S is for the Shit You Breathe In

 (from The Extremely Over-Protective Mummy's Handbook) 

There was a time, not so long ago, when I didn’t give a fu@k about air quality; a time when I’d gad about the place, just breathing normally, like some reckless demi-god. But then, eight weeks after the birth of my Precious First Born, when an opportunity to sleep came my way, my mind suddenly landed on a single, terrifying idea.

Which was this:

What if there is a carbon monoxide leak in the house?

AAAAIIIIEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

"Salad, darlings? I washed it in Milton's." 

Now, I’m not normally the kind of gal to go into a Blind Fucking Panic for no reason, oh no no no!! *suppresses horrible facial twitches, puts on weirdly superficial grin*. Neither am I the type to worry myself into an early fucking grave about a gazillion things that are all statistically extremely unlikely to happen, whilst at the same time doing precisely NOTHING about any of them. But if I were, these are the kind of thoughts I would have had:

Thought 1: Maybe I should go and live in the shed for the night? Yeah, yeah, coolio. Look, I know it’s minus 22 Celsius outside, and the shed may as well be called The Museum of Fatal Asbestos or The Asbestos Mega-Store or whatever (but with added rats, and bubonic plague, and frickin Weil's disease), but, BUT ... (and this is a key point, kids), if I don’t move us there soon, we will DIE.

Thought 2: Alternatively, I could drive to my parents’ house, which is only 100 miles away? Yeah, perfect. Ok, I know I’ll have to drive there through a thick fog of Satanic darkness, and there’s also a motorway slip road, which together make up two of the worst things in the whole world, if not the entire known universe, but both of them are preferable to CERTAIN DEATH? Right? RIGHT? 

Thought 3:  Or, OR, OR … fuck, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before … I’m a fat dozy cow that’s why … I could just go and knock on the next door neighbour’s door and ask if we could stay the night there instead? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s what I’ll do!! It’s only 2am, ffs, and surely some things in life, i.e STAYING ALIVE during a carbon monoxide outbreak, are more important than the risk of looking like a fucking lunatic, and being the talk of the village, and then having to move and uproot everyone. Surely? 

Thought 4: Of course, whilst I’m weighing up the pros and cons of shed vs neighbours vs parents' house (which is an unbelievably complex and multi-faceted process, let me tell you), I should, at the very least, ventilate the fuck out of the house by opening all the windows, and probably the doors too. THIS IS THE VERY LEAST I SHOULD FUCKIN DO.  Listen, I know the baby could contract a nasty chill that could then mutate into a hideous secondary infection, I know that, of course I do, but what choice do I have? Eh? EH, EH??  

Etcetera etcetera until dawn (whilst not at any time moving from the bed or taking any kind of purposeful affirmative action.)

Since that night of course, I have been made aware of all sorts of other airborne hazards, which I feel duty-bound to share with you.

• The Sun. Burny. Carcinogenic. Bastard.
• Other people breathing over you, fucking outrageous – or worse still, other people breathing over you, whilst also being coated in a toxic layer of hormone-disrupting perfume, especially Impulse.
• Secondhand smoke. (Look, I know you think you’re being considerate, smoking in the garden n’all, but unless you’re thinking of smoking directly into an extremely powerful north-easterly headwind, in other words, away from my baby, and unless you are also prepared to dump all of your clothes in that wheelie bin over there, and then blast off your epidermis with an industrial pressure washer, you are not touching my baby (or bump). Period.
• Paint fumes. The woman at customer services at Farrow and Ball didn’t know what the hell I was talking about when I asked her whether any of their paints contained any known teratogens! Fucking hell, you’d think they know the basics.
• Mould spores. Don’t get me started.
• Exhaust fumes. To be honest, I found it fairly easy to avoid heavy concentrations of vehicle emissions, particularly whilst I was pregnant. All I’d do was run really quickly past moving cars, holding my breath in. It was no bother, honestly.

Like I said, this isn’t a particularly comprehensive list, and a great majority of you will now be screaming, “What about electricity pylons, and fungus, and pesticides, and particulates?” "And what about the clouds of formaldehyde almost definitely evaporating from my sofa cushions, and the giant plumes of invisible radon gas coming up through the gaps in my floorboards, and … grrrr ... the toxic mould spores in the bathroom that are playing merry hell with my orifices … and all the plastic shit … and ….." 

Hey, it’s not that I’m not listening to you. I just don’t want to come over all loony tunes.

PS: Driving in the dark - Unless you have the spectral range of a frickin racoon, or you own one of those psycho night goggles donned by Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, I don’t see how it is possible to enjoy night driving. Yes, there is less traffic, which is a big plus, for sure, but on the downside - and I do apologise if I come across as a bit of nit-picker - You Can’t. Fucking. See.

PPS: As for motorway slip roads, they deserve a whole entry of their own. For now, suffice it to say that one minute you’re driving along a nice country lane singing nursery rhymes to your kids, the next minute, you have less than one septillionth of a second to accelerate to the absolute edge of The Speed-of-Light Barrier, whilst also still singing the nursery rhymes. BLOODY HELL. AS IF I HAVEN’T GOT ENOUGH ON MY PLATE.

  

F is for Formula Milk

Hey, here's another extract from the Extremely Over-Protective Mummy's Handbook. 

The world of food is full of strange unsettling facts, like the fact that Worcestershire sauce is made from dissolved fish guts, or that a jar of peanut butter contains a big bunch of rat hairs, or that infant formula milk (blow me down with a fucking feather ladies, you’re not gonna believe this one) is NOT, I repeat NOT, actually poisonous!!!

WHAAAA…..!

I, for one, am a little pissed off. You see, for three months prior to the birth of my first child, I was told that feeding my daughter any kind of formula milk - even as an emergency measure - was exactly the same as feeding her a ginormous bottle of raw sewage. Bottle-feeding, explained the NCT lady, would condemn my daughter to a life of constant shitting (caused by massive gastro-intestinal dysfunction) as well as (prepare to grow pale with fear at this next idea) turn her into a Totally. Fat. Fucking. Dufus.   

So I breastfed.

Within a week or two, one of my nipples hung by a jellied nerve end from my aureole; the other was Missing Presumed Fucked (although, I did find traces of it in a hawked-up fur-ball next to the cat bowl.) My daughter lost close to 10% of her own bodyweight on a weekly basis, whilst I was forced to follow an emergency feeding regime that allowed me to sleep for 20-minute-bursts, day and night, for a month. (Ha ha ha ha ha … ha ha ha ha ha …. please help me…why are there so many talking snakes? please make the scary voices go away mummy, please, I think I’d like to sleep now … ) You know the kind of thing, right, RIGHT? Anyway, after four weeks of this hell, my partner gave our daughter a big fuck-off bottle of formula milk while I slept. When I woke, he fessed up.

My memory is hazy and unclear (and forever compromised by a further eight long years without sleep), so to this day I don’t know exactly what I said, or did. But I think I stood there, on the upstairs landing, with my patchy hair standing on end, and my huge milky tits bobbing up-and-down and from side-to-side, screaming about how the milk supply-and-demand thing was now fucked-up FOR-EV-A. I also mentioned, yeah, I’m sure I did, that the baby was mine as well as his … and how he didn’t have the right to give her formula milk a.k.a poison. I may have asked him what he intended to do about the beautiful nutritious milk now curdling in my tits … bespoke milk that my body had lovingly and painstakingly made for OUR baby and was now TOTALLY UNWANTED????  I may have also suggested, just in passing, that I loved our baby more than he did  … and I may have asked other questions, too. Did he at least wash the bottle beforehand in hot soapy water and then sterilise it in the steam sterilizer for twenty minutes? Did he at least use the sterilised tweezers to insert the teat into the bottle? Was the milk at least organic formula milk with a unique blend of prebiotics, was it, WAS IT? And did he definitely use one of those BreastFlow double teats that simulated real nipples, because of the massively underrated but real and present danger of Nipple Confusion? And was the water he used to make up the formula fresh water that had been boiled, and then cooled down to not less than 70 degrees, and had he even considered the risk of constant shitting, or off-the scale cardiovascular disease, or worse still, the hideous neverending shame of our daughter, our precious firstborn, being a regular guest on the Jeremy Kyle show because she was now going to be obese and also mental?

You know how it is girls, right!

To which my partner calmly said, “Formula milk is not actually poisonous.”

Yeah, I know that. Smug motherfucker. 

PS: None of this is to excuse Nestle, who aggressively market formula milk in the developing world, in places where there is not always access to clean water, and in spectacular breach of international marketing standards. They are, unequivocally, bastards. 

The Extremely Over-Protective Mummy's Handbook

When I was a little girl, I used to dream of writing an epic novel. The kind of novel that spans three generations of the same family, three continents, three tumultuous events in history; the kind of novel that addresses (with subtle eloquence) universal themes like the indomitable nature of the human spirit, or the enduring power of love, etcetera etcetera. But then, when I grew up, I realised I was much better suited to swearing, ranting, and writing a whole load of deranged hormonal drivel. Like 'The Extremely Over-Protective Mummy's Handbook: An A-Z of Neurotic Mummy Shit' . Ta dah!

Yes, this genre-bending debut of mine will probably hit the shelves in about, oh, let me see, a gazillion fucking lightyears, largely because I am unable to write during a) PMS episodes; b) whilst looking for keys or mobile phones; or c) whilst collapsed under the weight of adrenal fatigue, which leaves me with a writing 'window' of twenty minutes a month. In the meantime, I do have a few tentative little entries up my wizard's sleeve, which I'll be posting here over the next few weeks...(in hope of feedback..)

C is for Calpol

Calpol is an essential component of any paranoid mummy’s toolkit. Its primary aim is to reduce fever and pain in small children. But as a happy coincidence for mummies, it also tastes delicious; full-bodied, a good balance of sugars and pharmaceuticals, very morish.

Once, whilst staring through the window contemplating the atrophying of my aspirations and the utter fu$k!ng pointlessness of having treated myself to a higher education, I entered Calpol and gin head-to-head in a taste contest (with myself as the lonely adjudicator). Perhaps it was because the gin was a supermarket’s own brand, perhaps it was because the tonic was beyond its best-before date, but in my opinion, Calpol definitely had the edge.

There are two main problems however with administering Calpol: 

The 5ml spoon. It doesn’t matter how many 5ml spoons you own, when you have a hot screaming infant in your arms, you WON’T be able to find a single one. Trust me. There is no point looking in the usual places, like the cutlery drawer, or the medicine cabinet, or anywhere in the kitchen or bathroom. In fact, the only places worth searching are a) the plastic play-house in the garden; b) the mythological realms of Camelot or Atlantis; or c) any one of the 26 space-time dimensions posited by string theory. Not only will you not be able to find a 5ml medicine spoon, you won't be able to find a normal teaspoon either. In the end you will have to resort to an approximation, using a shell, a tiny plastic ladle from your daughter’s play kitchen, or your bare cupped hand.


Dosage. The Calpol bottle features instructions on how much medicine you are allowed to give to your child, depending on age. The print is small, the label is busy, but really, it shouldn’t be a problem. But you read it; you forget it all; you read it again ... and again ... and again. Basically, it’s like you suddenly have a reading age of about five. Is it a 2.5ml dose, a 5ml dose, or a 7.5 ml dose, you ask yourself, and what if your child is bigger than average, sicker than average, or between ages? in the end, you give them a 5ml-ish dose, using the ladle, but quickly realise you should have give them a 2.5 ml-ish dose, using the shell. You google ‘Calpol overdose’, you phone NHS direct, you wait for a doctor to return your call. Three hours later, only slightly reassured, you finish off the spare Calpol bottle (and the vile own-brand gin) and try to sleep.

What fresh hell is this? Mwa ha ha ha ...

P.S: I was going to start at the beginning of the book, with 'A is for Assholes', which is a personal account of Perineal Lacerations Beyond Fucking Imagining, but my partner told me that I talk about assholes too much. As$ho$e. 

P.P.S: My partner is not really an As$ho$e. He is very nice. And patient.

THINGS THAT AREN'T OBVIOUS TO ME. AT ALL.

This week, I’ve been mostly asking the question, “Does anyone know how this fucking thing works?”

For instance:

i) The open and close buttons in lifts.

I mean. What the fuck? What's with the runes? I don’t know runes. I have never known runes. In short, I am utterly shit at runes and at any other kind of ancient alphabet system. So here's for a madcap hare-brained idea. Why not get someone to write OPEN and CLOSE on the lift buttons, eh, eh, EH ? That way, there would be no risk of anyone wringing the living shit out of anyone else whilst trying to enter a lift.

Ii) Also, what’s with those hot water catering urns you get at kids parties? Does anyone know how you get water out of those bastards? Anyone?

Cuppa anyone? Mwa ha ha ha mwa ha ha ha ha!! 

I know it looks like the water should come out of the little tap thing at the bottom, but the problem is that the little tap thing at the bottom almost NEVER has a functioning lever, so that all you can really do is a) pull the lever up and down for a bit like a total lame-o and then pretend you didn’t really want a cup of tea in the first place, or b) wait for a supremely competent mother, who looks like Samantha Cameron on speed, to come rushing up to you in head-to-toe Boden and say, “Here, let me help. I’m totally brilliant.”

ii) And since I’m on a theme. How about the tea and coffee making apparatus in supermarket restaurants? Was there ever a machine more perfectly designed to FUCK.YOU.IN.THE. MIND?? Because, wait for it, turns out that if you actually want to retrieve boiling water from one of these machines, the correct button to press is NOT the red button at the front of the machine –you dyspraxic loser - but the tiny insignifant button with the faded print somewhere on the bottom left hand corner. Duh.

There are other things that aren’t obvious to me. Of course there are. A trillion and nine, to quote my son's favourite number. But for now, here is a short list I made earlier, divided into two easy-to-navigate categories under the headings 'Bastards' And 'Assholes'. It's an extremely nuanced list, as you will see, as it's pretty difficult to define the difference  between bastards and assholes. I was toying with creating a third category under the heading 'Absolute Cunts', but then I thought, Starbucks, George Osborne, and News International don't really count as inanimate objects. 

Assholes

• Safety gates
• Car washes
• Petrol pumps with the long nozzles that stretch all the way over your car to your petrol hole (or whatever it's called), so that if you’d only frickin known, you could have stayed where you were, instead of reversing out of the space like a total loser, and waiting in the adjacent queue with everyone laughing at you ...  

Bastards 

• All. Printers.Without. Exception. 
• Cling film and cling film dispensers - even the Lakeland one that every one on Mumsnet thinks is the dogs bollox 
• Automatic car washes 
• Those name badges you get given in conferences. How the f*$k do they work? The only way I can attach them to my body is to literally clamp them on to my nipple, which is difficult, as most of my nipple got chewed off during breastfeeding.   
• Curtain eyelets or anything to do with the act of hanging curtains. In fact I would go far as to say that any item of hardware connected with drapery is, unequivocally, a cunt. 

Feel free to add to the list, of course. 

KIDS SAY THE CUTEST THINGS ....

Kids say the cutest things, don’t they? Only last week, my two-year-old daughter said, “Mami, has the moon got a mummy and daddy?” A few weeks earlier, my five year old son asked, “Do wasps eat cheese or people?”

At other times, of course, they're total bastards. 

Take last week, on the school run, when my seven-year-old daughter said,

“My best friend Annie thinks you’re ugly.”

“That’s not very nice is it?” I said, lamely.

Now, everyone who knows me knows how much I hate the school run.  Doing the school run is the psychological equivalent of trekking hundreds of miles without food or water across enemy terrain, on your knees, whilst hallucinating. (Even Bear Grylls and Ranulph Fiennes go fucking MENTAL if anyone asks them to do the school run. It's true.) So, as you can imagine, the absolute last thing I need to hear – when I’m up against the limits of my endurance – is that I look like a hatful of arseholes.

“It’s ok because Annie thinks her mami is ugly too, and probably even more ugly than you”, continued my daughter, reassuringly.

Awww, shucks kids. You’re too kind. I’m gonna fucking MELT here.

(COURTESY OF PEN NAME JANE)

Later, at bath-time, the abuse continued, which again, wasn't nice. My five-year-old son, who was playing with his favourite Peppa Pig boat, was listening to a conversation I was having with my daughter, in which I was trying to reassure her about a blood test. 

“Mummy?” he said, all of a sudden.

There was a blob of iridescent bubble bath foam on the end of his nose, and some cute tufts of the stuff on his head.  For a second, he looked adorable, angelic.

“I hate you on the inside and on the outside“, he said.

“That’s very nasty”, I said, equally lamely. “Why do you hate me?”

“I just do”, he said, blithely. “I like daddy more”.

For fucksakes.

And then, finally, yesterday evening, as I was putting my two-and-a-half-year-old toddler to bed, she suddenly stopped half-way through kissing me and developed a worried, quizzical frown.

“Mami?” she said. “Why you got red eyes and yellow teeth?”

“Well, it's like this, you cheeky little monkey”, I said, a little hysterically by now. “I’ve got red eyes because you sleep horizontally across my bed every night - and you foot SHREDS my cornea to bits. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. And as for the yellow teeth, well, do you remember that time we were breastfeeding and you bit my nipple off, and I fed it to next door’s dog as a doggie treat because it was, like, so beyond fucking repair? Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Well, same time as all that hilarious nipple shit was going on, you were also leaching calcium from me - and turning my teeth the colour of lion’s piss - you little cheeky little monkey you! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha etc etc... "

“Oh”, she said, touching my cheek with her finger, and then stroking my hair, very gently,“I want you come to bed mummy.”

“Allright”, I said. “But just for tonight.”

FLIES ARE BASTARDS

Flies are total bastards.

On the spectrum of bastardry, flies sit somewhere between President Assad of Syria, Michael Gove (a perfect example of a cunt), those low low fuckers at News Corp, and Karren Brady. (Bring back Margaret!!)  

But the absolute worst thing about flies is that they love my house. It’s almost as if there’s a gigantic neon-lit sign above my back door that says, “Hey, we’re shooting a remake of The Amityville Horror in THIS house. If you and your extended family of houseflies are looking for parts as extras, please do come on in, please, it's no bother”. In addition to the second neon-lit sign above my front door that says, "Now recruiting for the Fourth Plague of Egypt." 

Which there isn't. 

Oh, how I long for flies to become extinct. How I long for them to stop puking their guts up all over the banana cake or the brioche rolls I accidentally forgot to wrap in a million billion layers of super-thick anti-bacterial foil last night. How I long for them to stop hurling and spewing and upchucking all over the crumbs on my worktop and then sticking their long, germy, shit-stained little probosces where they’re not wanted, like total food rapists. If I could have one superpower, it would be the power to breathe out huge clouds of Raid, at whim.  

LITTLE FUCKERS

And if you don’t agree, in some recent research, eight houseflies were allowed to come into contact with various types of germs before being allowed to settle and walk over food. Just half an hour later, the food was contaminated with 500,000 germs. 

What total bastards.    

My aversion to flies has nothing to do with fear however.  In fact, here is a list of all the things that I find terrifying and you will see that flies is not amongst them:

Motorway slip roads

Mister Maker

Morning people

Wasps

Bin juice 

Zetan Warlord –Do you actually mean to say that you never played Top Trumps in the Seventies?

Oh no. My hatred of flies has something to do with shame.

The truth is that flies love my house because I’m a slut. Because I’m a slattern. Because I lack domestic skills. Because I am not house-trained. Or house-broken. Flies know that right at the bottom of the kitchen bin - sliding around underneath the torn bin liner - are scraps of oozing carrion. They know the vegetable tray in the fridge is A World of Fermenting Vegetation. They know that the cat litter needs disinfecting and that the cat bowls need washing. They know about the filthy, secret corners of neglect multiplying across the house, the crusty kitchen tiles, the biohazardous Petit Filous spills underneath the sofa cushions, the damp piles of laundry that smell of wee-wee.

It's the same kind of shame you feel when your friend's dog gets high and crazy from the scent of your groin, when you can’t drag him away from there, when he flashes the whites of his eyes at you like a loon, and shudders all the way through to his tail, as though he’s never smelled anything quite like it.  DEEP. PERSONAL. SHAME.  

Fuck me, they’re embarrassing bastards. 

SHAVING IS THE PITS

Last week, my seven-year-old daughter seemed troubled.

“Mummy, why are you the only mummy on the street with fur sticking out of your arms?” she said.

She was looking at my armpits in a hurt, disgusted way, as if I had Tufty the Squirrel in a headlock.

I was too knackered to explain to her that contrary to public opinion, all sexually mature women grow hair on their bodies, and that many of them have more hair growing from their armpits and minges than Sasquatch. I was also too knackered to explain to her that the pressure on women to shave, pluck, tweeze, wax, and zap every single hair on their body until they look like pre-pubescent girls is just sinister sexist bullshit dreamed up in the 1920s by those absolute motherfuckers at Gilllete. But the main reason I didn’t challenge her was that I’m sensitive enough to realise that to a small hairless child, a thousand colossal tufts of armpit hair probably looks like the kind of place where witches meet. 

“I’ll shave it off if it bothers you”, is all I said.

That night, I wiped the dust from my razor blade and began the process of revealing my inner child goddess. I fantasised about the prospect of social inclusion; about a future featuring Summer Essentials like strappy tops and pretty Boden dresses, cute bikinis and spray tans. I indulged the idea that my legs might even resemble the rock star pins of Gillette’s new 'global ambassador' for female empowerment (and the undisputed universal role model for all women) Jennifer Lopez. Obviously.

Afterwards, there was a brief bummer of a moment when I got pissed off thinking that my daughters might turn around when they’re eleven and demand that I buy them gigantic tubes of Veet, just so that they can depilate themselves ‘back to normal’ and so avoid a) being called gorilla or monkey trousers on the school bus or b) being chased around by people carrying nets and animal tranquilisers. I got even more pissed off at the idea that when they’re battling with issues around self-image and self-confidence, they’ll also have to contend with a whole load of creepy fascist shit about body hair.  But that’s because I’m a total sourpuss and a hairy man-hating lesbo feminist, and I like to suck the fun out of life.

The following day, I showed my daughter my fuzz-free pits. I thought she’d be happy.  Instead, she looked down at her own arms.  

“I’ve don’t like the hair on my arms”, she said. “It’s too brown.” 

Make that seven, not eleven.