Making it to the Top of My Own List

There was a programme on last year called ‘Gates’.   It was a comedy about a set of parents who knew each other from the school gates.   Daughter had only just started school and I was able to take her and experience the gates for myself, and that programme terrified me.   I was off work under unpleasant circumstances and not my usual robust self, but I was terrified of meeting some of these characters.   One- up-manship, trying to run off with husbands…what was I letting myself in for?! But in actual fact, I’ve made some lovely school gate friends, and I don’t even do the school gates now. What’s lovely is that between us, we manage to piece together the goings on at school.   She said what?   He did what?   Our children have us like amateur Miss Marple’s on our own, imagining the worst, but a couple of well- placed texts, Facebook messages or if it’s possible, get togethers, and we work out a more likely version of the truth. I rely on a co...

There’s a Christmassy chill about today.   Something in the air on my lunchtime dash about town made me feel festive for a passing minute. When can one start to feel festive?   I think not until December.   This may well be because I have a December birthday and when I was a child there was no Christmas activity until my birthday cards had come down.   That served me well until I had Daughter, and then suddenly that didn’t leave enough time to get it all done. Husband and I had a Christmas shopping day on Wednesday.   We hit the big city (Liverpool) and we hit it hard.   I shopped like it was Christmas Eve, and with a couple of exceptions, pretty much ticked off the list.   We were the couple people didn’t want to sit next to on the train, so surrounded by bags were we.   And I have to admit, I feel a bit smug.   No horrendous Saturday shopping for us, we can relax, fill the house with festive smells like mulled wine and watch Chris...

There was a news article in the summer suggesting that we begin turning into our parents at 32.   I’m 38 now, so it got me wondering if I’ve well and truly become my mother. The thing that started me wondering was when I signed the slip volunteering to send homemade cakes into school for the school fair.   I had flashes of the scene in ‘I Don’t Know How She Does it!’ where the mother ‘distresses’ some shop-bought mince pies for the daughter to take to school as her contribution to the cake stall.   I can bake a nice enough cake, but I know already that the night before I’ll be up until all hours finishing it. How does that suggest I’ve become my mother?   It doesn’t, to be honest, because my mum would have also ticked all the ‘I can help out’ boxes that accompanied the notes.   Parties, Christmas Fairs, trips, reading, embroidery…my mum helped out at them all. Daughter would be lucky if I turned into my mother.   Without doubt, she was (is!) a ...

I get lost all the time.   You wouldn’t believe how lost I can get.   It’s like I lack any kind of internal compass.   It surprises me, because Father knows how to get everywhere, and equipped me in all my pre sat nav travelling with clear directions, generally punctuated by pub landmarks.   Sister is relatively savvy in a local way.   Mother is quietly skilled, but me – blindfold me and spin me around in the living room and I’d get lost on the way to the kitchen. It’s so bad that I have actually relied on Daughter (who’s 5, remember), to point out the way.   We were off on a family day trip and were setting the sat nav up, and she asked why we needed it.   So as not to get lost, I told her.   She looked at me with wide eyed incredulity.   ‘But we’ve been before!’.   So you see how challenged I am. I’ve had a couple of corkers in the space of a week.   They were both on a Thursday, and so I will be driving straight home fr...

Daughter is poorly.   I should have realised she was under the weather when she didn’t join in at the party we went to on Saturday afternoon at all, but being the unsociable flower she can be, I just thought it was par for the course .   Then Auntie T and Big Cousin C visited, and she was on top form, impressing them with her interpretative dance routines. On Sunday, she woke up at a time that should be illegal at the weekend.   Surely 7.20am is still the middle of the night on Sunday?   And why is it that I have to drag her out of (our) bed on a school day?   By 9.30am she was asleep again and our suspicions were roused.   She had a brief spell of cheerful wakefulness an hour later and then bam!   Asleep again.   She missed her new ballet class, much to the apparent distress of her Little Cousin E, who has been going to the class for an age.   And that was the hope of a pleasant Sunday gone.   She spent the day crying or sleeping. ...