Je Travaille

I know how to speed up time. I know how to make the next few days whip by in a blurry flash.

I have signed myself up for back-to-back, wall-to-wall, bumper-to-bumper deadlines. If I get my head up for three seconds betweeen tasks, it will be a miracle. I will surely pay the price for this later, but for now it's what I need. A headlong, mindless lurch to 9am Monday with no room to think in between.

Some days, days like these, I want them to last forever. Other days, like now, I can't get them over quickly enough.

My head is down, my shoulder is to the wheel. Tick tock, tick tock.

Woodentop

When I look back through my diaries, my scribbles, my notebooks, it’s always been there. The knowledge that deep down, there is nothing to find. Nothing interesting, nothing good, nothing worthwhile.

Getting to know me is like the dread childhood experience of being given a matryoshka. What could be at the centre of something so interesting, so carefully crafted, so intriguing? Work your way through the elaborately decorated layers to reach the middle, and all you find is a nub of plain wood.

The whole of my life is designed around trying to conceal this fact.

Don’t bother to come close, dig down. You’ll only end up disappointed, like everyone who went before you.

Mommie Dearest

Cold. Dark. November. A Monday morning of torrential rains and gale force winds, mud on the roads, leaves on the line.

“Mummy, are you coming to my concert tonight? It’s at 4 o’clock. I’m doing three solos”.

Entirely uninformed of this event, I am about to disappear to a series of meetings and workshops that will only bring me back just before bed time. And Daddy is overseas. I explain this as gently, as kindly as I can.

"If you were a proper mummy, you would come to my concert instead of going to work”.

She’s crestfallen, understandably. I deaden my inner howl of anguish and explain that I would love to come to the concert, but that I am working hard so that they have the chance to go to such a lovely school with all the opportunities for music lessons and dancing and performances and so forth.

“But if we didn’t go to private school, you wouldn’t have to go to work so much. You could do your writing in the daytime and pick us up in the afternoons. We could go to the park together and have hot chocolate, and we’d still get good marks because you could help us with our homework. It would be like when you have a day off and you are making tea while we are doing our maths, and it’s all cosy in the kitchen and we’re laughing”.

Well, yes.

I went to my meetings. Two workshops with small businesses struggling in the construction sector. An OFSTED inspection at the College where I am a governor, which provides vocational training in deprived areas of the inner city and is fighting for survival. I thought that, on balance, they were lucky girls.

I watched the solos later, when I finally got home. Grainy mobile phone footage and crackly sound. It still brought tears to my eyes. All sorts of reasons.

Start the Week

The kitten begins the week with her tail between her legs. Has listened to some unpleasant home truths and is on a verbal warning.

School Daze

I go through phases where I think I've done a good job bringing up my girls, and then periods where I think I'm making a bit of a hash of it.  The main priority I've always given myself is to make sure that they don't grow up feeling as negative about themselves as I and many of my generation do.  I'm sure this must be where my Impostor Syndrome began  -  it's taken us lot a long time to become comfortable in our own skins, and even now we're very unforgiving of ourselves.

My older daughter had her first period last month  -  and I quietly congratulated myself on the fact that she was confident, unfazed, laid back and there was a general absence of drama about the whole thing.  I didn't want it to be the dirty, mysterious, somewhat shameful monthly occurence that it was when I was her age.

I remember I started on 14 November 1978. I had won the form prize the year before, and it was Speech Day that evening.  I had to walk across the stage to collect my plaque, and remembered having agonies of self-consciousness and concerns that you can only begin to imagine.  Thing 1, having been fully prepared and kitted out in advance, just casually mentioned at bed time "I started my periods today" and it was all a bit of a non-event.

Not for her the enormous towels the size of a mattress, attached by a system of belts and loops that was incredibly complicated yet totally failed to maintain the damn thing in anywhere near the right position.  Not for her the monthly horror of the requirement to run the gauntlet of Michelle and Renetta and their sinister fiefdom of the toilets.  Not for her the terror of the sanitary incinerator with its fiery roar and the big metal chute that we called the Jaws of Hell.

Still seems a shame though, growing up so quickly, to have started menstruating while you're still wearing Mickey Mouse pants. Girls these days have a different set of challenges.

Thing 2, on the other hand, makes that 18 months between them look like a million miles. She phoned me when I was on the train to complain that she couldn't finish her maths homework because she had a really bad neck ache.  Like any mother, I immediately assumed she had meningitis, and started grilling her about whether she had a headache if she looked at the light.

"I can't look at the light, my neck hurts too much if I try to do that".   Panic.  I'm on my way, fast as I can.

When I arrived home, all however seemed fine, and the neck ache had gone. "It only hurts when I do my maths". Ah, that sort of neck ache: I think I know that. "But I haven't finished my maths yet, so now you're back, you can help me".

We went upstairs together to the computer. For the first time ever, the maths homework had been issued electronically, on the new school memory stick.  How times change  -  I started doing maths with a slide rule and log book. The source of the neck ache became immediately obvious. Thing 2 was attempting to complete the homework from the memory stick whilst still wearing the memory stick on the nice blue school lanyard around her neck.

"We were told not to take it off the Lampard", she explained.  "The lanyard", I corrected. "Yes, the Lampard".   Her head was almost resting on the keyboard (our USB port is in the side of the screen) and so it was hard for her to type and look up at the sums from this angle. I could see it was indeed hurting her neck a lot.  We decided to try it by leaving the memory stick on the Lampard as instructed, but removing the whole affair from around her neck so she could sit up properly.  She smiled and gave me a hug. "Mummy you are so amazingly clever". Oh yes.

"Something exciting happened to me today", she said. "I have been chosen to put a wreath on the war memorial, from the school".  That's nice. "In England, we have poppies for remembrance. In France they have a different flower, and it's our school flower so we're going to have a circle of those made up and I am going to march up and put it on".  What is this school flower, then? "It's a cauliflower".

A wreath of cauliflowers for Remembrance Sunday? Really?????

She was insistent.  Outraged at my questioning.  In the end, I did the unthinkable and asked Thing 1. What's the school flower?

"The cornflower". Ah.

Venus and Mars?

I was going to say I hate books like this, but I realise I've never actually read one.  Mainly because I feel I would hate it. Usually I'm against facile gender stereotyping  -  and anyway I'm superb at reading maps.

However I do sometimes wonder whether they may be some truth in these things.  My elder daughter, for instance, as soon as she could speak asked me to buy her a pink sparkly top and a toy ironing board.  After that she wanted a toy vacuum cleaner, toy dustpan and brush and toy cooker.  Imagine my disgust.

Then my nephew arrived, cast his eyes around the playroom and siezed the broom in his hand. Pulled off the head, and triumphantly announced "I've got a sword, and I'm going to kill you all". (We don't have guns in the playroom, but I do still let the kids have soldiers with their boiled eggs, rather than peacekeepers).

My book-writer friend teased me when he saw my notes, listing one of the themes for my novel as "the women do all the tough stuff and the men are a bit crap".  I admit I deserve to be ribbed about that. 

His latest work, on the other hand, is going to be a boy's-own tale of adventure and derring-do. "Are there any women at all?" I wondered. "Erm, yes...." he mumbled. "There is one. She's housebound".

Hmmmm.

I think between us, we could write a set of well-rounded characters.  And then everyone could find them boring, rather than just half the reading public.

Breach

Once again, he’s been looking through my things. My bedside drawers. My Writing folder on my laptop. The Personal folder in my Outlook. My diaries even, who knows?

My sense of horror is palpable. Of all the conventions he breaks in our relationship, I feel this is the worst. The invasion of my privacy by a person whose constant mantras are “give me space”, “leave me alone”, feels like an outrage.

I would never do this. Never look in his wallet, never open his post, never snoop through his drawers or his laptop or his phone. Surely everyone is allowed their personal space?

Oddly, I feel it may be the straw that finally breaks this camel’s back. The lack of respect for me as a private individual who would be allowed my own things is I suppose just a confirmation of the way he treats me in other ways. Like a child, like a chattel.

Is it, I wonder, possible to live with someone who cannot afford me even that basic degree of courtesy? Is it, I wonder, possible to live in a house where I may not feel at home? I would rather be on my own.

I discovered this at the weekend and I’ve been mulling it over the last couple of days. I don’t want to jump to a hasty conclusion. But I don’t think I want to be with a man who would not take any of the things I offered, but would steal my private thoughts without asking.

I am the closest I have ever been to leaving. Just to work out what to do about the girls.