The Fun Mother

So much joy is coming!

Nothing compares to this moment when the buds are bursting and everything is lush and perfect. Nothing. At the risk of sounding gushy, it makes my heart flutter. The table of tiny bulbs, which formed the single focal point of my garden, has been usurped by a host of pretenders; the buds on the wisteria, the tulips with their still-tightly-closed-blooms, the new, un-marked, bright pale green leaves of things that have looked crispy and dead for months…all of them now, grabbing my attention. Here, is Tulipa acuminata which has made a precious, fleeting appearance.

I get up early and I go out immediately (because apparently if you go outside and look at the sky it will help you to fall asleep and stay asleep at night). It does actually help with sleep, but it also has other benefits. It’s twenty minutes alone. When you’re in the middle of quite a long school holiday, that’s not nothing. And there’s birdsong which I’m sure if I understood what they were banging on about it would actually be quite hectic, but I have no idea, so it’s just peaceful. There’s a robin who comes to see me in the morning. He sits there and tweets at me and stares at me with his black eye, one side and then the next. He’s probably telling me to go away isn’t he.

It’s here, especially during holidays, that I often make promises to myself. Ranging from “I will do some exercise today” and “I will tidy away those plastic pots” to “I will be a fun mother”.

It’s pathetic that I even try to be a fun mother. You either are a fun mother or you’re not, and I’m afraid I’m not her. I am quite sad about not being a fun mother….they seem to have so much…FUN. They join in with Halloween japes gleefully and they jump out from behind doors to surprise you and they take you to theme parks, and they get in the sea with you, and they let you make slime, and camp in the garden, and they let you put disgusting aerosol whipped cream on your hot chocolate and they never, ever seem to need you to go to bed, or go away, or be quiet.

My dear friend Georgie once put on a ghoul mask, and went outside in the dark during a raging storm to appear at the kitchen window and scare everybody senseless and make us howl with laughter. The ridiculous thing about it is that if I want to be ‘spontaneous’, I actually have to plan it. How sad. I am spectacularly unrelaxed about certain things, almost all of them related to certain levels of noise and chaos, which of course, is CHILDHOOD.

I remember my own mother being open to fun always…not necessarily creating it but nevertheless chill about it. (I don’t know if she actually was chill and calm but that is how I experienced her). I don’t remember her ever snapping at me, or getting cross with me. She was here a couple of days ago and the children were outside trying to spray one-another with the hose. This I have zero problem with, but they were pulling the hose ‘wrong’ and it had begun leaking from the attachment. Really, truly not a big deal, you’d think! But I had to go out there and ‘teach’ them (for the eightieth time) how to pull on a hose. Whoops of laughter gone. Game spoiled. I came inside and told my mother that I had just lost my temper over a hose and she said absent-mindedly, flipping through a magazine “Yes, no, you mustn’t do that.” and she’s bloody right, I mustn’t. I really truly mustn’t.

My akebia quinata (which is the wonderful chocolate vine) is reminding me of all this. I was sent the wrong one, you see, from a very good nursery…obviously a mistake. I wanted the exuberant, most choclatey, invasive one with the deepest darkest purplest aubergine flowers and the gorgeousest greenest five-leaved foliage. Instead I got a pale one…it’s not cream and it’s not purple…it’s not even what they call ‘mauve’…it’s an anaemic colour and it has taken so very long to become full and bushy that although I want to chop it down, I don’t have the heart for it yet. It just sits there looking etiolated when in fact it has been supposedly bred and brought to market to look this way….What think you friends? Do you loathe it? Perhaps I am loathing it in order to sidestep mid-holiday self-loathing.

The thing is, I can give myself grace and tell myself that I make up for not being a ‘fun mother’ with lots of other good things that I’m ‘good’ at, but at the end of the day you only get one childhood, and if all you remember is your mother getting cross about a hose then, well, that’s a bit of a shame. And it’s almost impossible not to compare oneself to those bright stars, the brilliant friends, who seem to be doing the ‘fun’ thing so effortlessly. My children will often openly say they wish so-and-so were their mother. We all laugh (and obviously I cry a bit in private)…but I get it…I remember daydreaming regularly about living with another family entirely.

I can concede that I’ve become better as the years have gone on. I’m better able to zoom out and enjoy a moment of chaos and laugh, but it’s not a natural thing. I have to remind myself it’s okay…it’s just noise…it’s just mess…it’s just…it’s just…FUN.

I have so much else to tell you. but this is too long.

Back soon

x Laetitia

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