Why Mummy Doesn’t Give a ****

Why Mummy Doesn’t Give a ****
Gill Sims

Family begins with a capital eff.I’m wondering how many more f*cking ‘phases’ I have to endure before my children become civilised and functioning members of society? It seems like people have been telling me ‘it’s just a phase!’ for the last fifteen bloody years. Not sleeping through the night is ‘just a phase.’ Potty training and the associated accidents ‘is just a phase’. The tantrums of the terrible twos are ‘just a phase’. The picky eating, the back chat, the obsessions. The toddler refusals to nap, the teenage inability to leave their beds before 1pm without a rocket being put up their arse. The endless singing of Frozen songs, the dabbing, the weeks where apparently making them wear pants was akin to child torture. All ‘just phases!’ When do the ‘phases’ end though? WHEN? Mummy dreams of a quirky rural cottage with roses around the door and chatty chickens in the garden. Life, as ever, is not going quite as she planned. Paxo, Oxo and Bisto turn out to be highly rambunctious, rather than merely chatty, and the roses have jaggy thorns. Her precious moppets are now giant teenagers, and instead of wittering at her about who would win in a fight – a dragon badger or a ninja horse – they are Snapchatting the night away, stropping around the tiny cottage and communicating mainly in grunts – except when they are demanding Ellen provides taxi services in the small hours. And there is never, but never, any milk in the house. At least the one thing they can all agree on is that rescued Barry the Wolfdog may indeed be The Ugliest Dog in the World, but he is also the loveliest.

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COPYRIGHT (#u4fb735cb-ed45-5bce-93a4-0fedaebc87a4)

HarperCollinsPublishers

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

FIRST EDITION

© Gill Sims 2019

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Cover illustration © Tom Gauld/Heart Agency

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Gill Sims asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008301255

Ebook Edition © June 2019 ISBN: 9780008340476

Version: 2019-04-03

DEDICATION (#u4fb735cb-ed45-5bce-93a4-0fedaebc87a4)

For Rona … the avalanche

CONTENTS

1  Cover (#u2bcb248f-07af-5ccb-9506-75d3e4aec5ba)

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Contents (#u4fb735cb-ed45-5bce-93a4-0fedaebc87a4)

6  JANUARY

7 APRIL

8 MAY

9 JUNE

10 JULY

11 AUGUST

12 SEPTEMBER

13 OCTOBER

14 NOVEMBER

15  DECEMBER

16  Acknowledgements

17  By the Same Author

18  About the Publisher

LandmarksCover (#u2bcb248f-07af-5ccb-9506-75d3e4aec5ba)FrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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JANUARY (#u4fb735cb-ed45-5bce-93a4-0fedaebc87a4)

Wednesday, 3 January

The first day back at work after Christmas and New Year is always a bit of a slog. The sudden realisation that foodstuffs exist other than Toblerone and Quality Street and cheese, and that it’s now frowned upon to start on the white wine at 2 pm, is always a shock to the system, let alone remembering that you’re a functioning adult with a responsible job and clothes with non-elasticated waists. When your first day back is followed by your first relationship counselling session after what could be described as a ‘difficult’ Christmas, it’s even less fun.

Christina, our counsellor, came highly recommended. Well, Debbie in HR at work said that Christina had saved her sister’s marriage after it turned out her sister’s husband had been having it off with their twins’ first teacher since they started primary school, and said twins were in Year 10 when this all came out, and he also had a thing for being spanked while covered in PVA glue and glitter (hence his attraction to a primary school teacher and their easy access to such things), so I thought that if Christina could wave her magic wand and sort out that little peccadillo, then surely Simon and I would be an easy fix – a walk in the park, practically!

After all, no peculiar kinks had come to light. He hadn’t betrayed me with a woman I’d bought several ‘World’s Best Teacher’ mugs and bottles of wine for, someone I’d sat across from while she outlined the importance of reading every night with my precious moppets, all the while having a life-size model of my husband’s penis on her bedside table, made from the scraps of clay left over from making Mother’s Day presents with her class and decorated with his favourite glitter, had he? I mean, when you put it into context like that, the fact that he had had a one-night stand with some sexy señorita that he met while on a business trip to Madrid really wasn’t that bad, was it? Or at least, it could have been so much worse.

That is what I keep telling myself. ‘Chin up! It could have been worse!’ He could have had a predilection for dressing up as Ann Widdecombe. He could have had a thing about bonking someone dressed as Ann Widdecombe (I’m really not sure which would be more disturbing). He could have followed in the footsteps of Perfect Lucy Atkinson’s Perfect Daddy who left Lucy’s Perfect Mummy high and dry when he ran off with Lucy’s Mummy’s sidekick and wannabe, Fiona Montague, leaving Lucy’s Mummy to face Fiona (whom I never liked, very smug and always just a bit too try-hard – though clearly Lucy’s Perfect Daddy liked how hard Fiona tried, even though he’s got very fat since moving in with her and is obviously overindulging in Fiona’s bloody endless cupcakes that she was forever posting on Instagram) at the school gate every morning. Of course, the kids are now too old for the school gate as they’re at Big School, so I suppose I wouldn’t have had to do that anyway. And Simon doesn’t like cupcakes.