Am I the only one who hates ‘Snow Days’?

The country has yet again come to a standstill; an annual event entirely foreseeable yet, with as much certainty, no one is ever prepared for.

At the first whiff of a snowflake a state of national emergency is declared. The situation is deemed unsafe for schools or shops to open, trains to operate, any public service to function. It’s like Armageddon hence the aptly monikered Snowmageddon.

As children we are lectured to learn from our mistakes rather than actually learning our mistakes and repeating them ad infinitum. Is this not just dodo-esque head-in-the-sand style stupidity; hoping that ignoring the situation might alter its outcome without any active effort to change it?

There are countries shrouded in snow for multiple months of the year, displaying seamless and uninterrupted everyday life. A centimetre is enough to bring us to our knees. Hypothetically speaking, any enemy looking to attack and conquer, just keep an eye on the snow report to time a guaranteed success. Just saying.

Have I mentioned that I hate the snow? I don’t just mean a fleeting dislike; I mean passionately despise. When it started to snow yesterday I was overcome by irrational fury, storming round the house, picking unreasonable and petty fights with my husband (I’m ashamed to admit that I  probably do this more often than I should).  Then he said, “I know why you hate the snow”. And I burst into tears.

The reason why I hate the snow so much is this: when I was heavily pregnant second time round, with toddler in tow, we relinquished the (now quite dismal) dregs of our singleton lives as untethered singletons and sold our souls to suburbia. The point of no return. Farewell to the young and free spirits of an identity we will no longer own. Like someone in witness protection embarking on a new and terrifyingly alien life.

That move coincided with a truly bleak and stark winter (how poetically apt). We moved into a rental where the heating was broken. We didn’t have a car (how many Londoners do?) and my driving wasn’t (isn’t) sufficiently confident to handle icy roads in a foreign place anyway. We owned a ‘city buggy’ aka the Bugaboo Bee, designed with lightweight agility in mind for urban dwellers, whisking it on and off the underground, whizzing around Selfridges and the like. It’s teeny tiny wheels immediately sunk and stuck in the snow and there’s only so far a pregnant lady can carry a buggy with baby onboard, regardless of how many times a week she frequents the gym.

There hasn’t been another time in my life where I have felt such darkness, isolation and hopelessness. And that is the feeling snow conjures up for me.

Anyway, it all ironed itself out in the end – we bought a buggy with the equivalent wheels and suspension of a  4×4; the heating was fixed (after much histrionics with the lettings agency); we bought a car (which I reluctantly with gritted teeth was forced to use); I signed up for a local gym with a crèche and, most crucially, as with as much certainty as its arrival was predicted, the snow eventually melted and went on its jolly old way. Good riddance.

Today is Day 2 of this year’s Snowmageddon. The children are still home. The shops are closed like a ghost town. The gym is closed, the pool is closed, we have already endured lost swim lessons, cross country fixtures, football course, yoga class (mine) – and that doesn’t even begin to cover the lost hours of school work. Not to mention the fact that I am now doing the job of home schooling via ‘Snow Packs’ as well as dinner lady, when we have actually already paid someone else to do both. Annoyed? Not much.

It seems I am once again trapped in confinement. Only this time I keep trying to remind myself, muttering like a crazy lady on loop: “At least I’m not pregnant and the heating works”. Repeat ad infinitum.

Habits for Happiness

I have been re-reading Gretchen Rubin’s ‘The Happiness Project’ in a bid to reboot my own happiness level. Much of what she says strikes a poignant chord.

Depending on the individual, the route to DIY contentment will vary wildly and not many of us can attest to having 12 minutes free let alone 12 months to experiment with all the facets Gretchen explores in her book.

My five key personal takeaways to unlocking my gateway to happiness lie roughly in the areas of:

1. Sleeping and exercising better
2. Decluttering and organising
3. Launch a blog and enjoy the fun of failure (you are reading the evidence of this!)
4. Mindfulness
5. Practising gratitude

The problem is that every time I have tried to build good habits to tackle and enforce each of these areas, correlating bad habits have an uncanny knack of sneakily sidling their way to the forefront, eventually obscuring all trace of existence of their better halves.

Examining my own habits in light of these areas, I can ashamedly attest to the following:

1. Sleeping and exercising better

Good habit: Most days of the week I fit in some form of movement in the form of weights, cardio, yoga etc. I have consistently been doing this, with exception of injuries, for longer than I care to remember. Exercising is a huge destresser for me and, unless performed too close to bedtime, helps me sleep better.

Bad habit: Exercise commitment slides insidiously into exercise obsession. There are times in my life when the days it can’t be accommodated leave me snappy and antsy in much the way of a drug addict being deprived of a hit. Sometimes the desperation for a hit means I exercise even if it is late at night when I know it impacts negatively on my sleep quality.

2. Decluttering and organising:

Good habit: I am an habitual note taker and list maker. Nothing escapes being annotated and checked off. Post-it notes gild every surface. In a bid to tackle decluttering I invested in a pretty notebook and kept all my notes in one place (see my posts on Bullet Journalling here and here). Check. Having heard about Marie Kondo’s Magic of Tidying Book, I also vowed to store my socks rolled up and orient them sideways – I diligently added it to my To Do list then ticked it off!

Bad habit: I am an habitual hoarder. My one notebook of lists reproduced with the voraciousness of rabbits, sprouting notebooks in every room of the house, for every category imaginable. Worse still I am harbouring a treacherous clothes mountain in the corner of our bedroom, threatening to avalanche and suffocate a small child.

3. Launch a blog and enjoy the fun of failure

Good habit: Since its conception a few years back I have generally been consistent in tending to the frugal needs of this blog. Go me! Even when I fail to get a single read of my posts it is still fun (so I keep telling myself).

Bad habit: There may be a small chance my fear of not consistently posting on this blog are bordering on potentially obsessive, when really, my time has so many more pressing, arguably more important demands on it. For instance, making some effort to bother with applying makeup daily or stop wearing my gym kit all day rather than just the hour I am actually at the gym. Plus, though I say I don’t care that no one reads it, in truth, the lady doth protest too much, meaning the whole exercise leaves me filled with self-doubt and inadequacy.

4. Mindfulness

Good habit: I am consistently being mindful of healthful, real food-based eating and almost daily, shop, prepare and cook meals for my family.

Bad habit: Justifying excessive sugar consumption (albeit in its natural form) and mindless ‘treat’ eating, under the guise of it being Paleo/ whole food/ real food/ healthy/ whatever. Bottom line is it’s all mindless and unnecessary consumption that is feeding and suffocating deeper seated issues rather than tackling them.

5. Practising gratitude

Good habit: One of my many notebooks (Point 2 above) was a dedicated ‘Gratitude Journal’ – gold star.

Bad habit: I mislaid said Journal amongst the pile of other journals and notebooks I amassed.

Better habit: I now include a daily gratitude line in my Bullet Journal – no extra notebook required and it is partnered with the habit of Bullet Journalling.

My one saving grace is that Gretchen urges above all else for ultimate happiness, to be true to yourself. It looks like my clothes mountain may be a permanent landmark and I have already invested in the mothership Bullet Journal to keep track of every other list and notebook that I own. Still, a mindfulness of my bad habits is a useful tool in keeping them (largely) in check.

“Wear ‘clothes’ every day”

In this week’s Happier Podcast hosted by the ever insightful Gretchen Rubin and her sister Elizabeth Craft (the sage!), they really threw down a gauntlet with the challenge to “wear ‘clothes’ every day for a month”!

A daunting prospect indeed. It’s not that I spend my days wandering around in my birthday suit but apparently the definition of ‘clothes’ does not include such slatternly attire as my regulation uniform of:

– gym kit (not even high end athleisure wear of the Lululemon ilk counts so it’s safe to say my common-as-muck Nike and Sweaty Bettys won’t cut the mustard),

– Running shoes/ gym trainers (smart trainers are apparently allowed so thank goodness for my leather Ash hightops, though not sure my trusty Uggs will pass the muster

– Hoodies (unless of a sumptuous fabric that redeems their slovenly stereotype, think cashmere, cable knit, fine merino wool)

– Sweatpants (nooooo – I love my sweatpants sooo much, especially my chavtastic, wannabe teenager ones, with ‘Wills’ emblazoned down the leg)

And to state the obvious, no PJs (yes, I am wearing these when my husband leaves for work at 7am and back in them by the time he’s home around 8pm so he’d be forgiven for thinking I’ve loafed around in them all day).

To make a tough challenge even tougher than a tough mudder, the challenge is to stay in these until after dinner! I can barely stay in my ‘not clothes’ (ie a veritable combo of aforementioned sartorial no-nos) until the kids’ bath time when I’m positively itching to put on my PJs. This makes the Whole 30 sound like a walk in the park. I really don’t think I could do it.

Then to make an absurd challenge even more insurmountable, in addition to wearing real ‘clothes’ the goal is to also wear makeup AND change jewellery! I have been wearing the same pair of earrings and necklace since circa Year 2k. I do take them off occasionally (not without much harrumphing at the inconvenience) for x rays, surgery and the like. Or if a big fancy do like a ball then I deign to put on something a bit more bling. But really, there just aren’t enough minutes in the day to be faffing around with changing jewellery.

In The Crown, Lilibet has someone put it on for her, remove it at the end of the day and store it away safely. Us mere mortals of the non-Royal variety have no such privileges. Though I daresay I have a lot of wasted jewellery that never sees the light of day. Ditto my clothes.

While listening to the podcast I realised I was still in my gym kit – gym vest, capris, sports bra (so much easier to machine wash than a real bra), a relic from that morning’s Piyo class – that ended 3 hours earlier. And I swear doesn’t warrant enough sweat to justify post workout shower. Only on the days I do a proper workout eg running, HIIT, do I shower after my workout and am hence forced to remove said kit and change.

I also had no makeup on (as usual) and my hair was pulled back into a messy ponytail cum bun thing with hair grips to tame wayward straggly bits from annoying the heck out of me when doing downward dog. I’m too old to pull this off with the nonchalance of a French ingénue. To be fair even in my youth I couldn’t pull this look off.

I used to relish getting dressed up when I had a job in the city back in the days of yore. Though increasingly, as I spend the majority of the day alone, I choose comfort over glamour every time and throw on some sweats, a breton top and a hoodie then pull my Uggs on for the school run. If I’m lucky I don’t even need to get out of the car for the drive-through pickups so I could be naked waist down for all anyone cares!

The reasoning behind this challenge (condemnation) is allegedly a test to find out if wearing ‘clothes’ makes us feel different in our outlook – in Elizabeth’s words, more ‘ready’. She also highlights that the stretchy nature of ‘not clothes’ encourages relaxed overeating (think inverse corset effect) but she clearly hasn’t seen my collection of jumper dresses which do away with the need for waistbands altogether! It may even serve to illustrate that our choice to wear ‘not clothes’ is still what makes us feel the happiest and most content.

Most days I go the gym, swim, yoga etc so my choice of outfit is legitimate. Sadly, my choice to stay in said outfit ALL DAY based on the activity of 1 hour is highly illegitimate. The thing is, it’s just so darn comfy and I just love to be comfy. If onesies weren’t such a nuisance for toileting I’d no doubt be in one of those 24/7.

But Gretchen is right, it’s not putting your best foot forward.

So this morning, I wore ‘real clothes’ (well, jeans rather than sweatpants) to my son’s class chapel service first thing. Though I have to concede that I didn’t put on any makeup as I was heading straight for a swim afterwards (tell me no one wears makeup to go swimming?) It was a total nuisance packing separate sweatpants in my swim bag but the idea of wrestling into a pair of skinny jeans with damp legs, in a cramped changing room, with questionable hairy bits all over the floor was too much to bear.

Truth be told I did feel less self-conscious in ‘clothes’. On a typical school foray I have a teeny weeny inferiority complex anyway (blame it on my  school days and experiences of, let’s call it, ‘racial disparity’). I secretly will no one to cast aspersions and I’m not even referring to those working mums looking all smart and coiffed ready for a day at the office, but rather the glamorous stay at home mums in their over the knee boots, faux fur jackets and up to date colourist appointments – the ones who would be horrified with a challenge to wear ‘not clothes’ every day.

Doing a bit of amateur psychoanalysing (a favoured pastime) while listening to the dulcet tone of forty something little boys singing about Moses, I deduce that my ‘not clothes’ are a manifestation of my comfort zone – physically and emotionally. Physically I just crave a sense of warmth, comfort and being cossetted. Who doesn’t? As for emotionally well, said clothes are usually black, don’t attract attention, are unassuming, practical and plain. Gosh is that really how I now see myself??

With this in mind, the moment I came home after my swim I went immediately to change out of my ‘not clothes’ before I got distracted and immersed in a completely unplanned task or had a chance to start procrastinating (I’m very good at both). Granted it’s just a pair of jeans, a T shirt (with real underwear) and a hoodie (I know I know it’s on the forbidden list BUT this one is cashmere blend, pale pink and really rather pretty), I feel different. Less comfortable certainly (the jeans are kind of tight) but more…. determined and purposeful.

It’s not just about what judgements people make from your appearance – judging books by covers and all that, but about how the external reflects the internal and caring about that external is symptomatic of caring for the person inside. I’m not really a vain person (pointing out the obvious to anyone who ever sees me on a school run) but I do want my kids to be proud of (ok, let’s just settle with not embarrassed by) their mum. And I definitely don’t want them thinking I’ve consigned myself to the middle age scrap heap. Perhaps feeling more ‘ready’ will radiate a more positive outward expression.

Recently the green eyed monster made a brief cameo when my son’s classmate wrote (of his permanently immaculately dressed and made up mother), ‘My mummy is beautiful’. My son, on the other hand, wrote, ‘My mummy is dairy free’ – great epitaph that will make; I might as well be a carton of almond milk.

So I am determined to try just a little bit harder, to make just a little bit more effort, by stepping out of my comfort zone. I’m not saying I’m going to venture too far but wearing ‘clothes’ every day is a start.

 

A Mother’s Place is (Still) in the Kitchen

[It’s been a while since I opened this dusty ol’ blog. It could be forgiven for thinking I’d abandoned it for good. Shhh – don’t tell it but I think I had. Then one day this week I realised I missed it; I missed the writing, the knowing that my jumbled words can reach other people leading just as jumbled lives as my own (though most likely only get read by myself marvelling at my own words gracing the wider world of cyberspace). So I started spilling forth my inner dialogue like an escaped convict embracing his (her) freedom. I posted this over on a recently discovered blogzine Selfish Mother and it feels good to be writing again…]

A Mother’s Place is (Still) in the Kitchen

All through childhood I wondered what could possibly lure my mother into spending 90% of her waking hours in the kitchen; seamlessly segueing from cooking one meal, to tidying up then washing up that meal, to preparing the next meal and so on and so on, like some relentless ground hog day.

Ha ha! I thought when I lived my joyous, frivolous, utterly selfish life as a single gal, whose spotless kitchen saw about as much cooking action as a Magnet showroom and who proudly wore her kitchen incompetence like a badge of honour. “Haven’t a clue how to turn on the oven!” I’d brazenly declare when guests came round for canapes that couldn’t be cooked.

Similarly don’t even ask my confusticated husband about the time I offered to make him dinner and tried to make his favourite dessert of sticky toffee pud – without scales (bathroom scales aren’t interchangeable it appears). Oh, and without any preceding main course. Clearly he didn’t marry me for my culinary prowess.

More importantly though, it marked the unsaid pronouncement that I didn’t need to know about such piffling trivialities as cooking and cleaning – I had restaurants to go to, a steep and glittering career ladder to scale, glass ceilings to demolish in my high heels and sharp tongue. In short my pre-baby fabulousness scoffed at the mere though of scullery duties – pah!

Fast forward days, weeks, months, years, decades, to a marriage, two children and a proper house, with not one but TWO ovens (and a steam oven that seemed so indispensable at the time of installation but has seen about as much action as the fondue set lurking in an upper cupboard since circa 1995). And all I can think is that my mother must have accidentally left her shoes here because it appears I have accidentally stepped into them.

Having in my youth positively spurned all but the bare necessity of crossing the threshold into the ‘dungeon of female domesticity’ (bar the very necessary trips to the fridge/freezer for champagne or icecream), it is now the room in which I reside, oh, let’s be generous, and say 70% of my waking hours (I have more school runs and afterschool activities than my mother did in the ‘80s). I have even adopted a favoured spot in the kitchen (by extension, this is therefore my favoured spot in the whole house?)

My husband has dubbed this square foot in the kitchen, within which I nigh-on perennially reside, as my ‘docking station’. At the time I remember thinking, ‘Too right, if only I had a real docking station to recharge my permanently waning/ flat battery,’ until the shocked realisation of how many hours a day I actually spend in this spot struck me dumb.

This is where I, among other things (and in no particular order of importance):
• make breakfast
• prepare the kids’ snack boxes
• test spellings
• fire off times tables questions with the relentlessness of a fully automatic firearm
• listen to random chapters of David Walliams offerings intermixed with who knows which number Storey Treehouse, with a smattering of Hobbit appearances to liven things up (an interesting book indeed this collaboration might make)
• order my weekly online grocery shop (and sort out the delivery when it arrives)
• deal with all comms and consent forms from school (the children know to dump said letters exactly as if a giant X marked the spot, straight from their schoolbags – on the days they think to empty their schoolbags that is)
• open the post (and at times, gaze longingly and nostalgically at the luxury holiday brochures that are about as useful as a chocolate teapot in this season of my life)
• fill in my daily bullet journal to ensure the next day is planned with military precision so as not to fritter away a precious nanosecond
• talk on the phone (reception permitting, plus I don’t mean chatting conversationally with old friends but rather, perfunctorily organising the services of plumbers/painters/electricians etc, or barking complaints down some customer services line, or listening to elevator music on hold with NHS appointments)
• scarf down Naked bars, green Nutribullet smoothies (and a host of other less healthy snacks that I don’t care to brag about) whilst simultaneously doing at least one other task on this list
• decipher recipes to make any dinner that isn’t on the regular rota of bolognese/ risotto/ jambalaya/ everything chucked in the oven masquerading as a feeble take on a weeknight roast
• make dinner (not confined to the docking station per se as this generally entails covering every available work surface in the vicinity)
• organise birthday parties/ presents/ write cards
• sneak a read of the latest Waitrose magazine under the guise of doing something more productive (less selfish)

Sometimes I’m known to just stand in this spot – at the counter in the corner of the kitchen, by force of habit, wondering what it is I’m meant to be doing. My husband jokes that this is my Sleep mode and that I have worn size 5 shaped Ugg slipper grooves into the tiles.

This, I have come to realise, is my ‘safe spot’ – whether this is because it roots me to my childhood, my mother and where I’m from, who knows. Possibly a reminder of who I am in the chaos of a life I often barely recognise and a self I no longer truly know when I look in the mirror. Or maybe it’s simpler than such psychobabble analysis and is solely by virtue of having spent so many cumulative hours in this spot that it now evokes a sense of attachment. Chicken or egg?

What I do know is that back in the day, the kitchen tasks my mother tackled in the kitchen were just that – kitchen tasks. Now, looking at the tasks tackled in our kitchen it seems the entire organisational web of our family life is orchestrated from this central hub, with my docking station as the beating heart. It’s quite literally the server (does that make me the glorified head servant?)

As a mother to a daughter now, I wonder whether she will view my relationship to the kitchen with the same curiosity, followed by determined defiance, followed by comfortable acceptance, in some inevitable circle of destiny. It’s always been my hope that she will carve her own destiny; one that will have only an upward trajectory rather than a loop with a foregone conclusion.

Yet I look around me now, from the vantage point of my docking station, and I can’t think where else I’d like to be (aside from that idyllic 5 star Maldives retreat in the latest tantalising Abercrombie and Kent brochure maybe).

Then it strikes me that our kitchen holds the most memories of any room in the house. Christmas dinners scorching in the oven(s) while kids zip in and out with new gifts. Birthday cakes, lit and resplendent, emerging to the many renditions of Happy Birthday. Tears over homework and cuddles to comfort. Crafting and baking with the kids. The summers in the garden seen through the kitchen window. The afterschool chats. My dear husband making my first and last hot drink of every single day. This is us. And that’s why this is my sanctuary; surrounded by family and the familiar, a sense of purpose mixed with belonging and just a touch of pride.

Mundane my younger self might justifiably argue but this older, wiser (and quite possibly marginally wider!) version of me recognises that fast forward another decade or three, it is this time here and now, in this kitchen, which I will hold close to my heart.

Now you must excuse me while I come out of Sleep mode and venture off the docking station to pick up the kids.

What age is deemed too old for a woman to return to work after a career break?

Apparently it is forty. So I have been reliably and rather bluntly informed this week by a head hunter.

Actually, the way he phrased it (“can I ask you a delicate question”) made him (note, ‘him’) come across as conspiratorially in my camp. He backed this up with declarations of his honesty and desire to minimise my disappointment in rejection.

My response followed a vague timeline of emotions.

The initial response was a typically British manner of apologetic embarrassment. I am terribly sorry to be wasting your precious time when you could be speaking to a more worthy (younger) candidate; do please forgive my imposition.

This was probably concurrent with the second (or joint first) sense of shock. It had never crossed my mind that I might be deemed technically over the hill when I am hell-bent on still viewing myself as in my thirties.

Which leads to my third reaction of defensiveness. Not wanting to labour the technicality but I am technically speaking still clinging on to the vestiges of my thirties, albeit by a few fingernails.

Calming the rising flush (not menopausal before you ask), I responded in a deliberately controlled tone, that surely a woman in her forties is no less employable than one in the 25-35 age bracket (his specified optimum hire-ability age range); posing the question, is it really better to hire someone likely to embark on a career break or someone returning from a career break? Neither of whom deserve to be discriminated against for heeding the call of nature to reproduce.

Mr Headhunter, not enjoying the direction of conversation, proceeded to chivy along the call to a close. I offered him my contact details (again) in the hope of being considered for any future roles that arise, which he was polite enough not to decline. Whether or not he even jotted them down I don’t know. Hastily wishing me luck in my future ventures (a true indicator that I shall not hear from him any time soon with any job offerings) he hung up.

With the passing of adequate hours to stew over the accusation and implication that a five or so year career hiatus, combined with being on the precipice of my Big Four-Oh, renders me ultimately redundant and unemployable, now gives rise to a sense of injustice. A twelve year career reduced to scrap fodder.

Would a man having taken a similar break be deemed equally unfit? I can’t answer that.

Despite the ongoing talk of encouraging women back into the workplace, the evidence is glaring that there is a long way to go. Mindsets need to evolve and embrace not just the notion of mothers reintegrating into careers they spent hard years building, but also the reality.

It is no new news that women are breaking glass ceilings left, right and centre, as the business pages tirelessly and tantalisingly remind us. And certainly there is nothing new about women engendering the next generation. But if depicted in my six year old’s Venn Diagram, I wonder how big the overlap set would be? And if we added a third hypothetical circle, ‘women who take a career break to raise a family’ to the diagram as a subset of ‘women who have children’, how would that affect the overlap? (Note Diagram is for purely hypothetical illustrative purposes and is not based on scale nor statistics).

Answers on a postcard.

“Please sir, may I have some… work?”

Oliver Twist I’m not – not yet anyway do I need to grovel for a second serving of gruel. However, grovelling it appears is what I must do.

After nudging five years out of the workplace I am officially a luddite and beyond employable. Emails to ex-employers remain unanswered; enquiries to potential employers disappear into the mire. The world of work suddenly seems severely hostile – as if repaying me for spurning his offers to hold onto me those many moons ago when the needy cries of newborn babies drowned out anything in its vicinity.

Because now he’s moved on, probably more than once, to pastures new. Fresh talent, youth and the hunger that drives career ambition that only comes without the burden of young children – all things I no longer possess. What about my decade plus of experience I counter? Pah, he spits back, all negated by the half decade of brain and soul-destroying nappy changing. And off he sends me to the scrap heap, sentenced to a lifetime of worthlessness.

Twiddling Thumbs

It’s been exactly one week since I remembered what silence sounds like. A week to the day the 2 year old officially started pre-school and the 4 year old was upgraded from pre-school to the fully fledged version. Albeit the silence is just for a precious 3 hours 3 times a week, I now appreciate that it is more than golden – it is priceless! The tapping of the keyboard actually resonates round the room – I never knew that. Thoughts can run without interruption and toilet trips can finally be taken alone.

But at the same time, their voices echo continually in my subconscious and in the stillness of their rooms resound the patter of their little feet. I think of the 4 year old, brave and bubbly (and often defiant). The 2 year old, full of love and laughter (and more often than not, selfish and possessive). And how incomprehensibly and comprehensively I miss them…

Then too soon, my brief respite is over and they are home, shrieking, arguing, wrestling, playing. Silence has taken cover away from the line of fire in a war zone. But I don’t mind too much because I know it will be back soon and there will come a day when it comes back and never leaves, when the children are grown up and gone. And I don’t want that day to ever come.

But for now it begs the question: aside from the groundhog day style drudgery of washing up, laundry, tidying, cooking and gym sessions to ward off mid-life spare tyre-dom, how best to fill that time?

I had a dream… I was tattooed to the hilt

This article was first published on 6 April 2011 on http://life.hereisthecity.com/2011/04/06/my-new-tattoos/

More specifically, I was sporting the ‘sleeve’ tattoo equivalent on both my legs (technically could they be referred to as ‘trouser leg’ tattoos?).

There is no doubt that this dream is entirely induced by the continual and compulsive viewing of ‘Prison Break’ that I have recently undertaken. For those unfamiliar, it is a drama series featuring the dreamy Wentworth Miller (Mensa-level intelligence coupled with Adonis looks – what’s not to like?) and charts his attempts at, as the title suggests, breaking out of prison. His secret weapon is the prison building blueprint he has tattooed across his entire upper body, like a long sleeved T-shirt.

I have no idea what guise the tattoos covering my legs came in as the shock of indelibly branding myself in such an un-middle class way woke me up instantly in a cold sweat.

I have nothing against tattoos per se; nor against the people sporting them. In the manner of sartorial freedom of choice it is no skin off my nose whether my neighbour has a daily dress code of leopard print or twinset and pearls. My aversion to tattoos is on a more personal level – I have never and would never consider one for myself. The permanence is too unsettling. How can one guarantee that the Chinese/ Sanskrit/ Arabic characters interspersed with some tribal art, that was deemed so universally cool in our university backpacking days, might not date in the manner of ’80s shoulder pads?

Some women are addicted to body art the way most of their peers can’t resist the latest ‘it’ bag. For most though, one tattoo usually suffices to sate the rebellious streak. It will serve as a reminder of that point in their life like a scar, whether a moment of drunken impulse or a sentimental dedication to some long lost love, whose name is now probably anathema.

At the height of the tattooing popularity sweeping through my contemporaries, most victims fell into one of two camps: the emblem (rose, dolphin, lizard, dragon, flower etc etc) on the lower back, versus the Chinese characters, most memorably ‘girl power’ (the Spice Girls have a lot to answer for) on the upper arm. Even Samantha Cameron it appears wasn’t immune and bears her dolphin as a relic of her youth, albeit tactfully discrete below her ankle.

As for me, a henna version was more than adequate to quench my tats thirst. Even then I couldn’t quite decide whether it looked boho chic or simply chav-tastic and was more than happy for it to fade to oblivion. Perhaps I am more prone to ambivalence than most and indeed there could be a whole host of grannies out there still enamoured by their body art, no matter how distorted by gravity’s pull on sagging skin. I wholeheartedly salute them.

As for everyone else, unless you have a supremely strong reason for it (for instance, as a means for breaking out of prison), the temporary tattoo might prove a filling taster.

The Intrepid Explorer

Golden Boy has started cruising. If this conjures up images of him cruising with his homies in an approximation of a scene from ‘Pimp My Ride’, I assure you it is nothing remotely like that. Rather, he is making his first tentative steps at navigating his way across any room using the furniture to forge a route and leaving a trail of destruction in his wake.

I am thrilled at his newfound foray into the realm of independence; not least because of the sigh of relief my back is breathing at not having to heave his almost twelve month’s of body weight around in his every waking hour. This is offset slightly by the extra hours spent hunched over retrieving toys and other paraphernalia from nooks and crannies in the house I was previously unaware existed.

Secretly and shamefully, however, I am somewhat wistful for my baby boy. As he takes each more confident step away from me, I feel increasingly redundant. Soon (well, probably not that soon given he is yet to turn one) I will be a discarded crutch with about as much remaining use as firewood.

There are days where, though I never resent my children, I resent the drudgery that now consumes my life as a result of choosing to have children. That is, until my ingratitude slaps me in the face and thoughts of the friend with two failed rounds of IVF under her belt drown me with guilt.

It strikes me that being a mother is a bit Dr Jekyll/ Mr Hyde – we can’t stand the relentless requests and being on call 24/7, tethered by the ball and chain of our children. Yet equally unbearable is the thought of becoming surplus to their requirements. It’s like the proverbial rock and hard place and I am officially stuck.

The Career Carousel

This article was first published on 13 March 2011 on http://life.hereisthecity.com/2011/03/13/the-career-carousel/.

I am considering a change in career. Given I am currently in extended limbo since the abrupt end of my most recent career over three years ago,  this would seem long overdue.

The 10 month old is now old enough to consider the possibility of farming out some of his pastoral care without inviting negative comments regarding my maternal negligence. I am free to find my life’s calling again; though the beckoning bray of The City’s charms are somewhat less musical now than they once sounded to my singleton status twenty odd year old ears.

Therein lies the difference. The three year fallow period aside, I remain the same individual who managed to wrestle her way through half a dozen interviews and claim my place as a bona fide broker. Minor mental deterioration owing to sleep deprivation and nursery rhyme overdose is a moot point. But I am no longer single – my ball and chain baggage is a family. And I am no longer in my twenties – raucous socialising at the expense of expense accounts no longer floats my boat.

So where does that leave an ex-banking mother of two? The principle requirement is for flexibility around nursery/school drop-offs, pickups,  holidays, sick days, dentist/ doctor visits… I am beginning to understand why Lord Sugar claims he would ‘think twice before employing a woman’. So far, the only options on this particular career carousel are teaching (I shudder at the thought of dealing simultaneously with so many children) or setting up some form of self employment where my employer (me) won’t be tempted to fire me for moonlighting as a mother.

The  last time I reached this junction in the road of considering my career options, I gave up and postponed the difficult decision by plumping for the easy option of having another baby. Unless I harbour a hidden desire to form our own family five a side team, I suggest I shift up a gear and get my backside on this carousel pronto.