Quick update on my situation…..

Avoidance doesn’t work. I tried it yesterday and was craving chocolate by last night.

So, today I’ve begun with a calm, healthy bowl of porridge and will face my challenge in a more constructive frame of mind. I will engage with the various temptations throughout the day. I won’t actively avoid them or throw them out. I have to learn to live with them around me. The chocolate will stay in the cupboard. Each time I open it to get a plate or a mug, it’ll be there, gazing lovingly at me, and I will smile back at it and acknowledge that we were once more than just good friends.

I lay in bed for a good while yesterday morning, on account of it being Sunday, my day of rest, and pondered my situation.

You won’t know about my situation, no one really does. On the surface, it’s just another love story but in reality it’s much, much more than that.

I need to find out why I crave it so much, why I keep indulging, decide that it’s unhealthy and even damaging, withdraw, only to then greedily go back for more.

So, I lay in bed tossing it over in my head. I’ve really agonised about it in recent days. It’s something I have felt I need more than anything. Sometimes I am strong and confident and can go for a few days without it but more often than not, I want it so badly that it’s impossible to resist. And it’s so delicious, I mean unbelievably so, for those few minutes, and even for a while afterwards as I savour how it felt.

But I have to calm it down. I have to learn to control it, enjoy it in a less obsessive way.

The situation is approaching its first anniversary, the day that we decided to go on this journey together, and for the first while I played by the rules and really felt that it was going to work out. But a few months into the journey, having reached a happy equilibrium, I couldn’t leave well enough alone and I’ve been pushing the boundaries ever since. Right now, I’m not too proud of myself.

For months I’ve been trying to bring it back to the way it was but haven’t been strong enough. Why?

Because what I feel can’t be controlled by rational thought alone. The obsession gets under my skin, it satisfies some very fundamental needs in me – security, contentment and fulfillment – and it never lets me down.

As I explained it to the father of my children yesterday “I need the security of knowing that certain things are always there and won’t abandon me”. And as I probed a bit deeper into my psyche, I realised that it’s all about my relationship with my Dad – he who was always there, first thing in the morning, every lunchtime, and always put me to bed at night, read me stories, stayed with me until I fell asleep. I’ve been looking for that guaranteed, unconditional security ever since, something that will never leave me because in the end fathers have to. And it suddenly dawned on me why I play a particular song in the car all the time, Britney Spears’ Unusual You – “you’re always where you say you will be, shocking coz I never knew love like this could exist”. And there we are, food is a security blanket, one that I now badly need to fold up, place on a shelf and just occasionally cuddle because it feels nice, because it’s an old friend, my best friend. I’ve got to get back to where I was a year ago when I started my new relationship with it and realised that I could enjoy it and derive great pleasure from it in a calm, unobsessive way. That felt a lot better than the frenzied relationship that I’ve had with it in more recent months.

I have reacquainted myself with using a dictionary this week! In the first instance it was as a result of spellcheck failure (my excuse) and the other instance was to find out that a word which I use in my head was not a real word at all! So, you may gather the written word is not my  forte, I am a reflective, listener type.  I am going to enjoy the challenge of this blog site but short and sweet will be my approach, if you had not noticed already.

Anyhow, I digress, back to serendipitious synchronization. Whilst literacy is very important, we are all human and mistakes happen even with spellcheck. But what if you could not read or write? Two mums told me this week about the reality of having children with ‘borderline’ dyslexia. I never realised. I always felt that people with dyslexia just learnt to read a different way than the rest of us. But that is not the case. A child even with borderline dyslexia may skip lines in the text and continously miss words they do not know. Can you imagine?? To be honest , I can’t! It’s difficult to comprehend but I can feel the struggle for all involved, the worry for parents and the frustration for the children/ dyslexia sufferer to say the least.

So, hearing that story during my bad spelling week, was not serendipity (a faculty of making happy discoveries by accident) nor was it synchronous ( go at the same rate as) but it was my word ‘synchronisity ‘.

Synchronisity in MY mental dictionary means something happens that puts the first thing that happened in perspective and strangely came at just the right time. I was upset because someone corrected my spelling in a very patronising way but now I realise what it might mean to not be able to read or write easily and that it is not something that everyone can take for granted let alone be haughty about!

So, lastly, I apologise in advance for any spelling or grammatical sloppiness on my part,  I will do my best not to be sloppy but mistakes do happen, even to the best of us.

Chair Mum

I am meeting Super Mum for coffee tomorrow. I haven’t set eyes on her in about four months, not even in passing! But then that is not surprising, she is so busy. Although I do consider her a good friend, clearly, there is one part of our relationship that does not sit with me too well. Yes, you can hear the buttons being pushed already and the reality of it is, they are my buttons! Have I done this? Have I done that? Did I not take the shortest route? That’s not where to go for the best price! Have I done enough? Is it good enough? Am I good enough! (Note, that is not a question!) Just now as I write, I feel I am doing her an injustice. I can see her face and am remembering the long chats about this and that and almost everything. I know that when I sit down, all that anxiety will be gone even if the buttons are still there ready to be pushed. So maybe my best advice to myself is to turn the filter up a little and try not to misconstrue her way of being, after all she has her own buttons.

Apparently I am a bit weird. The graphic designer that I have working on a prospectus told me that mine was the last e-mail that he received at 2 a.m. and the first that he received at 8 a.m. Did I sleep, he wondered, ever? I told him that I had been up finishing off my beef stew (oh, yeah, I’ve abandoned the French. Yes, I’ve been slagged enough today). I told him that if it could be sent via e-mail, it would be on his desk by now. He deserves it.

You see, in the last little while, I’ve been making a lot of mistakes. I don’t make mistakes very often or at least I didn’t up until I left my job over a year ago. Somehow the routine of work kept me on the straight and narrow and the fact that little mistakes could cost thousands focussed me on the job at hand. But this football thing has my head very messed up. And these mistakes keep being noticed by other people before I notice them. I don’t like that one little bit. If I f*** up, I like to find out before anyone else does so I can fix it before anyone else grimaces disapprovingly in my direction.

I was in particularly foul form a few days ago after having several mistakes pointed out to me and really not in the humour for two of my children to behave as though I was a piece of furniture rather than their mother. I lost it, spectacularly, and said I was off. The older one continued de-stalking strawberries for her smootie and the younger shrugged her shoulders. As I stormed from the room, the older one directed the following utterance at the food processor “don’t you think you’re a bit old for that kind of behaviour”.

Am I? Does one ever grow out of throwing a strop that a gay fashion designer would be proud of? Or am I really as self-obsessed as one of my good friends keeps reminding me I am? The friend, aka anyone else, of the mistake-pointing-out. The same one I delivered a little package of beef stew to earlier today, apologising that the potatoes were floury when they should be waxy.

I had the table set for dinner before I went round to my friend and I admit to feeling very virtuous as I told everyone to take their seats at the abnormally early time of 6 p.m. (we eat late in this house, a consequence of my anti-social football schedule) opened the oven door, celebrity chef-style, and proudly carried my creation to the table. My youngest doesn’t mince her words. “I hate it” she pronounced. The other two were more vocal. So, having been marched upstairs to spend the evening in their bedrooms without dinner, eldest has since returned to the kitchen to apologise for not giving my dinner a chance. Too late of course. It’s been devoured by myself and their father. And so she busies herself making macaroni cheese (her favourite). Note to self – do not eat all the dinner when the kids say they hate it. They’ll be back.

And so I send e-mails in the wee hours and first thing in the morning because I’m determined to make a better fist of it and to be on top of things and because all I really want is approval. After all, an idle wife doesn’t really want to be reminded that maybe that’s all she should be. Am I being a little hard on myself? Maybe, just maybe, 5 hours sleep isn’t enough anymore and maybe, just maybe, those floury potatoes won’t be so offensive because the beef is so good.

There’s probably something far-reachingly gluttonous about sitting at one’s laptop at 11 p.m. issuing instructions to one’s partner to ensure that they put apricot chutney on the ham and cheese bagel that you’ve demanded because the boeuf bourguignon won’t be ready for another half an hour at least. In fairness, at this late hour I can’t give sufficient respect to the dish that I spent a good hour preparing and which requires over 2 hours cooking.  It will instead be popped in the fridge at around midnight and heated up tomorrow evening when I can devote an hour to lovingly savouring each succulent (one hopes) mouthful.

These days who would believe that central to the renovation of my house last year was the installation of a 6-ring, 2 oven, 1 grill glorious piece of stainless steel that would not look out of place in the finest kitchens in Paris? Certainly not the fans on the terraces every Friday night who no doubt think my sole purpose in life is to ensure that my beloved football club survives the next financial crisis. But I’m not the only woman that suffers from this particular dual personality affliction in the world of wives and mothers. I share it with none other than the legendary Delia Smith, she who first graced our TV screens on Swap Shop every Saturday morning during the 70s and because of whom I would turn to another channel for the few minutes that her cookery spot was on. I wonder was Delia one of those elderly ladies who joined me in attending Julie & Julia last Saturday night and like me, had she just gone to escape the burden of the football club resting heavily on her shoulders.  I’m still grappling psychologically with the fact that I turned 40 relatively recently never mind trying to get a handle on the fact that Delia and I now have two things in common – a love of cookery and football. Please God make that be where the similarities end for her sake as much as mine. However, the fact remains that I haven’t cooked a decent meal since we returned to our renovated house last Christmas apart from Christmas dinner.

And I was sceptical when my partner told me what he’d booked. “It’s a film about cookery”, he grinned. “It got a rave review on rotten tomatoes”. I was still sceptical, so much so that I lost the will to resist the Ben & Jerry’s counter and stocked up on a large tub of Phish food and Jamaican me crazy. Oh I was close to being proven right. At first I thought the film was a must-see, the best kept secret in town, so long and slow was the queue leading to the cinema entrance. Soon I realised that it was merely the fact that the attendees of that particular screening were in the main twice my age, spoke very loudly and walked very slowly in what seemed to be all-female groupings of 3 or more. It did not bode well for my evening out. I took my seat reluctantly and my partner failed miserably to suppress his amusement at the look of disgust settling on my face. Let’s call a spade a spade – I was quite convinced that my precious night out was rapidly descending into a cinematic re-working of “Keeping up Appearances”. I was wrong, I was very wrong. I laughed, I shed a tear (a little one) and I left the cinema very much more satisfied than I was leaving the terraces the previous day when we lost 3-1.

And Eric Cantona will have to take a back seat for a little while because Julia Child has de-throned him and tomorrow night, I won’t be scanning the football forums, I’ll be tucking into her boeuf bourguignon. It’s cooling as I type, I’ve made sure that the fork pierced through the tender meat as she said it should and I think I’ve just fallen in love a little bit.

What is it with texting! I got a message yesterday and there was a hundred words in it! I could hardly believe it. One hundred words! It was the longest text message I ever received. The dexterous sender passed on two pieces of information which by the time I got to the end of the one hundred words, I has hoppin’ mad about! Without tone, inflection or body language , it was abrupt, rude and demanding! So what did I do? Yes, I gave myself a half hour to cool down and phoned the sender. After making two points whilst digging my nails into the palm of my hand,  she said ‘rightie oh!’ Whaattt! you are kidding me. Rightie Oh? Two words was her only comment. She had no more to say, ear to ear.  Some people should be handcuffed!

There are numerous reasons for setting up this blog! But firstly and most importantly, I hope it  will be some fun. I am doing it for a laugh!

I plan to blog about issues in a broad context and these issues will be anything in my life that causes a knee jerk reaction or a lurch in my heart. I hope this does not mean that I will use this blog as an outlet for my roadrage or a commentry on the prices in Lidl…..but who knows! It will be about whatever takes my fancy but more importantly it is about some not so desperate wives who are anything but idle, communicating over the airwaves. 

 Lastly, it’s gotta be better than face book! So join us if you feel the need! We hope to keep you interested.

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