You can’t live with ’em…

Men. Apparently, you can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them. Personally, I disagree. I think the real saying should substitute the word ‘men’ for ‘children’. To me, that’s far closer to the truth.

Take Saturday, for example. We attended the fifth birthday party of Poppy’s friend from nursery. Of course, she had a great time – who wouldn’t when you spend an hour bouncing on trampolines and then half an hour stuffing your face with sweets, crisps and cake? But sadly, it meant the rest of the day was an absolute write off, especially for me. It evaporated in a haze of sugar and E numbers, leaving behind only the remnants of a child who started out the day looking like a perfect party princess and ended it looking like the Tasmanian devil. Fortunately for me, I could see light at the end of the tunnel. Usually I’d have to just grin and bear it, and remember that come 7pm, that sauvignon blanc in the fridge would be very swiftly winging its way down my throat. But, on this particular day, I was dropping her off at her dad’s at 4pm, so I knew with a little bit of careful handling, I could survive this. I could get to 4pm and send her on her merry way to her dad’s (allowing her to eat some party bag loot en route because the resulting behaviour wasn’t going to be my problem) in time for a dinner and bedtime meltdown on his watch. Score.

The thing is, though, that despite the clock watching that afternoon, followed by the relief of being able to get ready for a night out without little hands grabbing my make-up and trying on high heels, I instantly missed her. It’s like that feeling when you think you’ve left your hair straighteners on and you’ve gone on holiday for a week….you have to stop yourself from turning back and checking because you know, deep down, it will be fine.

Nursing the hangover of all hangovers on Sunday didn’t help with my feeling of melancholy, combined with hanging out with friends and their children – one of whom is the same age as Poppy. And while I was glad I didn’t have to take a turn at toilet duty, or worry about making a healthy dinner when all I wanted to do was order in a Chinese and watch back-to-back episodes of Once Upon A Time, I just felt the sun had disappeared behind a cloud the whole time she was away.

Don’t get me wrong, most of the time I’m really grateful for the break from the relentless demands, and strops, and questions….but this time felt particularly hard.

When it was finally time to pick her up from nursery – after three sleeps away – I felt immediately like everything was right again. The sun had come back out, and I didn’t mind that she moaned about what I’d made her for dinner, or that we had to watch Elf even though it’s not Christmas, or even that she kept breaking wind and laughing about it like a maniac.

My sunshine.

So yeah, you can’t live with them sometimes, but they are impossible to live without.

We’ll see…

So, it would seem I’m having a baby. If you listen to Poppy, that is. She has got it into her head that she is going to “get a baby sister”. She has been talking about it a ridiculous amount recently, randomly dropping it into conversation when I least expect it. Approaching the airport terminal the other week, she casually asked me where babies come from as I was busy wrestling with two suitcases whilst trying to hold her hand to avoid us getting hit by taxis (though after that question, getting hit by a taxi was an appealing option…) And at soft play on Monday, when I spotted a hole in her already-too-short leggings, I told her it was time they went in the bin. She was horrified at the suggestion. “But mummy, why can’t you knit the hole so we can give the leggings to my baby sister?” Ummmm…..

I have to accept slight responsibility for her getting the wrong end of the stick. After one particularly long day, our dinner time conversation turned to the subject of her getting a baby sister. I tried to explain that that was not going to happen. “But why mummy? I want one!” I told her that I’m very happy with the child I have, and that just because she wants a sister, it doesn’t mean that I want another baby, and that I am quite content with just being her mummy and no-one else’s. But of course, that was not accepted as an explanation. And so she went on…and on…and on. And I made the fatal error…

“We’ll see”, I finally replied.

“Great!” said she. “I’m getting a baby sister! Can I tell daddy?”

“No!” I shouted, horrified at the thought of her sharing my phantom pregnancy with my ex.

I managed to scrape her off the ceiling for long enough to reiterate my earlier points about her not getting a baby sister….and I thought it was sinking in… until my boyfriend called. As I was just about to pick up, Poppy shouted out “Can I tell him about our new baby…?” Decline call….

It wasn’t until recently that I realised the full extent of my mistake when I innocently uttered the words “we’ll see” just to get her to shut up. Following another occasion where I gave her the same reply in response to her asking for something else she was never going to get, she turned to her friend and said: “When mummy says that, it always means yes.”

 

Good girls go to London

I was 15 the first time I went to London. I remember the feeling of excitement being slightly eclipsed by the feeling of fear. I was a country bumpkin from Dumfries, and suddenly I was let loose in this enormous, terrifying city where nobody looked you in the eye or stopped to give you directions, and where everyone was clearly out to snatch your bag. In contrast, Poppy’s first venture to the big smoke took place at the weekend. I envied her four-year-old excitement that wasn’t in any way marred by the thought of coming face to face with a modern day Fagin. On our flight from Edinburgh to Stanstead (yep, I took to the skies again with her) I told her all about the underground train system. Her reply – completely verbatim – was “wow, my life is going to change forever”.

As we walked along the South Bank, she was in awe of the street performers (“is that a statue or a real person”?), the River Thames which may or may not contain sharks and stingrays and the London Eye (“can we go on it? Can we go on it NOW?”). It was just one big catalogue of new experiences.

We opted for a boat ride to Greenwich, where we were staying with my boyfriend’s friends. She seemed slightly underwhelmed by the experience – I think she would have liked it to go faster – and seemed aggrieved that we weren’t getting soaked by the dirty Thames water like the poor sods sitting opposite us.

Her mind was set on our plans for the next day as soon as she laid eyes on “the pirate ship” on our arrival into Greenwich Pier. To be fair, The Cutty Sark has been on my own London to-do list for some time, so I was much happier to oblige her with this request than I was with the London Eye.

Our sightseeing continued with a trip to see the Queen, which fortuitously coincided with the Changing the Guard ceremony. I’m not quite sure which one of us got the biggest kick out of that…ok, it was definitely me.

And no trip to London is complete without a visit to Hamleys, especially if you’re four years old (though I definitely went there when I was 15….) She was practically drooling, not sure which way to turn, what to look at, what to play with, what to buy…But as with any good female shopper, an hour after entering the store and scouring every single level, she went back to the first item she looked at. In this instance, it was a Paddington Bear teddy.

I think this weekend may well have been the first where we went the whole time without any tantrums whatsoever (besides a brief tearful moment when she needed the toilet and I couldn’t produce one out of nowhere) so that in itself made it a successful trip. It certainly felt like a turning point, so maybe she wasn’t wrong when she said her life would change forever….it certainly felt like mine did a little bit.

 

All in a day’s work

In my job, I have witnessed some awful things. I have arrived on the scene just moments after a young girl was decapitated by a car in a hit-and-run. I have seen photos during an inquest of a father who hanged himself from a tree, and watched the utter heartbreak of his grieving family as they unwittingly looked at the same images. I have seen fear, squalor, depravity. I have interviewed murderers and had to be polite and professional on the phone to convicted sex offenders and paedophiles as they ranted about my newspaper’s coverage of their horrific actions. I have listened to a woman’s graphic account of years of child abuse at the hands of a family member. I have seen a dead body after a week lying undiscovered in the Water of Leith, bloated, discoloured, barely recognisable as the man he once was. I have drank tea in the home of a family who lost their beautiful ten-year-old boy to a hit-and-run driver in a stolen car trying to escape police capture.

Two of those things made me cry. I remember clearly the drive home through tears after watching the devastated family in front of me in the courtroom sobbing when the coroner – rather cruelly, in my opinion –  showed them the photos they could never unsee. And I cried every night for a week after listening to the father of the young boy so tragically killed on his way home from school talk about the son he would never see again. I couldn’t get my head around how life could be so unfair, and also couldn’t begin to understand how the boy’s grieving family were capable of such immense courage and resilience. I still can’t let myself think about it too much.

Both those stories I covered relatively early on in my career. I didn’t grow less sympathetic as the years went on, but I did grow hardened to the fact that life can be horrendous at times and that bad things happen every single day. They just happen. As a journalist, you quickly develop a skin thick enough to allow you to deal with situations like the ones described above; to get involved in someone’s tragedy to the point where they open up to you and share their innermost grief and suffering, and then walk away and barely think of it ever again. You also develop a humour black enough to make light of the most devastating situations. I quickly got to the stage where I no longer cried about the things I’d witnessed in my job, and stopped taking everyone’s pain and anguish home with me.

But today I’m worried about an interview I have to carry out with a young mum who lost her newborn baby. Since having my own child, I struggle to deal with stories like this anymore. I cannot even begin to imagine the pain and there seem to be no words capable of describing it. Where the rookie reporter me would have felt great sympathy, I am now capable of that more powerful emotion of empathy.

Today might be another day that I cry.

Mummy do it…

I am in possession of magic powers, it would seem. Apparently the way I pour a glass of milk, or pass a hairband or assist in putting on a coat is far superior to any mere mortal. I can’t believe I went all these years without knowing about my supremacy, only finding out around about the time my daughter started speaking. What a coincidence!

Ever since she was able to string the words together, it has always been “mummy do it” – though now she is more eloquent in her sentence construction, I am pleased to report. I go through phases where the “mummy do it” mentality annoys the hell out of me. For example,when we go to stay with friends or relatives, I like to have a bit of a break from having to do every single thing by myself all day long. I just want someone else to be capable enough in Poppy’s eyes to fetch her some raspberries from time to time. And I really wish that other people could just pour the goddamn glass of milk as well as I can. Why can’t they? What is wrong with people???

But then other times, I secretly like it. Because I know she does it because she has the genuine belief that I am amazing. She looks at me like no other person ever has or ever will. I am the single most important person in her life. She just wants me to be there with her, to acknowledge her, to play with her. It’s as simple as that. And I know that these days won’t last forever.

So the next time she refuses to accept help from anyone other than me, I need to try and remind myself of that. Or alternatively I could just go and lock myself in the bathroom for a while because that girl is not going to allow herself to starve for anybody. Not even me.

How could this face ever annoy me…?