset of hiccups. I don’t even know where to begin explaining this, but I’ll try. I began the thread with a post about the state of our kitchen (before renovations began). Our old wall tiles are decorated with mushrooms that are alarmingly phallic in their appearance and it’s no secret that I was eager to get rid of said penis wall tiles. Initially, this post prompted a wider mums’ discussion about unattractive household items, including Emily Roddick’s tasselled armchair (nicknamed ‘the hairy chair’), which eventually led to a rather more random conversation …

  Emily Wood: Are they penis tiles because they look like penises, or because penises smell of mushrooms? Have I gone too far with that?

  Gemma Perkins: I can’t keep up with this thread … does someone know someone who had a penis that smelt of mushrooms and sat on that hairy chair? I thought it was about decorating? … or was that a euphemism for something I don’t understand?

  Kelly Jones: I feel we’ve learned a lot here this evening … Tile designs leave a lot to be desired, hairy chairs are incredibly intriguing and some todgers smell like toadstools …

  Erin Campbell: Maybe it smells like that cause it’s a little fun-guy?

  Donia Marles: I now have the urge to sniff my husband’s penis to see if his smells like mushrooms.

  Amy Rebecca Griffiths: Jesus Christ, what have I stumbled upon? I’m laughing so hard in the bath I almost drowned.

  Natalie Collins: Emily Wood, I’ve said this for a million years, that man juice smells of cooked mushrooms.

  Neil Wood: Hmm, I clearly need to change my brand of shower gel! (Emily Wood’s husband)

  Sarah Edwards: My ex’s mother used to cook mushrooms in the microwave (I don’t know why either), but if you want to give your kitchen the fragrance of eau de spunk I’d highly recommend you give it a go!

  Rin St Sudra: I went to the library today. I told the librarian that I couldn’t remember the name of that new book about small penises, and she said, ‘I don’t think it’s in yet,’ and I said, ‘Yep, that’s the one.’

  As entertaining as all this has been, on a more serious note, I still can’t make sense of what I’ve read. Do willies really smell like mushrooms? I hate mushrooms …

  Thursday 31st

  15:32

  Today has been a testing one on the parenting front, mainly because the boys have insisted on fighting with each other. All day. Over nothing. Henry has zero interest in a toy until Jude starts playing with it, at which point it becomes the one and only toy he cannot live without. I’d understand if we were talking about Buzz Lightyear, or his Transformer, or an actual toy of any description, but he was getting his knickers in a twist about randomly crap objects, like a blue Duplo brick and an old Post-it that James had scribbled the meter readings on. It probably has nothing to do with the toy/object and everything to do with him feeling threatened by Jude. There are no doubt guidelines somewhere regarding how I should address a reluctance to share without psychologically damaging them both for life but, most days, ‘Will you two just pack it in!’ and a stint on the time-out step is all I have in my locker. Sometimes I wonder how other people cope with the crying and foot stamping, but you can’t just stand there wondering, can you? You have to take action, and if that has thus far been the wrong action, then on my head be it.

  15:55

  Maybe I should go out for a walk later. That will clear my head and make me feel brighter.

  16:13

  After an hour’s nagging from me that ‘somebody will get hurt’, Henry has just pushed Jude over and Jude has bumped his head. Somebody got hurt. Funny, that. I have just texted James, asking him to pick up some wine. There will not be any walking tonight.

  21:29

  I’ve concluded that I must be on a bit of a downer today (to be honest, this whole month seems to have panned out that way) so I should probably just go to bed, filing the past twelve hours in the fuck-it bucket on my way there. Instead, I’m sitting here, typing furiously, ignoring James and his car programmes because I’ve remembered something that I was asked at the weekend and I think today’s mood may have presented me with the answer.

  I was asked, in a relaxed, wine-fuelled conversation, what the absolute hardest thing is about being a parent. My response was something along the lines of it being a combination of factors, the main one being that your life is simply ‘not your own’ any more – which takes some getting used to.

  On reflection, though, I don’t think that’s it at all. Granted, there are times when it can feel frustrating that my life is no longer ‘my own’, like when I’ve planned something with military precision and then had to reschedule it three times due to chickenpox. Yet apart from something fancy like a slap-up meal with friends (which is more enjoyable if we get a babysitter), more often than not whatever we are doing is more fun with the boys around – and I really mean that. There have been lots of things that have shocked us about becoming parents, but our lives no longer being ‘our own’ is not one of them – we walked into that one with our eyes wide open. Our pre-parent lives were surrendered for a new dynamic – and it was
a dynamic that we wanted. So, no, I don’t think that’s the hardest thing about being a parent.

  The hardest thing, for me, at least, if today is anything to go by, is the effect that being a parent has had on my opinion of myself. I appreciate that this is sounding a bit dramatic and perhaps I really ought to call it a night and delete this waffle in the morning. I’m not going to, though, because I’m now typing at a pace of a thousand words a minute (well, it feels like it) and that tells me I should let it all out. So here are some ramblings about what I’m feeling.

  I have always quite liked myself as a person. I’m not talking Kanye levels of loving oneself here, I just mean I’ve always felt content in the knowledge that I am a good human. I’m nice. I hate seeing people upset, I smile at strangers, my default setting is friendly and I’m the first to chat to people who are on their own at parties and functions (just in case they only know the person they came with and that person has buggered off). When I was eleven years old and a girl in my year was being bullied, I put a note in her pencil case which read, ‘You can sit with me if you like’ – and this was years before Mean Girls. I worry about how other people are feeling and I hope that those who know me or meet me can see that.

  I can’t honestly say that I like myself as a parent.

  In fact, there have been many times over the last four years – today being a prime example – when I don’t much like the person I have become. This person shouts. She screams. She throws Paw Patrol figures across the bedroom in a rage because, yet again, the squabbling has started downstairs and she just cannot bear the bloody squabbling.

  This morning, after three hours of the boys’ combined whinging about everything and nothing, I yelled at Henry.

  ‘For God’s sake! Put. Your. Shoes. On!’

  ‘I’ve put them on,’ came a small reply. And so he had. I was so busy getting more and more wound up that I’d failed to notice that he had actually done the thing I’d asked of him. Granted, I’d asked him at least five times previously, but that’s not really the point, is it?

  ‘Sorry, darling,’ I told him quietly, before wondering once again when this became my style. Any patience I once had has all but evaporated, and that kind eleven-year-old who always hated people being sad now sighs and shouts at her four-year-old and doesn’t seem to find the time to be kind because she’s always so bloody cross.

  So I’ve changed my answer. The hardest thing about being a parent isn’t that I am no longer ‘my own person’. The hardest thing is that I don’t much like myself as a parent, and, given that being a parent is so very core to my being, I fear I don’t much like myself as a person any more. I definitely don’t today.

  Perhaps the ‘something that’s got to give’ just hasn’t given yet. It’s going to have to give soon.

  In the meantime, March can fuck right off.

  I’ve always preferred April anyway.

  Saturday 2nd

  00:21

  There is no virtue in staying up late when you have early risers who gate-crash your bed, but James is out at a work do and I can’t get hold of him, which is keeping me awake. While I know it’s not that late, he hasn’t replied to my text and his phone goes straight to voicemail. As he was leaving the house, he said, ‘Do I need a key? I’ll be back around half ten,’ and I told him to take one just in case I fell asleep or he decided to stay out late. I know from experience that ‘a few work drinks’ can easily snowball into stumbling around on a dance floor, cheering like a football fan when you see Bev from Sales gyrating on Paul from Accounts; something you would never cheer if you were sober because Bev stole your customers and Paul has a wife. (For the record, to the best of my knowledge James doesn’t actually work with any inappropriately amorous colleagues named Bev and Paul.)

  Our long-standing rule is that you will text to say if you’re pulling an all-nighter and promise to get a taxi. The absence of any message from James since he left the house just before 6 p.m. is out of character, which has left me to conclude that one of the following must have happened:

  1. He started walking home hours ago but was mugged and left for dead by the canal or in a ditch. I don’t actually think there are any ditches on the route he’d take home but there might be and he could be in one, alone, wondering why his wife hasn’t sent for help when he told her he would be home by half ten and probably wouldn’t need his key. This is genuinely my concern right now, hence I can’t get to sleep, even though I know the kids will have me up in a few hours.

  2. He has lost or broken his phone. I know his phone hasn’t run out of battery because we share a charger and were fighting for it earlier. James won first dibs on charging because he was going out. (Lord knows where the other charger is – probably with the clothes pegs and the rest of the odd ‘treasure’ Henry stashes under his pillow.)

  3. He is off his face on alcohol and has forgotten all about the pledge he made to his loving wife to send JUST ONE FUCKING TEXT to say he’s all right and is going to be out late.

  I really hope it’s 3.

  01:55

  He’s alive! No prizes for guessing that it was scenario 3. I finally got through to him just a second ago, having resorted to texting his friend to ask if James was still alive. (I think said friend must have given him a ‘Your missus is fuming!’ nudge.) He answered in a kind of slurred yell over the sound of dance music, ‘Hello? BABE! I’m in a club! Mark? MARK? What club are we in? Babe, I’m in A CLUB WITH MARK. Give the boys a kiss from me! Nobody is dancing!’

  Jesus wept.

  I might get the poster paints out and mark the shed with ‘doghouse’. Better still, I’m going to send Jude in to sit on his head with a shitty nappy in the morning while Henry sets off his Iron Man Hulk Buster, the one that punches its fist while shouting, ‘Take that!’

  Side note: I am glad he’s not in a ditch.

  14:11

  I can probably count on one hand the weekends in the last four years when I haven’t been to the park. There are three parks that are a reasonable walking distance from our house, and a couple more if you’re prepared to load the pram up like a carthorse and trek a bit further. I have mixed feelings about our park excursions. It’s complicated. In many ways I am forever indebted to the parks of Exeter because time spent at the park is time not spent inside the house, which is generally where I tear out the biggest chunks of my hair. A trip to the park also means that we are getting some fresh air and that, with any luck, I might just tire the boys out enough to bank an hour’s vacant TV staring later so that I can have a quick tidy-up and/or make myself feel depressingly inadequate by trawling through the impressive Instagram lives of people I’ve never met. (Yes, I have failed that resolution, too.) I need to stop doing it: the dishes won’t tidy themselves away and I don’t need to read about layering the essential summer wardrobe pieces or how rattan garden furniture is having a revival, not really, because I ‘layer’ solely by putting a hoody on top of everything and there’s not much requirement for rattan garden furniture in a concrete yard over-looked by flats.

  So, despite sometimes having to physically fight the urge to drop to my knees with my hands over my face at the very suggestion of the ‘P’ word, more often than not I clap my hands together, plaster on my Cheery Mum face and say, ‘Right, the park it is, let’s go!’ Today was no exception.

  After finally surfacing from his headachy slumber and feeling like he ‘could use some fresh air’, James came with us. Thinking that the worst of his hangover had passed, he agreed to join in with Henry’s new favourite game of ghost chasing. To play this game, the ‘ghost’ must do a kind of faux-run after Henry but is never allowed to actually catch up with him (because of the sore-loser thing – we simply cannot cope with the resulting paddy a simple ‘Caught you!’ brings). It’s much harder than it looks to maintain the illusion of running without ever catching up with someone who’s slower than you, but James managed a good few minutes as the ghost before he suddenly stopped dead, shot me a look of absolute
panic and said, ‘I’ve gotta go. I shouldn’t have run. I’m not sure if I’m going to be sick or poo myself, perhaps both.’ With which, he turned on his heel and did a kind of run-waddle back home. I laughed at first but then it dawned on me that I would have to take over as the ghost and that the plan I’d had to just plonk myself under a tree and watch the world go by would once again have to be abandoned.

  In the end, I ghost-chased both boys back to the play area. There, I spent ninety per cent of my time trying to prevent Jude, who has zero fear, from nosediving off the climbing frame while shouting over to Henry that I would shortly be over to push him on the swing/watch him karate chop a tree/listen to his song about monsters, and the other ten per cent wondering how on earth people cope with more than two children. Not mentally (though I can’t help but wonder that, too), but practically. How do you simultaneously ensure that more than two of your children aren’t at risk of killing themselves (or each other) at any one time?

  Monday 4th

  This morning, I found myself brazenly deodorising my underarms with a roll-on in the middle of a busy café. As I did so, I realised that, despite my self-loathing downer at the end of last month, there is at least one way in which I like myself more now that I am a parent. In case it seems a bit random that a quick armpit freshen-up in Caffè Nero made me think, ‘Christ, I love myself,’ allow me to explain.