2 March

Am racked with guilt and regret this morning as I am having (another) bad mother moment; I shouted and snapped at my eldest today for being disorganised and making us even later for school than we normally are. The truth is, it was me, having decided to wash my hair at the last minute, who held us up. My boy is calm and stoic and took it on the chin, probably quite used to the fact that he has a feckless and maddeningly indecisive mother. It’s almost as if he has to play the Saffy figure to my Edina; unfortunately my tiny daughter shows all the signs of becoming a Patsy. Oh well, it will give him something to talk about in therapy when he’s older. I’m probably a little more short-tempered than usual since today is one of those days that I refer to privately as ‘knife-edge Friday.’ R has been away since Sunday (Saturday night, really, since he left at 4.45 on Sunday morning and no, I wasn’t waving him off), and we never find these weeks away particularly conducive to marital harmony. Instead of being thrilled to see one another and embracing gladly, we are horribly competitive as to who has had the worst week. We circle each other slowly like vultures waiting for the kill, and the first comment from either of us produces a volley of sarcasm (me) or self-pitying resignation (him). He just has to mention the words ‘hotel’, ‘plane’ (especially ‘drinks on board’), ‘dinner out’ , or anything that could be construed as ‘adult conversation’ or ‘time to think’, and my back stiffens, my eyebrows raise of their own accord and some pithy remark escapes my lips, all by itself. Equally, any suggestion that that I might have had anything resembling a life since he’s been away, or that the children and I might have had fun, is met with an Eyeore-ish despondency and hunched shoulders from him. In my defence, my memory always settles on a particular incident last February, when he had to go to Seville for a week. It was the most grim and bleak kind of February weather here, and both children were unwell. He called me to reassure me that, although the work was boring, there wasn’t much of it, there was a great swimming pool at the hotel, and the weather was so mild that they could have breakfast outside in the walled garden. I rest my case.

Wow, blogging as marital therapy; I bet you’re all thrilled that I started this diary! I ought to point out, in the spirit of fairness, that although R is constantly travelling, his job is neither remotely glamorous nor fantastically lucrative, which begs the question of why we’ve ended up with this ridiculous lifestyle. The poor man does genuinely hate being away so much. He hates all the schmoozing with strangers that is involved when he goes away. As for me, I’ve become pretty self-reliant over the years, but believe me, it isn’t through choice. If you’d asked me when I was first married what my worst family life scenario would be, it would have been being alone in the country with small children with the owls hooting and the floorboards creaking – which sums up my life now. In the early days, when we were new to all this and we had a serous renovation project on the go, you could guarantee that the minute R left, some fairly major catastrophe would occur. The electrics would fuse, tiles would start throwing themselves off the roof, chimneys would crack, the car would break down, deliveries would fail to arrive and we would always, but always, forget to order any oil. To this day I think he thinks I did it all on purpose. Still, we have a sort of weary resignation with regard to our life now; God knows we have tried so many other permutations (R looking at different types of work, me working full time, me working part-time, me doing freelance work, me being at home full-time) that we have come to feel that this is just life’s little joke. One consolation is that in the country we seem to meet all sorts of people with slightly unconventional lifestyles. Green is the new black and all that, but there are an awful lot of frantically chaotic arrangements being made to fund our eco-friendly rural idylls.

Still, now the self-pitying is over, I am happy to report that we do have the sanctuary that we always lusted after, even if it is more dilapidated and rough around the ages than our dream version. The children have the lifestyles that we wanted for them. We’ve just got to work on both being here at the same time to enjoy it. And remember not to score points off one another. Or shout at the children over something that isn’t their fault. Here endeth the lesson.