Unfurling.

I have something to do that is really important and in true distracted style, I am not doing it. I am procrastinating and am quite proud, in fact, of my efforts of distraction. Today I was supposed to sit down and work on said task but instead decided to take 4 boys to a.. I don’t even know what to refer to it as.. it’s not a theme park despite it’s multitude of slides – wet slides, dry slides, death slides – and apart from pilate-esque meerkats and the odd skunk, it’s not particularly zoo-like.. anyway, we went to this.. place.. and I exalted in my utter greatness as a halo-deserving parent.

No mean feat taking four boys anywhere as far as I am concerned, in fact there are times when taking any sort of child anywhere deserves a medal. This combo consisted of a 6, 7, 11 and 12 year old. The older ones are complete nutters and funny with it. Although the funny aspect can quickly escalate to ‘shut the fuck up or I will kill silence you’. The younger two often make absolutely no sense whatsoever in either their skills of story telling or constructing an argument. The youngest decided to regale us with invented stories of how an angry parent would behave stuck at a cashpoint machine behind an old, slow lady. It took us all a while to understand what he was saying and afterwards there was quite a large tumbleweed blowing across the A27.

I failed miserably today, too. I forgot to bring a book with me. Any form of literature would have been great. I would have even considered reading The Sun or the Daily Mail after 2 hours of sitting in various areas waiting for children to stop jumping up and down on huge bouncy pillows (which may I add, look nothing like pillows and if anyone ever offered me a pillow to use that even vaguely resembled one of these plasticky, trampoline, cheesy feet tinged type of things, I would throat punch* them). I had little signal and anyway, there are only so many times one can read national and local news about the Notre Dame fire or how a local policeman was shagging another officer and has been struck off as a result of it. Might be contentious but I would far rather we concentrated on how we are fucking up this poor planet and it’s other inhabitants than obsess about raising money to rebuild a historical palace that housed art and history. Pretty sure Grenfell Tower housed humans and whilst I don’t particularly like humans much of the time (despite training to work with them), I don’t like them being burned alive either because of capitalistic, political bullshit.

We arrived home and I fed us a lot of carbohydrates and fat so that I didn’t have to cook or contend with varying levels of fussiness and then proceeded to try and transfer a puzzle into a frame so that I could hang it on the youngest boy’s wall. I feel I need to explain something here. I don’t like puzzles all that much (they bring on furious bouts of anxiety for some reason) and I fucking hate Horrid Henry. However, in my desperate bid to pry away the kids from consoles, I went to a charity shop and bought the only 500 piece puzzle I could find – I didn’t buy a 1000 piece because I knew I would be rocking back and forth within 10 minutes. This puzzle also had the added bonus of having some fluorescent touches which delighted said child and therefore it was almost considered a hit. As he has his own room (since yesterday morning) I thought I would do a wonderfully thoughtful and creative thing and place the puzzle in a picture frame and hang it on his wall so that he could be looked on by the little bastard Henry throughout the night in fluorescent fury. As I carefully tried to transfer the puzzle pieces, the whole thing collapsed onto the floor. And a little bit of me died.

I am now sleeping in the front room on a hard, cheap sofa bed. It’s one of the ‘click clack’ systems – the only click clack sound I hear is my back falling apart as I try and turn over during the night. Not that I am getting much sleep as the darling puppy we have had for a couple of weeks, only likes to shit (diarrhoea) at night. Every 2 hours. She is going to the vets tomorrow for her second vaccination and I am looking forward to handing them a 3 day sample of her shit so that I can then be told I will have to pay inordinate amounts to be told that she has got fucking Crohn’s or something. On one hand, despite achy hips and broken spine, I quite like having a rather large bedroom, even it does mean that I appear to have kids trudging through it whenever they are hungry or thirsty.

Life isn’t all bitterness and resentment though. I am quietly trying to reconcile myself with the knowledge that my future is as a single woman once more. Difficult when the love you feel is still so strong and so passionate. But I feel that these next few months and years are going to be pivotal in many different ways. Quite how, I haven’t got a bloody clue.

*throat punch – a term donated to my vocabulary by a dear friend.