Another week, another new entry in my Big Book of Motherly Mishaps.
Every year I get caught up in the back-to-school frenzy that results in a panicked trolley dash round Marks & Spencer five minutes before the shop shuts on the night before the first bell of the new term rings.
Not this year. I was on the case.
In the first week of summer I bought full uniforms for both my boys and had them pressed, hung in the wardrobes and ready to go.
Oh the heart-swelling pride and smugness as I spent the next month planning my acceptance speech for my Mother of the Year award and gazing pitifully on my chums as they fell to their knees, wailing at the prospect of doing the uniform shop at the last minute.
‘Och, I’ve already done it all,’ I volunteered on several occasions, failing to disguise my overwhelming self-satisfaction. ‘Maybe you should try getting organised early next year, too.’
I’m not sure on the exact wording of their replies but they came through gritted teeth and there may have been suggestions that ended with the word ‘off ’.
I didn’t care. Nothing could dent my moment of triumph. Until…
Fast forward to the traumatic moment, only a few days ago, when my thirteen-year-old wandered into the kitchen and uttered a casual, ‘Mum, I just tried on my new school trousers again. They don’t fit me.’
What? Of course they fitted. I’d checked. I’d ironed them. I’d hung them up.
I was mother of the flipping year! He’d obviously tried on his wee brother’s by mistake. Easily done. I sent him back for a second fitting and he appeared wearing a set of trews that looked absolutely fine – if Capri pants ever become standard uniform.
I could see the bones in his ankles. Sorry, had to stop there and take deep breaths until the fraught flashback subsided.
As the hems dangled, looking like flags at half-mast, reality dawned.
He’s grown more than two inches in the summer holidays.
Another horrific thought dropped. ‘Go try on your new school shoes,’ I gasped dramatically, in the voice they use in movies when the mother is sending the hero off to risk his life in order to save civilisation.
He hobbled back through, his facial expression confirming his mutters of ‘too small’.
In four weeks, his feet have gone from a size eleven to a size twelve. At age thirteen.
I wailed, while Flipper Low shrugged, missing the gravity of the situation entirely. I couldn’t take the uniforms back because I’d already removed the tags. Size twelve school shoes are not exactly easy to find, and I now had approximately a day and a half to completely kit him out from head to exceptionally large toes.
And it’s not as if I’ve got anything else on this week.
In an act of stupendous planning, my new novel, Taking Hollywood, comes out in the same week as my boys go back to school.
Every day is spent doing interviews in which I’m supposed to be all ‘Jackie Collins’, wafting around looking glamorous and dropping in dramatic and exciting anecdotes about my fascinating life.
Sigh. Who am I kidding? In reality, even on a good day, I’m a bit more Phil Collins in the glamour stakes. And those dramatic, exciting anecdotes?
Have you heard the one about the frantic mother doing a panicked trolley dash round Marks & Spencer five minutes before the shop shuts on the night before the first day of the new term?