The Harridan

So, you know that thing when you have five kids, and a dog, and you think vaguely that it would be quite nice to have another baby, and so you are a bit casual about contraception (i.e. coil removal) but you just don’t get pregnant and then you think it is because your eggs are old, and you are old, and so is your husband, all of us all Too Old, then you get quite used to the idea that the former fecund and youthful ripe-like-a-bursting-pomegranate juicy you is actually just a dried up floppy bag of stretch marks and ruined boobs, and then you find out you are pregnant? You know that feeling?

Just me, then.

Apparently, there will be a sixth kid born to this elderly and overrun family on April Fool’s Day. Surprise! It turns out that human biology still works like it is supposed to, even if it is a little sluggish and tricksy. And I am a bit worried, and a bit embarrassed. It’s all a bit noticeable now; cocktail consumption shrunk to nil, jeans won’t fit, gut protrudes, and everything smells so, so bad. The worst things are:

bacon

burnt toast

clean laundry

cigarettes

pillowcases

perfume

people

onions

And food is no longer my friend. I get hungry all the time, and desperate, eating-in-the-middle-of-the-street desperate, shopping bags cast asunder, baguette ripped open, butter  opened and spread all over it by my fingers, ham slapped in the middle, sinking into the bread like a starving dog. Then immediately I feel like my insides will burst from the pressure. My stomach is repulsed by the food-intrusion and the metallic taste takes over and I make ugly faces from the biliousness of it all. Burping. Eyes closing at 7pm. Cranky and weeping. No vomiting though, just a feeling of perpetual hungoverness. And shame; because

1. I have enough children already.
2. The planet! The PLANET! I’m taking too many resources and using too much water and emitting too much gas!
3. The other children will have less of us to go around and they will feel neglected and will have to spend many years in therapy.
4. Mark. Poor man. He should be retiring on a boat somewhere or something.
5. My career. My poor, poor career. The one that hasn’t started yet.
6. Where will we all fit? Can six children sleep in triple bunks in one room? How traumatising for them. We will have to move back to New Zealand so they can have more room to grow and run. So what if we will be in the car all the time.
7. People think we have so many of them for cultish religious reasons, and that’s embarrassing.

The jokes shame me too. The one about not having a TV, and the one about Mark not knowing how it happens yet. The football team thing. The jokes about vasectomies. The way that people tell us that if it is a girl, it will be worth it – meaning, probably, that if it is another boy we should bury it in the back garden. The concerned, kind faces from people who are worried for my mental health. The terrible domestic workload that another baby will present. The dog – how the dog should probably go, because we will all crack under the pressure that taking the dog out for a daily stroll will take on us. And the little hints that, well, it is early days, and the pregnancy mightn’t be viable, anyway.

So, it’s pretty much agreed FROM THE WORLD THUS FAR that this is bad news, and an all-round Bad Idea.

List Of My Other Bad Ideas

1. My mullet haircut at age nine, though I think I can put some responsibility onto the walk-in, no-appointment necessary cheap hairdressers in Whangarei that I was taken to for the fateful cut. Puberty kicked in almost immediately, the short bits became massive curly side-wings, like Princess Diana’s hair when it was at its most bouffant, though with long silken strands hanging down my back. Almost impossible to grow out. Such a bad idea, that one.
2. My law degree. Should have volunteered at a radio station. Learnt how to tell stories and broadcast them to people. Law was only good for making me feel a bit out of my depth. And for sending me into debt.
3. Forgetting to get a proper job. Thinking that one would come to me because I was a bit awesome. This is a terrible idea. I should have chased one when I was young and unencumbered. Also should have been less arrogant.
4. Trying my hand at product development. Money = firepit.
5. Accepting that fishtank from Fiona.  The remaining brown tiny boring fish still hasn’t died. It’s like a wet cockroach who weathers inconsistent feeding, bangs to the tank, constant Pokemon on the telly. He should have been floating belly-up years ago.
6. Eyebrow plucking. They are wonky and weedy and sad-looking. I am destined to colour them in for the rest of my life.
7. Dressing in secretary suits when I was 14. Mum and dad showed us home videos from the 1990’s when I had luxurious afghan-hound lampshade-shaped hair and massive glasses and inexplicably, I was wearing a turquoise linen skirt suit. I also remember a banana-yellow one, a brown one, and several suits in shades of green. I am sure everyone else was wearing flannel shirts and jeans in the manner of Kurt Cobain. I have no idea where the secretary dressing-up idea came from. Precocious eejit.

You see? Full of bad ideas. And the mean neighbour had a shouty fight with me about my appalling children and my terrible parenting and so we called the police. She was very cross because, over the summer holidays, the kids were variously:

1. playing with a ball outside out flat
2. playing on the stairs outside our flat, opening up one of those fake fossil things where you dig and smash it to get it open
3. playing a game where an old nike shoe was tied to a string, and they lowered it up and down over the stairs outside our flat like they were fishing
4. playing the our communal garden and running around.

These things, she said, have driven her over the edge and it is my fault because I am extremely bad at controlling them. And during this shouty, dramatic, upsetting street-fight,  I’m was thinking OH MAN JUST WAIT TIL YOU SEE THAT I’M GOING TO HAVE ANOTHER UNCONTROLLABLE KID – PROBABLY A BOY. She’s totally going to go postal and throw rocks or something.

Anyway, in the meantime, this uncontrollable kid turned three:

And my hair went right:

It’s the little things, eh.

So, what’s it like to live in London while the political, economic and cultural system implodes around you, I hear you ask? It is utterly draining and sad, is what it is. All the big stuff with Westminster and sick-looking Boris and weepy-eyed Samantha Cameron, all the horrified posts and the rabble of the media conversation, to the littler things like the Spanish mother at our kid’s school, turning up post-Brexit-day, hugging the tiny French TA, crying together, the Polish caretaker looking on, shocked and worried, the powerlessness that so many Londoners feel as all of the worst warnings from smart people are proved true, while the leaders all freak out and drop out – argh, it is really awful and sad and horrible. The same Spanish mother told me yesterday that she was hassled by someone in a restaurant yesterday, who told her that her time was running out – that she has two years left to live here and then she had better go back to where she came from…so ugly.

I’m obviously an immigrant here, though a privileged one as part of the Commonwealth, so I am currently safe – from what, I don’t really know – probably safe to stay here, and safe from awful ‘we don’t want your type here’ racism, because I am white, from New Zealand (‘just like England in the 1950s’ so the black cabbies like to tell you) and therefore from recognisable UK mongrel stock so I don’t seem to threaten anyone or their jobs. I don’t know what it would feel like to be born here, like my Polish/Sri Lankan friend, and have a half-Polish daughter, and suddenly feel aware, like never before, that she and her kid aren’t really welcome here like they thought they were before last Thursday – before half of the country voted to end of the right for people like her to be here. And what a poorer, sadder, insular, backward place we would be if we cut off European supply. The people and the accents and the food and the culture and the way that people who are not like you, being among you, turns you into a smarter, more tolerant, educated, better person. What a stupid ugly backward step to have taken.

It is hard to feel untouched by this, so I have to post some photos to think about something else.

Here is Ned and then Ned and Casper doing some stuff with sticks in a medieval hunting forest:

And, you know, convening some sort of den-related forest meeting:

Mid-term break day at the zoo. Noah has just discovered there is butter on the ham roll. He is TOTES not having any of it:

Two of the boys getting a Kray twins haircut from the proper Cypriot barber and his son:

Chocolate and churros after from the Spanish cafe:

My hair triumph – Ms Neradah taught me the ways of the Alpine plait:

Marylebone Summer Fair – a journey of food and balloons and real estate-branded goody bags, both free and really not-free (£60 later):

The youngest in tiny terry towelling running shorts with a rainbow elasticated waist band and spiderman JANDALS:

These Frame jeans, one half of the Selfridges sale haul – the other, a Stella McCartney tight denim jumpsuit with flares and a zip to the crotch – a saving of £800 and absolutely clothes to wear *everyday*, I thank you:

Same 70s jogging outfit, really great breakfast at the Riding House Cafe. Otis only ate about three mouthfuls of those pancakes and sugary clotted cream – so I helped him. Total blood sugar level chaos, but very, very good:

This Sunday, a walk through the park with the dog and six kids to see the new Serpentine Pavillion:

There is much to love about living here, and I am thankful every day for those things. I really hope we can get back from this tattered, wounded, angry place we woke up to on Friday, but I can’t see how.

So, remember how I went to Claire’s Accessories a few weeks ago, all rebellious and edgy-like, and how I let the cool bored teenager wielding a piercing gun do this to my upper ear:

-who then, after taking payment, only let me go once I had filled out the disclaimer and had a long talk about the importance of after-piercing ear care and who then thrust a huge bottle of disinfectant at me to take away?  And then I went back to see Mark at the Apple store, not exactly hiding my shining new earring, but not showing it off either, and it was then that I made up my mind to prolong the joy of keeping a secret by saying nothing about it; instead, that I would run some kind of covet unscientific love-test see how long it would take for anyone in my family to notice.

And here we are, over two weeks later, and no one has shown any awareness of my new piercing, or, in fact, even looked up to meet the area of my eyes and ear region, otherwise known as approximately my FACE. Even when they sit on my left hand side and I pull my hair up into a high bun and talk with my head facing resolutely forward does the message get through that YOUR MOTHER DID SOME HARDCORE BODY MODIFICATION. Not even when I stopped and stooped down to show the boys the psoriasis patches behind my ears – behind, in fact, the massive new 9carat gold butterfly clip and stud and stem sitting like a huge metal ANOMALY ATOP MY EAR RAVINES. Not even when we all clean our teeth together and I am busy swishing my bruised upper ear with my babyish disinfectant, branded “CLAIRE’S EAR PIERCING AFTERCARE SOLUTION”, does anyone clock the new punk mother they have in their midst.

Not one person out of six can see it, because apparently I am not a new punk mother, but just the same old invisible nagging chef who moonlights as a table wiper-downer and tends to spend a quite a bit of time picking up crisp packets from under the couch. I am all this, as well as school dropper-offer and wee-monitor but not visible in any other sense. This sucks, but this unintentional past-her-prime-and-therefore-so-boring-no-one-can-possibly-engage-in-any-meaningful-manner camouflage situation  could be useful should I take to a life of crime. Imagine the whiteware I could just carry out of Iceland! The electronic stuff from Currys!

I have spotted Mark looking fairly intently in my ear direction a few times, and I suspect he cannot workout whether I have been pierced like that for years, and we have perhaps already had that discussion about his disappointment in my choices, or whether it is…maybe…new….but, I think his internal narrative goes a bit like this:

It can’t be new because she never does things like that except for that time she pierced her navel when she was 18 but that got infected and now you cannot even see the scars among the stretch marks and she’s much older now and she’s a mother and where are my keys/glasses/dog lead/I need petrol/I must call Kevin about that roof/should I play golf tomorrow/what’s for dinner/I wish I was in New Zealand/I want to kill a pig.

And so his sharply questioning eyeballs leave my ear region into a wistful middle-distance stare and then he goes and gets a New Zealand hunting magazine and sits on the loo for a bit.

So I am feeling a bit wounded. I keep thinking that today is the day I march out into the living room and and stand in front of the TV and turn off that show about the last Alaskans  and clap my hands and lift my hair and MAKE them notice and perhaps shame them a little, all the while delighting them with my uncharacteristic  bravado and my utter post-1990’s ironic take on grunge stylishness. But, frankly, they don’t deserve it.

Also, to make matters worse, I have discovered a few tiny, white, thick little hairs sprouting out of my face in a random manner all over the cheek and jowls. Is this normal? Is this what happens when you are not young anymore? Do I pull these out or leave them to grow unheeded and then perhaps plait them out of my way when I eat messy things? Are they WHISKERS? Any advice appreciated.