Why Mummy Doesn’t Give a ****

‘JUST GET IN THE FUCKING CAAAAARRRRR!’

‘Mood swings too,’ she added helpfully. ‘And bloating …’

‘I’m not fucking menopausal, I just need you to get in the car!’ I begged, as Jane sauntered out the door, before screaming in outrage because Peter had beaten her there and was smugly ensconced in the front seat. I wondered if I went to the GP and just whimpered ‘Teenagers’ they’d prescribe me valium? And also gin?

I finally got them to the bus stop, and was just kicking them out of the car when Peter stopped halfway out (‘Darling, please, there’s traffic, what are you doing?’) to say, ‘Oh yeah, Mum, by the way, I need some money on my thumb for lunch.’

‘What?’

‘Y’know! My thumb money. You need to put some on it. So I can get lunch?’

‘Your thumb. Do you perchance mean your ParentPay account?’

‘Yeah. My thumb!’

‘Oh, I need mine topped up too, Mum,’ said Jane, suddenly sweetness and light and dropping the sarky ‘Mother’ now cold hard cash was involved.

‘Right! You didn’t think to remind me of this before?’ I said, thinking, ‘Wave them off with a smile, don’t let them leave on a sour note, be nice, so their last memory of you isn’t as a shrieking harridan,’ and also thinking, ‘Why couldn’t they ask Simon about things like this, just once? Why do I always have to do everything?’

‘We’re reminding you now!’ they said in surprise.

‘I’ll have to do it when I get to work. I’m late. Now please just GO!’ I hissed, before brightly adding, ‘Bye darlings, love you. Have a wonderful day!’

Arrgh! Fucking ParentPay. Or his ‘thumb money’, as Peter confusingly insists on referring to it. In theory, a useful and efficient website that allows you to top up your children’s dinner money accounts (which they then use to pay for their lunches using their thumb print, hence the ‘thumb money’. I do have concerns about this and fear the government might steal their data and keep files on them, although in my children’s case the files would mainly record the fact that they spend inordinate amounts of money on chips and traybakes while at school, because you can also check what they’ve bought with their thumbs. I quickly found it was too depressing to look, and I still marvel they’ve not got scurvy – they must have very sound constitutions, which I expect they got from me), pay for school trips and other extras, all online using your card, instead of scrabbling around to find change/chequebooks/cash to pay for these things. In reality, it’s a constant drain of money. No sooner have you topped up their accounts than they’re unaccountably empty again. It’s very depressing!

Sunday, 22 April

The chatty chickens are here! I’d pondered keeping them in the shed but decided against it (sometimes I wonder how Simon copes without a shed now he’s living in a flat, but I suppose he doesn’t have me to avoid and only has the children one weekend a fortnight. I bet he wishes he had a shed, though. How has it not occurred to me till now that I should really make the most of my shed-bragging rights against poor shedless Simon? I could really rub salt in the wound by laughing that actually, I use it so little that sometimes I even forget that I have a shed! That would go some way to making up for all the times he asked me if I’d had a ‘nice day off’ when I worked part-time when the children were little, when in reality I’d spent the entirety of my ‘day off’ trying to tackle the shit heap of our house, wrangle his feral fuck trophies and cling on to my sanity while trying to have a wee for the last two hours since inevitably someone needed me for something crucial every time I tried to head to the loo, and so now I thought my bladder was going to burst and I probably had a UTI … Hmm, on second thoughts, taunting him with my shed doesn’t even come close. Maybe I’ll burn it down in front of him while laughing maniacally and telling him I don’t need it. No, better to mock him with a functioning but unused shed …).

The chicken house arrived yesterday, a rather lovely little wood affair with a built-in run, and roosts and nesting boxes and all sorts including special fox-proof wire apparently. I was a little alarmed at the ‘easy clean’ features, as I hadn’t really taken cleaning out chickens into account (I sort of assumed they’d just poop outside and it would be good for the grass or something, but it seems not). Anyway, never mind, I decided that maybe the children could clean out the chickens for me – such a wholesome outdoor activity. After all, the whole point of the chickens (apart from their Instagrammability) was because I’d read somewhere that looking after animals was very therapeutic for children after suffering a trauma such as their parents’ divorce. Having paid out so much to bloody Christina to no avail as well, I also reckoned chickens would be much cheaper than getting the children counselling, and I’d get some free eggs out of it too. In a fit of chicken enthusiasm I spent most of yesterday painting the chicken house an adorable duck egg blue so that it would be a worthy home for my Speckled Sussexes to chat to me in. I’d attempted to persuade Peter and Jane that this might be a lovely bonding activity for us to do together, but Jane curtly told me she was ‘busy’ and after ten minutes of Peter enthusiastically sloshing my beautiful duck egg blue paint all over the lawn, the garden bench, the apple tree and himself – everywhere in fact but on the chicken house, I suggested that maybe I’d just finish it myself.

When I went in to get a cup of tea there were giant duck egg blue footprints all through the house, which was particularly baffling as Peter had taken his shoes off at the back door. How had he got paint INSIDE his shoes? I told myself it didn’t matter, it would wash off, and anyway, I was very partial to a bit of duck egg blue (perhaps I shall also keep ducks, as part of my wholesome Country Image? I can see my Instagram feed now, all hens and ducks and trugs of beautiful vegetables, and me skipping about in a pair of fetching dungarees looking like Felicity Kendal in The Good Life. I just need to find a way to stop myself looking like a Soviet era mechanic when I put on dungarees).

When the chickens arrived, the children did shuffle outside to admire them. They were very beautiful chickens, and even Jane seemed enamoured of them. I’d told the children they could each name a chicken, and I would name the third. I’d harboured hopes of names of Shakespearean grandeur, or perhaps some classics from Greek mythology (when I suggested they could look to the Greek myths for inspiration, Jane sniggered and said, ‘What about Jason? Was that the sort of thing you had in mind, Mother?’ to which I pointed out that the chickens were girls and so Jason wasn’t appropriate – and also definitely not what I’d had in mind).

‘So, darlings,’ I said cheerily. ‘Have you decided what you’re going to call your chickens?’

‘Oh yes, Mum,’ they said, exchanging knowing looks. I should have anticipated that no good would come of the children colluding on anything.

‘I’m calling mine Oxo,’ announced Jane.

‘And mine’s Bisto,’ giggled Peter.

‘What? No! You can’t call them after stock cubes and gravy. How will that make them feel? They’ll constantly be worried we’re going to eat them.’

‘Mum, they’re chickens,’ said Peter. ‘I don’t think they really know about things like that.’

‘They’re chatty chickens,’ I insisted. ‘You don’t know what they know about. You’ll upset them.’

‘Well, you said we could call them whatever we wanted, and that’s what we’ve chosen,’ said Jane firmly. ‘What are you going to call yours, Mum?’

‘Oh fuck it,’ I said wearily. ‘I suppose if I can’t beat you, I’ll have to join you. I don’t want my chicken feeling different, so she’d better be Paxo.’

At least, I reflected, Jane had called me ‘Mum’ for once and not a sarcasm-laden ‘Mother’. Perhaps the chickens were already weaving their therapeutic magic and soon we’d all be sitting together playing board games and doing jigsaws in the evening and having a good old sing-song round the piano, and being a wholesome, normal and functional family.

From Judgy Dog’s reaction when I tentatively introduced him to the chickens, he wholeheartedly approved of the names and couldn’t wait to see the chickens live up to them. Fuck. My. Life.

Wednesday, 25 April

I was feeling like a perfect, clever domestic goddess, totally and utterly nailing juggling teenage parenting, single motherhood and a demanding career (it’s very good being important enough to be given your own office, because it makes timewasting on non-work-related things – like topping up ParentPay accounts – much easier. I’d feel bad about this, if I didn’t know for a fact that my old boss, Ed, whose job and office I was promoted into last year, as he’s gone to be Busy and Important at the head office in California, had always had a two-hour nap under his desk every afternoon, having insisted that he must not be disturbed, as that was when he made Important Calls. Therefore I feel that since I’m actually rather good at my job and efficient enough to get everything done with time left over, snatching the odd half-hour for life admin is perfectly OK. We’ll gloss over the time I spend browsing the Daily Mail website, though).

In a fit of said efficiency, I’d ordered a Sainsbury’s shop online as there’s less temptation to spend money on unnecessary items that catch my eye and look useful or delicious – the budget German supermarkets are all very well until you hit the middle aisles and their tempting arrays of randomness – and arranged to have it delivered after the children got in from school, leaving strict instructions that they were to have put it away by the time I got home. I felt slightly guilty about making my poor latch-key children also put the shopping away after a tough day at school, but then I reminded myself that a) the fridge stuff would all be warm by the time I finally got home and there was no one else to do it, and b) agonising over making your children put away the Arborio risotto rice and Parmesan was surely a first world problem if ever there was one.

I got in the door to be greeted by Judgy’s usual performance of ‘Hello, I love you, you are the centre of my world, come and sit down so I can sit on your knee and tell you how much I love you!’ for two minutes, before he remembered that I had in fact dared to leave him, and so he hated me and I must be punished, even though I knew he’d had a perfectly lovely day with the fabulous dog sitter, who picks him up in the morning and returns him in the evening and who had sent me a photo at lunchtime of Judgy lolling on her sofa, having thrown all the cushions on the floor (he does this at home as well). He does this every day, though, so I’m no longer distressed by it, as he forgives me as soon as there’s a sniff of food.

The house, which had been tidy when I left this morning, looked like a bomb had hit it. A trail of shoes, school bags and coats littered the hall. In the sitting room, plates and glasses festooned every surface, while Jane sprawled on the sofa, staring intently at her phone.

‘Hello, darling,’ I said loudly.

Jane slowly dragged her eyes up from her phone and grunted something.

‘Did the shopping come?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘And did you put it away?’

‘No, that’s not my job. That’s your job.’

‘I can’t do everything, Jane. I just … can’t. Please help me out here. Meet me halfway?’

‘If you didn’t want to do everything yourself, you should have stayed with Dad then, shouldn’t you?’ snapped Jane. ‘Then you’d have had someone to help!’

I gave up and went through to the kitchen. The shopping was all over the floor. Jane followed me through.

‘And you had it delivered in bags!’ she said accusingly. ‘I mean, don’t worry about us, Mother! It’s not like we want a planet to live on in the future or anything.’

‘Oh shit,’ I said. ‘I must’ve ticked the wrong box. I’ll reuse them or take them to be recycled, it’ll be fine.’

Jane snorted again.

Peter meanwhile was standing there disconsolately, surrounded by the shopping.

‘When’s dinner?’ he said. ‘I’m SO hungry, Mum, and there’s no food.’

‘Dinner will be about half an hour,’ I said. ‘Peter, there’s literally food all around you, because neither of you have bothered your arse to put the shopping away.’

‘I did put it away,’ protested Peter. ‘I put the fridge stuff away, and then I didn’t know where anything else went.’