What with one thing and another,
it’s been a pretty rubbish week this week!
On Sunday last week I started
getting a sore throat and sneezes. Not normally so much of a biggie for me – a day
or two of sneezing and coughing and I’m usually over these things quickly. Not
so this time. On the Monday I had to be in the office for an important meeting –
of course – so while I was trying to be professional and give a good impression
my nose was streaming, my eyes were red and watery and I couldn't pronounce
anything properly as my nose became more and more blocked as the meeting wore
on. On Tuesday I should have been off work, but due to some training I had
swapped my days off so I was back in the office, this time with the cold in
full force, coughing and sneezing and feeling utterly hell while I learned
about new products and then came home to bury myself in questions about
existing products.
By Wednesday I was exhausted. I
had a day off work and I’d been planning a long-overdue visit to a friend but
instead I installed myself on the sofa with a duvet, a pot of coffee and a pile
of toast and I watched episodes of Breaking Bad all day in my pyjamas. Thursday
I was expecting to feel loads better so I vowed to do the housework then. It didn't happen. I felt just as rough on Thursday and just about managed to get J
to school and get home before I collapsed. Popping cold and flu tablets along
with vitamins as if they were going out of fashion I struggled to work on
Friday and was grateful when my mum arrived to collect J from school and whisk
him off for the weekend. I had a wonderful lie in on Saturday which helped
tremendously – unfortunately J was also poorly and on Saturday night I got a
text from my mum saying he was crying for Mummy, so I phoned her and she said
she was packing up his stuff and would be on way to us soon. Sure enough they
were at ours within an hour and I was trying to soothe my grumpy, irritable,
overtired and poorly little boy who had been crying for Mummy but upon sight of
Mummy decided I couldn’t do anything right so he was moaning and whinging and
having a right old go at me about everything I did!
This morning I woke up with that
familiar belly and back ache coupled with a feeling of sickness that women everywhere know and which makes you
roll your eyes with hate every time it happens. Oh yes. Coupled with this damn
cold – which has still knocked me for six – I now had that to deal with as well, and that
always tends to be a particular issue for me. I have a long and argumentative history
with it, including vomiting, nausea
and migraines. I had hoped that Daddy P might say “its OK my love, stay in bed
a while and I’ll get up with J” but no, I was woken to the noise of them
arguing and it’s been a theme for the day.
They wind one another up like you
wouldn’t believe. This morning J was trying to wake up Daddy P – admittedly he
wasn’t doing it in the nicest or best possible way – but still I found Daddy P’s
shortness of dealing with it somewhat surprising at eight o’clock in the
morning all things considered. I mean, he’d just woken up and he was that
annoyed already? Jeez what a fun day this looked set to be. All J wanted was
for his daddy to wake up, and talk to him, play with him, spend some time with
him. All Daddy P wanted was for J to go away and leave him alone so he could
sleep. And he wonders why at times I could cheerfully smack him … Sunday is now
the single day of the week where J
doesn’t have school and Daddy P doesn’t have work, so really you’d think he’d
be raring to make the most of that precious time together.
I ended up getting up with J and
left Daddy P in bed. We came downstairs, we had breakfast (I had lots of coffee
and painkillers) we played a game, we snuggled on the sofa, he helped me do
some housework and just past eleven Daddy P finally came downstairs. Almost immediately
him and J were on at one another – there’s no half measures, either Daddy P is
doing nothing or he’s having a go at J. There’s no warning from the other side,
either – J will go from lovely playing to horrible demon child in the blink of
an eye with Daddy P. I think it’s because he knows he will get an extreme
reaction, but of course I can’t say anything because whenever I do then Daddy P
just gets annoyed with me, too. I generally try to stay out of it, or take J
away and deal with it myself which while not ideal is the best option if the
other one is Daddy P loosing his rag. This morning it was all going well with
me sitting in the garden working on my laptop and J was chalking on his
blackboard. The moment Daddy P appeared, J decided to start chalking the walls
of the house as if that was OK or ever acceptable. So I asked him not to, and
immediately I was shouted over by Daddy P who’d gone from 0 to 60 and was
immediately in pissed off mode and having a go instead of a firm, “please don’t
do that” The threat of taking the chalk away was then used about a million
times with no follow-through on the threat, so of course J took this as an
invitation to do as he pleased because there was no worry about the threat
being upheld. After a million warnings the chalk was suddenly swept up and put
away, resulting in a major meltdown because after all, the previous million
warnings hadn’t meant anything so why was this one different? In his mind it
made no sense. (He wasn’t the only one who felt that way …)
All day has been the same. Five
minutes of nice playing together, then one of them does something and sets the
other off moaning and before I know it they’re bickering. Daddy P seems to
forget that J is four, not fourteen, you can’t reason with him as much as you
might be able to with an older child. He expects a lot from him, and I think he
forgets because J does act quite mature a lot of the time that he is only four, he’s still just little and there is so much more he
doesn’t yet understand or know how to process and react to. There’s also the
fact that J knows exactly how to wind us both up, and he’ll go right ahead and
press that button if he feels like he’s not getting enough of a reaction out of
you already. He’s always been the same, but instead of learning, Daddy P just
seems to get more wound up more quickly these days.
So the long and short of it was
that this week was rubbish and this day was one of the worst. The single day I
get in seven to spend time with my husband and my son. Tomorrow J is off to school and I am off to
the office and Daddy P can sit and play Lego Lord Of The Rings if that’s what
he chooses to do. I hope next week is
better all round – though at the moment I’m feeling so lousy it’s already off
to a bad start.
 |
| To my knowledge a video game is not something to get so upset about. J and Daddy P feel passionately differently and arguments will regularly occur about the video games. I can't tell you how many times I've felt like chucking the games console and all games in the bin! |
Off to bed early for me tonight
with a hot chocolate and some more painkillers!
Love, Mummy P xxx
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