The Unmumsy Mum Diary

by The Unmumsy Mum

  He no longer associates his mummy with swimming, or playgroup, or Bounce and Rhyme at the library, because somebody else now takes him to all of these things. I did all of that stuff with Henry, so it feels unfair somehow. Then again, James did none of it with Henry and maybe that wasn’t fair either.

  I’m not sure we’ve got it right yet.

  I also have no idea what right would look like.

  Answers on a postcard, please.

  Thursday 13th

  17:03

  This evening we’ve been tasked with encouraging Henry to design his own Christmas card. It seems that festive preparations at school start TEN weeks before the actual event, which is really helpful, as Jude overheard mention of the big man and is now walking around saying, ‘Father Kwist-mas coming! Present for Jude!’, which I’m fairly sure we’ll now hear on a loop for the next two and a half months. Anyway, we have to get this design finished and taken back into class by tomorrow and whatever he draws will be printed as a pack of Christmas cards to be sent to a select few (very lucky) friends and relatives. We have received similar cards before and I’ve always thought, How lovely. In fact, it was exactly the sort of activity I had really been looking forward to doing with my own children … until I had children. I am having to work very hard at not losing my cool right now over this sodding card.

  We have been given one piece of paper, on which there is a box. Henry must create his yuletide masterpiece within that box. There are no spares, so he only has one shot. I know from all the times I have asked him to draw a picture for somebody’s birthday/for Father’s Day that his typical style is to reluctantly pick up a pen (any pen of any colour) and scribble some lines on the page with zero effort or enthusiasm. It was for this reason that I pulled out some plain paper from the drawer and asked him to have a little practice just until he was sure of the kind of festive scene he wanted to capture.

  ‘Draw anything Christmassy you fancy, sweetheart. Use as many colours as you like and, remember, you can always ask me and Daddy for help with drawing or ideas if you get stuck. When you’re happy with it, we’ll draw it in the special box, OK? OK, Henry? Can we do this Christmas card now then, please?’

  I’m glad we got the practice paper out.

  As he haphazardly scribbled (with one eye still on Alvin and the Chipmunks, which I had to turn off), I gently asked him what he was drawing and, with a shrug, he responded, ‘A black maze.’

  Silly me, eh?! Of course it’s a maze, drawn entirely in black pencil. That well-known Christmassy symbol, the black maze. Little Donkey, Little Donkey, through a big, black maze. ‘Merry Christmas, here’s a depressing black maze of death.’ Give me strength.

  This is where I agonise over what I should do for the best. On the one hand, perhaps I should just leave him to it – it’s his picture, after all, and if he wants to mark the anniversary of the birth of Jesus by drawing a mess of black lines, perhaps I ought to just let him be. I don’t want to upset him, and I certainly don’t want him to develop a complex because he thinks I’m going to hover over him telling him his efforts aren’t good enough. On the other hand, I know my son; I can tell when he is putting his mind to something – and he hasn’t put his mind to this. He couldn’t give fewer fucks about this card if he tried and that’s making me feel annoyed, particularly as I spied one of his classmate’s cards being handed in this morning and it was like a festive fucking oil painting (genuinely, it was better than I could draw. Who are these pliable, arty children?). After taking a few deep breaths, I have done what I always seem to do these days and shared my frustration online. If the Instagram comments (comedy gold, as ever) are anything to go by, we are definitely not alone in this struggle:

  @topsy_cat When my eldest was about six I dutifully purchased his ‘festive coaster’ (hadn’t seen his masterpiece, as it was done at school). When it arrived I was dumbfounded. He had to explain to me that it was ‘a Mexican shooting a chicken’. I still have it.

  @pinkemy My son drew a Christmas dinosaur having a poo for his Christmas card. Not sure the elderly relatives will appreciate it.

  @jemmabla Sounds like my son’s school Xmas card a few years ago. It was apparently ‘the Polar Express in the dark’ but was basically just a load of black. Felt I needed to explain each time I wrote one out, as I knew everyone would be thinking, Shit, this child has issues.

  @bgatta_1 My son did a brilliant drawing of the Nativity and then wrote on it, ‘What a load of shite.’ He was six. I was just impressed he could spell.

  @elembee.x I had a class of thirty children who all wanted to draw the victims of Pompeii on their Christmas cards (part of our current topic work). They did suggest adding Santa hats … #thatmakesitallbetter

  James is now drawing a few outline shapes (stocking, Christmas tree, present, etc.) that Henry can copy on to the card if he wants to. I am working out ways of ensuring that he wants to.

  17:55

  Blow me down, he’s only gone and done it! We have a card, people, we have a card. A Christmas tree with a present underneath it and an impressively neat ‘Ho! Ho! Ho!’ written on one side. I don’t mean it’s impressively neat because we did it, either (though I’ll admit I was tempted to tidy up some of the colouring-in): no, he sat down and drew an actual picture as I gave instructions disguised as suggestions, such as, ‘Oooh, perhaps the tree could have a star on top? What do you think?’ and ‘Lovely colouring – are you going to colour the bottom branches as well or leave them bald? I think they’d be sad bald.’

  If you’re curious as to how the transformation from lazy-black-maze scribbler to mini-Picasso unfolded, I told him that Father Christmas would be making an assessment of the effort put in and correlating each child’s level of effort to the quality and quantity of presents delivered. I know. I’m weaving a Santa-based web of lies and we’ve not even reached November yet. I wouldn’t usually tolerate even hearing the C-word before Bonfire Night, but as school have set the Christmas chat in motion I thought I might as well capitalise on its strong-arming potential.

  I now feel like I should be hand-delivering his design to school tomorrow in a plastic sandwich bag and prising it out with tweezers, as though it were a delicate artefact. I honestly don’t think he’s ever drawn a proper picture before, and I was starting to think that perhaps he had inherited my shit-at-arts-and-crafts gene.

  Turns out he’s just lazy and/or unwilling to do anything that’s asked of him in the absence of a bribe. What a relief.

  Friday 21st

  We have survived our first half-term as school parents! I always hate it when people theatrically congratulate themselves for ‘surviving’ something that’s just a routine occurrence, but there were days in those earliest weeks of term when survive was really all we could do, so I think we’re allowed a high-five and a group hug right now.

  I’ve booked us a weekend away to mark the start of the half-term break, mainly as a treat for the boys but also because I’ve been feeling a bit delicate (guilty) about my lack of quality time with them and wanted to re-create our France bubble. This time, however, instead of a Charentaise farmhouse we’re travelling less than ten miles down the road to stay in a lodge adjacent to a kids’ adventure park. (I haven’t sold that very well – it does have a hot tub.)

  Saturday 22nd

  11:07

  We made it to our lodge last night and, after an early get-up (yaaayyyy for 5 a.m. holiday wake-ups), I’m now being subjected to playing Guess Who with a four-year-old. So far it has gone like this:

  Take 1:

  Me:

  Right, do you know which character you are, as I will be asking you questions?

  Henry:

  Yes, I’m an old man with glasses.

  Take 2:

  Me:

  You haven’t asked me any questions about my character yet. Shall I help? For example, you could ask, ‘Does yours have a hat?’

  Henry:

  Does yours like pasta?

  Take 3 (after further
explanation):

  Henry:

  Does yours have blond hair?

  Me:

  Yes!

  Henry:

  Why?

  So pleased our lodge for the weekend has board games.

  13:31

  Oh my days, these kids drive me to the depths of despair, but there’s no denying their entertainment value is phenomenal – my sides are aching from laughing so hard. This morning Jude opened the door of the lodge and shouted, ‘Booby-fart-fart!’ at the poor guy cleaning the hot tub. Then Henry, after getting over the Guess Who flop, suggested we play dinosaurs (a game where our little plastic dinosaurs go into battle with each other). Obviously, my dinosaur has to die in the end, even if I’ve got the T-Rex and he’s got a tiny broken-legged herbivore, because his are allowed special powers and mine aren’t. He was really getting into the whole dinosaur thing, so I asked him if he would like me to help him learn all the dinosaurs by their proper names. He laughed at my suggestion, as though I had just said the stupidest thing he’d ever heard, before responding:

  ‘I do know their proper names! This one’s Tim.’

  You can’t say fairer than that.

  Sunday 23rd

  10:11

  I have been ‘caught short’ of feminine necessities on holiday for the second time this year. What an idiot. My periods are all over the place, anyway (stress, apparently), and I just hadn’t forecast one for this weekend. I woke up with the unwelcomely familiar crampy tummy, only this time when I delved into my bag I couldn’t find anything helpful – it seems the emergency-tampon-packing me from April was a one-hit wonder, as she’s never returned. Naturally, Aunt Flo has rocked up on a Sunday morning when the shop on site isn’t open and it seems ridiculous to send James out looking for a twenty-four-hour garage in my hour of need, so I have just done the most resourceful thing I could think of: I took a pair of kitchen scissors to a size 5 nappy. So now I am about to head into the adventure park with a cut-to-size makeshift sanitary nappy, desperately hoping that the absorbent core that keeps baby dry at night will deliver on its biggest challenge yet: an adult on the first day of her period climbing up outdoor play equipment and going on a log flume. I won’t be posting this on Instagram. I have no idea why I am writing about it here, to be honest, I’m just irked that I am having to spend a day on slides and go-karts when all I really want to do is curl up on my own in bed with a hot-water bottle. Five minutes on my own in the toilet would be a start. Henry has been interrogating me through the door as he puts all his weight against it in an attempt to burst in.

  ‘What are you doing in there, Mummy?’

  ‘Are you doing a poo?’

  ‘Why did you have a hurty-tummy tablet?’

  ‘Did you cut Jude’s nappy up?’

  ‘Can we see it?’

  ‘Are we going to the adventure zone now?’

  I’ll admit, I am wallowing in self-pity right now.

  I can’t even bleed in peace.

  19:32

  Do you know the sound I hate most in the world? Myself, as a parent. This has been me, all weekend:

  ‘Why can I hear crying? Can you stop doing that please? It’s not nice to smack your brother. What’s that? I can’t hear you when you whinge. You want a drink? OK, give me a minute. No, no, don’t put that in the bin. LEAVE the bin alone. All these toys, and you’re going for the bloody bin again. Don’t say “bloody”, it’s not nice, Mummy shouldn’t have said that. Why is this in here? Where’s the other bit? Can you leave the door alone, please? Yes, a drink, yes, I know, I’m just about to do it; no, I don’t know where the other bit is either – I just asked you! A drink? I said IN A MINUTE.’

  I’m not surprised the kids zone out. Maybe if they DID AS THEY WERE TOLD JUST ONE GODDAMN TIME, I wouldn’t drone on at them incessantly. Yes, I do have period rage today and hate everybody. Though, in brighter news, I’m no longer wearing an actual nappy.

  Wednesday 26th

  I think I’m having a mumlife crisis. Is that a thing? I think it’s a thing, and I think I’m having one. A few things have happened recently which have made me feel weird. Just this morning, I glanced at my reflection in the hallway mirror on my way out of the door and for the first time ever I saw visible lines around my eyes. ‘Crow’s feet’, they call them. Just like that, I have become the target market for wrinkle creams. To be fair, I had done a rubbish job of concealing my under-eye bags and the concealer had kind of collected in the wrinkles, making me look worse than I had looked to start with, but it’s not just the crow’s feet. There’s also the hair issue. I have hair on my face. And I don’t mean that kind of fine face fuzz like the skin of a peach you only see when the light hits it, I mean proper hair on my top lip and a few sprouty coarse strands on my chin like old ladies get. I had to tweezer a couple out just recently and their roots were so strong they left massive open pores which will no doubt become spots. (Despite the wrinkles and the old-lady hair, I also get small scatterings of whiteheads. There is no justice in that combination, surely?)

  My behaviour has changed, too, I think. Since Henry was born, there have been a few occasions when I have caught myself doing or saying things which would have been out of character for the pre-parent me. ‘Old before my time’ things, such as celebrating a good weather forecast because I have a huge volume of baby bibs to dry, or getting excited about going to the garden centre to look at alpine perennials. In such instances, I have heard myself say, ‘Jeez, I don’t know who I am any more! I’m such a granny,’ but I have only ever been jesting.

  These past few months, however, the plot has thickened. I’ve realised that, rather than just pretending to enjoy responsible adulthood and all its associated activities, I’ve actually genuinely started to enjoy it. For a long time I felt like a child acting the part of a grown-up – on the inside, I still felt eighteen years old and kept hoping that another adult (somebody more adulty) would turn up and tell me what to do. There are still times when being a proper grown-up makes me want to hide under the bed (particularly whenever tax is mentioned) but, on the whole, I have settled into doing all the humdrum household stuff I once hated and embraced the boring stuff that makes me feel twenty years older than I am. I don’t feel out of sorts doing it any more. Things have changed.

  I take pleasure in stacking the dishwasher properly and planning new walks for the weekend. I delight in finding discount codes that can be redeemed online and I genuinely punched the air with a little whoop when I first discovered those microfibre cloths that clean the screens on electrical devices without leaving them smeary. I spent almost all of Saturday night just gone looking at bins on Amazon, and do you know what? I enjoyed myself. At one stage I had three separate browsers open, comparing bin features and reviews (then looking for discount codes). I regularly lose entire evenings browsing houses I’ll never afford on Rightmove and Zoopla, and I understand why people have labelled such browsing ‘property porn’, because last week’s search of ‘houses in Exeter up to £5 million with 5+ bedrooms’ returned results surpassing any fantasy I could have uncovered with any other sort of browsing.

  As I start to feel more settled in my role as a grown-up, there’s a niggling voice that keeps asking whether this means I am losing my grip on the pre-parent youthful self I have been so determined to keep alive and kicking. She’s definitely still alive, but I don’t think she’s kicking – she doesn’t have time to kick, she’s too busy thinking about toy storage for the living room.

  Perhaps this is what growing up feels like and I’m just struggling to piece together the woman who loves garden centres and discount codes with the younger model who has always hated having to be the adult. It can’t be a midlife crisis, because I’m not even thirty – though I do periodically find myself compelled to do impulsive young-person things, like buy bomber jackets, join Snapchat and seriously consider whether I should get a tattoo – which is all textbook stuff, right? Get a tattoo? Have an affair? I don’t have time for an affair. Maybe I oug
ht to do something very obviously outrageous like buy a red convertible that I can’t fit the kids into, or dye my hair blue, or get my nipples pierced?

  I’m not sure I can be bothered.

  But I will buy some wrinkle cream. It has begun.

  Sunday 30th

  Earlier in the year I promised myself I would pull my finger out and arrange to do something fun with my best chum, Mary-Anne, who I have seen only twice in the past twelve months. One of those occasions was her brother’s funeral, which, unsurprisingly, was all kinds of heartbreaking. We were finally reunited for that long-overdue girlie catch-up last night, when the two of us, plus two of her Brighton pals, went on a night out in London to see a show. When I say a ‘show’, I don’t mean we headed to the theatre to watch Cats or Les Misérables in a sophisticated manner. (In hindsight, both those show options now sound very appealing.) No, I’m afraid that, instead, we donned our best ‘going out’ outfits and tottered to a seedy establishment to watch a male strip show. I’m not sure if I’m at liberty to name the show but I can tell you that the ‘dancers’ are pitched as being the sort of boys that dreams are made of. We had an absolute hoot – it was hysterical – but now, sitting on the train back to Devon this morning (I promised the Turner clan I’d be home by lunchtime), I can’t help but conclude that it was hysterical for the wrong reasons. I am still in shock. There are some things in life you just can’t unsee, and for anybody who hasn’t been to the male-strip-show-of-dreams I feel I owe it to you to outline just what it was that shocked me.