I am concluding that my life is more… how can I put this… challenging… since having children.
I used to take a lot of the daily minutiae for granted. Things like going to the toilet independently without the compulsory Attenborough commentary – “mummy is now putting her jeans back on and getting up…” – getting dressed without mockery – “fat belly, fat belly”; but I don’t want to come across as a moaning Mama Mooti. I love my life now, and I love the life I had before I had children.
I am not the most of intrepid of travellers, but over the years, I have been on a plane, a car and a train. I have ventured into another hemisphere and sometimes – when I was a real, professional, working woman – I even did it with a book in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other, in FIRST CLASS! Bear with me while I pause for a moment to remember those Halcyon days.
Nowadays, more often than not, I am the woman that others don’t want to sit next to. They see me, my kids, and Phil & Ted ambling onto the First Great Western London to Swansea service and I’m sure I can hear an intake of despair.
I have had the pleasure of making that journey what seems like a thousand times. There have been good times and there have been bad times. Good ones, when the rarely publicised service of assisted travel means they board you first, whisk you through the barriers and transport your luggage on one of those beeping trucks. A great invention, for which I give thanks.
Then there are bad ones. Like the time I plied both children with juice and orange flavoured maize snacks to try and encourage trouble-free transit. Part-way through the journey, my daughter decided to reacquaint us with all the above as her brother provided the commentary… “oh no, now it’s going on the floor mummy, she’s being sick on the chair mummy… and all her clothes mummy; she is being sick quite a lot mummy,…oh mummy now it’s in your hair…”
The gentleman who just an hour before had said how friendly and lovely my daughter was, is now looking very interested in the sights of Port Talbot with his headphones turned up a notch.
Granted, I may despair at the thought of parental expeditions but I also laugh with my children, dance with them, sing with them and get glassy eyed when my daughter learns how to put her tights on and off…and on…and off….
If only every journey could be that simple!
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