“What are your plans for the weekend?” This question is presented every single Friday without fail. I remember a time when the answer to that was, “we’re going to start drinking as soon as we finish work on Friday and stop around 4am Sunday morning, have a kip and wake, less than fresh-faced, just in time for mum’s Sunday roast.” That was all there was to do, and all that needed to be done. Then, Oscar happened. Now, I was always led to believe that weekends with children were made-up of days at the seaside, theme parks, days spent painting in the garden, days spent at the park, and if Facebook is to be believed, a lot of people call this their reality. Sometimes we go do some of those things, but in reality, our weekends look like this…
Our weekends, like so many, begin on Friday after school. It takes about 20 minutes to get out of the school grounds as the grownups make small-talk while the children play. This is almost always followed by an emotional melt-down that can last anywhere between five minutes and five hours. Every school up and down the country at 3:30pm on a Friday is littered with mums prying their sobbing children away from the school gates and trying desperately to get them in the car before Rita the model mum catches sight of them and gives them the ‘That’s not how I would have done it’ look. I’ll take a moment here for a brief aside. You all know Rita, she’s the mum that has about four children, they all live on organic, home-grown vegetables and have never even tasted sugar. They wander around after their mum like ducklings waddling in a line, all in matching outfits, and they have never, ever, had a tantrum in a supermarket. You won’t catch Rita raising her voice at her children, oh no, her children have understood reason from the day they were conceived and are perfect angels. I’ll tell you a secret about Rita, her children are little shits when they’re at home. The youngest one sits pulling the legs off bugs, the middle one starts fires, the other middle one has an improper fixation with sharp objects, and the oldest one has been plotting Rita’s death for the last three years and is just waiting for the perfect opportunity to carry it out. Please don’t ever compare yourself to Rita, if you see her judgmental face, smile at her, and remember what I have told you.
So, back to the weekend, you’re in the car, you’ve stopped yourself from running Rita over, you have so many plans, swimming tonight, park in the morning, out for lunch, playing in the garden in the afternoon, then Sunday, a nice trip to the grandparents’ for a proper Sunday lunch. Sadly, your child is still melting down in their car seat, they hate you because you won’t buy them a toy. You can’t go swimming now because his eyes are so puffy people will think you’ve been beating him on the backseat of your car. Not to worry, you can have a nice tea, let him have an early night tonight and he will be all better for the park tomorrow. You get home, nothing in for tea, you go to the chippy, by now it is 8 o’clock so all hopes of an early night are out the window, but maybe you can rescue it and get him straight to bed now. 11 o’clock comes around, you’ve shouted “Get to sleep” at the top of your voice, every 30 minutes and things have finally gone quiet. “Oscar, are you asleep?” … “Yes mummy.” SHIIIIIIIIT. Although on the plus side, you’re going to get a lovely lie in in the morning.
6:30am. No lie in then. Open the curtains, raining, no park then. Maybe you can be like one of those families on the telly that actually does arts and crafts. That will be nice. Get downstairs and remember that the dining table is still being used as an ironing pile, and has been for the last three months. You consider actually doing the ironing, but that’s not likely. So, after a lovely healthy breakfast of sugarpuffs and chocolate milkshake, you reconsider your plans for the day. You can’t really do anything outdoors, and money has run out, so the only thing you can do is indoor softplay. Now, anyone that takes their kids to softplay, in my eyes, is a bloody hero. These places are hell. There is absolutely nothing likeable about them whatsoever, but kids don’t know that, so we drag ourselves along, let them loose, while we enjoy overpriced cheap coffee and stale cake.
After softplay, you think about lunch, you had chippy last night, so really do need to be a bit healthy today. “Can we go to McDonald’s mum?” Fuck it, that’ll do. Off you trot, Happy Meal is cheap enough, and he will be happy for an hour or so. Once you get home, you sit down and think it must be almost bed time now.
4:00pm. What do you do now? YouTube, he can watch some rubbish about kids opening toys, and that’s where he stays for the next two hours, until tea time, which is soup, because dammit, you are going to have one healthy meal this weekend if it kills you! Bed time finally rolls around, and he trots off happily, no meltdowns, but it’s Saturday, so he can play in his bed for a bit.
On Sunday you get up, go to the grandparents and there you stay, nanny cooks dinner while grandad plays with Oscar in the garden, you toy with the idea of going out for a bit and turning up at lunch time, but decide you were brought up better than that, so stick around with your head buried in your phone, or on repeated episodes of Come Dine With Me. Dinner is amazing, but Oscar won’t touch it. Cue more tears. Everyone fusses round trying to persuade him to eat, you just finish your dinner and wait for pudding, if he’s hungry he will eat, if not, he won’t, don’t need to make a thing about it.
You get home and it’s bath time, then straight to bed, it’s back to school tomorrow.
You did it, you’re at the end of the weekend, you’ve not done a thing that you planned, but all-in-all it’s not been a bad one, you sit down with a glass of wine to toast yourself for a mediocre success, then you remember that you haven’t washed the school uniform.