Every Day Madness
Act your age, not your shoe size...
close encounters of the awkward kind
Act your age, not your shoe size...
There can be little in life more risible than being accused of behaving like a child by the additional, fully-grown manchild you keep at home. However – full disclosure – one's own behaviour may sometimes veer into puerility and occasionally, an infantile chucking of the toys out of the pram...
That doesn't mean it would be wise for any man to remark upon it though. Unless you want surrepticiously-harvested, fresh, green bogies dissolved in your lovingly-prepared coffee, stink finger 'head massages' and a magnificent wedgie finale that rips you a new A-hole as well as your boxers....
Public (Male) Health Warning: Childish capes, perfected over decades, then fermented with lashings of wifely wrath is a potent and potentially eye-watering combo. Move along, Gents, nothing to see here.....
You'll never eat alone!
close encounters of the awkward kind
Act your age, not your shoe size...
First rule of parenting: What's yours is yours, and what's mine's.... obviously yours too.
How could I be so thoughtless as to think I could nourish my own flesh with some tiny morsel of food and not selflessly hand it over to you forthwith.
"Sharing is CARING, Mummy. YOU SAID SO!!!!"
What a crock of shit that is.
Hence you start to put lashings of chilli or arse-melting swathes of French mustard on everything. "Oh Darling, I'm so sorry - this is jalapeño ice cream.... you wouldn't like it - very spicy..."
"Ooooh better not, Sweetheart - these are wasabi-flavour truffles. They'll make your tummy sore"
Or is has alcohol in it. Well, actually. It does now anyway. That's not even a fib.
close encounters of the awkward kind
close encounters of the awkward kind
close encounters of the awkward kind
"I'm sure it was well-meant...."
Fuck off.
As if having your porky paunch pointed out (Oh SHIT! Thanks - I hadn't noticed!!!) and patted uninvited by randoms throughout pregnancy is not undignified and unwelcome enough, it just gets better when it continues, despite you not ACTUALLY being pregnant any more.
Especially when your last 'baby' is already 4. Years, not months.
For the sake of fuck, People. Just don't go there. Unless you see the piss-stick still warm in-hand and have your reading glasses on, and are definitely not potentially seeing double, then don't ever say it out loud.
The fear
back to school, fuckers!
close encounters of the awkward kind
That moment when your bowels involuntarily contract in utter dread and dismay, and melt drop-wise out of your sphincter in a fear-fragranced puddle of doom.
Think back to the smug parental pride of the early days. Your swooning delight at every laboured, haphazard stroke and scribble your perfect little Matisse mastered.
Now, with the novelty well worn off and a critically low threshold for messy play and anything involving paint, pens or, GOD-FORFEND GLITTER, these are the words you fear most.
back to school, fuckers!
back to school, fuckers!
back to school, fuckers!
That moment on the first day after the holidays when everyone has managed back to stop twunting about and faffing long enough to get their coat and shoes on (albeit on the wrong feet, but you gave up sweating that minor detail eons ago). Finally they are all out of the door back to the daily grind and you realise you are completely alone for the first time in weeks.
The silence is deafening and you feel momentarily bereft not having anyone's annoying shit or whinge-fests to firefight...
That. Someone should bottle that shit and make it into a 40-hour candle.
Napalm it.
back to school, fuckers!
back to school, fuckers!
Without even getting on to the topic of poonamis, baby and toddler clothes see some serious tours of duty. The predominant theme of the early-days maternity-mood board centres on a pleasing palette of dysentery beige, mesenteric mustard and gastric green.
Moving on to 'bastard blueberries', 'tenacious tomato' and 'bugger-that beetroot' as they venture on to solids. Which – incidentally – is an absolute misnomer, because 'solid' certainly ISN'T a term that springs to mind as you scrape pungent poo-pâté from half-way up their back and both chubbsome thighs after they pancake a still-warm, freshly laid brown-egg far and wide by plonking themselves down arse-first in the middle of the hard kitchen floor with the blunt force of a pigeon meeting a patio door.
And yet – despite being entirely frazzled, sleep-deprived, emotionally exhausted and broken of both under-carriage and top deck – new mothers are encouraged to persist in the collective delusion that their little cherubs must only ever be dressed in pristine, spotlessly clean, shiny-like-new baby clothes. Bollocks. Burn it.
Newsflash: Life is too short to scrub, soak or stress over something that will only be promptly shat upon again within 2 minutes of wearing.
Apparently some people even iron baby-grows. Shiver.
Make mine a strong one!
Make mine a strong one!
Make mine a strong one!
Days like these...
I vividly remember once hearing quite matter of factly at a family dinner that my grandmother (who I sadly never knew - especially because she sounds like a total QUEEN) took her tea 'white with 2 sugars and a splash of gin*'.... No one else batted an eyelid and I remember thinking, "Woah back-up guys - I have questions..." but the conversation had moved on.
She was a teacher too - which raises practical questions, but also answers some too, I guess.
*I stand corrected. Apparently it was Rum. Phew. So that's OK then.