Subject: Not urgent – Good home needed …..
Importance: Low
Item description:
1 careful owner
Good condition
Must be seen
If anyone wants a banana, I have one.
Subject: Not urgent – Good home needed …..
Importance: Low
Item description:
1 careful owner
Good condition
Must be seen
If anyone wants a banana, I have one.
Me: I have to think up performance indicators for the office.
Friend (who as only ever worked as a solicitor in a law firm): What are they?
Kate Evans has moved to Canada. She would like the Canadian nation to stop hugging her. She would like people to stop buying water filters. She has a baby too but she didn’t when I knew her first. Really. She is a cool blogger. I imagine her looking a bit like Kate Moss. I would like to emphasise that she really loves Canada, despite the hugging.
Jojo was appointed by the powers that be to enliven 20six, look after us and create a community. She did all that. She commented on new blogs, she pointed us towards interesting things and she solved our problems. When she left 20six, I packed up my virtual bag and left too. She’s a journalist with all sorts of items appearing in real publications that people pay good money for. She also still has a blog wherein she outlines the travails of keeping down a full time job as a free lance while looking after her son. She’s lovely.
I had an excellent day at work the other day. As I drove home, destroying the planet, I listened to this catchy song on the stereo. As far as I was aware, all three of my children were healthy and cheerful (I’m the ghost in the machine). We had a babysitter booked for that evening (I’m the sunset in the east). All was right in the world (I’m the trojan horse in Troy). This, I thought to myself, ecstatically, is having it all (tum, tum, tum, tum te tum, tum). Is it though, enough to make up for the other 364 days of the year (I’m the half-truth in the lie)?
And, I know, I’m one of the lucky ones. I enjoy my job. My colleagues are lovely, my boss is a pleasure to work with and the work is interesting. But in the mornings, Michael is particularly clingy and he clutches on to my clothing howling desperately when I leave (mercifully, Daniel is very phlegmatic). Even to go to the kitchen. My mother used to say, when the Princess was small “she was fine until you came in” and it’s the same with Michael. He’s fine and then he sees me and he starts to cry. It will pass I suppose.
But it’s hard. I hate to sound like Breda O’Brien, but I do think that the Irish government is wrong to try to force single mothers and every other type of mother out to work. It’s hard when you are going out to an interesting, reasonably well paid job; it must be bordering on the impossible, if you are going out to some horrible minimum wage job. Especially, if you have no partner with whom to share the childcare. And, let’s face it, what generally works best with childcare is part-time and, mostly, part-time jobs are neither the most interesting ones nor the ones with the best prospect of promotion. My cynical colleague says “worse, come the economic downturn, they’ll all be told to go home to tend their children, two part-time women is one full-time man”. I’m not sure I entirely share this view but I do believe that this whole dilemma will continue until everyone in society acknowledges that children have two parents, both of whom have responsibilities, and that to accommodate this, it is as normal for men to work part-time as for women. I guess I’ll be waiting a while, then.
It’s 38 degrees today. No air conditioning in our sunny flat. No air conditioning in my sunny office. And I am busy, busy, busy. Mr. Waffle isn’t exactly idle at work either but he’s been picking up a lot of the slack at home, while I hunch over a hot computer post 9.30 when our children finally go to bed. Need I say that both of us are up regularly during the night?
Yesterday the creche rang me to say that they would replace the cover of our car seat which got dirtied in their building works.
Me: Sorry, I didn’t see it, my husband collected the boys.
Them: But later when you saw it at home, how was it?
Me: My husband had put it in the wash. And he hung it out to dry and he dropped the boys to the creche this morning because I left the house at 7.30 for an 8.00 am meeting, so I have no idea what the damage is, but I’d say it washed out alright or he would have mentioned it.
Them: Silence.
Me: See, in our household, my husband looks after that kind of thing.
I feel that I am a cliché, running all day at work and running at home and only just managing to catch some of the balls that are in the air. At work, if I don’t write something down, I have no chance of remembering it and even then, some of my notes from the previous day can be baffling (is that somebody’s name, a new policy initiative, what?). As well as having a lot of the kind of competing deadlines that interviewers love to ask about we have a new trainee who is keen as mustard and entirely ignorant about what we do. This combination is proving a little difficult in the short term.
Yesterday, the boys were the last kiddies in the creche and the Princess was the last one waiting to be picked up from her course, the second last little soul having been picked up by her mother 50 minutes previously. The Princess was sitting on her own in a big room at a little table colouring conscientiously under the, slightly dour, supervision of a middle aged man (I suppose, it was hot and he wanted to go home). It was depressing.
Last night Michael woke up with a temperature and was up for a couple of hours. Being Michael, he was cheerful but he was hot. Since it was 30 degrees in the boys’ room anyway, I suspect that didn’t help. The Princess woke up with a temperature. Mr. Waffle took the morning off to tend to her but poor old Michael recovered so well that he was escorted to the creche along with our only healthy child and a message to them to call me, if he seemed unhappy (I called them, he was described as being as happy as someone could be with a temperature of 39 when it’s 39 degrees outside – I will have to rescue him when the Princess wakes from her nap). During the morning Mr. Waffle called to say that the Princess was very cheerful but he had taken her to the pharmacy to get something for her heat rash and they said “that’s no heat rash, that’s chicken poxâ€. What do you think might be wrong with Michael, people?
I had a dreadful trip. I scraped the hired car. I spent an hour or so circulating the airport but always ending up back on the motorway facing in the wrong direction in rush hour traffic instead of safely in the terminal building. When I tried to fill the car with petrol, it would only fill three quarters full. The little thing kept clicking. The man in the garage couldn’t come and help me as he was alone behind the till. I paid in three different installments, the last two being for sums of the order of 40 cents and 20 cents.
Pitched past pitch of grief
As I was complaining to the man behind the counter about this, I looked in my bag for change and suddenly realised that I had left my passport in the hotel room. An hour’s drive away. And that was assuming that I managed to get into the airport first go. I blurted out my problem to the man in the garage. “That’s the best laugh I’ve had all day”. The kindness of strangers. I drove into the airport pondering my options. I decided that I would hand in my hire car and try to change my flight and get the train back to the hotel (who had by phone confirmed that they had my passport).
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
I was feeling a bit mournful as I handed back the car to Messrs. Evil Avis, we couldn’t care less and my mood was not improved by discovering that I would have to pay 300 euros for my tiny dent. And petrol money (“probably air in the tank”). I was lingering at the Avis desk negotiating the details with the man when I had a brilliant idea; I would try to fly home on my Belgian ID.
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
I got into the airport. Passed through secuity feeling a little tense as I was now late and I felt that it might take some time to convince officials that I could travel on my ID. The security people stopped my briefcase and I could see them starting to huddle round the telly thing. Four men looked at it baffled. “It’s a breast pump” I said. I think the customs man who sped through my bag was marginally more embarassed than me (what, yes, ok, I’m still breastfeeding, leave me alone, don’t I have enough problems – if anyone so much mentions one word about breastfed babies not sleeping he or she will be shot).
Here creep, Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind
They did, in fact, take my ID without a blink. Until I got to Belgium where, perversely, they insisted on seeing my passport. I said I didn’t have it and the nice woman said “we may have to put you in the holding pen but I’m sure they’ll let you out shortly”. And I said “please, please let me home to my 3 small children and my poor husband who may well divorce me, if I don’t get back shortly” and she laughed and said “oh alright in you go”.
each day dies with sleep
Got home about 23.30 and remembered that I didn’t have any keys because our childminder had taken two sets to the Philippines, our cleaner one set to Poland and the publishing exec a set to London (our keys and globalisation, comments please, in your own time) and I had given my set to the royal grandparents so that they would be able to leave the house with her highness while I was gone. Rang the doorbell and woke the house. Collapsed into bed.
I suspect that I didn’t feel as badly as Gerard Manley Hopkins when he wrote “No worst, there is none” (as my mother is fond of saying “there’s always someone worse off than yourself”) but my English teacher had a special devotion to him and to this poem in particular and whenever things are not going my way it runs through my head and maybe now it will run through yours. Always the ray of sunshine spreading joy and happiness on the internet.
I see that despite the football, University Challenge is back. I’m videoing it. I told one of my colleagues this [the one from Northern Ireland, she is entirely unlike anyone else I’ve ever met from the North, if she were in charge there, it wouldn’t be “Ulster says NO†it would be, “Ulster says ‘oh alright, go on then, if you want’â€. I digress]. She said “Oh, my God, what nerds, you are videotaping University Challenge!†Pause. “I like to watch it liveâ€. Mind you, I’m glad that I didn’t given her extra ammunition by telling her that we were going to spend the bulk of our evening organising our Summer holidays on a spread sheet. Look, it’s complex: the creche is closed for a month, the Princess has 9 weeks off school and our childminder is going to the Philippines for 5 weeks. Is there anything as dull as other people’s childcare arrangements? Perhaps I should stop while I still can.