Wednesday you are the new Friday

Every Wednesday morning an angel in Marigolds comes to my house and transforms it into the kind of place you want to spend lots of time in.  As I walk through the door the self assurance of Pledge hits me and it's all I can do to stop myself from dropping to my knees in teary gratitude.  The effect a tidy, clean house has on morale is immeasurable.  Immediately after the gratitude comes panic.  I stretch my arms out in protection over hoovered carpets and gleaming sinks and start screaming. 'Nobody touch anything.  Don't play with any toys, don't eat anything, don't go to the toilet and don't sit anywhere.'

I have devised a system to prolong the joy as long as possible.  When I pick the children up from kindy at lunchtime on a Wednesday we don't go home to have lunch.  Oh no.  If it's not blowing a gale or bitingly cold I take sandwiches down to the beach.  Failing that we'll eat the sandwiches in the car while we look at the windy and cold beach (I have lost count of the number of four year olds who get in my car and blanche at the frankly unhygienic state of its interior but hey, who cares?  At least the house is clean).  I'll happily trawl the three of them round the supermarket and feed them a lunch of whatever they want from little plastic wrapped packages as long as the house is clean.  I try and remember to throw 3 packs of those milkshake as breakfast things into the trolley then the tidiness inches through Thursday morning too.

The irony of my not being in the house to fully benefit from its cleanliness is not lost on me but I don't care.  Wednesdays rule.

Shit parenting volume 4 (or it could be more. I've lost count)

twin 1

At the end of a meeting a colleague asked me how my children were.  Having had my professional hat on for the the last half hour my veneer slipped and I spoke as a mother on the edge.

"I have got no idea why, but the twins just cry so bloody much.  At everything.  As often as they can.  Every morning is a screamfest over getting dressed to go to kindy.  Twin1 steadfastly refuses to wear anything but a tiny little sun dress.  It's 10 degrees outside"

"Pick your battles." My colleague said.  "Don't fight over clothes, just let her wear what she wants.  She probably only makes a fuss with you, I bet she lets the kindy staff put jumpers and trousers on her.  It won't kill her to be cold for a short while."

And so it has been over the last two weeks that I have allowed the tiny little soul to go to kindy with barely a scrap of clothing on.  It's bloody freezing and I ask her if she'd like a jumper but the answer's always the same.  Yesterday I was told that a few parents have expressed concern over her clothes.  The last thing any parent needs is another parent's judgemental crap.  So to all those who give me the 'you're a shit parent' glance when they see twin1 dancing around gaily in her sundress and sparkly shoes while the rain sheets down in icy needles I gather myself to my full height, raise my head snootily in the air, muster as much dignity as possible and shout 'FUCK OFF.'

I like a good dose of variety

In a couple of weeks the husband is taking lad down to Wanaka to go skiing.  Some of his family will be there and there is a big nostalgic pull for him too; when I first clapped eyes on the handsome chap he was living in Wanaka so he's excited about seeing his old friends and introducing his son to them.  Twin1, twin2 and I will stay at home and I'm looking forward to the simplicity of eating baked beans on toast at 5pm with the two of them and devoting some attention (not the screaming, angry mother kind but rather the cuddly, mummy and daughter kind) on each of them.

The husband and I are used to being apart and while I always miss him, I love the change of dynamic brought about by venturing off to do our own things with the children.  I like change.  My brain gets itchy if I stay in the same place for more than a few years.  From birth my family moved house every 1 to 3 years as my dad was posted to different RAF bases around the world.  I always felt very settled and happy.  Home was wherever my mum and dad were.

If you could take a year off and live anywhere in the world, where would it be?

Guilt

Richard Wilson (Wiz)

As a young girl, when I broke my brother's intricately constructed lego space rocket or 'borrowed' 50p from my mum's dressing table to buy sweets, I felt the pit of my stomach roll around like a tiny boat on huge waves  and with it headed onto guilt's well furrowed path.  For children emotions tend to be black and white.  Enter the murky waters of adulthood and guilt doesn't stand alone but gets clever and joins forces.

In December 2000 when Wiz and I crashed head on into another motorbike, he and the other rider died at the scene.  I have some flashes of recollection in my mind like 10 second, chaotic home videos but I can't remember feeling or thinking much over the first couple of days.  I do remember though the start of the guilt.  I was horrified that I hadn't got up and tried to help Wiz.  I felt ashamed at my selfishness that I hadn't even thought about him.  My rational self knows that my brain was in shock and I hadn't made the connection that I had been on a motorbike, that I had been with Wiz or indeed where I was, as well as the more logistical problem of my inability to walk.  It doesn't matter, though.  Guilt, insidious and toxic, had started to weave a nauseous gait through my system and emulsify with hundreds of other emotions, ready to further blacken a sad day or prick a hissing leak into joy.

I know there was nothing I could have done to prevent Wiz's death and as the years passed I began to look at the guilt in a more detached way.  I hope it has made me feel more empathy with others who feel guilty about things over which they have absolutely no control.  Instead of being told 'it isn't your fault he died, you have nothing to feel guilty about' I think I would have preferred someone to say 'I understand why you feel guilty even though it wasn't your fault.'

Please don't think, reading this and my last post that my life is a seething mass of shame and guilt.  On the contrary, I am lucky to have parents who raised me to feel proud of who I am.  I have just been pondering emotions this week and how they shape our behaviour.

Are you there God, it's me Jenny

This evening I am going to the evensong church service as my choir are singing.  Although I'm not a churchgoer I am really looking forward to it.  Singing music written with pure and intense love and devotion is affecting.  I know I will leave all my worries and niggles outside and love the feeling of singing loud and full of happiness.  What a great way to start the week.

Get that fucking stick out of my fucking face

One of my very gentle natured friends told me recently that the one thing sure to ignite a furnace of irritation in her is the phrase 'Oh, so and so's such a good mother'.  Even though it's said out of goodwill there's the ever present whiff of competitive mum about it with its incumbent insinuation that although you are part of the conversation, your lack of 'top mum' verbal rosette is conspicuous in its absence.

So I dedicate this post to any mother who has given in to their screaming child at the supermarket checkout, pouring sweets down their throat 20 minutes before dinnertime just to earn 5 minutes of silence in which to pay for and load your car with shopping only to listen to someone deliver that smug, trump phrase after observing your parenting.

I have sworn at my children on numerous occasions.  I'm not proud of it and pre-motherhood I would have wrinkled my nose in judgement if I heard anyone do it but that has all changed now that I know what small children do to your blood pressure.

I took all three down to the beach to play on a wonderfully old fashioned swing slung up on a tree in a nearby campsite.  As we drove down, I had an Enid Blyton fantasy of photographing them on the swing individually, heads thrown back in ecstatic glee as they sliced tip-toed through the air and laughed with rapturous liberty at the blue sky and cool air whipping round their ears.  Here is twin2 enjoying the swing in a much lower octane fashion and for a much shorter time than the full length Disney feature film I had spooling through my head.

Lad wasn't interested in the swing, he just wanted to climb.

That's ok though, luckily I'm an easy going kind of gal who doesn't mind if my best laid plans of magical photo opportunities are dashed.  No matter.  There's always the beach.  I nag and cajole them to sit next to each other while I take their picture.  Lad has a stick and wants me to draw his name in the sand.

'In a minute, darling, just sit here for a few seconds and say cheese then we'll do some drawing.'  Twin 2 is collecting shells, twin1 is chasing a seagull.  It takes some time to encourage the girls to sit next to their brother and by the time I get round to taking the picture, lad has remounted his name drawing campaign.  Irritated, I swat the thing away and scream at him 'get that fucking stick out of my fucking face.'

I glance up to see a middle aged jogger grimacing in distaste at me and an elderly couple, horrified, holding hands and surveying the scene of my children shivering in the biting wind while their angry mother swears at them and dashes their healthy, wholesome, innocent fun, all in the name of a photo I could have taken after hurrying them back home in a murk of guilt and propping them in front of the TV with a warm Milo.

OK so I didn't exactly slosh heroin through their veins but I might as well have done with the adrenaline of guilt pounding through me.  We all feel the same every time we swear at them/give them tinned spaghetti for the third night in a row/put on the 4th back to back DVD to hear the end of a juicy piece of gossip.

Guilt is an important part of parenting.  It keeps our instincts well lubricated.  I just think its important to be able to throw guilt a well timed eye roll now and then too.  As the Rudd family motto goes - moderation in everything, including moderation.

Can you smell shit?

The result of cleaning up faecal matter every day for four years is olfactory havoc.  This morning as I chucked a few toys in the twins' room I wandered through a mist of minute shit particles.  Sniffing, I attempted to locate the offending nuggets whilst discerning from the smell whether I would be dealing with a dry pile of pebbles or a carpet clinging sludge.  The aromatic trail led me under twin1's bed where I found a cloud of baby wipes wafting their arse cleansing chemicals into the air.  I looked around for anything more sinister.  Nothing.  The rush of relief was marred by the jolt of realising I now find it impossible to distinguish between the smell of baby wipes and shit.  To be fair, shit always smells like shit.  But now baby wipes smell of shit too.

paint a red cross on the door

Yesterday I arrived at kindy to see stuck to the door "friendly notice:  head lice are doing the rounds".  Today the same notice is there with the words head lice rubbed out and replaced with chicken pox.  I admire the scribe of this missive and their perky, upbeat attitude but I am struggling to feel the same optimism about having my children picking at welts and scabs on their normally peachy skin and hauling finger nails through their heads collecting the eggs of these little critters then littering them about the house so we can keep the glorious cycle of nit life a-turning in the warmth of our home.

As I type this my head is itchy as buggery.  I don't want to slather my newly dyed red hair (see pic) in anti-nit chemicals.  It will probably turn my hair green.

A master of meditation in one stare

I was going to write about swimming today as lad swam his first few strokes this week.  But I will write about it another day.  This afternoon, surrounded by hundreds of people in our little community, an eight year old boy and his ten year old brother stood beside their daddy at the funeral of their young mother.  Such was this lady's role locally that the school closed at lunchtime so that the staff and most of the children could go.  Although I have never met her I have spent the day wiping away tears and staring at the grey clouds in the sky.  Three weeks ago this vibrant, athletic lady was diagnosed with cancer.  Three weeks.

Just recently I have spent quite a bit of time wondering what it must be like to fly out of the earth's atmosphere and stare through the blackness at our beautiful planet.  Whilst standing on it and trying to imagine our world as one, you are overwhelmed by landscapes, problems, people, billions and billions of insects, political leanings, cruelty, kindness, arguments with your neighbour, love and elation, fish swimming in the absolute dark of the depths of the ocean, drought, genocide, the list is infinite.  But from space, the world is one thing.  Your eye need not travel far within its socket to take in its entirety.  It would probably have the same effect on you as studying meditation for 50 years, all condensed into a silent, silent gaze as you drift across the universe.  We are nothing, in the scheme of things.  And yet we can feel so raging and full of life force with love and loss.

International Oyster Card

I am going to start playing the lottery.  There are only 4 million people in New Zealand so my chances of winning are much greater than when I used to play at home.  My aim is to win enough money to secure unlimited travel between the UK and NZ for my family.  I would like a kind of Oyster Card situation so I just wander into Auckland airport, bleep my card through the gates and hop on the plane as and when I please.  Business class would be rather nice but I don't really mind.  I miss trains, shopping in Boots, pubs, the trees, front doors of terraced houses and plugs with 3 prongs.

My parents fly out here at the end of August but I have started nagging my mum to see if she can slip in a quick visit before then too.  I am playing on the parental guilt thing as I know how powerful it is when my children use it on me.