It’s not that I want my children to be sicker – no, I don’t. I just want them to be silent, for a little while. The elder one is on day three of an ear infection (but there is no vomiting today so far) and the younger one is on large amounts of prescribed laxatives. Just enough to make them both grumpy and screechy and for my nerves to be, ultimately, shattered.

And so I hide from them, stealing all the good jelly beans and locking myself into the bedroom. I hide and even though I’m not alone, being bothered instead by a kicking uterine resident, a peeping duckling and a smooching tomcat, no one is actively whining at me and that improves things, rather a lot.

Some days are easier than others, but then, some days do not contain fluffy ducklings and jelly beans. So even if today is not the easiest of the lot of them, I am practising being thankful, just as I practise being unavailable right now.

Sorry, your mother is taking a mental health break. Leave a message at the door and she’ll get back to you, just as soon as she finishes downloading the words from her brain and eating this chocolate bar. BEEEEEP

Sitting in Emergency last night with my feverish son, I wondered if maybe the Universe was trying to tell me that completing NaBloPoMo this year wasn’t a great idea.

I’m still wondering, even though we’re home now.

I am sucking so badly at NaBlo. Blame this:

I just told my children that it was past their bedtime and therefore, my ears had turned off and I could no longer hear them. These are the measures I am forced to take on a Friday night when we all have ‘flu and are utterly miserable.

And in turn, this is what you get for NaBlo.

Whose stupid idea was this?

Tuesdays herald the start of the school week for us here, this year. It’s not that I don’t love the six hours with only one child following me around like a duckling – because I do, very much – it’s that the stress of getting everyone ready and out of the door on time for school drop off is sending me grey.

It feels like herding cats, or shepherding mice. Like trying to get goldfish to swim in synchronicity without the benefit of a belly full of iron shavings and a magnet.

And I’m trying not to shout, I really am, but when one child is squealing a high pitched squeal and slamming doors and the other child is trying to create a cat trap – when both of them ought to be eating their porridge, that’s when I start to get a bit shouty.

Once breakfast is done, then it’s a haze of hair brushings and face washings and where the hell are your shoes and can you brush your teeth please, no, I mean really brush them and library book and stop shoving and just get in the car already, leave the bloody cat alone.

But I know that even as I hate these mornings because the children are so small that I need to spoon feed them the next step in the getting ready proccess, it is worth it for the quiet. For the chance to drink just one cup of tea without someone shouting that SHE IS PUSHING ME or HE TOOK MY THING.

Definitely.

It’s like a ticking time bomb, trying to get something written here every morning before my children wake up.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Once they’re awake, my morning is a haze of breakfasts and snuggles needed, of meltdowns and NO NOT THAT BLANKET, THE OTHER ONE. And WHERE IS MY DINOSAUR and I NEED DA ODDER CEREAL.

It’s all good fun, until someone starts screaming and writhing on the floor.

***

My son wakes up, demands warm milk and a blanket (da blue one, in da bedroom Mummy, not DAT ONE) and smiles at me cheekily while he does it. I rub his stomach and hug him good morning, until he breathes on me and I gag.

That’s the part no one talks about – the morning breath, that on your husband is expected, but on your almost-three-year-old is a disgusting shock.

***

It’s Monday, the start of our week again and I have so many things happening that I am alternately terrified and very excited. Good things will happen this week, I can feel it.

Just as long as I can keep up, it will be all good.

I had a baby at seventeen, which contrary to popular belief did not ruin my life, or destroy my future. You’d be surprised at how many people will console you on a pregnancy if they feel that you are younger than the “perfect” age to be a mother. You would also be surprised at the treatment that young mothers receive from people in positions of authority, but I digress.

I could list all of my reasons for falling pregnant, but I’ve written them down so many times before that they sound trite. Needless to say, it was the right decision for me and my family and here we are, six years later.

When I was pregnant, and then a new mother, no one asked me what I “did”. Which suited me, because I didn’t know at that point. I was a mother, but my daughter was too screamy for me to think about what else I could do. My entire life was wrapped up in keeping the baby happy, feeding the baby, stopping the baby biting my nipple. While my friends were heading off to Uni, I was changing nappies and discovering just how in love you can fall with something you’ve created.

Two years after my daughter was born, I was pregnant again, with my son. When you’re pregnant, no one asks you what you “do”. You’re just a gestating vessel, the means to an end, a giant egg waiting to crack. Men avoid your eye (is pregnancy catching?) and women ask strange questions about your internal organs. Pregnancy is the only time it is deemed socially acceptable to ask a woman about her cervix.

As is the usual course of events when everything goes well, my son was born, cried some, grew some and eventually got to the age where I could leave him with his Daddy to go and DO things – which is when the inevitable questions start.

I was at an exhibition opening and someone asked me “what do you do?” and instead of saying “I’m a mother” I found myself saying the (only slightly practised in front of a mirror) line: “I am a writer.”

Which then leads to the inevitable questions about what do you write and where and so on. It took a few more months in front of the mirror to get those coming out smoothly.

You see, no one really cares what you DO, it’s just a way to start conversation.

I write things and I publish them on the Internet and 90% of society thinks that I’m a bit weird because of it – but I can ignore them. Anyone can be a writer, that is the beauty of it. Just like anyone can be an artist, or a musician, or a sculptor.

No one cares what you do to earn money – they care about what you DO because you love it. People aren’t interested in how you pay the bills (unless you might be helpful to them), they are interested in passion.

This is what I do. I am a writer and when people ask what I write, I tell them: I write a blog. It’s quite popular now and I really enjoy it.

Try it. The next time someone asks what you do, tell them what you love to do, rather than where you work. They might surprise you.

The point of getting up forty minutes before everyone else was to write a blog post, I grumble to myself.

It appears that the plans I make for myself don’t always work as well as I would like and my son wakes up three minutes before my alarm, demanding a warm drink and the middle of the bed as he rubs his eyes.

My daughter follows shortly thereafter, shouting at me that she doesn’t want to get dressed and WHERE IS MY PILLOW?

I’m not entirely sure how her pillow has disappeared in the five minutes between getting out of bed and shouting at me, but it turns out that she means the other pillow (no, not that one, the other OTHER pillow) that her brother is lying on.

Hilarity ensues, if by hilarity you mean heartbroken screaming and a little bit of shoving. Which I do.

‘It will be fine, STOP SHOUTING. There, do I have your attention? Share the pillows, make some breakfast, Mummy needs five minutes to THINK.’

Five minutes is a very long time when you are only five and three and I manage to get thirty seconds alone, hiding in the bathroom, before I am needed (loudly) elsewhere.

Such is my life and I suspect, such are the quality of blog posts you can expect from me this month.

There is silence in the house and I am still bleary eyed, but I have made the effort to get out of bed 40 minutes early so that I can start writing here. It’s got nothing to do with the fact that I am so busy today that I won’t have time later. Hello November. You’ve sort of snuck up there, haven’t you?

***

There is a psych appointment scheduled today. It’s been cathartic to go along each fortnight and just talk. Like every other mother however, last week I found myself dicussing my children. My fears and my stresses and the frustration I feel when I walk into the bedroom to find my daughter perched on top of my closet, eating my chocolate. She’s the perfect candidate for “owling” except for the screaming when she realises that she can’t get down.

Real owls have wings daughter, if you’re going to climb up, you have to learn how to get down. Just don’t break anything.

I spent an hour talking about my children last time, before the therapist gently mentioned that maybe we ought to talk more about me?

Silly girl. She’s not worked with many (any?) mothers, I would put money on it. The children are me and I am them. The fears for their future are not things I can separate from my personal anxiety and the frustration I feel at untriggered meltdowns is just as real as frustration with other adults. Tempered with a lot more love, of course.

I shouldn’t call her silly, in fact she is lovely – even if it is a bit disconcerting to be discussing the tangled web inside my brain with someone my own age.

But that is okay.

The main question is: Do you think she will help me work out how to get a cat into the roof, to eat the baby starlings that have hatched right above my desk? Because it’s hard enough to write a blog post half asleep, without adding shouting babies to the mix.

It’s a slow slide down into the dark places in my mind. Moments stretch into infinity as I imagine the worst case scenarios and how I would deal with them. I’m not sure how I got here, all I know is that I’m sitting at the bottom, looking at the light a very long way up.

It’s always unpleasant down here and the road back up is long and cold, usually.

The screaming outside of my head is never as bad as the screaming inside of it. The way the sound reverberates around, shaking all coherant thought with it, until I just want to curl up in the corner and drown it out with someone elses words.

It will be okay. It will be fine, I will be FINE, this is all fine. One foot and then another. It will be okay.

I’m regretful and despite regret being useless here, it insists on hanging around and I’m raw enough without adding regret to the mix.

Some nights, I dream ghosts and then I have days like today. Dreaming the past, I’d like to stay there. Nothing was broken there (only… everything was. We just didn’t know it yet.)

That’s the problem with dreaming the past, rather than the future. You can’t get there anyway, so there is no use trying.

Better to dream the future.

At least then you’re left with possibility.