Time and tide wait for no man

Children have a way of cutting you down to size. There was the time Youngest said, “Mummy! Your boobs look really droopy when you do that!” as I lent out over the bath to wash his hair. Or when Middle One told me how much he loved his “beautiful” nursery teacher, Elaine, and I stupidly asked, “so do you think Mummy is beautiful too?” “Of course not.” He replied.

So I wasn’t particularly surprised when Eldest pondered out loud at the dinner table one evening last week that he had absolutely no idea what I was going do with myself once Youngest left primary school. “Quite soon you’re going to have no life at all, Mummy,” he said, hitting that particular nail on the head with a crash. Thank you darling. The thought had occurred.

At the moment the primary school is punctuation in my otherwise free-form life. It provides a start and end to my working day; my closest coterie of friends from its seemingly endless stream of lively, intelligent mummies (and daddies) and a rolling itinerary of events, from more prosaic Friday morning assemblies and afternoon teas, to glamorous Friday and Saturday night discos, parties and quizzes, the most memorable of which was the PTA Stars in Their Eyes evening, one of the best nights out I’ve ever had. (Which isn't saying much but should in no way detract from how good it was).

Indeed, as Eldest made his remark I was just sallying out of the house to the Christmas shopping evening and, as a Class Rep, I’m currently selling tickets for the forthcoming comedy night (hosted by local celebrity Arthur Smith, don't you know).

So, although it may be a bit soon to start panicking, (Youngest still has the best part of three years to run) Eldest is right, of course: I am aware that a deadline of sorts is looming even if it is still a little way off. Perhaps deadline is the wrong word...watershed? I was even more aware of it after I went to see Clocks, a film that was showing continuously until recently (it’s just finished) at the Glass Cube Gallery off Piccadilly.

Clocks is a film lasting 24 hours consisting a series of very cleverly cut clips from hundreds of movies that happen to reference time, either visually or verbally, running exactly to real time itself so that it too is a clock, of sorts. It’s very, very clever, I might even say, brilliant. Not only are the clips wonderfully edited to make a beautiful whole: a piece of moving art, but the continuous, minute by minute reference to time and the passing of time with endless clocks and watches and alarms, creates a sort of profound shared experience. It's a commentary on the transient nature of life (no less!) and its meaning seemed to build as it went on.

When I saw it, it was lunchtime so, inevitably, there were hundreds of clips involving lunch and eating. Among many other things, it made me think about how much time is spent preparing and eating food, especially a mother’s time.

Paradoxically, I didn’t have much time to stay and watch it because I needed to eat and get back to school to collect Youngest at 3.15. I hope to be able to see more of it again one day. Perhaps when Youngest leaves primary school and I have more time on my hands.

P.S. It's not an accident that lots of words are in bold. Did you get it? Husband didn't.

Gouging out her kidney with a spoon.

“She would happily gouge out her own kidney with a spoon if I needed it,” said a friend of mine in the playground. She was talking about her mother. I know how she feels. A mother’s love knows no bounds, is at times almost overwhelming and this week, more than most, I’ve had reason to reflect upon it.

Remembrance day was spent on a Year 4 school trip to the Imperial War Museum where we stopped in still and silent contemplation at eleven o’clock to hear a lone bugler play. Gently, I tucked my arm around Youngest as he sat next to me on the bench feeling his fragile little frame leaning against me. The very thought of war, its pity and its pain, causing harm to one of my own sons…

I will always remember reading Birdsong in the days immediately after Middle One was born, twelve years ago this week. We were still living almost entirely in the bedroom, cocooned away together from the world in those precious first few days. I would breastfeed and read at the same time: milk flowing out as the words flowed in.

I fed him for hours on end to ensure that bond between us - or so I hoped - and as I did so, I read and read. That particular book broke my heart: all those young men, boys still many of them, wrenched away from their own mothers, dying, muddy and alone, in agony. In the heightened emotional state of new motherhood I gripped my boy baby to me with tears of rage and fear: no one would ever hurt my child, not this one, not any of them. But of course, from time to time, little things do hurt them, at least emotionally, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

There is no world war (thank God) and nothing vaguely approaching the scale of a war for us, but the sad truth is that no mother can protect her child from little pains in life, what Shakespeare memorably calls the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.’ These will always find their mark and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Eldest, miserable at school because he’s separated from his friends by the new GCSE timetabling; Middle One anxious about yet another test; Youngest upset because he’s demoted back down to the bottom swimming group at school and, “all the girls laugh at me.” I haven’t the power to avert these petty struggles and injustices, little things that will inevitably allay them from time to time but will quickly heal. Still, they loom large in a mother’s mind at four o’clock in the morning when she lies awake staring at the ceiling.

Someone once told me that a mother is only ever as happy as her least happy child. It’s so true.

Banana bread

Eldest loves banana bread but he doesn’t like bananas. Youngest and Middle one don’t like either. Eldest loves risotto. Youngest and Middle one can’t stand risotto. Eldest and Youngest love sausages. Middle One says he hates sausages but he used to love them. Eldest doesn’t like pasta but he will eat lasagna. They all despise baked beans and neither Youngest nor Middle One will eat lamb anymore because ‘it’s cruel to eat a baby animal’. You get the picture. Mealtimes can be a fraught affair to say the least and thinking of something interesting and nutritious they will all enjoy isn’t easy.

“Not this again!” Are words every mother dreads as the little darlings approach the dinner table, especially when you’ve slaved over a hot stove for an hour and a half while they watched the Simpsons, or bickered, or played on the X Box, and they seem be uttered more frequent nowadays than they used to be. But I stick to my guns. We all eat together at about 6.30 or 7 when husband gets home (unless they have a friend over for tea) and we eat the same thing, in theory. Sometimes, I think the easiest thing would be to have a roast dinner every night because at least they all love that (as long as it’s not lamb).

But perhaps I should take heart because I recall a hovering and anxious mother informing me, as she dropped her child at our house for tea, that her son would only eat ‘breaded products’. It took me a while to cotton on: she meant fish fingers, or chicken nuggets, both with chips, and nothing else. And I remember another child informing me, as I served him fish pie with peas, “I don’t eat peas, man.” I don’t know what was more annoying, the fact that he refused his peas or calling me “man.” (Actually, I do.) Then there was the child who burst into tears every time I accidentally gave him juice instead of water, even when he'd reached Year 6. All of which just goes to show that however annoying ones own children are at the dinner table it’s never as annoying as other people’s.

The other great advantage of feeding the children the same meal as us is that it saves on the cooking and the eating, otherwise there’s always the danger that I might find myself eating twice: fish fingers are just so hard to resist aren’t they? A friend of mine once put her children’s delicious leftovers in the dog's bowl to stop herself from eating them, again. But then, ten minutes later and after a large glass of wine, she took them out and ate them anyway.

Sniffing pants and other nasties.

As every mother knows there’s only one way to tell if a pair of pants left lying on the floor is clean or not. If you’re lucky it’s simply a discarded fresh pair and your deep inhalation will be met by nothing more innocuous than the pleasant odour of washing powder. But if you’re not, your speedy and involuntary recoil will soon tell you because there’s nothing quite so nasty as the sharp whiff of stale urine on cloth.

What else? Wiping thick snot from a toddler’s nose when you haven’t got a tissue. I used to recoil in horror when husband did this with deft use of thumb and forefinger - quite what happened to the ‘issue’ after that I wouldn’t like to say. By comparison, washing a child’s grubby face in the school line-up with only hands and warm spit, which I do, often, seems decorous. And then there’s poo.

Mothers become very familiar with poo. Nappy poo, fresh poo, old poo, runny poo, hard poo, stuck poo, other children’s poo, poo in pants, on floors, up walls and in beds. I’ve dealt with poo of every conceivable type and hue and here is what I’ve learnt: wooden floorboards with gaps in between and potty-shy toddlers doesn’t mix, ditto carpets and toddlers, ditto diarrhoea and carpets and sheets and toddlers.

I once left Eldest crawling on the floor without a nappy because I thought the fresh air on his little baby backside would do him good. Unfortunately Top of The Pops was on the telly (obviously this is going back a few years, because a) the programme was still broadcast and b) I was interested), and I momentarily took my eye off the ball to watch it, so to speak. When I looked back my baby was swimming in a sea of his own effluence.

I scooped him up, holding him as far from my body as possible and ran to the bathroom but didn’t manage to get there before he tightly grabbed my shoulder length hair with both his tiny poo-encrusted hands - and laughed in my face.

And Middle One once stood up on his chair and peed onto his dinner. This was in a restaurant in Portugal and he was about two. The strange thing was that at exactly the same time a wasp stung husband on his finger and I tipped over a glass of coke: a disaster triple whammy. This was on the same holiday that I had decided to try and talk husband into having a third child…as I recall he actually withheld his services for a few days after that.

But the piece de resistance, number two-wise, is something that recently happened to my dear friend and neighbour. Her toddler went through that charming ‘I’ll just leave her a little present somewhere in the house’ phase, like a cat with a dead offering. Her nose led her to it, of course, and as she opened the bedroom door he had left ‘it’ behind she inadvertently made a spectacular curve of excrement across the carpet, like the wing of a snow angel only made of poo. By comparison sniffing the odd pair of pants really doesn't seem so bad…

Salt water taffy.

“We want to make salt water taffy,” says Eldest.

“What’s that?” I say.

“You know, it’s like toffee. You boil it in a pan.” He says.

I know this is a bad idea and I want to say no but I can’t think of a reason.

“Okay. But only if you don’t make a mess. At all. Anywhere. And you clear everything up and put everything away exactly where you found it.” I say. Generously.

I’m grumpy because I’ve hurt my back. I don’t know how I did it; it could have been playing tennis last week. (I say playing but I can’t really play, I worry that the tennis coach will be cross with me so I anxiously grip the racket and this hurts my arm.)

Or, I could have done it carrying heavy bags back from Sainsbury’s last week when I was trying to be Green. I had to collect Youngest from school on the way and he claimed to be too exhausted to carry his own bag and trumpet, so I carried everything including his jacket and my own jacket because it was hot, (remember that?) and it was a long way.

Or, it could have been from sitting in the theatre watching Les Miserables at the Barbican last week, in the upper circle, in very upright seats, for three hours.

Or, it could have been from carrying the ludicrously heavy vacuum cleaner up three flights of stairs to Hoover-up the sick in Eldest’s room (see last blog).

Or, it could have been from the dinner party on Saturday night when I spent the evening craning my neck to talk to the people on either side.

Or, from holding the phone under my chin for a very long time while doing the house work and waiting to talk to BT about the broadband, or rather, the lack of it. (Nine days without.)

Or, it might have been from typing because I’m working on an article, and I’ve recently written 13,000 words for something else.

I don’t know. All I know is that my back hurts. Or it might be my neck, or my shoulder, or, my back and neck and shoulder; I’m not sure. I’m only sure that there’s pain and I can’t move my head properly and it’s preventing me from getting a good night’s sleep.

So, it was particularly unfortunate that I had to bend down and stick my head into a low, narrow kitchen cupboard for ages because of a mysterious, reoccurring slick on the floor: a slick that arrived at almost exactly the same time as the salt water taffy-making episode. (Which was a disaster by the way. It was black and solid and inedible.)

And sure enough there’s a large tin of golden syrup on its side without the lid on properly, the trail from which resembles a long, sticky, amber-coloured BP disaster. Every time I think I’ve got it, I find more of the stuff oozing from some new crevice. When I finally finish I have golden syrup in my hair and my back is hurting. A lot. Or is it my neck?

If I had a job I'd have been sacked by now.

It’s the middle of the night and we can hear vomiting noises coming from one of the boys’ bedrooms. Lovely. It’s still only September and they’ve started being ill again. If I had a job I’d have been sacked by now for taking too many days off. I mean a real job, not this larking around on a keyboard with mothering and domestic duties thrown in.

We have to get up to tend to Eldest. I say we, but I only go the first time, I don’t hear the other two occasions - honest - so husband deals with it. It's all a bit nasty when I realise the sick hasn't been washed out of the cream carpet three days later.

Eldest has two days off to recover. Of course there’s no way husband can help with that because he earns the money. And then Youngest fell ill. Ditto. When I went to get him in the morning he looked exceptionally tired, (he always looks tired) had a rasping cough and what sounded like a wheeze, so it was a tricky call: to school, or not to school. Always hard and I’ve got it wrong, both ways, often. Either they’re bouncing off the walls by lunchtime or I get rang up by some horrified teacher. Or, the child comes home ashen because nobody noticed and then has to have double time off to recover.

What would a working mum do? Take him to school probably, because she has to. I often wonder if our three really are ill more than everybody else’s children, as they seem to be, or whether it’s because I’m at home and indulge every ailment. Obviously, I don’t actually want my children at home with me messing up my plans; it’s just so hard to tell, with Youngest in particular. He screams in agony if there’s a stone in his shoe.

On this occasion I decide to take him back to school at lunchtime after the Doctor said it was just a cough. It was either that or he was coming with me for my haircut. Thankfully, he chose school.

It’s a funny thing having a child off ill when you don’t have a job to go to. On the one hand, it doesn’t really matter, as I say, no one’s going to sack me and I’m at home anyway. So far there’ve only been a couple of days when I’ve really had to work and at a push I can get on with writing with a child around, even with more than one child. On one occasion I put a mattress next to me on the office floor, for Youngest, and typed as he intermittently vomited into a bucket. On another, I wrote 500 words for a column in The Times, for a five o’clock same-day deadline, with one child in bed and the other two back from school with a friend apiece: five boys. I was proud of that.

But even without a deadline I do have my own life, of sorts, and having a child suddenly at home seriously hampers it. Day one is usually okay because, as long as it’s the right child, it means I don’t have to get up to go to school. I might slob about in my dressing gown all morning, make a large cafetiere of hot coffee and slope back to bed with a mug of it to read the papers leaving said child slumped in front of the telly. It also heralds a welcome chance to get on top of the washing, tick a few phone calls off the list and tackle something from the admin-pile. So, one day with a child off school can be a welcome reprieve, two days is another matter.

By then I want to go out in the fresh air again and do some exercise and I want to meet my mum friends for coffee (that might be the wrong way around). I may also want to nip out to get my hair/nails/face done, or jump in the car and run an errand. I do not want to make endless rounds of toast, or crackers and cheese, or pasta/pizza lunches (the menu depends upon how ill they are). Nor do I want to fetch dozens of cups of juice/water/flat coke, administer spoonfuls of Calpol, nor - and this is something I especially do not want to do - play schools upstairs with Youngest in his bedroom.

This is one of the many paradoxes when you are a stay-at-home mum: on the one hand it’s handy to be around for them when they’re ill, and on the other hand, it isn’t.

Mount Washmore

I’m drowning in washing: Mount Washmore a friend of mine calls it. Foolishly, I thought the end of the holidays, with all the to-ing and fro-ing (Yorkshire, Spain, and camping in Dorset), would mean an end to piles of washing, but of course it doesn’t, it merely signals an end to shorts and t-shirt washing and the beginning of school uniform washing.

As I hang some of it out on the line I think about taking a series of photographs: here’s some of it blowing in the wind, here’s some in the washing machine, here’s some more in the dryer and here are two piles on the floor waiting to be put away, and, wait a minute, yet another pile waiting to be ironed. I’ll call it, ‘five ages of washing,’ my very own Klimt. No wonder I never get on with my book.

I heard a marvellous story about Mel Gibson’s mother, of all people, who had a brood of eleven. As her husband worked in his study one afternoon, she slowly and calmly took every item of soiled clothing out into the garden, in front of his window, made an enormous pile on the lawn, poured petrol on it, lit it with a match and stood back to admire the pyre as her horrified family looked on. Hats off to the woman.

Of course now I have even more uniform to wash than before because Middle One has joined his big brother at secondary school. There are five white shirts and three pairs of black trousers drying on the line, and that’s not all of it.

It was sad to see all that sun-kissed summer skin disappearing beneath itchy white shirts and unforgiving collars. I looked on, on the first morning, as both Eldest and Middle One trussed themselves up and weighed themselves down in regulation ties and blazers topped off with ridiculously oversized rucksacks. It was the first time Middle One had ever worn a tie and he struggled a bit. “Try putting your collar up and folding it down afterwards.” I suggested, as I watched the tie going on over the collar with the seam showing. But he wasn’t going to listen to me. What do I, his mere mother, know about ties! And he’s got a point.

So I just watched, and thought about how lovely it had been to see the three of them revive during the holidays after all that end-of-term madness; hair began to shimmer with streaks of blonde, bodies slowly basted in the warmth, cheeks plumped a bit from all the holiday ice cream and chips (not just ice cream and chips, you understand). And how depressing to come home and have to start dashing around replacing out-grown items of uniform and school shoes they could no longer stuff their feet into.

On the plus side, there had been a very pleasant trip to Westfield with Eldest and Youngest a few days before the new term began. Middle One was out of the way, invited, for the whole day, on an educational trip with his ex-tutor (perhaps there really is a God) and his uniform has been sorted so I thought shopping with two might be manageable, and so it proved. In fact, it was a joy because Eldest has a very similar shopping style to my own, that is: see it, like it, buy it.

Something of a contrast to girls the same age, many of whom we saw at Westfield dragging exasperated mothers from shop to shop. Outside Office there was a stand off: daughter, looking up at the glass ceiling (no pun intended), hands on hips, her poor mother, both her hands jammed into her own hair, exclaiming, “For God’s sake, Sophie/Ella/Maddy!” (I can’t remember which.) “Does it really matter, you just need some practical school shoes, like the ones we bought last year!”

For once I felt just a little bit smug to have boys. Youngest was looking cute and obedient holding my hand as he chatted to himself (in character as a tortoise) as Eldest remarked, reasonably, that he wasn’t bothered what he got for school. We bought a pair of school shoes and some trainers in under an hour. I was so grateful that I treated them and we had a lovely time grabbing yummy things to eat off the conveyor belt at Yo! Suchi.

Youngest doesn’t have to wear a uniform at his primary school, so it was ironic that on Monday morning, his first day back, he spent ages looking for something in his wardrobe that would resemble his brothers’ “suits” as he calls them. He found a monogrammed white P.E. top and a blue jacket and insisted on wearing the same ensemble all week - which considerably cut down on my washing.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/life/families/article2665702.ece