Children

I can hear my children screeching in their bedroom, intermingled shouts of laughter and DON’T DO THAT twining around each other until I want to scream just go the fuck to sleep, please god sleep.

Guilt twinges. In the wake of horror you’re meant to cherish your children because elsewhere in the world other people are mourning theirs, but I’m out of cherishment, out of patience. I want them to sleep, so for an hour, or maybe two, I can just sit here and be an adult with my husband. No screeching, or screaming, or attending to cries of bottle me mummy, I needa you, and he hurt me why can’t I have it it’s not fair my life is ruined.

In the cool light of a school morning everyone will regret not falling asleep earlier, except the toddler who will have spent a happy three hours trying to play with my face in the wee hours, falling asleep again forty five minutes before my alarm goes off.

It’s the pointy end of the year and we’re all tired.

The older kid’s screaming drags the toddler from her bed and I clench my teeth together determined not to shout. I’ve shouted too much lately.

But it does no good.

Laughter should not sound like fingernails on a chalkboard.

One child: query cerebral palsy; mild. One child: query generalised anxiety; food restricting; weight loss. One child: trapped in the chaos and fighting for attention.

No wonder we are tired.

Christmas is coming and I can’t wait; we need the long lazy days of summer when the heat presses us all against the floor, to lay there in puddles of sweat and fatigue, too hot to fight or scream or throw a forty minute tantrum when I say no dessert.

I’m still working the antidepressants out of my system, a system requiring them for pain relief, but who needs pain relief when it comes with a side of crippling depression? Antidepressants causing depression seems like a roundabout way of fucking everything up, but what do I know. Nothing of brain chemistry and how to make joints stop hurting when I really just have things to do.

It’s been six months and maybe I can write again.

The toddler shrieks again loudly and I am suddenly very grateful that the next baby born in this family won’t be mine, or need anything from me except the unconditional love of an aunt.

And so I write it all out while a child pats me on the stomach and seriously tells me a story about hurt knees.

I thought I’d forgotten how to do this.

—

We launched a business and for a while there, writing wasn’t the driving part of my day. Losing yourself in the swirl of soap and the science of cosmetics, it’s easy to forget to remove the words from your head as the days stretch long and you’re working working working.

I love it though, the chemistry and the science of it, I love the testing and the creation and the pride in a well made product. My job is so much fun, and then people give me money for things I have made. What kind of magic is this?

The very best kind, it turns out.

But I want to write again, need to write again. The softness of SSRI’s has worn away and life is bright and sharp again. A blessing and a curse.

—

The light fades and the house gets quieter. The big children have stopped screaming, finally worn out from a long day at school. The toddler is curled up against my side, a warm weight against me as she strokes my arms and drinks a bottle.

Tomorrow will be better, when the last day of school is done and the days are long and full of sunshine.

Tomorrow will be better.

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The air is vaguely warm and damp as I walk home from the bus stop, holding the hand of my eldest daughter. We’re discussing her reading; more honestly, the struggles she is having with learning to read.

“Sometimes the words dance around, and go blurry and I can’t remember which word I’m meant to be looking at.”

A short story she brought home the previous day encourages me to probe for details, the transposed letters, mirrored words and sight words with the middle all muddled ringing alarm bells in my head.

I research Dyslexia and mark a checklist that tells me if you check more than ten of these, consult with a specialist. I check thirty four.

I make an appointment with our doctor for (another) eye test, just in case, before sending her off to her room to play. A highly intelligent child, this might explain her frustration with words not making sense inside her head.

My husband confesses that if he doesn’t read methodically, the lines move and blur together for him as well.

Huh. These things run in families, oftentimes.

She plays and I am grateful to be making this connection now, which she is small and malleable, before the disillusionment sinks in and the bright shine of learning gets knocked off her.

It will be okay – it will always be okay. It’s just another thing on our list of things, another reason to keep pushing, to keep reading, to keep paying attention.

Maybe something inside her brain will click tomorrow and she will stop shouting, frustrated, when the books don’t speak to her. Or maybe something won’t, and we’ll get help, falling to the bottom of the issue and working out way out again with success in our eyes.

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