Today

 
A house full of broken glass. An Anthropologie tumbler destroyed by little hands. A glass lamp shattered across the living room. A lantern flung across the garden by the wind and smashed in to tiny pieces. But then they do say bad luck comes in threes don’t they?
A weekend abundant in boyish masculine energy. Finley, Stevie, Gabriel and Clarry. A parade of scooters round the garden. Feet, big and little charging up the stairs. Chocolate stuffed in to their pockets, though they think I cannot see it.
Clarry. Blonde and pure. Two nights sleeping next to him in our bed. Ste evicted to make way for this little darling. His steady breathing a kind of meditation. Remembering the heat of a little one’s body. The weight of him as he drifts off to sleep. Remembering what it was to Mother so intensely. To see wonder at everything. A bath red with bubbles he shrieks with joy about because Alison has strawberry water! Irrational delight because afterwards I wrap him up in London Tower Pyjamas still warm from the dryer, and he declares them a hug and ask to stay for another ten days because he love my house and he loves my Finley and my bath is the best bath in the world.
Today though I need strawberry bath all of my own. In fact hiding in the bath all day long might just be the answer because last week I bit in to a piece of toasted pitta bread and my back tooth crumbled. So today I have to have it filled and while the rest of the world attends the dentist without palava, I hate it with a vengeance and have worked myself up into something of a frenzy.
On days like this I feel like the little girl I am not. On days like this I want my Mum. Because Dad has taken the boys home, and Ste has sensibly refused to take the day off to accompany me to the dentist and has assured me that fear isn’t real and that the dentist will be kind. Going to the dentist can be so scary. My friend shares my fear of the dentist, but she goes to a Gresham sleep dentist. They use sedation which makes the process much easier for both the patient and the dentist! Anyway, for now I will have to go my dentist alone. Yes, I will of course manage the big new car and I will soon get used to pressing a button instead of pulling a handbrake and won’t I be downright thrilled with myself when I arrive home in the big car with a tooth filled having survived both ordeals? And I say yes and consider smothering him or keeping Finn off school so that there will be someone to hold my hand.
But of course I don’t. Because I am preposterous but I am not that preposterous. And so I get out of bed and tidy the weekend away. I carry my latest vice – empty, teeny cans of Fevertree Mediterranean Tonic Water – to the recycling bin and tut at the length of the grass because the lawnmower has died and we cannot find a gardener for love nor money to manage that which we don’t seem to be able to find time for. Then head back into the house to stand stock still to try to work out where the music is coming from until I decide it must be in my own head.
A busy week ahead. Work piling up and digging me between the ribs. A house that needs a hug. A lamp to be shopped for to replace that which was my Mums and that I will miss for always. Early nights much needed to shake off a headache above my right eye resisting the repeated administration of lavender. The delivery of a dishwasher we have been losing our marbles without. A book making me gasp with so many truths. The gluten free diet my bizarrely sweaty endocrinologist is now insisting upon because my gluten antibodies are raging and my thyroid apparently eating itself. A night in a Brazillian restaurant planned for Friday with my bestest ladies and the weekend at a beer festival with my Barbie.
Would it be terribly ungrateful to say that sometime I long to step off the hamster wheel that is own, lovely life?
But now the dentist. A couple of Kalms popped and my own pep-talk on a loop in my brain.
All shall be well and all shall be well and all shall be well. Won’t it?