The Harridan

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.

We have been to Turkey, which is warm, yellow, blue, with lizards and bats and meaty tomatoes that make you feel briefly teary-eyed when you realise how good they taste alongside sheepy cheese – and you know you might never come back because you have a husband who wants to live in New Zealand where the water is cold and the mosquitoes give you scabs, and where the emotional and literal cost to flying back to exotic locales in Europe is frankly too much to bear.

Mum and dad came with us, and let me just iterate right now, really clearly, that having grandparents along on your holidays is much better than not having them coming along.

Reasons Why Grandparents Should Come On Your Holidays:

1. Higher adults:kids ratio, so you can cast your eyes down to read a chapter of Joyce Carol Oates’ We Were The Mulvaneys or Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend without some kid tripping into the unfenced pool to drown. Or falling out of the treehouse which, to be fair, did happen twice, but it may very well have happened more times, say, if there weren’t so many adult eyeballs regularly looking up and sharing the onerous duty of caring.
2. Discipline is shared. My dad says his dad taught him judo, on a farm in the 1940’s in rural Te Kopuru, which I guess might well be true, and so he would do quite stingy arm holds on the kids when we were driving anywhere until they stopped wailing about somebody touching their elbow/shoulder/thigh. It was a triumph of ouchy martial arts-related wizardry.
3. You get to go out for dinner in a consecutive date night frenzy and you get home and the kids are asleep and you just say thanks to your mum and dad and no cash leaves your palm.
4. Grandparents are more into playing endless games of draughts with the grandchildren than you are and they make up stuff like Olympic Relay Races to entertain the children while you sip gently sweating gin and tonics in the shade.
5. *EVERYDAY SEXISM ALERT* You mum helps you do holiday-lite housewifey/cooking stuff while the husband and grandad ignore anything that might be a bit domestic, and they play on their tablets and don’t even clear the table of snorkels and crisp packets while you serve them all tomatoes and sheep’s cheese salads and figs and yogurt again and again. And if they do some dishes or chop some watermelon, they figure they have done their bit for a few days.
6. But your dad finds you a seasick tablet on the boat while you are staring into middle distance, pale and sweaty-about-the-forehead, thinking that squeezing out a baby is more pleasant than being on a big stupid boat which has trapped you in a long day of choppy, sloppy, rocking hell, and everywhere you look you see waves and things smell a bit like diesel and you want to vomit but don’t have the energy and everyone talks to you about things like when they were seasick once. But then your dad gets a pill from somewhere, and it works.

Here are some photos to show off a bit.

Grandparents and kids with slushy ice drinks which apparently comes from the first snow, which is stored in huge deep holes in the mountains all year, and then bought out in summer to be crushed with a mallet and stirred with syrup and sold in a cup for about 10p. The traditional syrup which you can buy from families by the side of the road is black molasses which made Ned weep from the horror of it all. This stuff, however, was bright yellow lemon and fluoro pink cordial.

Grandad chucking Barnaby under the ice-cold shower which spouted from a massive tree outside the villa:

Mum and dad and Barnaby swimming at Butterfly Valley. See the boat-o-sickness to the left, and the lovely way my parents are holding on to each other:

When Dads find pills:

When you get babysitting services for free, you look as happy as this:

And you get to read for longer stretches of time. Amazing.

A leech-gatherer for your viewing pleasure:

2000 year old rock tombs:

Camel:

The water. Now, really.

Mostly we ate chips:

And melons:

 The Sad And Gross Bit

It’s not all sunshine, bikinis-all-day and turtle-spotting on your annual holidays, though fellas. Casper and I all got hot and developed itchy heat-rash which we scratched and it turned into these embarrassing weeping crater scabs:

All of which kills my post-holiday buzz a little. Otis, meanwhile, got some sort of allergic reaction to insect bites and we spent five hours at A&E yesterday getting his lesions dressed and blood tests. He is now walking about fully bandaged around his middle to stop the weeping open wounds. But, mostly, selfishly, I feel a bit embarrassed about the way my craters are very cigarette-shaped, like instead of basking in the hot sun and scoffing sour cherries, I have spent two weeks self-harming in a bid for attention. As if I needed any more.

Anyway. We are back, and everything is wet in London, and my parents are wearing borrowed raincoats when I had promised them to only bring t-shirts and shorts on their holiday. Because it’s summer, right?

A few days ago, I thought I might have been pregnant. Just a tiny bit. And so I was oscillating between really excited, and then horrified, and then kind of embarrassed, then nervous, and I was attributing everything from headaches to a blocked ear to my SO OBVIOUS HOW COME NO ONE ELSE IS NOTICING new pregnantness. I figured out via my baby-related apps-wizardry on my phone that a baby would come at the end of March, which seemed like an excellent month to squeeze out a baby, and she would be called Eliza Alice because my phone also tells me when to have girl-producing sex. I found an expired pregnancy test, which obviously was negative, and then bought the cheapest Boots pregnancy test, which was obviously negative, because I tested on the third day of my period being late and it was in the middle of the day, after a glass of water. Diluted hormones! ROOKIE MISTAKE. And then I told Mark that my period was late, and he said nothing and went to sleep.

My period came, of course, though later than my phone apps said it should, and so it turns out I am not pregnant; instead I think I might be a bit mental. Mark then says that he was doing the skin crawl of horror when I said we might be having another baby, and what a vast relief it was when he found out my mooncup was being put to good use. And now I am wandering around the flat, trodding on toddlers and accidentally sitting on small children who are playing free games on the smashed screens of the available iPads under mountains of blankets to hide from their brothers whose turn it probably is, feeling sad about how we only have five children, and not six. I want them all to scatter to the far-corners of the flat so I can mope about my phantom future non-babies in some sort of peace. No one called Eliza is coming, no more visits from midwives or milky massive boobs or labour (which I happen to think is an excellent time had by all). No more maternity clothes, ultrasounds, or thick, luxurious hair (before it all falls out and grows back in that awful accidental undercut/tiny pointless fringe kind of way). I have no idea why I am like this and I probably need some therapy. I am even boring myself.

And because it is the school holidays, there is more of a actual real children/phantom fantasy imaginary baby contrast than is usual. They bicker, pull hair and throw bits of mandarin skin in a vague direction of the bin, while the imaginary baby just smells nice and lets me dress her up in leopard print. They pole-dance on the tube and steal biscuits from the Salvation Army cafe, they break my art deco teacups and call me ‘UGLY LADY’ when I refuse them booty from the V&A gift shop, but the phantom Eliza just breastfeeds and lets me take her to Ottolenghi for flat whites and salads and of course one of his cakes because you can eat cake all day after a baby and it doesn’t matter.

BUT ANYWAY, MOVING ON

I’m glad to have gotten that little nugget of questionable mental tomfoolery out of the way. There are very good things to be grateful for, things that should really be overshadowing my odd infant-neediness. Mum and dad are here to see the existing, real children and to help me over the unrelenting holidays. Here we are, doing London things, mostly involving lunch, and only getting told off from the managers of a park in one of the photos for garden-compromising hide and seeking:

Thirsty work, traipsing around all day, trying to keep the kids from walking into bus lanes and humiliating us with screams and traffic-light-wrestling matches.

Here is Casper and Otis, in the days before the summer left us, in a hat that didn’t make it home from Kensington Gardens. For a moment, we were so together:

And the baby, so cute and photogenic when he isn’t punching my arm or driving his cars into the keyboard to stop me from doing anything of use at all:

Crackers for breakfast, and a surfeit of tiger-print:

Noah turned nine, went to see Ant-Man, ate Dominos pizza and got a wearable water-gun which annoyed everyone so, so much, but look at the delight on his face and manifesting itself in those hunched-up-at-the-ready shoulders:

The baby, meanwhile, is a shoe and traffic-cone thief. I find my never-worn heels all over the flat. He finds them deep under the bed-of-no-more-babies, where he must surely fight his way through forests of tumbleweed dust balls, silicone earplugs and old boiler manuals. Yesterday he did a poo into my Salvatore Ferregamo sandals, though I will spare you the photo:

And a trip to Postman’s Park where it looked like we were having fun, until we noticed they were breaking into the goldfish pond and stealing the coins at the bottom:

And so it continues. I’ll check in with more photos when I am over my terrible phantom-baby funk.

I am kind of broken, and it’s not just me. But let’s not get straight to the punchline. Let’s go back about a month ago, to when things were lovelier, and there weren’t any deadlines, and most things were intact.

I had gotten a few emails in my inbox which stood out amongst the random betting spam and those incessant emails from gap and the outnet (from which I don’t seem to have the emotional strength to unsubscribe from) – one from Ogilvy & Mather saying they would run the new version of the Dove ad for another year (Go! Watch! You know you want to look at my generous thighs getting into the bath again!) and another from a company asking me if I wanted to take the kids out for a day courtesy of Three Mobile and use a Samsung Galaxy phone to take photos and review it on here and send it back.

So I said yes, because it is a bit flattering and a bit fun and I was intending to go to the Punchdrunk show anyway (Against Captain’s Orders at the National Maritime Museum), and I like a phone. I like a product! I like advertising! I like social media and its new, tricksy ways! So the phone arrived and it looked like this:

A bit big, but so clean, and the case is a very flattering navy blue glass, which we all know suits an ageing assisted blonde, and it had very dance-y and excited graphics which made me think there was a tiny party going on in my palm. My iPhone, it has to be said, doesn’t seem to have the same sort of zest for life as the Galaxy. It kind of sits there, a bit not-bothered, a bit stand-offish, if you will. Anyway, I carried both phones around for a few days and got confused and felt like a drug dealer. Here is me trying out the phone for the first time, taking an truly lovely selfie after watching Mad Max while scoffing four cocktails and some sort of Spanish platter which was mostly peppers and chorizo and grease. This photo isn’t my best work – no fault of the phone, more about my dimly-lit bedroom situation.

Because the phone took gorgeous photos. Really and truly, though you’ll never know, because I couldn’t get the photos to download onto the mac and so there is an emailing-to-myself-thing going on, and something got lost in translation. But no question, the photos were clear and lovely. The dog had a glistening furry pelt, even.

And that is us, walking to the skateboard park on Saturday looking for bloated dead animals in the canal:

Casper wanted to try out his new skateboard, which took about eight minutes to take out from under the buggy, sandpapering his fingers and calves as he heaved and yanked and coaxed, then another 17 minutes to strap on his knee/elbow and wrist protectors and then to fasten on his helmet, and then he looked down into the skate bowl, slid the skateboard into it, watched it go really fast and crash, got a little white in the face and then said that we should all probably just go to portobello to get crepes. Smart boy, that one.

But To Get To The Point

Our day out to the Punchdrunk show should really have been excellent, but we were late to leave the flat, and there was some weird things going on with the DLR and we went the wrong way at Bank and finally we got to the Museum and we were ten minutes late and missed our slot. So they said to come back in an hour and try to get a place if there were no-shows, so we wandered the Museum and I tried to be interested in the boats but OH I CANNOT CARE ABOUT NAUTICAL THINGS, I just cannot, and we came back to the ticket people but no, there were no free spaces and so we had to go away again and come back in two hours. Casper was being a little bit horrible by this time, and took to spelling out “F.U.C.K.Y.O.U” quite loudly to no-one in particular, and so I took him outside into the rain and said we had been expelled from the Museum for swearing. He got a bit defensive and then bored and asked if we could go back inside, but I first took him up to a bewildered security guard and told her that we had had to leave the Museum because of our foul language and would it be ok to come back inside if we promised not to talk like that again? She said ok. He didn’t do any more cuss spelling after that.

Then we went to Jamie’s Italian for lunch and two cocktails to numb the pain and kill time, and then things suddenly felt quite good. Here is a bellini:

We stopped off at a vintage market on our way back and the kids got one pound to spend – Barnaby and Casper bought six old coins and Noah hoarded his pound because he thought he might buy himself a donut. Yes, a donut. Here are the coins, in fine samsung galaxy detail (see what I did there?):

So we went to the show, and I cannot say anything about it because it is a secret, but it is a most excellent secret and you should all go, though not with my family because they oftentimes make you feel full of rage and shame.When we got out, Noah had lost his coin, and we said that was a good lesson, and he got very mad. He wouldn’t appear in our photo owing to his fury at not getting an extra replacement pound, but he did compromise enough to take the photo. Even when raging, he has a steady hand:

But he was still really mad about the pound. So mad, in fact, that when we got out, he lagged behind us, and sulked, and dragged his cardigan in the puddles to demonstrate his inner turmoil. I took a photo of him because he was attracting some attention and it was a bit funny. But he got cross with me for taking out the camera because he thought I would post his sulk on youtube, and so, he twirled his heavy, wet cardigan in the wet rainy mud and flung it at me and knocked the Galaxy out of my hand and CRACKED THE NAVY BLUE GLASS BACKING! Here he is, a second before the samsung was smashed to the ground:

And here is the phone, still navy and stylish, but violated:

It was a bit mortifying and I went a bit mental and couldn’t really look at anyone in the face. So Mark tried to cheer me up by asking me which of the boys would need braces, and they opened their little mouths and flashed their uncleaned enormous wonky teeth at me in the train and I thought “UGH, YOU GUYS ARE AWFUL”. That’s the general feeling right there, in that train photo. Everyone a little bit sad, even the foreigners:

But, you know, it was awesome. So thanks, Three Mobile for giving us a day out. I’m sorry about your cool phone, though. It won’t happen again, if anyone else wants to loan me some stuff. Ahem.

Today, this morning, I ran my second 10k race and I was pretty slow and I totally did a torrent of accidental wee at the end. The others were supposed to watch me coming into the finish line, but they had some domestic trouble with sandals, and so they were late, and by the time I found them, I was pretty much dried up. Those tight running pants pride themselves on wicking moisture away, and I think I know what they are getting at. Then when I got home, I found my toenail, which I had been furiously growing in an effort to impress the pedicurist Vietnamese ladies down the road, instead of horrifying them when I ask them to paint my tiny bleeding stubs, had grown indeed, into a sharp point, and it had attacked the other toe during the race and there was blood everywhere in my running shoes. And by then, I smelt like an old public toilet. The moral here? I don’t know. Wear sanitary pads all the time in case your bladder decides to give up working at inopportune places? Don’t pick your feet into a scabby mess, but if you do let your feet go forth and grow like a wild dead-skin-and-curly-toenail-garden-of-despair, then occasionally prune those gnarly edges? Don’t bother entering races? Stay at home and drink tea. But, you know, it isn’t all about urinating in public. In the light of my post a month or so back, when I shared the true horror of having small children go apeshit on public transport, here is a photo to prove that my children can indeed sit down calmly on a train and not pull anyone else’s hair. In fact, they look shattered, which is what a week doing serious learning about stuff at school can do to a kid. They look positively forlorn: Again, with the kindness and picnic-y brotherly love: And here they are at the local skatepark, which is where we like to hang out for a bit on a Saturday on the way along the canal to Portobello for crepes and hamburgers. They are scared of the big cool skaters, and you can see them slyly watching the big teenagers with their shirts off and looking cool, and they are wanting to be them, and wanting to be so cool and assured. And then one of them starts a game of frenzied tag, and they forget themselves and act like dicks again. It is funny and sad and sweet to watch. At the top of Portobello they have a funny little newish foodie space, with tables and chairs and pigeons and stalls which are mostly pretty good. Everyone in the family except for me gets a boner for nutella crepes. Even that poor baby. See him as he takes a rare, unguarded moment to think of his baby teeth and his bad mother who knows that sugar is poison, but gives it to him anyway: But you stick a filter on everything, wear girl’s stripy tights and some adidas trainers and the pain all goes away: Yes? Yes. Who needs teeth anyway? We hadn’t been to A&E since Otis got his front tooth smashed back into his upper gum in a hotel forecourt in Wales, and other than needing help with the psychological shortcomings of our children (we have been attending seminars on fixing your children who are a bit nuts, to paraphrase), and a tiny bit of vomiting a few weeks ago, we have been all pretty healthy and unscathed. But then there was this little number – Ned flicked a piece of metal which was attached to a string of  rubber bands into his forehead, requiring stitches. It was rudimentary weapon fashioned by Noah, who had been swinging it around narrowly missing the telly, and then Ned got hold of it and it there was much screaming and blood. Everyone said “Oh, you must have been so upset!”and I look back and think, not really. I think you get a bit used to physical damage and trauma when you have a bunch of kids, and you know they will heal over and scab up and scar but they will be ok. Here Ned is, just before the bruising came down into his eyes making him look like Vincent in Beauty and the Beast, not bothered, having a ride on a spinning teacup and feeling awesome. And all this leads me to Mark, who had a birthday yesterday. Ned wore a Jean Paul Gaultier-esque bondage homage apron to help me bake Mark the most excellent Nigella honey and chocolate cake ever, although the icing split and took on that curdled sick quality. But black and white forgives a vomitty surface, and he didn’t mind. Look at the happiness on his slightly grizzled face! He is like YAY someone cares about me and YAY tonight we are going out and we don’t have to put the little buggers to bed! That’s all it takes really, a reminder that someone loves you enough to build a cake (as my grandmother would say) and that someone will take away the drudge of an evening. And so he spent the day indulging in his newest, expensiviest hobby, the excruciatingly uncool sport of archery. He spends lots of time reading archery magazines, and has joined an archery club, and he thinks about bows and quivers and that kind of embarrassing shizzle. And he watches “Arrow” on Netflix and it breaks my heart, because the guy wears a Robin Hood-updated-for-modern-times crap outfit and he bothers to kill people with his stupid bow instead of just shooting people, which would be quicker and more accurate, but I am trying to be nonjudgemental about it all. It could be lawn bowls, I guess.