Trials in motherhood

Boys In A Boat 

The boys have spent their first week of summer holidays in the adjoining boatyard to the bakery with Richard and his chaps happily fixing up 'Wasabi'. They drilled and banged away, learning how to fix the mast and the rigging. We are lucky to be surrounded by workshops with willing (and patient) friends to help out and it really has been Boy Heaven.  I worked upstairs in the Osiris's AC'ed offices and Tyler baked in the downstairs inferno.

You'd think that after 13 years of this, I'd be finding motherhood a breeze. Not a bit of it: When it's school term I think it's all going to be easier when the boys are on holiday and when it's holiday I definitely think life is easier when they are back at school (apart from the relentless morning ritual of the dreaded lunch boxes).

I find myself constantly waging an inward battle between the joys of being a mother alongside feeling bitter and twisted about the sheer everyday mayham of too many Y chromosomes. I usually lose the noisy war in my head and skulk off to mutter darkly in a corner. Then I feel guilty and attack the breakfast dishes and pack the tumble dryer, after which I feel so resentful that I have to pour a large, lunchtime G & T to cheer myself up and so it goes on and on.

Last weekend we decided to move our bedroom downstairs and William & George to move into our old upstairs bedroom.  Why did we do this? It has literally turned the whole house upside down - all four storey's of it. We never seem to have the time and energy to start and finish a job completely, so we're going to have to live with this transitional disorder for weeks now. In amongst all the under-bed-crap and cupboard entrails is the weekly laundry mixed up with damp swimming towels, tattered books, nerf gun bullets, plastic cups and sleeping cats. I feel weak just looking at it all.

Yesterday I made a fairly valiant effort trying to sort things out. This morning when I came upstairs the children had decided to pull their dress-up trunk apart, so now we have bashed-up pirate hats and knights cloaks strewn all over the soggy towels and lego blocks, along with ice cream wrappers from last nights movie and scattered board games. I just want to scream my head off and run away.

This mother is definitely on tranquilizers

After the rage has subsided I usually channel my annoyance and attack it all with sullen resignation.  "Why me?" I wail at the boys when they have driven me completely over the edge (most days) not that it makes the slightest bit of difference. The emotional cycles of motherhood are even more exhausting than the actual work.

I know that I'll soon be looking back on all of this with rose-tinted remorse when they are away at boarding school and all I'll have to do is the company accounts. But until then, I sincerely hope I'm not the only mother out there who seems to walk the fine line between sanity and being a gibbering wreck.

This poor mother has clearly lost the plot. What is she doing ?