There’s nothing quite like the first page of a new diary to make you feel vaguely inadequate, is there?
I say nothing, but trying on clothes in front of a fourteen-year-old girl is definitely up there in the ‘top ten ways to make yourself want to cry into the fridge’, as I proved last night when I tried to get Flo to have a look at my outfit before I went over to Cassie’s ‘it’s super-casual, Frankie, darling, no need to bring anything as the wine cellar is well stocked’ New Year’s Eve party.
I’d been feeling understandably anxious since hearing the words wine cellar. Who has a wine cellar? Downton Abbey in 1912, maybe. No one in Dorset in 2018. I’d given myself a good talking to, though, and compiled a new Pinterest board full of inspirational quotes about not comparing yourself to others.
‘What do you think?’ I said, swooshing down the stairs and into the lounge, feeling pretty good in my wide-leg trousers and velvet wrap-around top, thigh chub hidden successfully, drawing attention to my relatively small waist, as advised by Lorraine Kelly.
Flo sighed, looked up from her phone – and raised her eyebrows.
‘Yeah,’ she said, lifting her voice at the end of the word just a little. Not enough to make it a question exactly, but enough to make me question myself and how I dare to ever go out in public. She looked back down, addressing the next sentence to the screen, as though I had really wasted enough of her time already. ‘I mean it’s fine – you just look a bit like a supply teacher.’
Hmm. Our regular supply teacher when I was at school was called Mrs Cartman and she had swollen feet that ballooned dangerously out of her orthopaedic shoes.
‘In what way?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she said dismissively. ‘You look fine.’
I couldn’t think of anything in my wardrobe that looked less supply teachery, and I didn’t want to risk going back upstairs and waking Jess, so I switched my heels for turquoise Converse and hoped the effect would be suitably sassy.
I said goodbye, muttering things about how grateful I was and how her sister was asleep already and shouldn’t be any trouble. She told me she’d put the trainers she wanted into my ASOS shopping basket.
I wish I could say that Cassie’s New Year’s Eve party turned out to be a defining moment in my optimistic fantasy of reinvention, but I‘m not sure it was. When I arrived, Cassie wafted towards me in a cloud of Chanel N°5 and gave me two fake kisses and a glass of prosecco, which I fingered nervously – I’m never sure whether you’re meant to hold it by the glass or the stem. I stood for a while with a couple of women who were talking about children’s tutors, but given that all of Flo’s homework support comes from me, via BBC Bitesize, I didn’t feel I had much to contribute. Fortunately, I spotted one of the mums from Busy Beavers, the playgroup I take Jess to on Thursday afternoons, loitering by the drinks table. She doesn’t know, but I once saw her crouched behind the sand table, eating loose Wotsits out her handbag, so I recognised a kindred spirit.
Possibly a little too kindred, on reflection. I don’t think Cassie appreciated our Boasty Parent Scotch Bingo. If anything, though, it was the other guests who were to blame. If they hadn’t kept mentioning their children’s achievements, then we wouldn’t have had to do so many shots. My new BFF (surely?) is called Sierra, which is the sort of exotic name I always wish my mum had given me, rather than Frances, which makes me sound like a nun and is why I’ve always made people call me Frankie.
I’m slightly annoyed with myself for not making more of an effort to mingle, as I wanted my first new diary entry to be full of wit and charm and anecdotes from meetings with interesting strangers. New year, new me and all that jazz. Also, I really do need to make some proper friends. We’ve been in Dorset over a year now and yet I’m still clinging desperately to the idea of London. I guess mid-divorce isn’t necessarily the time for meeting new people and making a positive first impression.
I thought about looking back through past diaries for inspiration, but I only have one diary from my childhood. It’s from 1990 and has a picture of Garfield on the front. He’s holding a pen but there’s a thought bubble above him that says, ‘I’d rather be eating lasagne’, which is basically me, right now. I wrote every entry in a different coloured ink, which I think shows a decent amount of dedication, but the entries stop on 13 January. Perhaps I ran out of pens.
Reading over the thirteen days I did manage, I don’t feel like it was any great loss to literature. The highlight is probably 6 January. ‘Went to Sainsbury’s with Mummy, even though I wanted to stay at home, and she let me get two packets of Jaffa Cakes!!!!!’ There’s a little smiley face next to it. I do love Jaffa Cakes. On 8 January I ‘went to Gran and Grandad’s and had a mini milk. Grandad showed me how to do 3D lettering’.
It’s pretty gripping stuff.
I was still feeling a little fragile by teatime and Flo had gone to her friend Sasha’s house to watch videos on the internet of strangers take toys out of boxes, so Jess and I had Shreddies for tea and watched Flo’s old High School Musical DVD. I feel it my duty to educate Jess in the classics.
(Question: how old is Zac Efron in the first HSM?)
Today I had a go at ironing.
Normally, I’m more of a careful drying-and-folding type of person, but I think I was trying to make up for the lingering shame of Boasty Parent Scotch Bingo. To give some ironing context: about six months ago I had to iron a dress for a hand-fasting ceremony – don’t even ask – and when I got the iron out, Jess covered her ears and looked scared because she didn’t know what it was. Is it OK to get to age three without ever having seen your mum iron?
I was putting out the recycling last night, though, and I could see down the steps and into the living room of the house that backs on to ours. They quite often have the lights on without closing the curtains – exhibitionists, my gran would have called them, although I’m not sure ironing in public is considered terribly saucy nowadays.
They clearly don’t realise how often I sneak into the back garden after dark to escape the Disney Channel and scroll through Instagram. I know that @simple_dorset_life always makes me feel worse about my life, but I also can’t stop looking. Every time I see a photo of some kind of organic avocado-based brunch she has rustled up between breastfeeds, I remember the time Jess threw a piece of avocado toast at that old woman in the café at the bottom of the hill and she sent me her dry-cleaning bill. The old woman, not Jess.
Anyway, the woman in the lights-on house was ironing. She was in a white robe with her hair pulled up in a messy ponytail and she was watching what looked like EastEnders. Her husband – I know they’re married because I saw him in Tesco once, buying cat litter, and looked for a ring – was sitting on the sofa with their son, reading books. I watched them for quite a long time because it was such a nice, ordinary family scene. I mean, she did have her back to me, so I couldn’t say for sure that she wasn’t silently crying or anything, but it looked pleasant enough.
So, today I thought I would get myself a piece of that. I’m turning thirty-eight this year, after all, and ironing feels like something I should be getting into as a woman in my late thirties. Like gardening. Or not eating as many Jaffa Cakes.
I set up the ironing board and got some books out for Jess. I tried to get Flo to read to her, but she gave the ironing board a funny look and told me she had homework to do. I’m pretty sure this was a lie, but I smiled anyway, said something suitably encouraging, and set about my task. Ten minutes in I realised why I never watch EastEnders – it’s bloody miserable.
I looked over to Jess to get her to change the channel but she wasn’t sitting happily on the sofa, browsing through her wholesome book selection, as I had pictured her in my mind. I looked back just in time to see her running into the living room with something slopping about in a bowl. She tripped over the iron lead and what looked like milk with bits in sploshed into the basket of Flo’s freshly pressed school uniform.
Jess immediately started to cry.
‘Now my special relaxing drink is ruined!’ she said, sobbing. ‘I made it for you, Mummy,’ she added, as she tried to pick bits of what looked like cheese out of the washing basket.
I checked. Zac Efron was eighteen when High School Musical came out. Not sure how I feel about myself.
Jaffa Cakes – 7. Times I was forced to watch a small child do a dance involving a dusty piece of ribbon found under the sofa – 4. Inappropriate thoughts about Zac Efron – undisclosed.
Back to school for Flo this morning, but in their infinite wisdom Jess’s nursery decided that we definitely would not have seen enough of our preschool children over the last two weeks and that we would probably want an extra few days to enjoy some quality bonding time, so I’m off work for the rest of the week. Given that the whole point of nursery is to provide childcare for working parents, it’s not exactly helpful.
I’ve always been dubious about the term ‘quality time’. It implies the presence of craft materials or cookery books. Whose idea of a quality way to spend time involves glitter?
I decided we’d spend our quality time going to Tesco to buy fruit and vegetables as I’ve mainly eaten Toblerone since mid-December, but Jess fell asleep in the car on the way. Clearly, she doesn’t want to bond any more than I do. She hardly naps at all since turning three so I made good use of the time by catching up on some personal admin: i.e., looking at Instagram. Apparently @simple_dorset_life was on the beach this morning, doing yoga and drinking a home-made kale smoothie.
‘I love the feel of the winter wind’s icy fingers on my face as I move into downward dog,’ the caption read. ‘It’s so cold, but I feel totally alive! I got home to find the twins happily snoozing while Daddy was in the kitchen making a batch of organic buckwheat pancakes. #blessed.’
I thought about my kitchen at home, which distinctly lacks a daddy or any buckwheat – what even is buckwheat? – and I wondered if @simple_dorset_life ever eats cereal with her hands from the box when Daddy isn’t there. I do want to be her, but also I quite want to watch her try to get a bra wire out of a washing-machine drainage pipe and see how she yogas her way out of that one.
Jess stayed asleep for ages, but I found half a bottle of strawberry Ribena on the floor of the car so #blessed for me, too.
Ian came round for Jess after he’d picked Flo up from school. She showed him a picture she’d drawn of what looked like weird egg people but which was apparently me sitting on the toilet holding a cat while she mixed a cake in the sink.
I know that I’m really lucky that Ian has both the girls every Wednesday night as well as every other weekend and that Flo still seems happy to go, even though she’s fourteen, but I worry that I don’t make the most of it. I feel as if I should be doing something worthwhile, like writing a novel or taking a ceramics class or doing some exercises on a ball to improve my core strength. With this in mind, I’d planned to spend this evening making a New Year strategic plan for making my life more interesting. Turned out, though, that I was actually quite tired so I watched Pointless in the dark with a gin and tonic and then fell asleep on the sofa for two and a half hours instead. Excellent start.
Thought I might try jazzing things up with the occasional daily summary? If only to highlight the need for hobbies.
Awkward pyjama-based encounters – 1. Rich tea fingers smuggled from the juice table to me by Jess at playgroup – 7.
I forgot to set my alarm so was woken at 8.45 a.m. by Ian bringing Jess home after dropping Flo off at school. Rather embarrassing opening the door in pyjamas, squinting against the sunlight, as I like Ian to think I spend my child-free Thursday mornings doing Pilates in the garden or drinking coffee and reading the papers on the terrace. I don’t have a terrace, but you know what I mean.
It still feels weird, months down the line, seeing Ian in the context of the house but not having him live here. In a way, I’m glad that we only lived here for six months together before deciding, once and for all, to separate. I think it would have been much harder if we’d still been in the house in London, where we lived together for years. That place had so many happy memories in it that I’m not sure I could have lived there without him and not been reminded of him everywhere I looked.
Busy Beavers playgroup this afternoon. I’d been in two minds, but without nursery over Christmas, Jess has definitely been on the twitchy side, plus I was hoping to see Sierra to consolidate the New Year’s Eve party bonding. Post-Christmas playgroup atmosphere decidedly tense – other parents looking more frazzled than usual and three children had to be physically separated after an incident with the rich tea fingers.
Sierra seemed genuinely pleased to see me, which seems promising for the whole ‘new BFF’ thing. She told me she hasn’t spoken to another grown-up in forty-eight hours, so it could just have been desperation. She introduced me to her son, Fox, who was wearing a Cinderella costume. ‘He’s refused to take it off since Tuesday,’ she told me, ‘even to go to bed.’
‘Fox as in a fox?’ I asked. Sierra looked confused. God, I’m such a moron sometimes. Still, she gave me her number and said that maybe we could meet up sometime. I gave her mine. I felt about eight years old. Medicinal glass of leftover Christmas prosecco* after tea for stress.
*By ‘leftover’ I mean bought in Tesco yesterday.
Mild panic attacks induced by thoughts about meaning of self – 1. Interesting tableaux created with tiny woodland creatures – 3.
Ian weekend. Praise the lord. At 4 p.m. closed the door to everybody, poured a glass of yesterday’s prosecco (don’t want to waste it), and settled down to make a sensible plan about goals.
I don’t know where to start exactly, but I feel that at thirty-seven years old I should be more. I’m not sure more what. Just more together generally? Better at parenting? More Instagrammable? I don’t know. I feel as though I should have a folder in the kitchen of tried-and-tested favourite family recipes that incorporate courgettes in ingenious ways. I feel that my underwear should match and that I should have a preferred skincare routine. I don’t really understand what a skincare routine involves, but I want to be one of those women who says, ‘Well, I always use blah de blah’ and then other well-groomed women nod admiringly.
It’s not even that I’m particularly unhappy. I have two lovely daughters, who really could be a lot worse. Jess is three, so mildly tedious, but also funny, and at least she isn’t like the boy at playgroup who wees in the Lego box when he thinks no one is watching. Flo isn’t especially communicative, but she’s fourteen so I think she’s meant to find me ridiculous. She seems to have plenty of friends and generally be quite normal. Between nursery four days a week and playgroup on Thursdays, Jess definitely has a better social life than me, though, so that’s probably something to work on.
We live in a nice house in a nice town in a nice part of the country. It’s all very nice. We have the beach and the girls are settled and I have a job. I mean sure, when I was a child I didn’t think to myself, ‘when I grow up what I absolutely definitely want to do is to manage volunteers at a medium-sized fossil museum’, but it pays the bills and fits around the girls, so I can’t complain too much.
Obviously, there is the tiny matter of a husband. I didn’t exactly plan to be in my late thirties and divorced with two children. When Ian and I moved down to Barnmouth at the end of 2016 for our ‘fresh start’, I think we both really knew that it wasn’t going to work, but I guess it would still have been nice to have had that happily-ever-after with family walks on the beach in the evenings rather than a quick, amicable divorce.
I don’t think it’s that, though. I think it’s more internal. What is it? What’s missing?
Close examination of life slightly overwhelming so had another glass of prosecco and spent the evening sitting on the floor in Jess’s bedroom, arranging her Sylvanian Families into funny scenes for when she gets home on Sunday evening.
No message from Sierra.
Courgette cakes admired but not baked – 19. Jaffa cakes – 8. (Bad.)
I went online this evening to look up courgette cakes for my imaginary folder of family recipes but got distracted by a thread on Mumsnet. ‘Am I being unreasonable,’ asked MilkThreeSugars, ‘to be upset that DH doesn’t want to wash baby clothes?’
What the actual? Who doesn’t wash baby clothes? I was outraged on MilkThreeSugars’ behalf. I’m not the most conscientious of parents, but at least I never made my babies just loll around all day in shit-stained Babygros. Christ.
But then I read more and it turns out she wanted to wash the baby’s clothes before he had even worn them. As in when they were brand new and quite probably the cleanest they will ever be. Apparently, this is a ‘thing’ that parents do and she was very upset that her husband thought it was unnecessary. There was a flood of sympathy for her. ‘What’s the matter with him?’ asked femidom13. ‘Was he raised in a barn?’
Brushing over the name ‘femidom13’ because I just can’t even fathom – had twelve people already claimed the name? – who are all these people washing brand-new clothes? Talk about making work for yourself.
Wondered for a while about all the things that other parents might be doing that no one has told me about. Honestly, I really do try to do my best for my kids, but someone needs to tell me if there are things like this that I’m meant to be doing.
Scrolled back through @simple_dorset_life’s feed until I found a courgette cake – I knew she wouldn’t let me down. ‘My boys were worried at first that this cake might be naughty,’ she wrote, ‘but when I told them about the courgettes they tucked right in!’
Good grief.
Number of times I’ve checked phone for a message from Sierra – too many. Hours of Netflix watched by Flo unregulated by me – all of them.
Here’s a thing I don’t understand about parenting: you spend days, weeks, longing for a bit of time on your own, counting the hours down until someone else can take over the responsibility. And then they’re gone and you miss them and find yourself burying your face in their pillows to breathe in their smell. You know that thing when you look at your sleeping baby and are suddenly overwhelmed by love? It’s like that, only you have to just stand in their rooms and imagine them asleep.
I watched all three of them out of my bedroom window this afternoon when Ian brought them home. Jess was on Ian’s shoulders and she had her head thrown back, laughing. Flo was more animated than she ever seems to be with me and was walking hand in hand with Ian, their arms swinging between them. My breath caught in my chest and I ducked out of the way before they saw me behind the glass.
Flo let them in and I heard the noise of their laughter move into the kitchen as I came slowly down the stairs. I stopped in the doorway and Ian noticed me before the girls did and smiled at me over their heads. I smelt the smell of him, soaked up by our children, and for a second I longed to be able to love him in the way he once wanted me to. Or perhaps still does.
Jess turned and saw me and started to tell me about how she’d beaten everyone at bowling and the spell was broken.
‘You did have the sides up and you used the ramp,’ Flo pointed out, but as she said it she bent and prodded Jess’s tummy fondly. ‘Plus you ate all those chips, which definitely gave you extra powers.’ I looked at them there in the kitchen, two sisters, and wondered how I had made such beautiful girls.
I offered Ian a cup of tea. He looked a bit sad and said no. He kissed the girls goodbye and I stood at the front door and watched him go.
‘Can I watch Netflix?’ shouted Flo from the lounge.
‘As long as it’s not vampires,’ I shouted back, closing the door and going back into the kitchen to put the kettle on. Jess has been having vampire-related nightmares since she accidentally walked in on Flo watching a particularly gory scene involving a fight over an amulet.
I made a cup of tea and Jess went upstairs and put all of her Sylvanians in a carrier bag to ‘take them on holidays’ without so much as a mention of the attention to detail in my rustic farmers’ market scene.
I thought quite a lot about Ian this evening. I know that the separation was the right thing to do, that we were always better as friends than as lovers, but sometimes I can’t help but wonder if we did the right thing, especially when I see him with the girls and how happy they all are together. Am I chasing a dream of something that doesn’t exist? Should I be settling for something simpler? Not that it’s my decision to make. Although it was me who said it out loud, Ian knew it wasn’t working either and I don’t think he would want to get back together, not really. For the girls, maybe, but that would hardly be fair.
The worst part of the break-up, of course, was telling my parents. They’ve always been amazingly supportive and I couldn’t have asked for more from them, but when I married Ian you could tell that they were just so relieved. They’d felt responsible for me for a long time, especially after Cam left, and at last there was someone else that they felt they could trust to look after me.
They tried for years to have a baby and were in their early forties when I came along – that much-longed-for only child – so they were retired then by the time Flo was a toddler. They were a massive help when she was young and I was on my own with her, and I never felt as though I was imposing, exactly, but I knew, too, that they’d always had a dream of moving to France when they retired, and I couldn’t help but feel as if they were putting their life on hold for me.
When Ian and I got married, they finally felt able to make that step, and so for a long time after we separated I didn’t tell them – I didn’t want them to feel as if they had to come back and take care of me again. It was difficult, but they seem OK with it now, especially knowing Ian is so close by. I know they’d be happier if we got back together. Hardly a reason, though, I guess.
Nothing from Sierra. I keep replaying the ridiculous Fox comment over and over in my head. Decided I was being ridiculous and messaged her instead.