I have arranged my week around certain pitstops, which in wintertime work perfectly because the day is essentially shorter - in the summer the struggle to get children to bed seems interminable. It's the classic carrot approach. I need to reward myself for making it through another day. The current carrot is hot chocolate [and that's hot chocolate neat with no hidden alcohol content]. The mere thought of it is enough to get me through till around 7pm.
Actually I think the main attraction of HC is the fact that you have to sit down to drink it and by then I am well in need of sitting down. Helpfully it also coincides with my favourite tv show, H20. It's an amazing programme about three girls who, when they even sniff water, turn into mermaids. The girls refer to it as "mummy's programme". I kid myself it is for them, but really the moment the opening song plays I am hooked. It's even better than Come Outside, to which I devoted their early years. How cool, but ecologically unsound, to have a spotty plane at the end of your garden.
My other weak spot is the bath, again unecological. It is the one place I can escape everyone, even if toddler daughter now waits devotedly outside with my pjamas ready, no matter how late it is. I found her completely out for the count one night. The bath had lasted just that bit too long.
Most nights I have had it by around 9.44, but just recently I managed to stay up at least an extra hour when I went to a real grown-up event. It was for work, but it felt slightly odd to be out at night alone, with no one. Kind of exciting. It was a dress-up event. It said black tie on the invitation. I had hastily pulled my black dress out of the wardrobe the night before, run an iron over it and hung it in the car, fully expecting sticky fingers to run all over it on the morning school run. Luckily it remained intact.
I hurled some high heels into the car along with the make-up box and all the school bags, work kit, etc. After dropping everyone off, hairing up the M11 and doing a full day's work, I meandered down to London and through my old haunts. I found the car park just in time, but that is where the fun began. I had to struggle into said black dress with spaghetti top while in the car. Also I discovered that the make-up kit had been infiltrated by small people. Where there had once been an array of stuff, there was now virtually a desert. I had to stick my finger all the way down the lipstick. The only remaining make-up left was a purple eyeshadow which I rubbed heavily into my cheeks and put on my eyes, giving a somewhat 80s New Romantic look.
I felt a bit giddy at the event, like a child being let loose in a toy shop. I had somehow forgotten the art of late-night, ok evening, conversation. At home, by the time the kids are in bed, I can basically string only small phrases together and even then I drift off in the middle and forget where I was going in the first place.
This week our house has been somewhat uplifted by the Spanish football victory as my partner is Spanish. He went out to watch the final, leaving me to get the kids to bed. I was searching around for the tins of fruit that we had to hand in to the school tombola the following day to qualify for not wearing school uniform and was criticising in a mild way the fact that said partner had put them somewhere so secret that no human being would ever be able to locate them when toddler daughter piped up matter of factly "It's fuckit, isn't it, mummy?" Clearly she thinks this is the expression to use when faced by minor disasters.
I alternated between feeling very guilty that she had probably got it from me when I had lost my cool on some occasion or other [there are so many, take your pick] and crying with laughter. It brought to mind when bonkers daughter as a toddler used to run to the smoke alarm with the tea towel when the toast burned shouting "shit shit" as if this was the required way of getting it to stop. I am clearly not a good parent, but every day I am striving. And boy am I striving.
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