Mothers and sons 2

Yesterday was blissful. I only realised how blissful, when I woke up last night and realised I was laughing in my dreams. I like the idea of laughter in the dark. I fell in love with my husband for any number of reasons - one of them a habit of laughing in his sleep. (I presumed, of course, that he was not laughing at me.) I had not realised, I could snatch the habit and make it mine.

Daffodils die back. You think: "Shame, glory gone." Then, tulips arrive: "Ta-da". Trees applaud with branches of budding leaves and Spring moves on. I spent a spring yesterday with my six-year-old. Him and me. Just him and me. Innocent in gardens. We watched the sea spill down stone stairs, chased each other through avenues of pink blushed blossom and cast coin wishes. Northumberland is full of castles. He wants to live in one. He told out his wish, loud and proud and made a listening stranger laugh. As for me, I cannot tell my wish. The day moved on; we plunged back into another Eden, took a jar and microscope and watched insects turn to monsters. Naturally, we tamed them and set them free.

Later, a strange thing happened. The garden at my cottage has a secret, dappled corner where a stone bench rests its tired back against a wall. Purple flowering aubretia spills over the wall down to the moss matted, wooden seat. A small plaque with an engraving is embedded in the bench: "The kiss of the sun for pardon, the song of the birds for mirth. One is nearer God's heart in a garden, Than anywhere else on earth." The man who created our beautiful cottage garden has been dead for four years. I liked him extremely. I more than liked him. The plaque was in his mother's garden; when she died, he found a place for it in his. It reminds me of him and I like to be reminded. Last night, I looked out of the kitchen window of this rented house. I was standing by the sink. I try not to stand by the sink. I find standing by the sink attracts the washing up. I have lived here 10 weeks. Yesterday, I looked up to see a small stone birdbath standing in the garden. On the side of the bowl, I could make out the faint tracery of letters: "The kiss of the sun...." Ever felt you were meant to be some place?

Blonde bombshell

I was reading the boys a bedtime story and my six-year-old starts combing through my hair with his fingers. It reminds me that I haven't checked for nits for a while and I really should. Check the children that is, not me. If I get nits, I am shooting myself. He says: "Mummy, you have blonde bits in your hair like I do." I think this unlikely. I am the dullest and most resolute of brunettes. He pulls my hair closer to his eyes as if he was thinking of buying it. "A sort of grey blonde." I know my hair is now threaded with grey. I just pretend not to.

There is an advantage in having children late in life aside from an impressive number of City Breaks in your thirties; people presume you are younger than you are. I have a baby. That means I could be anything between a clueless 13 and an ambitious 47ish.(Older, if I was desperate or deluded.) Ofcourse, I do not have spots and I do have grey hair, apparent even to juveniles. That rules me out as a teenage mother then. According to a photo, a friend sent me this week, when I smile I also have score marks down from my eyes, stretching diagonally across my cheeks out to my ears. I was not impressed. Who sends their friend a photo of herself looking like her granny? I had noticed the lines criss-crossing my face when I got up in the morning but I hoped they shook themselves out after a few hours. They do not shake themselves out.

I can no longer fool myself. Nobody in their right minds would think I was in my twenties. I am clinging onto the semblance of thirty-something looks and rapidly losing my grip. The last time I went to London, the only men to eye me up were in their sixties. When did that happen? When did I turn into eye-candy for granddads? I am old. My children have started to notice. That is how old I am.

The Jungle Book

If I cry, do I look like a victim? Probably. Do I care about looking like a victim? Probably not. I am old and, for that matter, mean enough not to care how I look. I certainly wanted to cry this morning when a friend who was in school last week, said he had noticed that my son was unusually quiet and anonymous in class. My friend described him as "a different boy". Another person described my son's face, normally responsive, as "set" in the last recent while. Sheesh! This afternoon I went up to school to see for myself what was going on. I was informed that the child who had bitten him yesterday, today managed to "accidentally" sit on my son's head. The boy apologised - as you do when you accidentally sit on someone's head. OK, I will buy the fact you can accidentally sit on someone's head. It is possible; a shove, a fall-over, a stumble. Not quite sure about the follow-through kick to the hip. School is a jungle. As an adult, you know deep down that school is a dangerous place, you just choose to forget the dank hurt and slavering darkness. Until the day bleeds out into a tropical sky and you watch your own child disappear into the leaf-heavy gloom, whistling as he goes.

I am assured the school is taking it seriously. The committed and professional teachers seem as concerned as I am. There have been conversations and meetings; next week we go back for an official update with the head who is a woman in whom I have every confidence. You trust teachers with your children's lives, quite literally. I have no idea what happens when you do not trust the teaching staff. Panic horribly and home educate? God. The thought of home schooling brings me out in shingles. My children would get bullied then, by me.

In the meantime, like nice middle-class parents, we are checking with a nice middle-class doctor in case there are "spatial awareness" problems with our son. I am not quite sure how spatially aware you have to be to avoid having your head sat on. In any event, I have issued my son with the first few pages of his jungle survival guide: "Do not sit next to him. Do not stand near him. Do not talk to him. Do not play with him. Do not have anything to do with him. Do not pull a tiger's tail." He looked at me blankly: "What tiger?"

Holiday blues

I have gone away and left everyone behind. It is just me for a week and I am guilt-wracked and tense about the whole idea of a holiday on my own. Not so guilty that I did not get on the plane though. It has been such a long time since it was just me that I do not know if I can do it any more. What if I am really bad company?

I left my husband a note.

Be patient with the children
Be more patient than I am with the children
Remember the six-year-old likes peas, hates beans
Remember the four-year-old hates peas, likes beans
Both eat raw carrots but hate boiled carrots
Do not try to make them eat boiled carrots
Remember the six-year-old needs a Comic Relief red nose for school on Friday
If the six-year-old has a red nose, the four-year-old will want one
Best get the baby one so she does not feel left out
Remember to ring my mother at least once while I am away
Remember to hear the baby if she cries at night
Remember the binmen come on Tuesdays
Remember you love me.

Back soon.

A Table Monarch

"When I'm king," said my four-year-old tonight, fork in hand, pasta sauce on face, "everyone will wear pants on their head. Apart from Granny. I love Granny."

Daddy's home

My husband is back. This is a good thing because I get to point the children at him and say: "Look children, daddy is back. Mummy is just going for a bath. I'll be out in three days." We have only had one row so far because he made us late for a children's party. We are driving along; he is behind the wheel and I am wrapping the fleecey, black, baa-lamb puppet present in paper that says "Merry Christmas". My husband has been home for three hours. I am not in a good mood. I would go so far as to say, I am in a bad mood. Snipping off a dangling piece of cellotape, I said: "This party was really important to the boys. I really did not want us to be late for it but you had to take them out. You couldn't just let them play for half an hour and get them ready. If I had been on my own with them, we would not be late." My husband psshawed (if that's a word, he made that sort of clapped out steam engine sound anyway) and snarled: "That's outrageous." All this, by the way, in glorious sunshine, driving too fast along country roads which are too narrow . My six-year-old spoke up for sanity in the back. "Daddy's been away for a long time Mummy. He's still getting used to it. OK?" I hate the way men make you feel so unreasonable.

Today

This cash for honours thing is gaining currency. As BBC Radio 4's Today programme mumbled on, my four-year-old lifted his bed-haired head from his rice krispies to ask: "Is Tony Blair going to prison?". Milk dripped from his spoon as he waited for my answer. "No," I said, "I very much doubt it." Difficult to judge which way my four-year-old would jump if breakfast focus push came to infant ballot but his brother is firmly behind TB. Already on his muffin, my six-year-old chimed in: "I think Prime Ministers should be allowed to do what they want." That's TB and a six-year-old then.

Smile for the camera

The album which keeps my baby photographs is worn and grimy with the years - a bit like me. It is a pale and padded plastic blue with white buttons; held whole with tape that has begun to curl and a sorry silk tassel whose burlesque days are through. When you open it, joints creak and it sighs a little. The inside cover, once virgin cream, is now a rusting and unpleasant brown, as if one day, I snatched it from a hearth where it was smouldering.

Many of its flattened subjects hold me tight in there and once loved me. Some still do. But others I could not keep by me: a father, two grandmothers, godmother, godfather, a curly-haired aunty and her cross-legged son. The blood list lost, goes on. Then, they were mine and I clutched their fingers. Now, they are mine only in memories and an album - for as long as they smile "Cheese" and the page is open.

I think the album sad, though it show-cases a content and lace-dressed child. Perhaps the thought that these days have come and gone, arrives too soon for me. On the very first page, a suited man relaxes, leaning against the rails on the windy prom at Blackpool; a cigarette between his fingers. You can only lean so long. Look again, he is sitting down on a wooden bench, my mother's leather handbag and a parcel beside him. The snaps are of my father who should perhaps have tossed the cigarette into the cold black and white sea behind him. My mother tells me I was six weeks old when she left with him for three or four days in Blackpool. Her husband - the first - my brand new father, had not confessed to coughing blood but pleaded for a seaside break. "I didn't want to leave you," she tells me, "but I knew he wasn't well and so we went."

One year and eight snap-filled pages later, the cigarette has quite gone out, the coughing stopped and there is no more suited man. Instead, another trip this time to Ireland; the camera shutter closes on a young matron in a tilted, black straw hat with her solemn fat-faced babe. My widow-weeded mother holds me forever in her arms in front of roses, river, bridge and church. He may be gone but I am her victory over death, a triumph in pantaloons and bonnet. I think she may be sad then. I'm sure she is, as she carries me around with her, a memory of him, until, in the way of things, she meets another kindly father man, marries him and smiles again.

Here is the confusion. I opened the album up because twice lately, I have had the sensation as I looked at my own daughter, that I was looking at myself. I never felt that with the boys. My sons are my lions; terrorsome and grand. See how they go; march and strut and shout. But the other day, as I gazed at my baby standing proud in the grass, deciding should she walk or not, I felt: "That's me. I'm looking at myself". Again today, I held her in my arms at the bathroom sink, glanced up at the mirror and thought again: "That baby in my arms. That's me." So I dug out this relic of the past to see if my baby-self had escaped her black sugar-paper prison. But no, she was still there, safe in her mother's arms.

That Cabaret Life

Why won't children let their mothers sing? I like to sing. Admittedly, I can only remember the first line of any song. Still, I like to sing that line and do it tunefully. But children like to keep their songbirds caged and dark. "Don't sing," my youngest son dictates from the table where he plays with plastic soldiers, guns moulded and ready. "I mean it. Don't sing." He fires a cannon and three men die in friendly fire. "Why not?" I ask, my painted smile slipping as I stand in the spotlit darkness of my kitchen cabaret. "Why can't mummy sing?" I lob my question into the blackness and hear my six-year-old's voice: "We like it quiet." This from boys who moments before, arms spread wide and mouths a-roar, were jet screaming round the table. The super trouper flickers and turns off.

Picking up the pieces

I broke my six-year-old's favorite egg cup. This was not good. I was trying really hard at breakfast. I had scrambled some eggs for one of them, boiled an egg for another, made porridge on request, fed the baby, spread three different flavour jams (pear and raspberry, raspberry and strawberry) in stripes on one piece of bread. I had not laid down silent on the crumb-strewn floor. I remained upright and mobile at all times. Then I broke the egg cup. Technically, the baby broke it, but really it was me because I said to my eldest: "She'll be fine with it, don't be silly" when she grabbed it and he wanted to take it back from her. She looked straight into my eyes to thank me for my trust in her, slowly opened her porridgy fingers and dropped it. The cup, last year's gift from the Easter Bunny, smashed leaving a yellow spotted cheetah holding nothing but disappointment in his arms. My six-year-old gulped, he folded his arms together, laid them on the table and buried his head in them. The despair I think was half because of the egg-cup and half because of me. My four-year-old came over. He laid a consoling little hand on his brother's heaving back. "Never mind," he said, "you can share my lion."

In sickness and in health

My morning so far.

I am asleep in a large wooden bed, unusually a husband slumbering by my side. I do not see enough of this bed. I like it. I enjoy its company but somehow we have drifted apart. I have been asleep for nearly two hours. The hands of the Mickey Mouse ticking clock march on and reach their destination. It is 2.40am. The silence lets out its breath and the door opens to reveal my six year old caught in the landing light. "Mummy, I feel like I'm going to be....bleaurgh". Our rented house has carpets. I sweep the wretched boy into the bathroom, trailing sickness after us and my husband wrenches himself from the warmth of the bed to fetch a bucket with soapy water for the carpet. My son refuses to go back to any bed but the one in my office so he and I curl up together with an empty tupperware box close by in case of emergencies. (Best to say "No thank you" to biscuits when the biscuit tin is full in my house although I am always very careful to wash it afterwards.) My poor white-faced, black-eyed child is sick at 3.15am and again at 4.20am. At 5.45am, his sister wakes up to be fed and I bring her in to bed. She is far from happy when she has to stop at 5.55am when her brother needs the biscuit tin again. I tuck the poorly one up and take the baby downstairs for a cock's crow breakfast with my husband. At 6.55am, he leaves for London. "Bye, darling," baby on my hip, I wave to him cheerily as he drives away.

When my four-year-old comes down for breakfast, I pour him a china bowl of strange rice crispy shapes, add semi-skimmed milk and lie on the kitchen floor with a soft woollen jumper for a pillow. The baby comes over to sit down on my head, then crawls away again. As I lie there, slightly chilly, I debate whether curling up on the kitchen floor is a symptom of mental illness and decide no one can see me so who cares. I have to get up when the doorbell rings. A mechanic stands waiting to fix the Volvo. I cannot find the keys. I say: "Give me a minute," and close the door. I clench my fists and beat my head with them to see if that will help me find them. It does.

Surprisingly, I found the china bowl for cereal without self-harming. My cousin who came to visit, organised my kitchen with startling ferocity. She talked me through her reasons for putting pots, pans and raspberry jams away. They have been placed around my borrowed cupboards and shelves with the same gimlet-eyed efficiency Wellington would use to deploy his troops in battle. Since I am the sort of general who would be hopping up and down with one foot in his shiny leather boot looking for the other one when the trumpet sounded, I have not got a clue where anything is. Last night, I ate my dinner with a spatula.

Machine versus man

All weekend machines conspired against me. I heard them whispering. The TV is ofcourse a dead zone, sulking because my husband refused to get it a satellite companion. They have taken revenge because a man in overalls fixed the phone when they believe it had the right to a duvet day or two. Worse than being without a phone was the fact I kept forgetting it did not work and would pick up the receiver and say "hello, hello?" like someone in a 1930's movie summoning a monochrome operator to the drama. I cannot even use my mobile. Up here, people have mobiles but more in hope than any expectation of using them. What century do we live in? Why is it necessary to stand by the bedroom window, open the wooden shutters and stand on one leg to make a call. The landline had only just been teased into submission when the car gave up the ghost. I cannot be sure but I think I hurt the Volvo's feelings when I said we had too many cars. This morning, my husband arrived just past 2am on a 24 hour stopover between work crises. He found me waiting for him, curled up in the darkness beneath a green silk quilt with a sick six-year-old. "How are you?" he whispered. "He's sick and the car won't start" I said. Tonight, my computer joined the ranks of the conspirators. "I'm not working," it told me, "I don't like what you write."

Ding Dong

There are some days so bad, the only thing which could redeem them is a proposal of marriage. Friday was one of them. As I hunkered down by my pyjama-clad four-year-old to start cleaning his perfect milk teeth, he gazed intensely into my eyes. "When I'm big, I want to marry you." He paused. "If you're still alive."

So long. Farewell.

That went well. The rented house looks like a shipwreck. Clothes, books, toys and bedding are strewn across each and every room while in the hallway, plastic binbags breed like something from a low-budget sci-fi movie. I keep thinking: "Socks for school tomorrow" and realise I have no idea where they are. Then I think: "Knife, I need a knife for the bread". No idea either. I may send the boys to school wearing saucepans on their feet.

Then, it all got much worse because my husband left to catch the train for London. He is away for three weeks on a work deadline. Just before he left, the children wanted a hug so he went upstairs to kiss them goodbye. This gave me the chance to pour and swallow the remains of a bottle of chablis in the kitchen and burst into tears. I had just got my act together and he came down again to tell me he had screwed the tops of the children's wardrobes on so they would not come down and kill them but I had to ring the TV repair man tomorrow because the TV is not working. I stopped crying at the thought of three weeks with three children and no TV. But by the time we said goodbye, I was already snuffling away again. As he headed into the night with his smart trolley-dolly suitcase on wheels, I closed the heavy wooden door behind him and went back to the kitchen to pour another glass of whatever I could find. Cooking oil probably. I was just about holding it together till I heard the siren wail of my six-year-old from the top of the stairs. Two minutes later and my husband cracked open the door to slide in a stray children's car seat; he glanced up the staircase to find a sobbing six-year-old dressed in a robots' sleepsuit with his legs wrapped round his crying mother. "We'll be fine. Go and get your train. Hurry up or you'll miss it." I waved him away. As the door closed heavily behind him again, my four-year-old came out of the bedroom. He kelt down and kissed me: "I love you mummy," he said and lay next to us on his tummy as I patted his brother's back and rocked him gently back and forth. "Shush now," I whispered. "Shush. We'll be fine."