This blog is a lie.

This blog is a lie. The thought suddenly occurred to me when I burnt the dinner on Monday night because I was writing for the Daily Mail.

It all started because I was bored - the blog that is - and because I felt like a failure. I wasn’t a frantically busy working mother successfully juggling all her balls in the air. I was more, ‘she doesn’t do very much at all,’ than ‘I don’t know how she does it,’ and I wished I did do it, or at least a bit of it. Sometimes.

But every now and again, and increasingly often of late, I do feel like one of those mothers - hooray! I think. 

And to be perfectly honest, although stressful and challenging at times, it’s great. Example: making dinner at the same time as writing on a tight deadline.

Okay, so it was a tad frustrating to have arranged for children to come and play with Youngest all day to keep him occupied as I worked (it was an inset), only to finally get ‘marks’ back from the editor at 5.30 ("more about you, more colour, more anecdote"), when the playmates had all gone and the family needed feeding and we were about to set off fireworks in the back garden because it was bonfire night.

But running up and downstairs between the kitchen and office, chopping onions, putting the oil to heat, running back up again and writing another paragraph, running back down and throwing the onions on and running back up to write, before running back down and adding garlic and ginger and chilli, (it was a chickpea curry by the way, not that we’re vegetarian you understand, it's just that I’d spent a lot of money on meat at the weekend so thought I’d better economise and cook something healthy), anyway, it was really all rather enlivening, fun even, taking multi-tasking to the limit.

What was annoying was that despite all three sons being in the house, two of them an age now that I was when I helped my mother with dinner, sometimes even cooked it myself, not one of them helped me. Nothing. Zilch. Not a sausage. Or rather, not a chickpea. And I was calling out every five minutes…

“Can anyone chop these onions for me?”

Silence.

“Boys?”

Silence.

“Where are you all?”

Silence.

“I’m writing something in a hurry!”

Silence.

“Could someone turn the gas down on the hob? Hello! Are you in your bedrooms?”

More silence.

I was on too much on a roll to stop and go and search for them, and got rather engrossed in my work...

So when husband arrived home, just before seven, expecting his delicious home-cooked supper to be sitting on the table for him as per usual, he marched straight into a smouldering Mary Celeste of a kitchen.

“What the!” I heard him shouting from below as I was mid-sentence, writing: “…so when I called wrap on a shoot in south London sixteen years ago, I had no idea that…”

“Oh my God!” Husband again.

Concentrate, Elizabeth, concentrate, blot it out: “...no idea that I would never…”

“What the hell is going on here?"

"...that I would never..."

"Where’s Mummy!"

"...work as a children's TV director again because..."

"This dinner is burning dry!"

“You’re bloody lucky to get any dinner!” I shouted back, abandoning the sentence mid-flow. “I have to work! You can cook it yourself! The lot of you!”

Which is, perhaps, not a very wonderful homecoming and just goes to show that I don’t do it after all. So this blog is not a lie. 

Phew.

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