The Harridan

So, I’m lying on the couch, the poor, fake leather couch which is spilling its foamy guts all over the living room floor, bits of yellowy sponge occasionally ripping off and reminding me of old folk’s homes’ ancient uriney interiors, ripped open because it is a) cheap vinyl, and b) the children jump on it every single day, even though we shout

US: “Barnaby/Noah/Casper/Ned/Otis STOP JUMPING ON THAT POOR BROKEN COUCH WHICH ISN’T EVEN OURS BECAUSE (OBVIOUSLY) WE HAVE MORE TASTE AND WOULD HAVE BOUGHT ONE FROM THAT SHOP CALLED ‘MADE’ OR ‘LOAF’ OR EVEN SOME CLEVER EBAY REUPHOLSTERED NUMBER”

and they keep jumping, we repeat, they jump again, Mark says something like

“If I have to get up from my chair, then, well, you are probably gonna GET IT BAD”

and then they say

“We aren’t JUMPING, we are SHIMMYING” and they carry on, satisfied that they have won the little showdown through their sheer mastery of unexpected synonyms. Anyway, I was lying down on the couch, hoping not to breathe in too near the foam, because of the likely urine/toxic fumes/etc, and my eyes start to close and I think about this excellent article I read on the interwebs a few weeks ago about how to do parenting when you are lying down, with your eyes closed. And so I asked them to brush my hair, and to be doctors and to examine me for an irregular pulse, and then, the very best thing – to write on my back their full names, dates of birth, three secrets about how they were feeling on the inside, as well as dinner requests. And it was a total EPIPHANY because I realised I could get a bit snoozy, while showing my interest in both how their handwriting was coming along, get some fresh ideas for their tea, AS WELL AS TAKING THEIR EMOTIONAL TEMPERATURE by engaging with their innermost feelings!

So I thought it was worth passing along. The technique isn’t perfect, because their spelling is patchy, and Ned got his small, hard plastic Hulk to give me a ‘punching massage’ instead, and then they all asked for money afterwards because they felt ‘exploited’ and ‘misled’ once they worked out the whole thing was more about me than them. But whatevs, kids. Welcome to the rest of your life.

Anyway, thanks for all of the lovely thoughts and sensible words of advice after I told the world the terrible truth about our marital impasse in my last post. It has thawed a bit, mostly because it was getting boring and lonely, so now we are just not talking about it. Mark is going to go to New Zealand for a few weeks to hopefully get it out of his system, to arrive and be crestfallen at the rain and mosquitos and the poverty and the terrible TV and literally FALL OVER at the price of ground almonds and imported cheese, spluttering at the house prices and the corrupt government and the people who don’t wear shoes in the supermarket. Or, he will get so excited and find a job and fall in love and will start the process of changing our lives in a big scary way, and hopefully I will cope and not get all passive-aggressive and resentful, carrying around a bitter poisonous stone in my heart which may blossom into a depression or general discontent for years afterwards, turning me hagged and mean-looking well before my time. I’ll keep you all posted, obviously, because there are no secrets with me, and I can only deal with enormous profound issues by telling everyone I meet all about them in detail.

And look! We had a kid turn 11 today, which involved this cake encased in hardened chocolate poured over rapidly deteriorating unseasonal fruits. Cutting into the cake was like cracking into an easter egg, with the soft, oozing, rancid fruits reminding me that sometimes, looks aren’t everything. Yes, it looks too fabulous. But it had a rotting core. A BIT LIKE ME.

And here he is, birthday child liking the cake for its simple cakeness, not knowing that I would manage to turn the cake into a dramatic, tragic, and overblown personal metaphor, sounding a little bit vain in the process and making it all about myself AGAIN:

But, you know, I’m a little like that. And this is what he was like when he was three, all soft and curly and uncomplicated:

Argh. I hate how the kids get older, though the alternative is an early death, so I’d best be thankful and learn to like them as they are and not mourn for those early years of scrappy tiredness and desperate toddler manhandling. It all seems like it was so much fun though, which I think might well be the ageing and desperate biological workings of my inner womanly core, screaming for one last baby. *I hear you, screaming desperate womanly core. I’ll do my best!* 

So, back to London on a Wednesday night. Celia waited in line on an unspecified Monday morning for an hour with very enthusiastic pensioners for extremely cheap £10 tickets to see Dominic West and Janet McTeer in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, where we got front row seats, close enough so that I had to swerve out of the way when McNulty did a sword fight with another guy, and I could see the veins on Janet McTeer’s gorgeous uplifted bosoms. £10 and a fifteen minute tube ride. And you all wonder what keeps me here? And beforehand we ate at Peter Gordon’s Kopapa and we had these:

Tamarillo cocktails.  So, yep. And Peter Gordon was there, and then we got coffee from Monmouth, and swanned around Seven Dials and both of us said that living here was the best place to live, even better than Toronto and Milan. And both of us have to leave here, sooner or later, and it really bites.

More Reasons To Be A Happy Londoner 

Westminster Council do a whole lot of subsidised programmes for the intercity unruly youth, which my boys are, and they get to go boxing at this very old school boxing gym JUST LIKE ROCKY BALBOA DID IN PHILLY, and it only costs £3 and you drop them off for an hour and a half:

So that’s our new thing on a Saturday, while Mark, Otis, Magic and I go wandering along the canal, being all very urban:

And here are Magic’s lips, too perfectly labial and furry not to include here:

There is no neat conclusion here. So I urge you all to find ways to get massages for free, ideally from enthusiastic supple little fingers, and to make cakes and eat unseasonal fruit before it rots and to kiss dog mouths and drink tamarillo cocktails and get your kids boxing like Rocky and go see a play. And find (and share) parenting hacks, because they are awesome.

Happy New Year. So far, it is a bit of a Miserable New Year, despite a party and a wedding anniversary and the children leaving the flat for hours every day to learn stuff for free and get fed massive English midday post-war dinners with an array of puddings all cooked and served and cleaned up by other people, and despite the Selfridges sale which actually netted me my Best Sale Purchase EVAH. You would think we would be high-fiving each other and celebrating with modest amounts of wine in the evening and booking holidays and basking in the love and warmth and familial chaotic overload of dark cosy January with a grateful face and a rosy glow, lit by a Netflix screen and comforted by a big fat dirty dog. But no. It’s all silences and hissed one word responses and enormous gulfs in the bed. It’s not this:

(But that, to be fair, was a long time ago – 18 years actually, and we were thin and young with more hair and less arm circumference.)

So at my place right now, it’s war.

And that is because we have reached one of those relationship impasses, where we both think a very different thing about something big. One of us wants to leave and return home to New Zealand, like, NOW, and one of us definitely does not, certainly not now and maybe not ever, and we have to figure out what to do about this enormous, fundamentally different point of view. I think we need a spreadsheet and a therapist to work it out. Mark thinks we just need tickets and a shipping container.

It makes me feel panicky and itchy and claustrophobic to think about going home, like the end of school camp where you think you will never be the same again, and while it would be good to sleep in your own bed and get your mum to do your washing, you will never again feel so free and independent and reimagined and grownup, and you won’t ever have this much fun ever again, and you will miss your friends and the camp so much you might die. You’ve gotten used to the compromises like cramped spaces and the cold, and you are in love with the adventure and you don’t want it to end. So, going home would feel a little like that, but with the extra add-ons of no jobs, no money, no place to live, no sensible plans, no idea about schools, with an orange dog in quarantine and five children who are skinny and white and who are completely English with no rugby skills AT ALL.

Mark says (shouts) he is done here, DONE, I TELL YA! He says he misses family and friends and fishing and he wants a house and a garden and he is sick of work and the dark and the difficulty of it all. Then I get psychosomatic nut-allergy symptoms and have to leave the room, to mutter mean things under my breath and to try to remember to breathe. OH, it’s all too late for me now, but there was a time I would have been happy going back, when I didn’t know there was more out there, when I would have been satisfied with doing up a house and going to the beach a lot, when I would have been ok with never getting on a plane, except for the occasional trip to Melbourne to see some musical theatre. The end of how we live and what we do and the fun we have with the people we do stuff with and the things we have yet to see and the restaurants we haven’t tried yet and the sales I haven’t exploited…it just kills me.

So. I have a big globus hystericus which lives in my throat, just like Cheryl Glickman’s in the new Miranda July novel, and it gets massive whenever Mark starts looking on TradeMe for another million-dollar villa to buy in Dannevirke, and whenever he suggests we buy a bed and breakfast to run. I cannot make my own bed and my floor looks like this:

I didn’t even set that filth up. That filth is always there because I don’t like to sweep because it keeps me from More Important Tasks. So I CANNOT RUN A B&B because they would shut me down for health and safety reasons. And I would be serving people tea in stained chipped teacups and I would be crying and they would want to complain about how I didn’t make their beds with convincing hospital corners but they wouldn’t feel like they could berate me because of my obvious emotional distress and so they would leave some sort of bad review on trip advisor and we would be RUINED! And my kids would get beaten up by the massive shoeless New Zealand kids because their ball and tackling skills would be so underdeveloped, and because they have prissy English accents. And maybe Otis would be ostracised because he thinks he is Queen Elsa:

There’s no good to come of this.

Here are my children in their grey London habitat, eating Saturday crepes at Portobello Market, right after they went to skateboarding lessons. Can you even get crepes in the southern hemisphere? Don’t answer that, because, yes, obvs. And admittedly, Ned looks really sad and cold in that photo, and Casper in the other one looks mightily pissed off, but often they are beaming with the London joy, like their mother does.

Here they are, in Kensington Gardens, climbing a massive tree, enjoying all that outdoor space, the kind of space you might imagine they would get a few minutes from their house in New Zealand, but actually wouldn’t, because it would be more likely to be a highway or a farmer’s paddock which wouldn’t be open to all the kids to just climb trees on, willy-nilly:

See? Practically Hobbiton, but a well-connected Hobbiton with Selfridges down the road and many tube stations to take you around to the free, culturally enriching things EVERYWHERE. On the Selfridges thing, I got a Stella McCartney leopard print wool coat from this season which was £1340, reduced to £150. Yes, nearly £1200 off. You don’t get THAT kind of thing in High Street, do you? DO YOU? NO, mo’fos, you don’t.

Anyway, my globus hystericus has appeared again with all this traumatic talk. I have to go make a convincing spreadsheet and possibly sweep a bit of that crap from under the table.

It’s been a very long Tuesday, in that twilight zone betwixt Christmas and New Year, where it seems everyone is possibly dead, inside their homes, in front of the TV, or they are on holiday somewhere sunny, but you, alas, are neither dead or on holiday, just eating ham and feeling thirsty all of the time, without any idea of the date.

Mark is inexplicably golfing, in that kind of way where last night, he says “Tomorrow, I’m going golfing” and you say “OH” and then he gets up out of bed in the morning, puts on one of his many Hawaiian shirts and takes off, leaving us all in a puff of exhaust fumes, all wishing we too were sporting unseasonal short sleeved comedy shirts on our way to do some golfing, instead of still here, with a dog to walk and vicious fighting to get bored by. And no one wants to walk the dog, even though they all asked for a new puppy for Christmas.

I’m like “Dudes, you don’t even bother to look after the dog we already have” and they are like “He’s NOT A PUPPY” and they slink off, to the TV, or the iPad, or one of the two new nintendo DS things that I so foolishly bought them for Christmas. There has been a tiny voice of caution and wisdom telling me not to bring nintendo DS things into the house, ever, because they would turn my children into future IT specialists, all pale and unwashed, dorky, with weak arms and maybe some small Dungeons and Dragons models to paint, with special lamps to paint with and general weakened eyesight from the lack of sunlight and bad diet of biscuits. But I weakened, from the sheer exhaustion of five years of pestering and hoping and wishing, and then I went onto CEX, the computer exchange store on Queensway which has a mediumly attractive IT specialist guy with a beard and a beanie but also a knowing little grin, and he said the boys would be fine as long as they went outside sometimes to walk the dog. Well. That’s all very easy to say when you are a CEX salesman who knows how to charm an old nintendo DS skeptic, with your youth and your  beard and your superior knowledge of what non-rugby-playing skinny kids actually like to do, without the terrible pressure of having to walk the dog everyday.

Anyway. I see the error of my ways, and I should have listened to that mean little inner voice who said they would be better off with another massive packet of Lego and a book.

We went to Devon again, because staying home over Christmas is just the same as staying here every day, but with more loneliness and more roasting of meats. So we figure we may as well stay in a cottage somewhere with a pool, do the same things but with an air of ‘holiday’ about them, and muck up someone else’s oven with spilt ham glazes and layers of fat. We had duck, ham, roast beef and lamb. Mark made an apple pie but the jam bits leaked through all over the bottom of the oven and he stuck butter all over the top of the pastry because he likes to do things his way, instead of listening to me. There was no good bread to be found in all of Devon and Cornwall, but the butter, cheese and bacon was ace. Here we are, doing some Christmas morning present diving:

And one of those terrible, terrible consoles:

Otis got a barrel of plastic dinosaurs, which were quite the hit:

And I bought myself Acne boots and Tom Ford lipstick on eBay and gave them to Mark to give me. It was win-win, really, and amazingly, the boots slipped over my massive feet with the extra side-bone like they were made for me. All that secondhandedness wore them in over the difficult parts:

Ned opening his Woody:

And here we are on the beach at Looe, getting a little bit cold and underwhelmed:

And us in the pubs, eating massive pies:

And a lovely night at Quo Vadis with the bookies, where I wore a massive ballgown and a jumper, just like Sharon Stone at the Oscars with her gap shirt. EXACTLY like that. Then I got hot, and took off my jumper, and displayed my furry armpits, which I have been cultivating since summer. Everyone was disappointed to see how wispy and scanty they were. I didn’t take a photo of them though, because I am not yet awesome enough to document my feminist armpit hair, so here is my ballgown instead, on my artful walk home:

Here is Ned at the school nativity play, wearing a red cape and bearing gifts of frankenseen (?). Just look at that annoyed little guy in the star headband:

Mark has come in from the golfing just now, had a shower, and put himself to bed. TO BED! My face looks just like the boy in the star headband right now.

Happy New Year, all of you who are still alive in front of the TV and to those of you warming yourselves in another hemisphere! I’m off to confiscate some screens.

Today is the kind of day where I feel a bit like crying, or a bit like whacking someone around the chops with a handbag. For no reason at all. Maybe something to do with demands on me, or lack of demands, where I feel both pulled in all directions and completely redundant at the same time. Hormones?  Probably hormones. But then that thought makes me sad too because one day soonish I shall dry up like a wizened shell without these pesky hormones, and give up on my mooncup and frequent, hopeful pregnancy tests and my face will become parched and dry like a biblical scroll. Or like unleavened bread. Even a dishcloth that has been drying on the radiator and is stiff and ripped in parts, and smells a bit like cat food. You know?

(On the mooncup thing, I need to tell you all that you should be wary of using it after you have been recklessly chopping up chillies without gloves on. Seriously, take care out there in the dangerous world of domesticity, where it is entirely plausible that silicon-meets-capsaicinoids-meets-your-lady-parts. Also don’t take your contact lenses straight out either. It gets me every time.)

So this boring funk I am in may have something to do with the fact that we are parents of a ten year old and things are getting out of hand. I can do babies no sweat, and toddlers are fine, if a little inconvenient at times, and kids make me annoyed in general but they aren’t that bad, but I have never dealt with an actual prepubescent and it is all suddenly a bit trickier and more serious. We went to see an alternative secondary school for our biggest kid a few weeks ago, and I saw parents who I recognised from baby groups when he was tiny, and we were all pacing the halls of Holland Park School nervously, overawed by it, and thinking about our kids fitting in there, and everyone was really just thinking about themselves going there and what it would feel like because we did all this ourselves not that long ago, and it was kind of horrible. (Not Holland Park School, which was so fabulous that I went a bit nuts for a few days after, telling everyone I met about it like boring overexcited parents tend to do. Apologies, anyone who came into contact with me had to go through the prospectus and were given a blow-by-blow account of my exciting open day visit. I won’t do that again.) Horrible because it signals the end of something and the beginning of the growing up and the growing away.

He has asked to walk home from school on his own, and he asked me this morning for a proper tie, not one of the elastic ones he has been using since he was four, and he has been popping out to Queensway for urgent supplies of tat from Tiger by himself, as well as having a little dog-walking job which generates a whole £2 a week. All good things, which I take to mean we have done an acceptable job of looking after him: the whole point of this parenting gig after all being that they start to diverge from you a bit, and stride out on their own, one block ahead of you and their straggling scrapping siblings, proper tie flapping in their small faces, with year six daily homework straining in their one-size-up school bags. But it all feels a bit heartbreaking. Even Otis has shunned the buggy in favour of his new second-hand micro-scooter, and refuses to sit in his high chair anymore, preferring instead to tip his weetabix into the grooves of the wooden table from the more convenient dining room chairs, just like his big brothers do.

It happens to everyone, I know. It’s just a bit new and a bit odd. And of course the other thing is that I am going to be 38 on Saturday and that feels ridiculous. Like completely absurd and stupid. It came from nowhere! I was about 20, and then I had some Christmases and stuff, and now I am filling in that age bracket on questionnaires which goes from 35-45. And inside, you are shouting NO, I’M NOT THAT OLD, ACTUALLY! Not really! Because 38 looked different when I wasn’t 38. When I was a kid, it looked quite old and middle-aged and people got their hair cut short and they stopped listening to new music and their clothes weren’t very cool. I don’t even think people who were 38 had sex any more. Not in my hometown, anyway.

Here is a black and white series of boy photos to distract you from noticing that I referred to my mooncup and people having sex. Sorry about that. If I wasn’t nearly 38, I probably wouldn’t feel I needed to apologise. GAH

Here they are in Kensington Gardens, looking for mushrooms and blackberries which were not sodden and mouldy on an inset day last week, which was really a day off for Eid. No luck, though a very belated Eid Murabak everyone and cheers for the day off:

And a video of Otis drumming:

On Sunday we had a last hurrah picking raspberries at Crockford Bridge Farm and ate gelato, because soon we will be too cold and miserable for frozen dairy products:

And the children huddled onto Noah’s bed, united by episodes of Max & Ruby:

That’s more than enough self-wallowing. Tonight we all have to stay at school for a shared dinner (at 4:30pm) to meet the teachers. It is Casper’s turn tonight, and I am going to have to ‘fess up to his teacher that he has been hiding his homework down the side of his bed in a pathetic and misguided belief that he wouldn’t have to do it if it got lost. Noah has been trying that trick for years now and it doesn’t work. But still they try. Eejits.