I’ve spent a few New Year’s Eves in A&E; as a patient, as a wife, and as a police officer. So I shouldn’t have been surprised to find myself there on the last day of 2012. I was making jewellery with the children (I am now the proud owner of a pair of mis-matched plastic […]
Parenting
Today
I spend most of my life with sadness buttoned up inside me, a scarf wound tightly around the lump in my throat. When sorrow seeps out through the gaps I add more buttons, another layer, another piece of armour. But it’s a tenacious beast, grief. It won’t be quietened, it won’t give up. Some days […]
Is Voldemort real?
Four-year-old E suffers from a vivid imagination. She seizes upon single issues and pursues them doggedly, often worrying for hours into the night about the hows and the whys and the whens. Unusually, for a mother as uncharitable as I am, I am enormously sympathetic to her. I think I was born worrying about something […]
Fireworks
I can’t recall the day the boys were born. Can’t play a film of it in my head, the way others can. The day is a series of snapshots, taken as though I were quite detached from it all; merely an observer passing through the maternity wards. Jolly midwives; grim-faced doctors; juddering contractions; trailing wires; […]
The behaviour chart
This is our behaviour chart. Impressive, isn’t it? It was drawn up one weekend when the disproportionate ratio of tantrums to coping strategies became too much to bear, and the rain had flooded us out of the park once again. I have never been a fan of sticker charts. This is partly because I loathe […]
Puddle-jumping
As the rain fell for what seemed like the hundredth day of the school holidays, my Facebook newsfeed filled up with smug status updates: ‘Wellies on – let’s go puddle-jumping!’ ‘Picnic in the rain lol’ Leaving aside the fact that ‘LOL’ should simply never appear in one’s own status update, nothing makes me reach for […]