Monthly Archives: February 2013

Boys will be boys

My blog pal over at Circles in the Sand wrote a charming little post this week about having boys. It made me smile because she’s right, it doesn’t matter how much you try to produce a child without conforming to stereotypical behaviour, nature always wins out.

Boys are mental. I never appreciated until I had a small one in the house, how much energy they use and how much food they consume. I never think of mine as being a particularly gung-ho kind of a boy, yet he still insists on talking, singing, playing, arguing, and running from dawn to dusk, permanently on the move, climbing, jumping, and using me as a wrestling dummy. The sheer exhaustion caused by bringing up a boy, any boy, should not be underestimated.

A grey toy car, n°1

Of course when they hit puberty and retire to their rooms with porn, acne and terrible smelling clothes, we mothers of sons will get a bit of a break. Whilst they sit languishing over computer games and rap music or alternatively run about on a field with a ball of some description, we will be gazing from the sidelines and merely be in charge of providing food (this is my vision; don’t ruin it for me). The mothers of girls, on the other hand, will be dealing with horrid younger versions of themselves getting into trouble at every given opportunity whilst being overly emotional and completely foul at the same time. All those years drinking coffee and watching their little girls strut about in dressing up clothes or sitting doing ‘colouring in’ will fade into a grey memory as they attempt to dissuade them from older men with cars and clothes small enough to fit a Barbie doll.

But, in the spirit of ‘enjoy it while you can’ I try not to imagine those heady days when I might not claw my way to 7pm and a bottle of wine after an afternoon spent throwing, catching, pretending to sleep/eat/fly/drive/be at school/belly dance etc. etc. I try not to yearn for a time when I don’t have to stick the TV on just to have a conversation that doesn’t involve the words ‘Why?’ or ‘Because’ or ‘be careful‘ or ‘mind my hair/sofa/your fingers’, or ‘get down/sit down’ (delete as appropriate).

And right now, my son really is very enjoyable. Despite being relentless. So I really do have a lot of love for him, and as I watch him grow from a baby to a little man I am so glad to be part of this series of special moments. And special they are. For example, this morning, at breakfast, he gazed up at me and said in his very serious voice, “Mummy, it would be very sad if everyone in the house died. Then I would be all alone.”  (I’m not sure where his current obsession with death came from but it seems he has some issues to work out)

“Yes, that would be very sad,” I replied. “But it’s not going to happen, so you don’t need to worry about it.”

“Mummy, I don’t want to die,” he said, “you have to look after me very well so I don’t.”

I gathered him up in my arms and got the best little boy cuddle ever. “Of course I will look after you, you are my number one boy, and I will always look after you.” I replied, with a little catch in my throat. I kissed his head and held on as tight as I could to the moment, hoping he could feel how much I loved him.

Then my darling little boy looked me in the eye, gave me a smacker on the lips, smiled, and farted.

Reasons to be cheerful

A slightly lazy look at life today, either because a) analysing the Star Wars screenplay for my course has been surprisingly draining,  or b) it’s nearly midnight, I’m still not in bed having swore I would go early, I can barely read the screen my eyes are so tired and I need the bathroom.

So, five things that have made me laugh this week that I thought I would share, for better or worse:

1. ‘Girls’. I just finished Season One and I’m hooked. If you haven’t watched it already, get hold of it. Funny,clever, poignant and goes where no Sex in the City episode would have ever dared to tread. (Note: if you were ever remotely shocked by Kim Cattrall, you might want to skip it)

2. My son and his incessant thirst for knowledge. Question of the week: “Why don’t cats have hands?” A close runner up: “Mummy, can we buy a book about lungs?”

3. The fact that I had a spot on that bit under your nose that really hurts when you have a spot on it. This, per se, did not make me laugh (why the f*** am I still getting spots?) but my idiotic reaction did, in a sort of ironic way reserved usually for people I don’t like very much. Aged 38.5, instead of leaving well alone, I did the mature thing and wrapped my fingers in toilet paper, squeezed until my eyes watered from the pain, then cursed at the resulting sore mess on my face for the next two days. Dumb ass.

4. Relentless Laundry , whose brilliant writing never fails to make me laugh out loud and reassures me that I am not alone.

5. My son, again, this time for managing to fake a limp so realistically I made a two hour round trip to the physio to get him checked out at a cost of $100. He told me in the car on the way home “it was just a pretend bad leg”. This has not made me laugh yet but I’m sure I will look back on it one day with a smile.

Happy Monday y’all.

The simple joys

One bleak day in the year 2000, at the ripe old age of twenty six or thereabouts, I was single again after a spectacularly bad ending to what had been, on the whole, an utterly miserable relationship. I sat in my mum’s kitchen with a cup of tea and predicted my fate.

“I don’t think I’m ever going to get married, or have a family,” I said “I think that’s it. I’m done.”

My mum sighed and took a sip of her coffee.

“I don’t think you are either,” she said.

She wasn’t being mean. I think we both genuinely believed I wasn’t cut out for that life, whatever ‘that life’ meant to me at the time.

It wasn’t too long after that I met the man who changed all that – and now, a significant number of years later, I can honestly say how grateful I am to him that he was in the right place at the right time. Without him I would not be the person I am now, I would not have experienced the things I have, nor live the life I do. I think there’s only a few people in your life you can honestly say change it completely for the better, and for me he is that person. He puts up with me, encourages me, supports me and loves me through all the good bits and the bad, and you can’t ask for much more than that, can you?

We celebrated seven years of marriage last week, and apart from a lovely dinner which both of us only have vague recollections of due to excessive alcohol consumption, we haven’t had an awful lot of time together to spend reminiscing. In fact, between his work, my work, visitors, and life generally getting in the way, we’ve barely had time to exchange a conversation. We elected not to do gifts this year, to save the pennies until we had the time or inclination to get something really worthwhile. So this morning, as we strolled towards the athletics stadium to watch our little man in his first sports day, I found myself musing over what we might treat ourselves to should we ever get time to go to a mall together…new saucepans, a new lamp for the living room, some new bedlinen….but as we moved around the field from race to race something else occurred to me.  As I sat and snapped a hundred photos and cheered on my boy while he ran and jumped and threw for his team, I felt the pure unadulterated joy and love that comes from being a mum flow through me.

And it may sound a bit sloppy, and it may be well past our day of celebration, but that, I realised, was the best gift I could ever have been given.

Arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Popcorn

Dinner, anyone?  (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Apologies for this fleeting post, and for the completely unoriginal title, but it’s been that kind of week. Just when I thought this place couldn’t give me anything else to laugh/scream/sob about, it comes up trumps once more. I kid you not, here are some of the completely stupid things that have happened to in the past seven days that just make me want to bang my head against a wall.

– I tried to mail a birthday card to my aunt in Mallorca and the post office informed me that they no longer deliver to the Balearic Islands. EH? I thought the point of a postal service was that they mail ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. They helpfully suggested if I put ‘Spain’ on the envelope, it was nearby and might get there.

– Overheard at a party on Saturday:

“I ordered a pizza and a salad the other day and they told me they couldn’t deliver the salad because it was raining.“

“What about the pizza?”

“Oh yeah, they brought the pizza.”

EH?

– On the subject of pizza, our local take out place made waves this week by encouraging people to take photos and text whilst driving. Their genius ad campaign, later removed from their website after several complaints and an article in the local newspaper, read, “Catch us on the go! If you’re on the road and spot us, snap a pic and share where you were!”

– Our gas bottles were replaced on Tuesday and the regulators on the bottles changed at a total cost of Dhs 750 (about $200). The oven has since performed its own comedy show every time I use it and I am only able to light one gas ring OR the oven at any one time, or it all trips out. This is making cooking tricky and I have visitors arriving in the morning. Not an auspicious start. Upon recalling the gasman to sort it out, he blamed the electrics and told me to call the electrician. The electrician came and told me there are NO ELECTRICS to fix and it’s the gas regulator inside the house that is the problem. The perfectly functioning regulator that went wrong on the very day the bottles were changed, what a co-incidence. No-one can tell me who the hell fixes these but clue: It’s not the gasman and its not the electrician. Is there a regulator-man I wonder? Answers on a postcard please.

I’m sure there were more; these are the stand-out moments. It is no small wonder I look as deranged as I do, if you throw in hours devoted to PTA, the 2 days of acting work that meant I had to entrust someone else to pick up my baby from school for the first time (emotional stress = 8.5/10), the guys that were supposed to come and remove half a ton of broken furniture from the house and forgot after I waited for 4 hours for them to show, a monologue to write and about 400 pages of reading to get done by the weekend. Did I mention I have visitors arriving, or that my husband is away until Friday morning, meaning I am completely sleep deprived, slightly grubby and suffering from mental exhaustion due to single parenting the ‘Child Who Wouldn’t Stop Asking Why’? I would worry about the lack of food in the house but there is nothing to cook it with, so, you know, whatever.

I refer you to the title and bid you goodnight.