Baby talk

I tell my baby girl: "I love you" one hundred times a day. The thought as natural as a breath. I chase and catch, hold her in my champion arms and kiss a perfection rounded cheek. I shout out: "I love you" as I whirl her round in celebration of my dazzling prize. Later, as we play, she sucks in her cheeks to moue a kiss, then, distracted by a brother or a toy, walks away. Disappointed in my loss, forlorn, I say: "I love you" to her back. Sitting on the kitchen floor, with infinite and tender care she tears the paper edging from a teabag, peers into the heart of her gift and fragrant pours it into her lap pot to join the rest. I, as ever, notice too late. Sigh, scoop and hug, whisper: "I love you" and pull her from the dried tea sea.

She walks now among our words, one small and trusting hand in mine. Unsteady still, sometimes she totters and then falls. Plump on her behind. Unpeturbed, she sits blank a while and then clambers up to try again to reach her goal of understanding. She says: "Mama. Loves. Loves me." True and sweet. Her mother loves her. She does not say the words she hears. She does not say: "I love you" though you would think she might. Might hope she would. Instead, she wraps herself entire in this one and truest certainty. "Mama. Loves. Me."

Whine and wine

I went to get the baby up this morning and she looked at me as if I was the best thing ever to have happened to her. I am not sure how it was for the baby, but for me, the day went downhill from then on.

I have given in on the pantry which I wanted built in to a corner in the new kitchen. I needed a pantry so that I could hide things; tins, saucepans, mess, children, myself occasionally. I really wanted a pantry. The architect really wanted me not to have a pantry. I held my ground right up to the point I caved. I decided at a site meeting at the house this afternoon that I simply did not care any more. I barely want a kitchen. Frankly, a wine cooler would do me. I have discovered that some people drink so much that they do not just have a bottle chilling in the fridge. They have a fridge just for bottles. Now a wine cooler. That is worth going to the wire for.

(Did I spell that right? Some people just read me for the spellings.)

Holiday blues

I have gone away and left everyone behind. It is just me for a week and I am guilt-wracked and tense about the whole idea of a holiday on my own. Not so guilty that I did not get on the plane though. It has been such a long time since it was just me that I do not know if I can do it any more. What if I am really bad company?

I left my husband a note.

Be patient with the children
Be more patient than I am with the children
Remember the six-year-old likes peas, hates beans
Remember the four-year-old hates peas, likes beans
Both eat raw carrots but hate boiled carrots
Do not try to make them eat boiled carrots
Remember the six-year-old needs a Comic Relief red nose for school on Friday
If the six-year-old has a red nose, the four-year-old will want one
Best get the baby one so she does not feel left out
Remember to ring my mother at least once while I am away
Remember to hear the baby if she cries at night
Remember the binmen come on Tuesdays
Remember you love me.

Back soon.

Daddy dearest

When my worn-down husband comes back from the city fray, I think we struggle to adjust - all five of us. Men come home from war and business breakfasts and think their aproned, lipsticked wives should ticker tape their return, break out the brass band vinyl records and shout: "Huzzah!Huzzah! The hero has returned. Huzzah for him!" Last time my husband came back, my four-year-old pointed out: "The baby is looking at Daddy like he's just some old bloke." This time, at the railway station, as he hoisted her into his arms, she looked as if to say: "I know the face. I just can't place the name."

Today, he took my chair at the dining table and I said: "You're in my chair" and he said: "No, I sit here." "No," I said it slowly so he could understand, "you have not been here. Remember. I sit there. If I sit somewhere else, I can't feed the baby." He moved but hogs the phone for work and I have to wait to make a call, eats herrings in the study, assumes he will drive and I will sit beside him. When I do go out alone, the car keys are not where I left them; the jangling keys fewer and more silent than they were. "Where are the other keys?" I ask. "I took them off. The bunch is too big for my pocket."

While he was gone, I took my long-handled sable brush, my titanium white and painted him out of our daily life. We managed. We got through. We were OK - the kids and I. The picture still looked good. Daddy rang and there would be a silence. I watched my six-year-old with the phone pressed tight to his ear: "I'm standing, looking at the wall and the train engines on the floor". A silence, then: "I'm fine". Another, then: "Yes, good. Bye Daddy. Love you" all in a rush and that was that.

Now though, when I should cheer, I growl at his shadow. I am the irritated prompt as my husband tries to remember his lines back in the centre-stage of our family life. Family is a subtle, complex thing; petalled with strong emotions, hopes and history. I hear my six-year-old rage on the stairs when checked by his papa: "I don't want him here," and sympathise. Yet that same night, I see his father kiss a torn finger to better mend the tender spot and think: "He's home. That's good."

Over to you

So you wake up and you stretch out an arm and you find a man in your bed. Your first thought as you wrap yourself around his warmth: "Fabulous, there's a man in my bed". His hand slides down your smooth and naked thigh and he murmurs something you cannot quite make out. Your second thought, and it follows light-speed quick, bearing in mind the room is black dark and you have only just made it to the surface of the day: "I can have a lie-in." You remove his fond hand as the baby starts to mew along the corridor. "Darling," you tenderly whisper into his ear. "You're on."

Perchance to dream

You have different obsessions at different times of your life; breasts, sweets, sex, a job, a lover, a baby, sleep and, finally, when and how you die. It is possible to strand yourself in one or other but I have swept through and out the other end of most. I have not yet begun to draft my final words or plan my soily grave; I swear to God, though,I would be a nicer person if I got more sleep.

Three out of the four last nights have been disturbed by one or more children; two out of three nights, I have had to sleep - I use the term loosely- in the spare bed in the study to be closer to a cough-filled baby. Last night, I had a choice of distractions: I could listen to the gusting wind outside the house as it harried red-brick chimneys and bare-branched trees, or, I could tune into my hacking, pilgrim baby who tumbled her way round first her cot and then my bed, trying to find some peace. By 2.45am, I decided either she had to be medicated or I did. I carried her back into the darkness of her own room and found the new bottle of cough syrup. I pressed down and twirled away the child-proof cap watched by a murky Peter Rabbit, and groped for a silver spoon in the gloom. She coughed against my chest. "Ok darling," I murmured, "Mummy will make it better". (I don't know how long that one lasts - I figure it should hold until she is two.) I sat down wearily, bundled her gusting warmth into the crook of my arm and tipped up the sticky bottle. It emptied itself all over my bare leg. "Oh dear," I said out loud in the dark. "Mummy's poured cough syrup all over herself." For a moment, the wind outside died and there was silence. Carefully, I scraped a spoonful of blackcurrant linctus off my skin and swallowed it.

Bedrest

Getting up was so difficult today I almost did not bother.If I had been given a choice or my children had shown a degree of compassion, I would be there yet. I finessed my sons into the sofa infront of a video in the hope of another couple of precious pillow minutes. It is not that I regard the television as an unpaid childminder; it's more of a dear family friend.The baby, however, is made of sterner stuff than the boys. She was awake. I had to be awake. I had brought her in to feed but after that, she was a lot keener to get on with the day than I was. I steadfastly refused to move; eventually, she clambered out of the large carved bed, clinging on to the sheet and lowering herself carefully on to the floor where she discovered my handbag. I did a mental review of whether she might find an ecstasy tablet, prompting horrified headlines and a visit from an under-paid, over-anxious social worker. I decided it was unlikely since I have never bought an ecstasy tablet. I have tried. Apparently, they do not sell them to the middle-aged. Reluctantly, I opened one eye to check she was still there and had not crawled off to fling herself down the stairs. She was standing by the bed, watching me. Next to me was a pile of money lying on the mattress - every note and coin I had loose in my bag. I felt cheap. I do not think a 15-month-old baby should feel she has to bribe her mother to get out of bed.

I got lost again today. I think that getting lost is becoming a metaphor. It is happening so often, I think part of me wants to get lost. Maybe if I got lost enough, I would one day, find myself on the fringes of London. Then I could ring and say: "You'll never guess what. I got lost. Guess where I am. I don't think I can find my way back." What made it worse was that my children noticed. I hate it when they notice I am lost. I think it diminishes their respect for me, which is probably low enough already now they pay me to get up. My six-year-old said loudly: "Mummy you are going the wrong way." I denied this. "I really think you have gone wrong mummy." Ofcourse, he was quite right. As I slewed the car round, narrowly missing a horse box, he said: "I was going to say something, but I won't." I pulled back on to the hedged and narrow road. "What were you going to say darling?" I looked back at him through the rearview mirror. "I was going to say 'I told you so'," he said. I could see the tiniest smile as he glanced down at his toy puppy, "but I decided not to."

Haunted houses

Apparently, while I slept last night, the baby was weeping uncontrollably and went to look for me under my pillow. "You'd have caved," my husband boasted manfully this morning. "She was utterly pathetic." He sobs in imitation of her over the breakfast table and she gazes at him from my arms as if she hates him.
Next door is hardly a haven. It has become a strange, silent place. A house which is ours but is not a home any more. It is not that it is hostile. I was perfectly easy as I slept in the high wooden bed we have set up in the frontroom infront of the coal fire. But, even with the fire flickering, the air in the house is catch-your-breath cold and still and the rooms feel like they are waiting for something or someone - us hopefully - or, at least for us to send round a man with a mallet. It wants to be a home again I think as it was for 47 years, to the elderly couple who used to live there. Perhaps it misses them. The chap was lovely. He was very kind and welcoming and used to be the farm manager here. The cottage was tithed and when he died, only a matter of months after being diagnosed with a brain tumour, his widow went on living there for a couple of years. She didn't drive and it is an isolated spot and lonely. I think too, it must feel very odd to sit as a silent widow with your puzzle books and jigsaws. In the same chair, in the same room, just as you have done night after night but without him. You must look up expecting to see him, you must think you hear him moving about upstairs but, ofcourse, he is not there. It is just you and your plastic-wrapped library book. She decided to move into the village when another house became available. Every week or so, I drive down to the new estate where she lives in a warm and cosy bungalow and I drink her tea and eat her cherry cake, her puzzlebooks resting by my plate on the tiled coffee table.

"Mama? Mama?"

I was thrown out of the house last night - well maybe, not so much thrown as eased out gently with a flashlight and a duvet and told to sleep next door. My husband, let's call him TW, has had enough of the baby's nocturnal breastfeeding. Since we are pushed for space and there is nowhere else for her to go, the baby's cot is in our room. Unlike my husband, the baby rather likes her nightly routine and, in that halfway state between sleep and wakefulness, I have been unable to resist her plaintive bleatings of "Mama? Mama?" in the cold darkness. She starts up and I stumble out of bed, pluck her from the cot and sink back into the bedding with my little victorious suckling. As she sees it, I'm lying there and it's not like I'm doing anything else. But TW is right, it has gone on long enough. She's nearly 15 months old and God knows, I could do with a night's sleep. The mini-bar is officially closed.

Sofa so good

We bought a sofa yesterday. Having put up with a two-seater sofa since we moved up here, I finally rebelled and insisted I wanted something I could lie down on. Fair's fair. There is nowhere to go out to at night up here which means I am forced to lie on the sofa and watch TV. I wouldn't do that normally.I'd be out at gallery openings, first nights and glamorous parties - honest. You'd have seen the pictures in those magazines you read at your desk when you are supposed to be working. Even though I am very short, a two seater sofa means my feet jut out over the end. Every night as I gaze at my feet, the irritation grows. It is the sort of thing that Balkan countries would have called the "The Sofa Question" and gone to war over - hence a trip to one of those large sofa showrooms. I didn't think these places actually existed outside the adverts of lounging beautiful couples, but they do. The only problem I had shopping for the sofa is that I am no longer one pedicured half of a lounging couple, I am the nail-quick biting mother of three noisy children who all had to come along. The two boys decided to treat sofa shopping as another soft play opportunity while the baby just screamed to draw more attention to us incase anyone was missing her brothers' antics. The only thing more irritating than the cheery sales assistant pretending to find my children charming ("Is that you making all that noise? Is it? Is it?") was the fact she demanded an extra £120 for fabric protection. Obviously we didn't have to take them up on that, she told us, gazing adoringly at my two boys dismantling her dried flower display. "But, I think you'll need it." Ofcourse I need it. Why then don't they just spray it on automatically? Because they see an opportunity to slap an extra £100 surcharge on "Wimmin with mucky kids" presumably. I should have bartered for it with a child.