Working Mum

Christmas is a plot against women

2011-12-11T13:09:00.000-08:00

I am not sure if I really like Christmas any more.

I told my mummy friends this over dinner a couple of weeks ago and they were visibly shocked.

"What - not liking mince pies and bright-eyed children and the Christmas carols and the smell of mulled wine and open fires and all the rest of it?" was the cry. It was like telling a roomful of devout Christians I did not believe in God.

But the fact is, I have come to see Christmas as the anti-feminist, patriarchal construct that it is, designed mainly to keep women busy between September and January.

That is four months of the year when far too much of women's spare time and energy gets channelled into preparing for the big holiday of the year.

If you took all the time that all the women in the world spend preparing for Christmas and used it for something else we could probably have cured cancer and solved world hunger by now. But no, instead, we've wrapped presents, hand-painted some baubles and hunted down fresh cranberries from the shops. Now there is something to be proud of.

I had a day off work a few weeks ago, a rare, hard-earned bit of leisure in exchange for having worked on a Sunday the week before. And what did I do with the day? Did I lie in bed eating chocolate and reading? Did I make a start on that great work of literature I keep meaning to write? Did I study Chinese characters, or take autumn photographs, or play the piano or any of the other things I might enjoy?

No. I went Christmas shopping. Six hours of trudging around a shopping centre sniffing scented candles and picking out slippers for my nan, after which I had a headache and felt I had completely lost any vestige of seasonal cheer.

Oh, I know you can do Christmas almost entirely online these days. I have, some years, done all my shopping on Amazon and had it delivered. But that isn't the point. I still feel a bizarre need to go Christmas shopping, some time between November and mid-December, like some ritual or penance.

And even if you do it online, you still have to spend the time choosing, clicking, opening windows and comparison-shopping. You are still agonising over the choice of the book or jumper or throw or whatever it is.

What irritates me is that women do 90 per cent of the work for Christmas. And we do this to ourselves. No tyrannical husband stands over us demanding that we bake gingerbread biscuits with the children and decorate the house and stash presents in the back of the wardrobe like some demented magpie.

We tell ourselves these activities are fun, they are traditional, that will give the children great memories. And that is probably true. But we are also following someone else's agenda when we do this, ignoring other things that are more fun and original.

By mid-November, the home-maker mums I know had most of the Christmas shopping done bar a few little presents. They had ordered tickets for the pantomime, calculated the weight of the turkey they needed and sorted out what the social plan would be for Christmas - whether it was hosting everyone at their house or a complicated schedule of driving between parents in Surrey and Suffolk, with a diversion to see great aunt Mabel in the nursing home along the way. All this by mid-November, a full six-weeks before the day. And no-one thought it odd at all.

Ask a man about Christmas at that stage and he will look a bit blank and say "but it is November!"

My dad used to do all his shopping on the 23rd of December. Sometimes we got just envelopes with promised presents on slips of paper inside because he's not made it to the shops in time. My friend's brother would - seriously - do his Christmas shopping at the petrol station his way to the lunch. Road atlases, air freshener and cheap boxes of chocolates for everyone, all bought in about 10 minutes flat.

When the Christmas decorations and carols appear in the shops at the end of November, they don't surprise women. We've already been waiting for them, having started Christmas shopping in about July. They only serve to remind us that time is tick ticking away now, and the cards need to be written and sent and the order placed at the butchers.

I actually like cooking and I used to love hosting parties. But I get resentful about Christmas because it is forced on you. It is they day, more than any other in the year, when you feel the need to play out a charade of 1950s domestic goddess surrounded by loving family. You bring the turkey out proudly like you've just given birth to it, and sit, dolled up with a glittery top and eye make-up, to eat in your own dining room. And then you spoil the effect by wearing a stupid hat. I hate those paper hats at Christmas. There is nothing either funny or attractive about them.

My family never went to church when I was growing up but at Christmas my father used to insist we read something from the bible because it was traditional. I hated the hypocrisy of it, and many a teenage Christmas descended into me shouting at my parents that the holiday used to be a perfectly fine mid-winter celebration before the Christians co-opted it. That was always good for keeping things festive.

Meanwhile my mum would seethe with passive-aggressive rage because none of us really appreciated all the effort that had gone in preparing the food, the decorations, the presents and the whole day in general.

It annoys me that I am falling into this same trap, the primal need to create a lovely and perfect Christmas. Scrimping and saving a bit here and a bit there the whole rest of the year so we can buy presents no one really needs and over-eat fatty, meaty foods for three or four days, until we feel bloated and ill.

When did Christmas get so far out of hand? I thought the thing started as a bit of a distraction to jolly us through the darkest time of the year, but now it has become such a marathon of events - from the school Christmas fair, the nativity play, the work Christmas party, the visit to Santa's grotto, the switching onof the Christmas lights, the carol concert and so on - that I end up run down and ill. In the last four years I have twice had flu at Christmas and I don't think its a coincidence. Christmas has become a test of endurance, the very opposite of what it was meant to be.

I shouldn't even be writing this blog post now because there are Christmas cards to write and a Christmas grocery order to plan. But I say bah humbug to that. Bah blimmin humbug. If you get your card late from us this year you will know why.

How to hire a nanny

2011-11-13T14:04:00.000-08:00

Not only do I like our nanny, I sometimes think I am slightly in love with her. More than six months into the relationship, the romance hasn't yet worn off. It is like having a brilliant, devoted wife.

K is infinitely more patient with the children than I. She plans activities for them during half term, brings in materials for craft activities and regularly takes the baby swimming. When she has time, she hoovers and empties the dishwasher although these are not part of her job per se. On Thursdays, before she leaves us for the weekend, she tends to leave a plateful of home-baked cupcakes under a tea-towel on the kitchen counter. No husband, however, committed and attentive, could be as good. Certainly not in terms of the baking, anyway.

A lot of friends have commented on how nice K is and have asked me how I found her. So I thought I would blog on this. I am not claiming this is a definitive guide, it's just what I did.

1) You don't need to use an agency

I just put a small, free advert on the Gumtree website. It was something along the lines of 'nanny wanted for three lovely children', wording that made my husband raise his eyebrows and ask whether it might be in breach of the trade descriptions act.

A lot of people in our town tend to use a nanny agency. But when I rang up and made inquiries with them, I discovered they would charge me £700 to find a four-day a week nanny. The scrooge in me decided I could at least try other routes first.

I was surprised by the response. - I got around 30 CVs sent in within days . Once I had weeded out the wildly unsuitable ones - the ones who didn't live in the area, didn't work in childcare, and one plucky lady who had two young children of her own but was proposing to look after my three on top of that - I had about 15 serious applicants.

2) Make it a good job

I think the reason I got such a good response that we tried to make it a reasonably good job. We were offering 40 hours a week at £10 an hour, the top end of the £7 to £10 range I was told was the norm in our area. Asking someone to look after three children under 5, I felt we could hardly offer much less. I had been doing that job for nine months, full time, and could vouch for the fact that it was relentless and exhausting.

Other friends had struggled to find a nanny when they were offering just two or three days of work. With four days, it was a full-time job, without pressure for the nanny to find something else to fit around it.

We also tried to be very fair with holidays. I get six weeks off a year so the nanny gets the same, half her choice, half ours.

3) Interview lots of nannies - and be prepared for surprises

Interviewing was interesting. I interviewed eight candidates in the end, quite a large number, but I felt it was good because I really didn't know what I was doing to start with.

I found it very instinctive. Within about a minute of meeting each nanny I had a very clear feeling about whether we could work together or not.

I interviewed one older lady, initially taken with the idea of a "grandmother" figure for the kids. But once we met it was pretty clear it wouldn't work. It wasn't the age, it was the fact she was so flustered the whole time. I had to explain the directions to our house many times on the phone. Then she was late for the interview because a road diversion had sent her off course and she had panicked. She spent most of the time at the interview telling me how betrayed she had felt over being made redundant by her last employer. I couldn't really see her coping with the pressure of hauling three children and a double pushchair through the rain to the Tuesday afternoon dance class.

Another nanny had a police caution for shoplifting marked on her CRB certificate. She explained that it was many years ago and for something minor like a lipstick. But I felt a little taken aback and wary. If I had really liked her it might not have mattered, but there were others who I thought more qualified in any case.

I asked one nanny where she wanted to be in five years time - one of those fairly standard interview questions.

"Working in prisons," she answered. It turned out she was undecided between childcare and the security work she had been doing more recently. She was a big lady with strong, beefy arms. I was worried her discipline regime might be a little too harsh for the children.

4) Include the children in the interview

I had the kids around when I interviewed the nannies, not really by design, but because I had no one else to look after them. But this turned out to be a great strategy. Watching the nannies interact with the kids told me much more than any interview question.

As I made a cup of tea and set out biscuits, the kids clung to my legs and cried, fought among themselves and generally hindered progress. Some nannies just sat watching it all. The good ones immediately jumped in to help.

One of my favourite nannies turned around to my four and a half year old who was nagging me for a biscuit.

"That is an awful lot of 'I want' and not very much 'please and thank you'" she said kindly but firmly. Brilliant. My daughter was silenced for several moments, before asking for her biscuit with beautiful manners.

I might have hired that nanny on the spot, but it turned out she couldn't drive and I really needed someone who could take the children longer distances.

Another nanny I liked was a wonderfully free-spirited girl who had just come back from traveling. I could imagine her taking the kids for rambling adventures that would enrich their childhood no end. But I worried she might keep returning from those adventures having left someones shoes or hat or even the baby behind.

5) Call up all the references

And then there was K, the last nanny that we saw, and I liked her instantly. My only worries were that she is quite pretty and I had really been hoping to hire a big, fat homely girl to remove any temptation from my husband. The nanny-and-middle-aged man affair is such a cliche.

The other worry was that she was so young, only 20. My younger sister is 28 and I still have a tendency to think of her as being too young and irresponsible to look after children (my sister is a special needs teacher so I do realise this may be a little irrational). But 20 really did seem barely old enough to be in charge of anything. It turns out, however, that K is 20 going on 40 - she had just bought a house with her long term boyfriend and they spend weekends doing DIY and going to car boot sales, like a middle-aged couple.

I was also reassured when I called her references. Her previous employer could not have praised her more highly. The little girl she had been looking after before was badly disabled by cerebral palsy. The mother said that she, herself, struggled to cope with outings that involved the heavy wheelchair and assorted medical equipment. K, on the other hand, didn't balk from taking the girl for trips on the bus. I decided that our double buggy was unlikely to daunt her.

K was only leaving that job because the girl, now 5, had got a place at a special school and no longer needed K full time. But they were all still planning to keep in touch. That spoke volumes too.

We agreed terms pretty easily and K did a couple of trial days for us before her official start.

6) There is always worry

No matter how good the person you hire, I think there must always be a difficult moment, the first time you leave the kids completely alone with a nanny. As my husband and I drove off to his company's annual employee outing, K's first trial day, I fretted in the car.

"You do realise that we really don't know much about her. She could be a front for an international child trafficking ring," I told my husband. "We will get home and they will be all gone and we will never see the children again."

"What about the former employers, the nice woman with the disabled kid you spoke to about half an hour?" my husband asked.

"She could be a trained actor, working for the same child-snatching ring," I told him. I almost made him turn back home.

When we got home later that afternoon, the older children were drawing at the kitchen table angelically and the baby was asleep. It got a bit easier leaving them after that.

7) The downsides

There have only been two downsides of having a nanny that I have discovered so far.

The first and biggest is the expense. It eats up pretty much all of our spare income. For the next two years we are on an austerity package tighter than anything imposed on Greece. There is no spending money at all, no frivolous take-out coffees, no girly shopping sprees, and our only holidays will be staying with my parents and the odd camping trip.

What really rankles about the expense is not so much K's salary, which she richly deserves, but how much we have to pay the government. They get three bites of the cherry because I am working. I get my salary, which is taxed, and out of that I pay K, who pays tax on what she gets. Then we pay a few hundred a month in employer's national insurance contributions, which is the bit that really takes us over the edge financially. It feels a little like being punished for having created a job for someone, but there you go, that is government for you. It would, however, be a lot easier for women to justify working if they could pay the nanny out of pre-, rather than post-tax income.

The other downside is that the baby learned to say K's name before she learned to say 'mummy' and that did leave me feeling wracked with guilt and jealousy. But I tried to be rational about it. I kept telling myself that is must be better for the baby have a nanny she is attached to, rather than one she did not like. And I would always be her mother. In any case, she has now learned to say "mummy" and tends to shout it, loudly and incessantly, all day long, making me almost long for the earlier time.

It is a journey

2011-10-08T15:02:00.000-07:00

It is easier to spend time with other people who have children. They keep the same hours as we do - rise early and struggle to stay awake beyond ten pm. Their houses contain toys and childproofing and they understand that lunchtimes must be prompt. They know that spending the day together will involve taking the children to the park at some stage. In dozens of little ways, it is just simpler getting together.

So when good friends of ours finally had a baby this summer we were delighted. We went to see them last weekend, and already it feels like the baby has brought their world closer to ours.

But I also suddenly realised that becoming a family is a long and tiring journey, not a destination you arrive at overnight after giving birth.

Their baby is still less than three months old, so things are fairly hard going for them. There is a lot of waking up at night and crying in the evenings. My friend asked if I could reassure her that things would start getting better as time went on.

I thought about my answer carefully.

I looked around their house, which has yet to be taken over by toys. There were a few, tasteful baby items dotted about, but it was still free of the tidal wave of plastic, beeping tat that seems to have swept over our house. Their fridge was not covered in children’s drawings, the table legs were free of crayon marks and the backs of the chairs had not been decorated with stickers.

I thought about how, after the baby went up to bed, our friends put his few toys away with adorable care. At home, I often just stare at the mess in dull resignation and wonder whether it is worth bothering doing anything about it when all the things will only get pulled out again the next morning.

I thought about the shepherd’s pie they had cooked for lunch - a recipe they had found and clipped from the BBC Good Food magazine together. I can’t remember the last time my husband and I browsed for or discussed a recipe . Its good going if we even manage to eat at the same time. I don’t cook to recipes any more - it is usually whatever needs using up from the back of the fridge, combined with mince. If I put anything more exotic than black pepper in, my son cries because “there something dirty in my mouth mummy” and my daughter performs a forensic examination of her portion in case there might be “black bits“. The baby just slingshots it at the walls with her plastic spoon.

At mealtimes we run through all the classic parent lines:

“It is not yucky, it is a green bean.”
“You haven’t even tried it.”
“If you are too full to eat your dinner you will be too full to have pudding.”
“Lots of starving children in Africa would be very grateful to have a dinner like this. And, no, we cannot mail it to them.”
“It is NOT yucky, It is a green bean. You like green beans. ”
“There is not anything dirty in your mouth. It is a green bean.”

In some ways the first weeks are the most intense. The tiredness is so bad it makes you physically nauseous. But you feel like a few good nights sleep would set it all right again. After several years of on and off broken sleep, the weariness settles in the bones like rheumatism. Its not the dark circles under the eyes - it is the way your whole face has just started looking old, and you aren’t sure it is reversible anymore.

It is not that any day is overwhelmingly hard. It is just that it is every day, another lot of pasta to wipe up from under the table, another set of packed lunches to make, and uniforms to iron, toys to pick up, unaccountably large quantities of milk to buy, over and over and over again.

They tell me this bit will go more quickly than I would like, that soon I will be waving them off to university and mourning my empty nest. That is probably true, but in the thick of it, it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like Groundhog Day in a gulag.

I thought about all this as my friend nursed her baby and her glass of red wine. But I decided to offer the kind answer.

“Absolutely,” I told her. “This is the hardest bit. It gets so much better. ”

Working mother's survival guide

2011-09-10T15:24:00.000-07:00

So, I have been back at work for a few months and we have achieved a kind of precarious balance. Its a balance easily knocked out by a child's illness or a problem at work, and we are exhausted, but, life mostly functions.

So I am feeling brave enough to share a few of my coping tips...

1) Every task can be subdivided into an almost infinite number of small units. Making cottage pie, for example, takes about an hour. If you have a spare five minutes, though, you can chop the carrots in preparation for it. Put them in a bowl of water in the fridge until needed. Another five minutes slot and you can do the potatoes. Sometimes I start making a meal several days in advance. For something more complicated, like organising my daughter's birthday, I started about three month's in advance. Decorations - a couple of clicks on eBay during a lunch break. Invitations - during several evenings watching TV. Cake - made the base a week earlier and froze it, undecorated.

2) When cooking, always cook a double quantity and freeze half. It takes about the same time to make two lasagnas as it does to make one. And then you don't have to cook next time.

3) Buy everything in bulk. We get a Sainsbury's internet grocery delivery once a month where we get industrial quantities of nappies and washing powder and orange juice etc delivered to the door. I don't have to think about whether we are about to run out. I do have to worry about where to store it all, but that is a different issue.

This also applies to things like birthday presents for the children's friends. If you see one good toy, buy ten of them, especially when they are on sale. Same with birthday cards, school uniforms and socks. There is never any time to go shopping, so when I do go, I make it count.

4) Adopt a "see it, do it" attitude to housework. If the washbasin is filthy, wipe it straight away. There is never time to come back to it. Just 20 seconds of tidying here and there can help keep the chaos at bay - just enough - to make it through the week.

There is a flip side to this. If you really don't have time to do it, just pretend you don't see it. Men have been doing this for years and I am convinced it has contributed to their greater degree of boardroom success.

5) Which leads me to the next point. Let go the inner control freak and delegate. My husband is now in charge of all the laundry. Even though he shrank one of my jumpers recently, I still think it is a good arrangement.

In the beginning, when our wonderful nanny started I found myself getting peeved because she baked so much we were constantly running out of eggs. It felt strange letting another woman have control of my kitchen. Then I realised that too much cake was really not a bad problem to have, and now I just order extra eggs and cheerfully pass off her creations as my own when friends come round.

6) At work, never complain, never explain. No one really wants to hear about your domestic issues. And they won't be sympathetic. I never tell people I don't work on Fridays. I just say I am not available for that meeting or that time. At a pinch, I might tell them I am out of the office that day. That could just as well be for a training day or for business travel. If I tell people I have another appointment, they don't need to know it is with my daughter's teacher or that my "breakfast meeting" is with my son. It makes me sound dynamic and in demand and gets accepted a lot better. When you drone on about not being able to make a meeting because of your child's conjunctivitis, people write you off an another flakey mummy-track mum. Obviously I'm not evasive like this with my boss, just people outside the company who don't need to know.

The only exception is when I am talking with another working mother who I know will be sympathetic. One work contact was desperately trying to book me in for a breakfast meeting, a time I just couldn't do. She was being very persistent, and I wasn't sure how I was going to get around it until I remembered that she had three young kids as well.

"Look, the thing is the nanny doesn't get in until 8," I confessed. "Is there any way we can do it later?" As if by magic, the schedule was re-jigged.

7) Reject guilt. There is so much of it, all the time, for a working mother. You are never working late enough, or baking enough for the bake sale. But what does that guilt achieve? It just wastes energy, which is in short supply. If no one has died, you haven't been sacked and you children aren't on drugs, it is probably ok and it is best not to worry about it.

So these are a few of my secrets, but I am sure there are many other tricks I am missing. Let me know some of your coping tips. I need all the help I can get.

Why does everyone run?

2011-07-09T14:37:00.000-07:00

In the middle ages, when people got religion, they would start wearing a hair shirt, stop eating meat and wear their knees out in prayer.

In our modern, secular life we mortify the flesh in a different way, with a pair of air-cushioned trainers and a sports bra. Approaching or shortly past the age of thirty, everyone I know seems to take up running.

It also wears out the knees, by the way, and the atmosphere at a race meeting is like some Deep South revival meeting, with everyone clapping, cheering and whooping as the runners stumble and dry-heave their way across the finish line. I have been to these things many times to support my husband and friends and always felt like I should be shouting a "hallelujah" somewhere into the mix.

The running trend irritates me. Probably because it is so virtuous. So obviously healthy. People who run often tell me they like running because it makes them feel good - a statement that makes them sound even more pious. It is like telling people that you help out at the homeless shelter on a Saturday morning because you find it so fun and rewarding. Even if it is true, it sounds saccharine.

Running doesn't really make you feel good - not in the way that sex, or having a massage, or sinking into a hot bath makes you feel good. It gives you shin splints or a stitch in the side, makes you feel hot. At best you'll get a moment of runner's high, and after you finish, it makes you feel pleased that you have done something healthy, and a little less frightened of confronting your own mortality through the gradual decline of your physical fitness. But this is not really the same as feeling "good".

Oh, I have experienced runner's high, and I didn't think it was all it was cracked up to be. In the year before my wedding I ran a lot. I spent hours running around the local park or on the treadmill at the gym, most mornings. I didn't do it because it felt good. Or because I liked it. I did it - solely and exclusively - so I would look good in my gorgeous, slinky wedding dress.

In any case, after about six months of dull plod plod plod plod, one morning I got the euphoric feeling. I had released natural endorphins into my brain. "This is it!" I thought. And it was pretty great for about five minutes. But it wasn't really worth all the hours I'd had to put into the running to get there. You can get just as much of a euphoric feeling from lots of other things for a lot less effort. Laughing at a funny joke, for example. Listening to a sublime piece of music. Or getting my husband to kiss my neck in just the right place.

Devotional running builds up slowly. It often starts with a 2k Race for Life, just for the fun of it. Then a 10k to challenge yourself, then - god help us - a marathon, or a triathlon, all of which take hours and hours of preparation time.

Serious runners get quite boring about it, a bit like born-again Christians. They talk about the times they have done, the times they are aiming for, and well, that is about it, what else can you really say about it? Running technique? One foot in front of the other, generally.

And serious running begins to taint everything else they do. Family life gets put on hold because they need to put in their training hours. They start spending money on fancier trainers so correct the knee and arch damage that the running is doing.

Worst of all, if they do drink at all, serious runners drink like my grandmother used to. They accept every beverage with a little protest "oh I really shouldn't because I have a 10k run in the morning". So that all the rest of us are reminded that really, they are a virtuous, athletic person.

Running is an easy and virtually free option for exercise, easy to wrap around busy child-rearing duties. So I can see the appeal. And I am not knocking exercise. But its so unoriginal. I wish just a few people were taking up jazz dance, or potholing, or badminton instead.

Birthdays are different after giving birth

2011-06-19T12:30:00.000-07:00

It was my birthday last weekend and I had a lovely two days. The children were sweetly excited about it and my husband tried his hardest to make the day relaxing for me. But birthdays are also often reminders of just how different things are now that we have children. I spent part of this one in a rain-sodden tent on the edge of a field, trying to stop the baby from eating cow pats. And no, it wasn't Glastonbury.

One of my favourite birthdays of all time was when I was five. My mum and I made kiosks out of cardboard and instead of just serving us a birthday tea round a table, my mum got my friends and I to queue up to "buy" a hot dog or hamburger from one of the kiosks with some play money. It was the coolest birthday party in the class that year.

A close contender for all-time best party was when I turned 25. All my friends came to a bar where we drank cocktails with silly names and danced salsa very badly. I cannot, in fact, remember the latter part of the evening, having drunk a few too many of those cocktails. But I woke up in the morning to discover that my then-boyfriend-now-husband had got me home, taken off my boots, persuaded me to drink some water and tucked me up in bed safely. The hangover was hideous but my love for him immense. The following evening we had dinner on the Oxo tower balcony.

The all-time worst birthday was four years ago. My eldest daughter was around one and had just started nursery where she contracted a violent stomach bug. We'd been meaning to go to Royal Ascot for my birthday, leaving daughter with babysitters while we sipped champagne and remembered how to be unencumbered adults again. But there was no question of being able to leave our projectile-vomiting child. So we cancelled Ascot and spent the day trying to get a doctor's appointment.

It was a case of gradually diminishing expectations. My husband suggested a pub lunch but this was equally unfeasible with a sick child. So he cooked me a birthday dinner at home. Nice china. Candles, napkins, mood lighting. Even though I was holding a whimpering child in my lap as we ate it was lovely. Then suddenly, I felt this warm wetness spreading all over my lap and down my legs. The baby's stomach bug had moved to the diarrhea stage and there had been a nappy failure on an epic scale. We both had to have a shower, and I gave up trying to celebrate after that. I think we just went to bed, exhausted.

Ever since then, I've had fairly low expectations for my birthday.

This year, I asked for a lie-in, and I did get it, sort of. My husband nipped out very early to get some chocolate croissants to surprise me with and unfortunately that was just when the baby woke up crying for her bottle. But I kept my eyes closed while I fed her and pretended it didn't count as really waking up.

My little boy rushed into the room next to wish me a happy birthday. "Guess what mummy. After it your birthday, it my birthday next," he said, jumping up and down. He's basically just happy because he knows that once we get this one over with it will be his turn in two weeks' time.

My five-year-old daughter took charge of unwrapping my presents. "I am just going to help you, mummy, because its your birthday" she told me firmly, when I protested. I got to see my gifts only after they had been inspected by all three children.

We were duty bound that day to go to a Midsummer barbecue and bonfire evening, and had the children's cousin with is for the day, for good measure. It was idyllic, in the middle of a field and the kids had a blast climbing over tree trunks and straw bales and jumping over cow-pats. Until the heavens opened and all 50-or so people there had to cram into a small wigwam for shelter. Trying to feed wet, tired children soggy hot dogs in a tiny space was not my favourite part of the birthday. I was praying the sausages had been on the barbecue long enough to avoid having a repeat, later, of the Stomach Bug Birthday.

We got home, pretty exhausted, got the kids to bed and heated up some Thai food. We opened a bottle of bubbly, then retired to bed to test out the theory that a woman hits her sexual peak in her mid-30s. It was starting to feel like a proper birthday now. Then, just as we were getting to the really - REALLY - good bit....

"Whaaaaah". The baby- who has been teething on and off for weeks now - began to wail inconsolably. It was impossible to carry on.

But we're getting better at this. Once the baby had been soothed back to sleep, we picked up more or less where we had left off. So the thing about the sexual peak must be true, at least.

Party tips for five-year-olds

2011-06-12T13:17:00.000-07:00

The parties keep getting bigger. My eldest has started school and she wanted to invite the whole class to her 5th birthday celebrations. With 27 children in the class, a cousin, a couple of non-school pals and her three-year-old brother the numbers quickly added up to a whopping, 36 children.

The trend at the recent round of children's parties we've been to has been to hire an entertainer. We've seen Mr Banana Head and Mr Marvel strut their stuff, and it does seem to make party hosting very easy. But the £200+ price tag put me off doing this myself. We never had entertainers when I was growing up, I told myself. How hard can it be to run a few old-fashioned party games?

Pretty hard, actually.

But not impossible. I can report this now, having survived what must have been one of the longest 120 minute-periods of my life last Saturday. The children had fun, no-one got trampled, and after about four litres of caffeinated drinks and several hours lying still on the sofa, I felt roughly ok again. But you have to be very well prepared and it helps to own a bubble machine. I've made a few notes should anyone be planning to do this as well.

1) Keep the games quick and simple. Have at least 10 to hand, as 5-year-olds still don't have a very long attention span. Musical bumps, Simon Says, What is the time Mr Wolf, flapping a parachute about and batting a balloon in the air with a bit of rolled-up newspaper worked very well. We tried a complicated game with two teams racing each other to pass balloons between their legs. This descended into complete chaos. I couldn't even get the kids to stand in two lines. Half of them lost interest and wandered off before we'd even got the first balloon out.

2. Share the party if you can. My daughter's best school friend's birthday is only a week later so we had a combined event. That means there are more adults on call to help. My daughter's friend brought her whole Sri Lankan extended family come help, including grandmother, aunties, uncles and granddad. Brilliant.

3. It is important to have lots of adult helpers because at age five, lots of parents just drop the kids off at the party rather than hanging around. Some parents still stay, but those with the most difficult children will invariably be the ones that simply thrust their hyperactive offspring through the door and run off to enjoy their two hours of peace and quiet.

4. At every party there is at least one bolshy little boy who is bent on causing trouble. His parents will be one of the ones who dumped and ran. Identify the troublemaker early and make it clear that you won't put up with any nonsense. If you try to be too gentle about it you will end up like Mr Banana Head, getting punched in the stomach by one particularly repulsive little oik. At our party I discovered the problem child kicking my three-year-old son in the shins to make him cry. He was told to sit down and eat his birthday cake in a tone of voice that implied he might soon be wearing it. The good thing is that its still pretty easy to lay down the law with 5-year-olds. In another few years I am not so sure.

5. Keep the food simple. My Sri Lankan friend is a semi-professional caterer. She makes amazing spring rolls and a divine curry. But she didn't quite realise that British five-year-olds will not touch these things. Some looked visibly frightened by the food she brought to the party. A lot of it ended up in my freezer (perhaps not a bad result but not much use from the kids' point of view). Kids at parties will eat one or two small sandwiches, a couple of cocktail sausages and then focus on the crisps and cake. The responsible mother in me feels obliged to offer cucumber and carrot sticks. But I am not sure its worth the bother. Only the kids whose parents are hovering around next to them will eat them.

6. Be prepared for the party to be a grueling physical workout, the equivalent, say, of a 10k run. I prepared for it as if for a race. I got an early night and ate a hearty, carbohydrate-rich breakfast. Midway through the party I realised I was sweating so much the whole front of my dress was drenched. I could have wrung water from it. And the next day I woke up with my legs painfully stiff.

7. If you are hiring a hall for the party, get a good sound system for the music. Last year at my daughters (only slightly smaller) 4th birthday party, we had a weedy little CD player that no-one could hear, which made it tricky of play games like musical bumps. This year we discovered we could plug an MP3 player into the ancient amp left over from my husband's more rock and roll years, and it was much better.

8. I think cheesy golden oldies work best as a sound-track. Think 1960s, Beach Boys, YMCA,...My husband recoiled at some of these and wanted to include a more up-to-date selection. So we put in a bit of Lady Gaga and that sort of thing. But it didn't get the kids dancing very well. I think they need something a bit more melodious. They are only five, not reviewers from Melody Maker.

9. Buy a bubble machine. I got small, battery operated one on sale at Sainsbury's and it was the best £7 I spent on the party. For the last 20 minutes, when we had run out of party games and cake, I just walked around the room with the machine held aloft, with a trail of children in a conga line behind me, trying to grab the bubbles.

10. Don't plan to do anything else for the rest of the day. We came home, put the smaller children down for their naps, parked the birthday girl in front of the TV, ate some of the left over Sri Lankan food and whimpered softly to ourselves for about two hours. I drank about a gallon of tea and a diet coke, and still couldn't achieve the second wind that caffeine normally gives me.

But we were pleased we had pulled it off, and when my beaming daughter told me "Mummy, you are the best ever at party games" I nearly burst with pride.

I might even do it again next year.

Why everyone should take maternity leave

2011-05-16T14:17:00.000-07:00

It is my fourth week back at work and we are all slowly getting used to the new routine. On the days I work my husband does dinner, bath and bedtime for all three kids on his own, a process he initially described as "hellish", but which seems to be going more smoothlynow.

My little boy wet the bed a few times - not sure if this is related to my absence - and the baby has been teething, so we are not getting much sleep.

Although I still think going back to work is the right thing to do in the long term, I am looking back fondly on the maternity leave. I do think everyone should take parental leave - especially if a shake-up of employment law means fathers can take long periods of leave as well.

There are lots of reasons why I think taking this kind of career break (three times) has been helpful. There is, of course, the benefit of spending time with your children and being a big part in their lives, that is a given. But there are other things as well.

1. I have become part of my community. I don't mean just volunteering at the local school. I have talked to my neighbours more. I discovered that Barbara across the road speaks Mandarin. And I have learned local history from the elderly lady next door. I might have been able to make these connections while I was working, perhaps on the weekends. But to really integrate with any community you have to be a bit needy yourself. I always thought it was a bit boring chatting to Joan next door. She tends to tell the same stories about her grandchildren over and over again. But on some maternity leave days I was so starved of adult company even the prospect of seeing the photos again was appealing.

I made a very different set of friends. At work I deal with a lot of slick, cynical, ambitious corporate people. My mummy friends include a sri lankan arranged marriage bride, a nursery school teacher, a massage therapist, an 78-year-old and others who all have a very different take on life.

3. I have stopped swearing. I work in a pretty macho environment. A colleague today referred to an overstaffing issue as a "bit of a clusterfuck", sending my eyebrows shooting up to my hairline. I realised I just don't speak like that any more. And that is a good thing.

4. I have sorted out the house. We finally got the drafty windows replaced, solar panels installed and the playroom has been transformed from graveyard of unwanted furniture to a bright space with new curtains and lots of storage. When I am working, I see the house less and care less. Piles of paper and folded washing - at least it is clean - pile up in tottering mounds.

5. I honestly think it has made me better at my job. It has given me perspective to see what is an isn't important. Doing things efficiently and on time - important. Office politics - not important. Remembering to say thank you to people who have helped you - important. Going to fancy lunches - not important. Taking time to have a cup of tea with colleagues - important. Staying late to show the boss how hard you are working - not important. Coming back from maternity leave I feel like I am reacting to people more like a human being and not so much like a ball of stress. I hope I can keep it that way.

6. I don't take myself so seriously. At work we often become a bit pompous. We have titles like Director or Manager and Senior Something-or-other. We have Responsibility, and wear suits, and give power-point presentations. We talk about strategy with frowns wrinkling our foreheads. On maternity leave I found myself crawling around on the floor pretending to be an elephant while the overweight lady who runs the playgroup played "Thrumba-diddy" on the guitar. It is hard to be too self-important after that.

7. If the job does become too much, I know there is an alternative. It may involve nappies and wiping mucky hands and noses, and coaxing dinner into reluctant mouths, but it is a genuine alternative. And that is good to know.

Back to work

2011-04-20T13:05:00.000-07:00

Last night I dreamed that my husband had died. It was one of those very realistic dreams that is almost impossible to separate from reality. I dreamed that I was lying in my bed, in my bedroom, waking up on the morning after husband had died of something, probably a long illness. It was unspecified, but nothing dramatic, nothing abnormal. The dream was not about the death but the crushing sense of loss and longing that followed. I wanted to bury my face in the clothes on his side of the wardrobe to inhale the scent of his skin, to cling onto the last things that remained.

I woke up with tears streaming down my face.

When I came to fully, luckily, I could hear my husband pottering around downstairs in the kitchen, he had not yet left for work. He looked up from slicing tomato for his ham sandwiches to find me giving him a passionate, tearful kiss, and telling him how grateful I was that he was still alive. Probably a bit of a surprise at 6.30 on a Thursday morning.

I am not one for analysing dreams much, but you don’t have to be Mystic Meg to realise this dream has something to do with the small sense of bereavement I am feeling as I prepare to return to work after Easter.

I have always planned to go back, and I am not worried about the job as such. This will be my third return and I have a pretty realistic expectation of what it will involve. I will remember how to do it all within a day or two, the contacts in the contacts book will be largely the same, my colleagues will still be as they were, good and bad. After a month it will be hard to remember I was ever on maternity leave.

I went in to work last week to have a meeting with my boss and talk about my return. After months in mummy-land I felt impressed by the product the company puts out and quite amazed I was part of it. The joy of unfolding and exercising my brain - like unleashing a dog that has been cooped up in a small car - was immense.

My big fear is that the job sill start taking over my life again, little by little. I won’t be present in the same way for my children. I won’t know all the things that go on in their lives as intimately as I do now. I feel sad that I will not see as often the many lovely mummies that I have got to know during maternity leave.

I keep having to tell myself that returning to work is not the end of everything, that there will still be my Fridays off each week, and the weekends, and breakfasts with the children every day and some bedtimes, life will go on.

Staying home seems a seductive option at times. Although not quite enough to decide to pack in the job. There has to be some sort of life-balance, halfway house possible. When women stay home, it feels like the economics of their lives become bizarrely warped.

For example, since my eldest started school I have been amazed by the amount of baking and volunteering that are required of the stay-at-home mother. I now bake for the school, the nursery, for the children’s Saturday school, and spent several hours last week in the drafty entrance of the local Sainsbury’s flogging raffle tickets for the school’s summer fete. All these efforts for small - but I am told essential - sums which will go towards fixing leaking roofs, boilers, and getting more play equipment.

Selling the raffle tickets was particularly depressing. In two hours I managed to sell 17 tickets at £1 each, listen to one man’s rambling life story, admire photos of several old ladies’ grandchildren, and was invited to a 70s funk and disco night by a heavily tattooed man called Steve.

Raising £17 for the school cost me slightly more than £20 in nanny fees. Granted, there were probably some intangibles in there, like positive PR for the school and the community service of giving old, lonely ladies someone to talk to on a Tuesday morning. Not to mention the strange ego-boost of being chatted up for the first time in about 11 years. But it still doesn’t feel economically viable in the long term.

It highlights how poorly valued women’s time is, when they stay at home, doing what is supposedly The Most Important Job In The World.

In the worst case scenario, after the child rearing years are over they end up with no savings or pension, financially shackled to a husband they may no longer love. My mother has friends like this, who after dedicating their lives to The Most Important Job In The World, now fear divorce and poverty. For them, the dream about the dead husband is not about grieving but of freedom. I don’t want that to be me.

Light-fingered friends

2011-03-25T10:48:00.000-07:00

There seems to be a spate of petty pilfering going on amongst my four-year-old daughter's friends.

One little girl got in trouble at school for pinching a lip balm from someone else’s desk drawer during break time. The school cracked down on it very hard and the girl was so upset over the incident she soiled her bed that night. The girl’s mother and I have debated whether the level of response was correct or not. Clearly stealing is not acceptable, but what is the best method of drilling morality into four-year-olds?

Now I am faced with my own dilemma. A few weeks ago, one of my daughter’s friends came over to play. I am not going to name any names - and I have changed the details slightly - because some of my friends read this blog.

I was making a snack for the girls. My daughter was mooching around next to me trying to negotiate for chocolate chip cookies as a snack rather than apple and sandwiches. Her friend disappeared upstairs to for a while.

When I went upstairs to my daughter’s room a little later, I noticed that the hair clips box had been thoroughly ransacked. Not a big deal, the girls are always playing with the hair things and leaving them lying all over the floor. It will be a miracle if the baby makes it through to toddler hood without swallowing a sparkly hair bobble.

The girls ate, played dressing up, bickered, played mummies and babies, bounced on the trampoline. I mopped up a spilled drink, mediated a dispute over the dolls pram and picked up the clothes they had left strewn around the house.

When I picked up my daughter’s friends jeans, they were very heavy and rattled. On inspection, I discovered a huge stash of my daughter’s hairclips in the pockets, including the prize Hello Kitty clips.

“I don’t think these are yours,” I said to the little girl as I fished my daughter’s things out. “Why don’t we put them back in the box upstairs?” It was calm and friendly, but firm.

“I was just going to borrow them,” said the girl, sulkily. But it was clear she had not asked my daughter, who looked surprised and annoyed when she saw her pink trophies emerging from someone else’s pocket.

I haven’t mentioned the incident to the girls mother, and I am not sure if I should. I like the mother a lot and think her parenting is fine. I don’t want to make this into a big deal or panic her. I think, at this age, the moral compass of most children is still a little wobbly. I dread to think what my daughter might get up to if left alone with temptation.

But am I really now going to have to start frisking children on their way home from our house?

The art of persuasion

2011-03-10T10:39:00.000-08:00

We reached a major breakthrough recently when the two and a half-year old middle child learned to use the potty. It all happened quite quickly. We had been waiting for signs that he might be ready, and typically, it was a week before we were due to go away on holiday in Italy that he announced that he wanted the “big boy pants”. So something of a tight deadline.

My training method was unashamed bribery. If he managed to get something in the potty he got a chocolate coin. Occasionally, when his initial enthusiasm was beginning to wane a little, I resorted to dancing around the kitchen, waving the chocolate coin about with one hand, while pointing to the potty with the other. In the business world, I believe this is known as “performance related pay”.

But here is the really genius idea. I promised my four-and-a-half year old eldest daughter, that whenever her little brother managed to “perform” on the potty, she would also get a chocolate. Suddenly she developed a huge interest in helping him. She followed him around the house with the little blue potty, asking whether he fancied a wee. She helped get tricky trousers up and down and while I was stuck feeding the baby, she sat for hours reading to him in the toilet. In the world of work, , I believe this is called an “executive bonus scheme”.

It worked beautifully. After three slightly tiring days of mopping the floor he had no more wee accidents at all, and even managed to use the airplane toilet on our trip.

The poo was another thing. He managed the occasional turd in the potty, but was often reluctant to go. He preferred to hide away somewhere and just soil his pants. This continued while we were on holiday. We left a trail of soiled underwear in toilet bins across the scenic towns of northern Italy - I couldn’t bear to bring them home. And while the Italians were almost universally welcoming of children - even the tiny posh business restaurant we accidentally stumbled into in Milan welcomed the five of us with open arms - their toilets are almost universally small and lacking in baby changing facilities. So I was getting increasingly fed up, and one day I cracked.

We were in a pizza restaurant and I had just asked him if he needed to go. He told me very firmly, “no” and then stood up and got that faraway look in his eye that I was beginning to recognise. But by then, it was too late. I couldn’t stop myself being cross with him as I changed him in yet another tiny toilet.

“This is disgusting. This is unacceptable. I will not have this. You will not poo in your pants any more. I have had it with this,” I ranted at him as I sealed the evil-smelling undies into a nappy sack. It really wasn’t the way the childcare manuals recommend you do it, and part of me was thinking “this is going to give him a complex”, but I couldn’t control the annoyance.

The funny thing is, at the end of the rant, he said in a small voice: “okay mummy, I not do poo-poo in my pants any more”. And true to his word, he hasn’t had a poo accident since. I think in the world of work, this is called a “career discussion”.

Life with only one child in nappies feels wonderful. My husband points out that we still have another two years before the baby gets to toilet training and we are free of the smelly things altogether. But I prefer to think that we are now two thirds of the way done. This is called a “positive PR spin”.

Starting school

2011-02-10T14:40:00.000-08:00

My eldest started school last month and a new era has begun for us. To my surprise I didn’t cry when I left her at the school gates on the first day. The best cure for such sentimentality is having two other children to look after. That morning I was busy working out how I was going to manage to drop her off, get to my son’s pre-school on time, feed the baby and still get back for the early pick-up. I never had the time to be tearful. Maybe when the baby starts school I will indulge in a few tears.

I am finding getting to know the other mums a bit daunting. It has only just struck me that while my daughter is developing a new social circle inside the school gates, I will have to do the same outside. We live in an area where commuter housing slams hard up against a council estate, and the local primary school’s good Ofsted rating is new and undiscovered by the pushy middle class parents. So the intake is very mixed.

In theory, I had thought this a lovely idea, that my children would learn to be friends with a very varied bunch of kids. In practice, I am finding it a little strange and uncomfortable. Everyone lives up to their stereotypes. The middle class mums really do all have bobs, jeans and Boden raincoats. The council house mums really are about a decade younger than me, and really come to drop off in track suit bottoms and scraped-back hair. One mother turns up every morning looking like she has been on a bender, effing and blinding in front of the kids, and flashing the vivid tattoos on her lower back. In all honesty she scares me, and I have been worrying that her daughter might turn out to be my daughter’s best pal. She may be lovely when you get to know her but I just can’t at the moment imagine going round to hers for a play date. So much for my woolly liberalism.

In an attempt to make some friends and fit in, I have joined the committee organising the school’s diamond jubilee celebrations, which are coming up in May. This seems to be organised by a bossy cohort of the middle class mums, who are frightening in their own way. They are mainly the big-bosomed cake-baking sort of mothers, who run scout troops and charity quiz nights in between ferrying dozens of children of varying ages to swimming and football and ballet. They have made motherhood into a properly serious, full-time career. I feel like a real novice next to them, but I am hoping I score some brownie points on the diamond jubilee stuff before they discover that I am about to weasel off back to work in a couple of months.

We’ve also had one of my daughter‘s new friends and her mum over for a play date. I cleaned the house and made sure we had some healthy snacks for the children. But my efforts at making a good impression were foiled by my children who staged, between the three of them, a poo marathon while the guests were over. The baby’s nappy leaked through all her clothes and onto my trouser leg. My eldest had an enormous sticky, tarry movement in the downstairs guest loo which required me to scrub out the bowl with the bog brush. And the two-year-old produced a succession of four - I kid you not - soiled nappies. I kept whisking him off upstairs for a change and still, every time he walked past there was an evil-smelling waft following him. Never mind that the rugs were freshly vacuumed and the sofa cushions plumped - the house stank of excrement.

What has been really fun about school, however, is seeming the light bulbs going on in my daughter’s head as she picks up new things. It has only been a few weeks but she is recognising a few words and is obsessed with copying down every bit of writing she can see in the house. I keep finding scraps of paper covered in random words like “ultra lightweight” “Philips” and “Samsung”, which have been copied off the side of our kitchen appliances. I don’t think she has any idea what she is writing but she takes it all very seriously. I hope that enthusiasm for learning will stay with her for as long as possible.

One morning last week I woke up with her sitting on top of me in bed. She wore a solemn expression.

“Mummy, do you know that if a box jellyfish stings you.. life.is.over,” she said.

I am not sure if she learned that at school or whether it was something on Octonauts. But It was one of the most surreal awakenings I have had. What else will the next 12 or so years bring?

The magic of Christmas

2011-01-17T14:27:00.000-08:00

Maybe I am just feeling jaded after a flu-riddled holiday season, but I have come to the conclusion that Christmas with children is not all it is cracked up to be.

I can already hear the howls of protest. It is one of the biggest taboos for a mother to say this. Christmas, after all, is supposed to be one of the big compensations of parenthood. Watching their eyes light up as they see their filled stockings on Christmas morning…all those lovely mother and child moments of decorating gingerbread biscuits and making mince pies. Rushing out into new fallen snow on Boxing Day to make a snowman. Surely, these are some of the very reasons we had the nippers in the first place.

The trouble is, in the early years, at least, it is nothing like this.

Christmas, over the last few years, has usually found me struck down with flu. With little sleep, a breastfeeding baby and two children bringing home nursery germs, I have become a prime target for illnesses. The holiday time tinkle of champagne glasses has been replaced in our house by the clink-clinking of the cough medicine and paracetomol bottles. Two years ago I missed watching the children open their gifts because I couldn’t get out of bed. This year, my husband was bed bound on Christmas morning. I had recovered just enough to cook Christmas lunch for 14, but not quite enough to enjoy eating any of it.

Or then, there is the delight of travelling to see family during the holidays. The Christmas budget goes sky-high on purchasing peak-time air tickets for a family of five. And Christmastime travel is always chaotic. Last year we spent hours battling through the snow to get to the airport, several more hours waiting to see if our plane would leave, and finally arrived without our luggage. This year, it was even worse for travellers, with many spending several days in Heathrow and Gatwick. The one thing that cheered me up as I shivered in my sickbed was the thought that at least we were not trying to fly anywhere.

Nobody likes sleeping on an airport floor, but with children, the delays are worse. Two delayed adults can repair to one of the airport bars and while away the tedium in an alcoholic haze. Delayed with children, you are arm wrestling a fat woman for the last ham sandwich left on the Boots shelves and trying to devise entertainment out of a used drinking straw and a women’s magazine. Oh, and you will be covered in sick, poo, and every other human excretion, none of it your own.

When you do arrive at your parents home the joy of a multi-generational Christmas is a little dimmed by the realisation that you are sleeping in your teenage bedroom…as a family of five. There is not going to be any Christmas nookie because the children will, in all likelihood, be sleeping on top of you.

Babies don’t know it is Christmas - they still wake up in the small hours of the night and their howls penetrate through the thin walls. In the morning, your brother, nursing a monstrous hangover, looks murderously at you and your boisterous little treasures.

Even without illness or travel delays, Christmas with small children is hard going. Small children do not like disruption to their routine, and the timing of Christmas lunch is almost always wrong for them. A good friend missed Christmas dinner with her husband’s family last year because they had - kindly - timed to coincide exactly with the children’s bath and bedtime. There is nothing that says “Christmas magic” quite like bolting down baked beans on toast in the kitchen with your toddler, while the other adults sip champagne and canapés in the next room.

Children are not great with Christmas dinner. My daughter burst into tears when a well meaning uncle put a Brussels sprout on her plate. My mother used to have to cook spaghetti for my sister when she was little, because she refused to eat any of the Christmas food.

Even unfussy children are too excited to eat and merely make themselves sick on chocolate. Following a bit of indulgence at Christmas my toddler has now become completely unreasonable.
“Mummy, I like chocolate breakfast,” he tells me firmly each morning. When I explain that the choice is between Wheatabix and Shreddies, he dissolves into a mess of tears and flailing arms. Joyful.

And then there is that magical moment when the children open their presents. Rather then being able to enjoy this, my husband and I always feel on the verge of a heart attack, trying to help our whining, rapacious offspring open the packaging fast enough. Why is every toy fastened with at least eight pieces of tightly twisted wire? Is it some kind of sick joke by Chinese factory workers? Or a comment on our Western over-consumption? We’ve learned to come armed with wire cutters, spare batteries and a Stanley knife. But still we emerge from the ordeal with bleeding fingers. I also frantically write notes on what the children have received from their various relatives, confused scrawls I cannot later read. Magical moment? More like being a contestant on some sadistic game show.

I am not against Christmas as such. I just wish it could be downgraded a little. That there could be a little less hype, a little less pressure.

Overall, as a family, I would say we had a much better time say, last weekend. We had all recovered from our coughs and sniffles. We slept in relatively late (about 7.30am still feels like a luxury) and lingered over our breakfast. Unlike Christmas, when the kids were largely ignored while I tried to cook and prepare, we had time to play games with them. We went to the park and played football. We dropped in on friends, then came home and ate spaghetti bolognaise, which took me about half an hour to cook, and which the children loved. After the children went to bed - on time and without whining, unlike Christmas - my husband and I opened a bottle of wine and lit the fire. Perfect.

The good thing , I guess, is that Christmas is just once a year. Whereas you can have that perfect, ordinary weekend any time.

Spy bear comes to stay

2010-12-02T06:26:00.000-08:00

My daughter comes home from nursery with Foxy Bear and my heart sinks. Foxy is the class teddy bear, which the children get to take home in turn. Its not Foxy so much that I object to. But he comes with a journal and the idea is that we take him around everywhere with us for a week, take pictures and record it all in the journal.

I flick through the pages of the journal and see pictures of Foxy and various smiling children at the swimming pool, on a horse, at the zoo. Great, now I have to think of something interesting to do so I can get a photo for the journal. Otherwise it is going to be a picture of Foxy at the Sainsbury’s checkout or queuing at the local post office.

I briefly wonder if I could fake something. Foxy listening to a lecture by Stephen Hawking? Foxy up Mount Everest? I am sure I could download something off the internet and Photoshop it. Is this allowed? Luckily, I have been planning to take my daughter and the baby in to my office in London that week. Foxy can come with us to that.

The bear is a pain. I am still trying to get used to leaving the house with all three children. I am having trouble remembering my mobile phone most days, and the right number of hats and gloves for the children. And now I have to remember the bear as well. And his bag of clothes, which my daughter unpacks and leaves lying all over the house. We manage to lose his shoes almost straight away.

The bear strikes me as yet another method of keeping an eye on parents, like that “surprise” visit from the health visitor the week after you have a baby. While innocently chatting and sipping tea with you, she’s of course scanning your house for any signs of drug abuse, domestic violence, or failure to cope with a small infant. Which is probably a good thing - I would rather someone was checking up and making sure babies are being cared for correctly. But it does always make me feel uncomfortably under scrutiny, no matter how boringly upright and middle class I might be.

It’s the same thing with the bear. I wonder what would happen if we took a photo of Foxy next to a bottle of vodka and a syringe. Or the caption: This is Foxy helping Mummy go to the A&E department after an argument with Daddy. How long it would take before there was a knock on the door by a concerned social worker?

In any case, we go off to London and I remember both Foxy and my camera. And the children. So it’s all going well. We take Foxy for lunch at Wagamama, and then take him to the Tate Modern art gallery, which is right by my office. I expect my daughter to find it a bit boring, but in fact, surrealism seems to be a big hit with her. The contorted figures of Picasso make her laugh, and she enjoys the huge space of the gallery.

You aren’t meant to take pictures in the Tate, but I sneak a quick one. Caption: My daughter and Foxy enjoying a bit of modern art. I feel immensely proud of myself. I even manage to breastfeed the baby at the Tate, while we watch a short 1930s surrealist film clip in a darkened room.

Its only later that I take a closer look at the picture we had in the background of the photo. It is a smallish work by an artist unknown to me. It depicts a hanged man dangling from the branch of a tree while another man - how can I put this politely? - ‘makes love’ to the tree-trunk. My daughter asks: “Why is that man doing a wee-wee on that tree?”. Umm. Yes. Good that she still thinks he’s just relieving himself.

Must change the caption: My daughter and Foxy viewing violent and pornographic images. I wonder how long now before we get that knock from social services?

Mum-crush

2010-10-10T12:23:00.000-07:00

A woman’s life is full of milestones. First period. Birth of first child. Menopause. They mark the passage of time and the transition from one phase of life to the next. In between the epic ones are the smaller milestones. The first time you buy alcohol from an off-licence and are not asked for ID. Your first grey hair. Having a fringe cut to hide those fine lines appearing on your forehead. Buying a black one-piece bathing suit with tummy control from M&S for your summer holiday. All telling their own , poignant, tale of the relentless onward march of time.

And now I have discovered a new one: the “mummy-crush”. This is the first time you develop an inexplicable attraction to a boy young enough to be your son. This is that strange Robert Pattinson Twilight phenomenon, where both daughters and mothers watch the films, drooling over the young vampire hero.

Given that I have only been to the cinema three times in the four and a half years since the birth of my daughter, the Pattinson thing had pretty much passed me by. But as I have written before, I am now spending a lot of time watching X Factor. And I am a little bemused to find I have developed a crush on Harry, the curly-haired, 16-year-old member of the boy band One Direction.

Yes, that is right. The 16-year-old mop-headed moppet. But its not really a crush like in the old days. Unlike a quarter-century ago when I used to dream of John Taylor of Duran Duran scooping me into his arms, I don’t imagine any physicality. It’s more that I find Harry as cute as a button and kind of wish he was my son. Or that, in about 12-years’ time, my daughter would bring someone like him home. And then I could flirt with him a little in that excruciating, but ultimately benign, mumsy way. Or that my teenage self could travel forward in time and meet him. I am not really sure what I imagine, but it is something akin to what an elderly auntie might feel for a favourite nephew.

I wonder if this marks some sort of transition of sexual identity? Does hanging up my reproductive spurs mean a different take on fantasy men (or boys) from now on? Is it a mental shift from sex-bomb to mother hen? Or has my sleep-deprived brain just short-circuited somehow on an overdose of an ITV format show? In any case, I find the whole thing slightly disconcerting, another one of those undignified by-products of the female ageing process, like bingo wings and hot flushes.

The one good thing is that this is one crush which my husband should find entirely nonthreatening….I thought he was going to wet himself laughing when I told him.

Ritual and talismans

2010-09-23T06:04:00.000-07:00

It's not Babygirl’s fault, bless her, but she’s not at her best. Week six is generally the peak of the crying with a colicky baby, and sure enough, she’s crying pretty much all the time now, whenever she’s not being held. Her entire head is also covered in milk spots so she’s not looking particularly cute. We have yet to see a smile, so there is very little reward right now. It is just a case of persevering, and looking forward to things getting better. If this was my first child, I might have given up hope by now.

As it is, I am trying to approach it stoically, and am spending a lot of time wearing her in the baby sling, jigging around in front of X-Factor. I am hoping it is going to hone my thighs better than an aerobics class. There has to be some upside to all this.

We are also developing our own little rituals and talismans. Throughout the ages people have tried to appease the angry gods and ward off natural disasters with offerings and charms. Sacrificial virgins, lucky clover, anything to try to bring a sense of control and order into an unpredictable world. We are much the same with Babygirl, whose crying erupts without warning and leaves our nerves ragged.

We have the special blanket, which we kid ourselves helps her sleep better, because she once napped for a longish stretch in it. It goes everywhere with us, and I am wondering when I am going to manage to wash it. And I worry that washing might lessen its sleep-inducing magical powers. There is also the bottle of Infacol gripe medicine, which I trickle into her mouth before each feed, with the ritualistic manner of a priest scattering incense.

I don’t think any of it really works, the only real cure for colic is for them to grow out of it, which generally takes three months. But the rituals give us something to do while we wait. Three months is quite a long time. It is 84 nights of crying. I calculated that one evening, and nearly burst into tears myself.

But then, just after a particularly long crying spell, which has made the milk spots glow a fierce red all over her face, she suddenly grows quiet, looks directly at me with big eyes and says “oooh” in a tiny little voice. “Oooh”. A tiny little coo. Like the sun breaking out after a storm. I am charmed, smitten and coo back at her, like a lunatic: “ooh, ooh”. Its our first conversation, and makes me forget it all for a moment, all the carrying, jigging and rocking. And in any case, there are only about 46 more nights of crying to go….

Despatches from the front lines

2010-08-26T02:16:00.000-07:00

Babygirl is just over a week old today, and its so far so good. Although its third time round, there have still been a few surprises. Although I would hesitate to describe giving birth as “easy”, third time round was much better than the previous two. For the ladies who have gone through this birth business before, I just have two words: “intact perineum”. If you have ever had stitches after birth, you will know how amazing that is.

Also, four and a half hours from start to finish was not bad. Woke up at 1 am on Monday morning with contractions strong enough to pin me to the bed. There was little or no gap between them, so I woke up husband and told him we needed to go, straight away. Arrived at the hospital at 2 am, and by 5.30 Babygirl was out. The actual pushing came on so fast the midwife didn’t even have time to put on her gloves. She and my husband more or less had to dive to catch the baby, who was expelled in two pushes.

I must confess I am a little proud of my strangely strong uterus. I’ve never been particularly good at any sport. I can’t run fast or throw a ball especially far. But if giving birth were an Olympic sport, I think I’d have a shot at competing with the top athletes. Shame its not really a spectator sport, or even something you can really brag about down the pub. And of course, I am never doing it again.

Its not all been smooth though. I feel a little as though my husband and I have both become single parents. I follow Babygirl’s mainly nocturnal schedule while my husband has been getting up at the crack of dawn with the older children. God knows how you would do this if you really were a single parent. He’s even sleeping in another room for the moment, while Babygirl and I have our nightly feeding frenzy in the bedroom. With three to look after, its simply a case of having to conserve energy very carefully, to divide and conquer. I am looking forward to having a conversation with him again in a couple months time.

The other surprise has been the breastfeeding, and how difficult it is, even third time round. I breastfed my older children for six months each - that’s a year of solid breastfeeding - so I thought I had it cracked. But either I’ve just forgotten or each baby is very different, and the only thing I have cracked is my nipples.

We are now starting to get the hang of it. But the early days of breastfeeding remind me of awkward first-time sex. Yes, there is some instinct to it, but there is also a lot of sweaty wrestling and undignified cramming and pushing. It tends to leave both parties frustrated and tearful . Inevitably, it happens in the middle of the night when I am at my most tired: in a desperate effort to please, I put up with an uncomfortable position and end up sore.

What is worse is that breastfeeding a baby is like living with a sex maniac, who wants to do it every two or three hours, day and night so your sore bits never get a rest. The experience does prove, however, that a mother’s love is the greatest of all loves. You would never put up with this discomfort for a lover.

Approaching D-Day

2010-08-10T12:32:00.000-07:00

We are now 5 days from D-Day, and I am at that stage of pregnancy where I can’t wait to get the baby out. I am sure its nature’s way of convincing women to face up to the whole painful business of childbirth. Several hours of acute pain seems fine, now, as long as it means getting this baby out. I can’t breathe, I can’t eat, I can’t sleep and I can’t go more than 30 minutes without a pee. Every time I get up off a chair I have to take a moment to straighten my hips out. Its like being trapped in the body of a fat, arthritic person. I can only dimly remember the time before I was pregnant. In short, it’s the last few days and I am thoroughly fed up.

I’ve tried most of the folk remedies. I have cleaned the house from top to bottom, even distant, unreachable corners which were last cleaned…well, about two years ago when I was at this same stage in my previous pregnancy. I’ve washed the cushion covers. I’ve filled the freezer with lasagne and cottage pie. My husband and I went out for a curry. I bought a pineapple. But still no sign of baby.

Amusing exchange between my mum, my husband and me on the subject of inducing labour. My mum was recounting an old country saying to my husband about the “three S’s” for getting a baby out, these being sauna, sex, and cleaning (which in my mother tongue also begins with an ‘s’). I piped up that I personally disliked the third ‘s’ but was having to do it now as Stacy (the cleaning lady) was away on holiday. I guess my mum had recounted the list to my husband in a slightly different order, however, as he coughed awkwardly and said that he “didn’t have THAT kind of relationship with Stacy”. We don’t pay her enough to provide that kind of service, he remarked, dryly.

Like some kind of masochist, I’ve also been listening to lots of stories about having third babies. None of them particularly reassuring. After two straightforward labours, my friend C had a horrendously drawn-out third delivery, with the baby getting the cord tangled around his neck, leading to an emergency C-section. She was then virtually incarcerated at home for several weeks, unable to walk or drive into town, with three children going mad with boredom. It didn’t sound or look like much fun.

At the opposite end of the scale, I met a woman in the park who had given birth to her third baby on a laundry trolley in the car park of the hospital, because she simply couldn’t get in the building quick enough. She’s had to be induced for the first two children, so had no idea how fast things would progress with her third one, which went into labour spontaneously. She looked remarkably untraumatised by the experience though.

On balance, I think I’d rather take the laundry trolley, as at least it would all be very quick. My husband was not convinced, however, when I told him and looked somewhat haunted by the thought of having to deliver a child by himself in some side street. I think I caught him secretly doing an inventory of the blankets and first aid stuff we have in our car, just in case.

Role reversal

2010-06-23T05:09:00.000-07:00

My husband and I had a thought-provoking role reversal last week.

An urgent project kept me late at work and when I finally arrived home, apologetic over missing dinner, I found my husband in a flap. Not so much because of my lateness, but because he was trying to bake a cake for my birthday the next day and it had come out of the oven completely flat.

He was also traumatised because he'd had to remove two deeply-embedded splinters from the four-year-old's palm. She is terrified of needles and had become nearly hysterical during the procedure.

There was flour and baking stuff all over the kitchen. The 'surprise' birthday card my daughter had drawn was in plain view and my husband was exasperated and grumpy.

For a moment, I felt a stab of sympathy for the corporate warrior husband who returns home after a being put through the wringer by his boss all day, only to find a chaotic house, a snappish wife and 'dinner in the dog', as the saying goes.

"For god's sake, why don't you just buy a ready-made sponge or something," I told my husband. "Its not that important. I'd rather not have a cake - or a birthday - than see you get yourself in such a state."

Even as the words came out, I knew this wasn't the right thing to say. Because the much harder, less rewarding job is being the stay-at-home wife, dealing with the "trivial" things that seem to swallow up your whole day.

I realised, with a quick shudder, that in just over five weeks time when I go on maternity leave for the third time, this is what my life will be like every day. Except not nearly as exciting. Baking a birthday cake AND dealing with splinters on the same day would be big news. Even if the cake comes out flat.

With a newborn and two other children under five, each day will be an endless, mind-numbing round of wiping stuff: poo from the baby's bottom, snot from the children's noses, spilled shreddies from under the table, marker pen off the arm of the sofa. The challenge will be getting all the kids into shoes and jackets at the same time so we can leave the house, or hanging up the laundry before the baby needs another feed. Last Monday, when I was home all day with the kids, the biggest news I had to relate to my husband in the evening was the fact that a bird had pooed on one of the clean sheets I was drying in the garden. It was depressing.

So I had real sympathy for my husband as he despaired over the cake. I know that feeling of wading through treacle, when even the one small goal you set yourself is out of reach. Being told not to stress about it because it doesn't matter just makes it worse. No wonder women often find their self-confidence sapped when they stay at home for any length of time.

My husband said something very telling that evening. I told him to leave the tidying to me and head for bed. It was late and he looked tired, I said.

"That's ok," he answered. "I'll be on holiday tomorrow."

He meant he was going to work.

Where are all the knitting men?

2010-05-10T12:16:00.000-07:00

This picture both amuses and saddens me. It is from a book my mother dug out from the basement to help answer the four year-old's increasingly direct questions about the baby in my tummy. ("But how did it get there mummy? Did you eat it? How is going to come out?")

It was printed in 1970 in Sweden and must have been something my mother showed me in my own childhood, although I don't really remember it. There are lots of pictures of naked men and women, all with extremely bad hair, but this is the image that fascinates me. It is from the section that talks about how the young couple prepare for the arrial of their new baby.

How far we have fallen short of the equal rights ideal that briefly flowered in the seventies. Where are the men today, who knit nappies for their offspring?

We must have absorbed a little of this vision while we were growing up. My husband- I have to boast- is great with the kids, gets up early to sort out the laundry and dishwasher, and realises that when you hoover, you have to move the furniture. He's a marvel. But he is not the norm.

All the studies still show that on average, men still spend, I don't know, 30 seconds on household tasks each day, while women spend three hours on top of going to work to help pay for the crippling mortgage.

The sad truth is, we are still quite traditional in our divisions of labour. I can get nine months of paid maternity leave and my husband can't, so it makes sense for me to take the time off. As my job becomes a bit sketchy because of my frequent maternal absences, I need my husband, rather than knitting nappy-covers, to knuckle down and make progress at work, so that he can get a bonus and we can get the terrible, drafty windows in the nursery upgraded. And so it goes.

I do know some families where the dad has taken time off to stay home with the baby. But that's usually an interim thing in the first year, before a suitable nursery can be found or the baby is deemed old enough to be left in such a place. I can't think of any dads who have stopped work permanently after the birth of the second child. But I know scores of women who have done just that.

And then, as result, we have legions of depressed middle-aged women, according to the press, and battalions of frazzled slightly younger ones wondering if we were sold a lie when we were told, growing up, that we could have it all. I haven't been able to put my finger on it, but somewhere between this picture and today's reality is a clue to how it all went wrong.

Number 3

2010-02-20T12:13:00.000-08:00

I've just torpedoed my career and kissed goodbye to having a waist ever again. Yes, I am expecting baby number 3.

Many aspects of the pregnancy are familiar. The nausea, the slightly patronising midwife, the constant need to pee. Other things are different. Unlike its older siblings, this baby is creating a lot of cravings, mainly for pickles. The other day I ate a cheese, gherkin and jam sandwich, and it was EXACTLY what I wanted. I also ate a whole packet of that pickled sushi ginger. We'e given the baby the working title "Pickle".

Psychologically, also, this feels different. Its a bit of a watershed. Two children is the norm these days, three means you are, to some extent, dedicating your life to raising kids. We will be that much further away from being able to have unbroken sleep. We are sentencing ourselves to a couple extra years of nappies and poverty because of childcare costs.

Three children makes people pause before inviting you over. We've had to buy a bigger car. Three children feels like a bit of a luxury, to be honest. And this will be it for us, any more seems utterly unmanageable. Have you ever noticed how the only people who have four or more kids are either on benefits (where every child therefore actually adds to the family income) or rich enough to have a full-time nanny? We fall into neither camp.

Reaction to the news has been somewhat underwhelming. Even my mother, who is a devoted granny, looked a little taken aback when I told her. Everyone else has asked me if this was an accident. I had to drag the three-year old and the toddler into the doctors surgery with me for the initial consultation. When I told her I was pregnant, she looked at the two of them, squabbling on the floor over a toy, and asked me if I wanted to be. A few weeks later, the midwife had much the same question, and so did my boss's boss, when I broke the news to him this week. He's not really meant to ask things like that, I am sure employment law does not allow it, but on the whole he's been very supportive so I am not planning to shop him for it. I think he was genuinely surprised.

For the record, in case Pickle ever wonders, this was entirely planned. In fact, we tried harder for number three than the previous two, where I seemed to fall pregnant almost instantly. This time age and lack of time made the conception process a bit trickier. I even got one of those ovulation kits. I didn't actually buy it - those things cost over £20 a pop - but Sainsbury's accidentally delivered one to us with someone else's shopping. The surprise bag contained four tubes of toothpaste, some posh tea and an ovulation kit (what a bizarre window on someone else's life), and Sainsbury's advised me to keep because it was not worth their while coming back out to collect it.

The week I tried the kit was a tough one. The kids had had chicken pox that month, one after the other, then the baby had an ear infection and a mystery rash. We hadn't had a full nights sleep for weeks, and by that Friday morning my husband and I were sniping at each other out of sheer exhaustion. That, of course, was when the little smiley face appeared in the window of the ovulation monitor, indicating that this would be the lucky day.

I could hardly have felt less up for it, but somehow, we did manage it. This is why you have to marry someone you really fancy. One day, you are going to have to fall back on every single ounce of sexual attraction between the two of you.

Three months later, here we are. I have decided I am going to have to downshift my career for a while. Its been a struggle to handle two kids and a demanding job, I think its unrealistic to try with three. So I am planning to voluntarily exile myself to what my ambitious colleagues will consider a backwater of the company. Sometimes it feels like quite a hard thing to do. Like it or not, a lot of my sense of identity is tied up with my job. At other times its a relief. The truth is, things between my boss and I have soured, and I want a change of role as much because of that as because of Pickle. My biggest concern is whether there will be any way back from the mummy track later on. I'd love to know if women ever manage to speed up their careers again once the intense childcare years are over. It seems such a waste of education and experience if they can't, but the lack of women in boardrooms and at the helm of corporations suggests that the mummy track move may, in the majority of cases, be irreversible.

Lady Marmalade

2010-01-31T11:43:00.000-08:00

This was my second marmalade season. Last year I was amazed and beguiled by the ease of making home-made marmalade. My first attempt was a triumphant success. I put oranges, sugar and water into the pot - stirred a few times in between feeding and changing the baby - and a few hours later I had a crisp, tangy, jewel-coloured jelly that set like a dream. Like gelatinous sunshine in a jar.

I'll admit I got a bit cocky. I wrote about how simple it all was, and how unnecessary it was for people to over-complicate things like cooking.

This year, it was different.

I was well-prepared for the season. Dear Husband was despatched to the shops to get the Seville oranges and sugar in good time. I had all the jars ready. I set aside an evening for the cooking, while Dear Husband set off for a friend's 40th birthday party.

When he left for the evening, the oranges were already chopped and bubbling away on the stove. I felt on top of it all. I thought I'd finish the marmalade off quickly, then indulge in a chick flick or a bath.

But then it started to go horribly wrong. I think I got the sugar level a bit wrong. I was pfaffing around with two pans of jam this time, wanting to make a double batch, and this confused measurements. In any case, the damned thing just wouldn't set. When Dear Husband returned, around 1 am, I was still stirring the marmalade, a little wild-eyed, and obsessively placing little saucers of jam in the fridge to check whether it was starting to gel.

I put it in jars that night, more hopeful than convinced, and sure enough in the morning, when it had cooled, it was still liquid - syruppy but still very far from gelatinous. I felt humbled, frustrated and resentful of the time it had robbed me of.

There was nothing for it but to boil it again, adding more sugar and some lemon juice for good measure. Eventually it did set, but by this time it was as dark as cough medicine, a swampy brew, the orange peel the colour of burnt onions. I eyed it suspiciously as I poured it into the jars - not so much sunshine in a bottle as something from the dark side.

On looks, I would have written the whole thing off as a failure, but then I tasted the marmlade. It was a revelation. Rich, complex, intense, mature - like a fine old wine - with notes of caramel and toffee mingling with the citrus. Like a beautiful, older woman who has survived a great but tragic love. It was sublime, and made last year's light orange batch seem as brash and jejeune as a page three girl.

I suddenly understood another thing about the English marmalade tradition. Now I see why people stay up late into the night with their preserving pans, fretting and stirring, double boiling and adding secret ingredients like molasses and whiskey.

There is a life lesson in there somewhere: often, it is only the things reached through great difficulty that are truly worth having.

Or perhaps another: for an easy life, make sure you never skimp on the sugar.

Holiday diary - or why I will never dream of a white Christmas again

2009-12-30T11:39:00.001-08:00

December 17
Last day at work before the Christmas holidays. Just as I leave the office I see fat white flakes falling from the sky. Although it’s all very Christmassy and lovely, I am gripped with worry. The dear old UK does not cope well with snow, and we have an afternoon flight to catch from Gatwick tomorrow.

By the time I get off the train I know we are in trouble. I step out into a blizzard. There is about ten centimeters of snow on the ground already and its coming down so fast I can’t see. It’s impossible to drive the car, the summer tires are slipping all over the road. I am forced to abandon the car in the car park and walk home, ice darts whipping into my face. I can barely keep my eyes open and the road has disappeared under the snow.

December 18
At six am, the wind and snow have stopped, but the road is covered in 20 cm of snow. My husband wonders whether he should go get the car, but decides it will never make it up our hill. There is a chance that the main roads will be clear, however, from where I have left the car. So we begin the first leg of our 1000 km journey home for Christmas on foot.

My husband makes two trips to take the luggage to the car, then we pack the children in the pram and push them through the snow. Prams are not made for this, it is like pushing a wheelchair through the Sahara desert.

The motorways are clear, but we can’t get to them. Dozens of incompetent drivers have skidded all over the road and we are caught in miles of tailbacks leading to the motorway slip road. We turn back and abandon the car in the car park again.

We catch a train going to Gatwick by the skin of our teeth. My husband jumps on board with the two luggage bags, sweating and swearing. At this point I am still laughing, if a little hysterically.

The train gets stuck in the snow. The toddler, who is due a nap, goes ballistic. We’ve already eaten all the snacks. We are now stuck, and accompanied by enraged screaming. Those passengers who can, move away from us.

Eventually, the train pulls into Gatwick. We check in and are told the plane is leaving on time. But it doesn’t. Four hours later, there is still no information from the guy at the so-called information desk. We have made a little camp on the floor, near the big Christmas tree in the departure lounge. The children amuse themselves by trying to remove all the baubles. There is a near riot at the information desk. Two policemen are called and stand nearby, looking ominous.
Finally, we board the plane, and then sit on it for another hour while the plane is de-iced. The toddler fortunately conks out and sleeps on my lap. Easyjet offers us all a free soft drink and snack as compensation. It is the best thing to happen to us all day. It’s been one of those days when our expectations have been getting smaller and smaller. We are now just hoping to arrive with roughly the right number of children.

We land at half past midnight, and wait for our bags. One does not arrive. It takes another hour to fill in the forms about this. The children are wired. We arrive at my parents’ house at 2 am. The toddler is inconsolable and has to sleep between us in the bed. I am suddenly reminded that we will be sharing a bedroom with both children during this holiday. Sex is not going to be on the cards.

December 19
We wake up and survey the damage. The lost bag contains my husband and the toddler’s clothes and the Christmas presents. We put his sweat-soaked items from the previous day in the washing machine, and try to find him something from my dad’s wardrobe. My dad is about 50 kilos heavier and ten centimeters shorter than my husband, so this is a challenge.

We finally find a rugby shirt that is a little too small for my dad. It is still voluminous on my husband, flapping around him like a flag on a flagpole. Nevertheless, he wears this to the Christmas party that afternoon.

Fortunately my mum has bought some clothes for the kids so the toddler has things to wear. No problem there.

I call about the bag. It is in Marrakech, but the baggage handling people promise it will soon be on its way to us soon.

The three year old’s body clock has been messed up by the previous day's travel. She can’t sleep and ends up in bed between us. Clearly sex is not going to be on the cards.

December 20
Get up, put husbands socks and pants through washing machine again. Hope the bag will arrive soon. Visit relatives. My husband still in the rugby shirt.

Call about the bag. Its arrived in Gatwick but has yet to make it onto a flight to us. The local baggage people don’t know why. I ask them for a number for Gatwick baggage handlers so I can check directly. This is not possible, apparently.

I call several people until I get the number for the head of the airport. I call him at home, on his mobile. At 11 pm. He is not very happy about this. I tell him I am sorry but that if I had had better service from the baggage people, I would not have had to disturb him. He sounds like he wants to bite my head off, and I am really pleased there is now someone as annoyed as I am about the bag situation.

The toddler cries in the night. It might be teeth, but the MediSed, which is the only thing that helps with his teething pain, is in the bag sitting in Gatwick. He ends up in bed between us again. Sex is unthinkable. Even if the children weren’t between us, we’d be too tired anyway.

December 21
This morning when I ring about the bag, I don’t even need to give them my reference number. They know who I am and the give me the number of Gatwick baggage handlers straight away. Last night's call to the station chief has had some effect.

The Gatwick baggage handlers offer no explanation for their failure to get the bag on the plane. There has been more snow in the UK. Things are not hopeful.

Wash pants and socks again. Husband gives the rugby top a rest and is back into his travel clothes. When the shops open we buy toiletries and more pants and socks. Try not to panic about the presents. There are still a few days to Christmas.

My prescription eczema cream is in the Gatwick bag and the dry winter air is causing a major flare-up. The children sleep through the night this time but, feeling like the Elephant Man, sex is unthinkable.

December 22
Wash pants and socks again. No news on the bag. The Gatwick baggage handlers can’t be reached. I ring the number again and again.

Finally someone picks up. I launch into the reference number and the description of the bag only to be interrupted by the man on the other end of the line.

“…I am really sorry but I am not going to be able to help you. I am actually a passenger. I have been standing here for half an hour waiting for someone from the baggage service to turn up. I only picked up the phone because I thought it would be someone who could tell me what is going on. “

“You are a passenger too? With a lost bag? And there isn’t anyone there?”

“No”

I commiserate and hang up. Clearly things are not going well at the airport. The bag, unsurprisingly, is not on the evening flight from Gatwick.

We play in the snow with the kids. It’s a nice day. Just trying not to think about the presents in the bag.

In the evening, I feel shivery and achy. Go to bed right after dinner and sleep fitfully. Wake up in the night with the roof of my mouth and tongue so dry you could rub them together and make fire. Stumble downstairs for a drink and find my brother and his girlfriend in the kitchen baking a gingerbread house at 2 am. They ask me if the gingerbread seems a little soft. I poke it and tell them to put it back in the oven for a bit. It’s like a strange dream sequence. Expect to see husband turning into a giant hamster, turning cartwheels wearing the rugby shirt.

The toddler cries in the night again and we think longingly of the MediSed in the bag in Gatwick. Finally, he falls asleep, sideways, between us.. Between the toddler, the fever, the eczema and the memory of the rugby shirt, clearly, there is no sex.

December 23
The day begins hopefully. I feel less shivery and someone answers the phone at Gatwick baggage handlers. It is a real customer service person called Jenny and she says that our bag is scheduled to fly out that night. Hurrah.

Play in the snow again. Visit grandparents. Feel optimistic. The eczema is retreating a little. Getting used to washing the pants and socks daily, and even beginning to tolerate the rugby shirt.

Then, crushing disappointment. I call Gatwick baggage handlers to see if the bag has left with the evening flight.

“Who told you that it was going tonight?” asks an unfriendly male voice on the other end of the line. “There is no record here that it has gone.” I burst into tears. There is now no hope that the presents will arrive in time for Christmas Eve.

I go online to send a message of bitterness and hate to Easyjet, then see a message from a very good friend saying that she is getting divorced. This puts things into perspective. I suddenly feel very lucky. Both children are in the bed between us tonight but my husband is still there.

December 24
Where I come from, Christmas officially begins at midday, when the declaration of “Christmas Peace” is read out by an official on the steps of the town hall of the old capital city. It is a custom harking back to the Middle Ages, and is nowadays televised across the nation. At this point the shops shut and everyone settles into holiday mode.

For the working mother, of course, Christmas actually begins many months before this, in about July, when the first Christmas presents are bought and stashed away in the back of a cupboard.

I've undergone complex negotiations with my boss for months over time off at Christmas. We've paid a small fortune for the tickets back home.

In October I start making a calendar from family photos, a annual Christmas present for all the close relatives. It takes several evenings to pull it all together, print it and bind it. More evenings in December go into wrapping presents. I sat one evening, when my husband was on a rare night out, curling ribbon and cutting up last year’s Christmas cards into pretty tags, late into the night. And now all those elaborately fashioned packages are sitting in some baggage storage centre in Gatwick.

Despite my intentions to keep things in perspective, I wake up on the morning of Christmas Eve feeling rage and despair. As a child it was always the most magical morning of the year to wake up on, full of anticipation and excitement. How things change over the years.

Things are not helped by the toddler’s early morning crying. He is now refusing to sleep in his own bed at all. If we were home we could do some controlled crying but here, the house is packed and the walls are thin, so he gets his own way and snuggles next to us. I am so tired and frustrated that for about five minutes, I feel pure hatred towards the toddler. Then it passes. I love the smell of him, the feel of his baby-soft limbs next to me, his breathing. I don’t hate him. In fact, I love holding him. But I am really really tired.

Christmas Eve actually turns out very nice. The children are excited, the dinner is delicious, we laugh a lot. Everyone else has bought so many presents for the kids that the lack of ours is not noticeable. In fact, the toddler is quite overwhelmed by it all, and doesn’t quite understand that these are his things. He’s more keen on just passing the parcels around than opening them. Its an old-fashioned, happy, warm Christmas.

December 25
Christmas Day is also relaxed and we spend most of it in our pajamas. We play in the snow with the kids, they play with their toys, we eat left-over Christmas ham and chocolates.

At 9pm, the bag is finally delivered to the house, 11 hours before we are due to begin our journey back home.

We do Christmas all over again with the newly-arrived presents. Then we pack everything up in the bag again.

December 26
Wake up at 6.30 and see flurries of snow coming down, almost obscuring the windows. Not again. As we set off for the airport, the car barely makes it out of the driveway, which is clogging up with snow. We are heartily sick of the stuff by now.

We make it to the airport all right – thanks to winter tires and a much more organized snow-plow service where I come from. Even the flight leaves on time. We arrive back at Gatwick and all the luggage arrives back with us. It feels like a minor miracle.

When we come out of the terminal, it pouring with - RAIN. For probably the first time in my life, this makes me quite happy.

Another one bites the dust

2009-12-04T12:24:00.000-08:00

Last weekend our old NCT group met up for dinner at the local pub. It was the first time we'd all met up in the evening, without the children, since spring 2006, when said children were still just increasingly uncomfortable lumps wedged between stomach and bladder.

I was nervous. It was the first time we'd had anyone other than a blood relative baby-sit. I'd managed to get the kids to bed a half hour early, bought biscuits and crisps for the neighbour’s daughter who was sitting for us, reminded husband that we were going out that evening - he had marked it down as the following evening - and we were off. The feeling of freedom was exhilarating. Three hours adult time - an incredible luxury.

The conversation and wine flowed – the wine more moderately than in the past - but sufficiently. The steaks were perfect.

But here was the bombshell: My friend H, mother of two, partner in her own business, is planning to resign and devote herself to motherhood. This comes just after another friend, C, decided to take a 6 month sabbatical, from which she may well not return.

This will leave me as the sole working mother in our NCT group. Another of the mums is going back to two days a week in January, but still, the overall retreat from work is dramatic. Out of the five of us, we will collectively be working six days a week. That is compared with 25 days a week that we would have contributed before children. If that is not a brain drain, I don't know what is.

H and C who are giving up work are actually pretty angry about it all. Giving up work will ease the complicated juggling of their lives, but they are unhappy they have been driven to this decision.

"I feel a sense of rage that I have been put in this situation," said H.

She's been locking herself into the car by herself recently to scream. For the sake of her children, marriage, sanity, giving up work is the best choice. But having to let go of the business she has built is galling too.

And then, I am hearing all those justifications start creeping in to their conversation. C tells me, earnestly, that "its really important for children to have time with their mothers. They need the stable parental influence. We'd have less badly behaved children if parents were more involved."

I understand her reasons for giving up work, and I agree with what she is trying to do. But these justifications worry me. I hope they will not become more fodder in the entrenched warfare between the stay-at-home and working mums.

I point out that badly behaved kids can also come from families with stay at home mums. And if you believe the Daily Mail, the very worst kids come from the families where neither parent works at all.

When you give up your hard-earned career, your pension security, a big part of who you are, its natural to justify it by telling yourself that the thing you are going on to do is much more important. And raising children is hugely, monumentally important. But I hope it doesn’t become a rebuke on those of us who still cling to our jobs – especially those women who don’t have much choice.

Instead we should be focusing our rage on the establishment that has driven us to this. The insane workloads, the unhelpful partners, and the complex, historical expectations that still weigh heavy on mothers.

The etiquette of sick children

2009-11-08T13:30:00.000-08:00

Sick children are a good way of finding out how much your friends like you.

We all know the scenario: you haven't seen your old university mates for ages. After months of discussion, somewhere in between mother-in-law's visit, Saturday morning swim club, a lunch obligation with husband's work colleagues, you have finally found a weekend that everyone is free. Hurrah. The date has been in the diary for months. Finally the day arrives and...

...one of the children wakes up covered in what could be (but can't definitively be identified as) chickenpox. Or swine flu. Or another lurgy. What do you do?

As a parent of the possibly pox-ridden child you are honour-bound to inform your friends. But how they react will say a lot about your friendship.

A good friend showed up at my doorstep a few weeks ago, just as I had returned from a doctor's appointment confirming that the spots on the baby's tummy were almost certainly chickenpox. Opening the door a tiny crack, I explained that we were contagious. I was trying not to even breathe too much in her direction. But after only the tiniest of hesitations, she decided to come in anyway. Her daughter would get chickenpox sooner or later anyway, she shrugged. She was prepared to take the risk. And we had a lovely afternoon.

It wasn't just that it made me feel our friendship mattered, it was also refreshing to see someone willing to chance things a little. We've become so overprotective these days, with all the soft rubber surfaces in the playgrounds, the meticulous accident report forms at nursery for so much as a hangnail, the incessant vetting of everyone who comes into contact with children. Its getting tiresome, obsessive, a little delusional. However much we do, we cannot protect our children from absolutely everything - nor is it healthy to. Protect them from every single germ and their under-employed immune system will simply attack itself, giving the child asthma or some allergy or intolerance instead.

The trouble with the ill-child etiquette thing is that it is prone to abuse. I've used it as a social get-out clause myself. Last summer we were due to meet some old friends with a new baby. Plans for the meeting, had, however, turned somewhat convoluted. What had started off as a simple plan for lunch had turned into picnic extravaganza in a hard-to-reach location. We feeling a little lazy. The day was hot, too hot to really want to contemplate travelling down to London in the car. So when the toddler woke up with a tickly throat, we did something slightly naughty.

We told ourselves we were letting them decide. "She's not badly ill, so we are happy to still come down. But we though we should let you know, you know, with the baby and all that..," I waffled over the phone. But really, I knew that, being anxious new parents and with swine-flu hysteria still in the air, they were going to ask us to stay away.

Ironically, the same weekend other friends called to see if we could meet up. They also have a baby and we explained again about the sore throat. They decided to brave it. Not for them to imagine swine-flu in the smallest sniffle, and by the time they had motored up to ours the sore throat had more or less disappeared. We had a marvelous time, and felt somehow closer to them afterwards. Either they really enjoy our company or they are pretty relaxed parents. Either way, I like them for it.