The yoghurt & pizza daysSeptember 16, 2015

For me it’s a pot of fruit yoghurt that comes to the rescue. The lovingly prepared meal is spat out, clawed from the mouth by tiny fingers, pushed away and rejected. It’s not that he’s not hungry, and one day he’ll realised that biscuits and grapes are not a balance diet, but not yet. So out comes the yoghurt, the full switch doesn’t work for the yoghurt, he’ll eat a whole adult pot and keep going. Perhaps I should have rushed to prepare something else, but I chose the easy path and reached for the fridge.

Mummy’s yoghurt is pizza. The days she just can’t cope with any more she cries pizza. The kitchen is a bomb-site with almost every dish stacked and re-stacked in the dirty pile. Toys are strewn over the floor alongside crumbs and shopping bags that never quite got emptied. Dirty clothes sit in piles waiting for the machine, that finished long ago but never got emptied and now needs rewashing. She’d leave the mess and escape if the return wasn’t so deflating or she’d made it to the shower today.

Thankfully today isn’t a pizza day, it almost became a yoghurt one. They are common around here but thankfully they are getting a little less common than before. It’s shaming how many bin-days our wheelie contained a pizza box. Like many I lay in bed with grand plans, ‘I’ll do *(insert seemingly reasonable tasks) tomorrow’, to find myself the next evening telling myself the same thing. Sometimes I’d beat myself up about the failure, get frustrated that my time is so preoccupied, chastise myself for all the “switch off” time where little is achieved.

Mostly, I’ve learnt to stop myself from doing this. My time is no longer my own – if that means pizza and yoghurt because I just haven’t the strength to dig out the cooker then that’s just going to have to be ok. My time is no longer my own – it’s full of holding little hands as tiny feet walk, and a myriad of other things that come from the roles of mummy and wife. My time is no longer my own – I signed it away long ago, long before delivery rooms and wedding vows, in a huge cupboard, in a church hall, in a summer of my youth.

That time I want to control is a gift given not a right claimed.

And as a gift it’s delighted in. To type this blog, to brandish a paintbrush, to slob before a tv show or to visit friends, each is a delight. It’s a gift delighted in when used wisely and also when it’s squandered with grace, joy and recuperation. So roll on the pizza and yoghurt days, roll on the days when mundane tasks stack up, because life is being lived.

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