Pussycat, Pussycat, Where Have You Been?

I’ve been to Australia to visit the Queen!  (Well, not actually the Queen queen, who's been busy being visited by her poor grand-daughter-in-law, possibly asking her to NOT SIT DOWN lest she smear chopped liver all over a royal couch, and wondering why she was feinting before her very eyes.)  The queen I was visiting isn’t royal at all, merely one of the few queens of my heart,  (because not many friends have lived with me, and even fewer still talk to me, so she’s definitely regal in some regard).  So it was her birthday, and barely had she suggested potentially having a party than the Man and I had booked our flights and cancelled the maid’s day(s) off, and off we skipped on Thursday night, for what turned out to be 48 hours of sleeping (ahhhh) and imbibing (aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh).  It was fantabulous. The only  slight fly in the ointment were that her children were there, and they were just so well behaved that I felt a bit sick and a bit jealous.  They’re older, I reasoned with myself (except they’re not really), and there’s only two of them (because we all know how well behaved my kids were when there was only two of them), and they’re... Australian? Have lost their baby teeth?  Go barefoot a lot?  The sad fact is that some children are just calm and keep themselves to themselves, and some (“some”) are not, do not.  Between naps and glasses of champagne I studied the familial interaction to see if there were any obvious parenting flags missing on my flag-mast, but nothing leapt out.  She did seem to not fuss about them too much, and – at the risk of causing offence – sort of ignored them most of the time (IN A GOOD WAY).

By contract, we got in late last night (after 8 hours of more-or-less solid drinking on the flight, which is classy, no?)  and I, weepy with relief at being ALIVE (am I the only one getting more nervous about flying as I get older?) and possibly a bit pissed, went straight into the children and tried to wake them up to say hello.  But this morning I awoke full of resolve to start ignoring them more.  Which is hard, y’know, when your 4 year old is clinging on to your leg at school and screeching NO-MAMA-DON’T-GO, and you WANT to ignore her but wonder at what point you’d  give in  – when you got to the car-park where the ground is rough and she’s bleeding from the knees,  or before, when you’re dragging her past the head-mistress’s office and she looks out and you have to smile and pretend there isn’t a hysterical child attached to your lower body?  And so later I tried to ignore the Baby, who had found the communal jam, and its communal spoon, in a (communal) cafe and was flicking it across the room, but that stopped working so well when – ooops – it hit a man on the back of his shirt (and I still don’t know if he knows or not, because he was mid-leaving and by the time I saw the damage he was on his way out the door).  The Boy, it possibly goes without saying, does not allow himself to be ignored, and so this isn’t an experiment I’m going to have much success at with him, but I will try.  

In the meantime, exhausted both with the on-going riddle that is parenting, and the fact that my body currently comprises about 87% alcohol, I am DETOXING.  Yes, the dreaded de-toxing knock-you-up! (Like a pick-you-up, but given that it always gets me pregnant, it is in fact the exact opposite)  A scaled-down version, meaning just no alcohol for as long as I can bear it.  The trick is to automatically pour myself a drink as soon as the children are in bed – which is what I usually do – but to make it non-alcoholic.  A – shudder – MOCKTAIL.    

All you actually need to convince your brain that you’re having a well-earned DRINK is a spring of mint, lots of ice, and equal parts apple juice and sparkling/soda water.  If you can, squeeze in some fresh lemon or lime, and add some freshly grated ginger  (half a teaspoon per glass). 

My brain totally thinks it’s having a Moscow Mule, and then orders me to go tickle the sleeping children.