Why Mummy Doesn’t Give a ****. Gill Sims

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      Two days. Two whole days. All to myself. What to do? I could go for a run (ha ha, NO!). Read an Improving Book? Or, first things first, I could finally finish the unpacking and get the house straight.

      It was very quiet. I unpacked another box, and found the DVD of Jane’s nursery graduation. So then I had to find a laptop with a DVD drive so I could watch it. And then I cried all over again like I had on the day she left nursery and I thought my baby was all grown up now she was ready to start school. She was so little. In those dark days when they were babies and toddlers, I never thought they’d grow up. I thought they’d be little forever, and God knows, some of those long, long days certainly felt like forever. But all of a sudden, they went and grew up when I wasn’t looking.

      I checked my watch. 2.41 pm. Gosh. Was that all? Doesn’t time … drag when you’re not running round like a blue-arsed fly. I’ve spent years longing for this moment – to not be constantly chasing my tail, to have some time to myself, to have some SPACE to myself, to have a room of one’s own, or at least an hour with the house to myself with nobody fighting or complaining they were hungry or demanding I magically increase the broadband speed or provide my credit card to buy something on the internet that they’d definitely pay me back for but hardly ever do. And now I had it – I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself.

A nap, I decided. A lovely nap. When was the last time I had time for a nap? Probably … pre-children. I know, I know, we’re all told that you’re supposed to nap when the baby naps, but then when are you supposed to have a shower, make the dinner, put the laundry on, pay the bills, stare hopelessly into a mirror wondering who this hollow-eyed stranger is staring back at you that bears a vague resemblance to your mother? Exactly. When the baby naps. So, FINALLY, after fifteen years of feeling permanently sleep-deprived, I could start catching up. A nap!

      I arranged Judgy Dog and myself on the sofa with a snuggly blanky (Jesus, will I ever be able to say ‘blanket’ again, or are certain words condemned to be forever ingrained in my mind in baby talk – the same way I seem unable to shake off the urge to shout ‘LOOK! COW! HORSEY! WHAT DO COWS SAY? DO COWS SAY “MOOOOOO”? WHAT DO HORSEYS SAY? HORSEYS SAY “NEEEEEIIIIGHHHH!”’ every time I pass a field with animals in?) and we cosied down for a lovely nap.

      The more I tried to sleep, the more wide awake I became. I stared at the ceiling, wondering what would happen if I died right now. Who would find me? Would Judgy have started eating me by the time the children came home on Sunday night? Would they then be so appalled and disgusted by his cannibalistic ways that they got rid of him and then he died alone in a shelter, even though it’s not actually cannibalism for a dog to eat a human? The thought of Judgy’s lonely death, all by himself in a cold concrete pen, was almost too much for me to bear.

I gave up hope of sleep and scrolled through Instagram instead. Maybe the children were having a horrible time at Simon’s and their feed would reflect this and I could feel smug. Except Jane had blocked me and Peter had not posted anything in months apart from photos of gaming scores. WHY HAD MY OWN DAUGHTER BLOCKED ME ON INSTAGRAM? I looked at Perfect Lucy Atkinson’s Perfect Mummy’s page instead. She was on a girly spa weekend. Why was I not on a girly spa weekend, drinking champagne in a hot tub? Even though champagne makes me belch and I haven’t been in a hot tub since I read an article that said they’re basically just heaving cauldrons of bacteria soup. But even so!

      What about Fiona Montague? Oh, look, she was training for a triathlon and posting lots of photos of her looking great in skin-tight Lycra with ‘inspirational’ captions. Fuck off, Fiona, you husband-stealing slut. But despite her wanton ways, even Fiona was out and about having fun, and oooh, she’d just posted a new photo – her toes in the bath with a glass of wine because apparently she was about to head out on a ‘date night’. Bitch.

      Who else to stalk? What about Debbie from HR? Debbie had been out for ‘brunch with good friends’ and finished her caption with #lovelaughlive. I might have to have Debbie killed. Christina, my erstwhile relationship counsellor, only posted wanky quotes about being true to yourself. That made me feel a little bit better, and I had a bijou judge of Christina.

I searched for Simon’s name again, although he’d always been staunchly anti-Instagram, and lo and behold, there he was! @SimonRussell30 (imaginative, Simon – I assume the ‘30’ refers to a random number, and you weren’t hoping people would think you were actually thirty). Why did he have an account now, after being so scathing about it for all these years? Not many photos yet, obviously, but there was one last night of two beers clinking, just titled ‘#Friyay!’ FFS. Firstly, who even still says ‘Friyay’? Even I know that is totally lame. Secondly, why does he get to go out for beers on Friday night when I spent my Friday night cooking dinner for his children, doing all his children’s laundry so they had clean clothes to take to his house for the weekend and then just as I was about to finally have a glass of wine, having to go and pick Jane up from the cinema because apparently the ‘bus hadn’t come’ – the same bus I assume that passed me heading out of town as I was heading in, as Jane seems to think if she misses the bus that is clearly the bus’s fault and it must have just not come and so I need to solve the problem. All while Simon was quaffing his ‘Friyay’ beer. And thirdly, who did the other beer belong to? Who? It could have been a work colleague, of course, but it was a wanky little bottle of foreign lager, not a Manly Pint, so equally could have been a girl’s. I realised I’d gnawed off what remained of my nails while scrolling through Simon’s photos. #SweetNewPad was another, with an arty shot of what must be his new sitting room (I couldn’t see the sideboard. Where was it? After all the fuss he made about me painting it, had he just got rid of it? RUDE). It looked very nice, and considerably more elegant than my own scruffy sitting room. But ‘#Sweet New Pad’? What was wrong with him? And he did realise you don’t have to hashtag every caption, didn’t he? Twat.

      I went to my own page to see what Simon might think if he looked at it. It was less than inspiring. The last photo I’d posted was a pile of boxes, simply captioned ‘Moving Day!’ I must try harder. I wanted Simon to seethe with jealousy at my sheer fabulousness every time he looked at it. Assuming he looked at it. Why wouldn’t he look at it? Apart from because he was too busy having mindblowing #Friyay sex with a wanky, beer-drinking twenty-three-year-old with gravity-defying tits and no stretch marks in his #SweetNewPad, of course. Oh God! That was obviously what he was doing, while I lay slumped on a sagging sofa, trying not to cry because me and my cannibalistic dog were both going to die alone and unloved.

In the end, in case Simon did find a minute out of his filthy shag timetable to look at my page and gloat he’d escaped the nagging witch of an ex-wife and remind himself of how much he was #lovinglife with his lithe sex bomb (who could probably contort herself into improbable positions without shrieking, ‘Wait, stop, I’ve done something to my hip’), I went and had a bath and posted a Fiona Montague-style shot with a glass of wine and about a million filters so it looked quite sexy, and put ‘The weekend starts here!’ It wasn’t much, but it was the best I could manage.

      Duly bathed (it turns out a bath isn’t quite so decadent when there isn’t much else you’re supposed to be doing), I was bored out of my mind and quite alarmed at the prospect of the many empty hours stretching ahead of me. I’d been so sure I had Inner Resources at my disposal and would be happy with my own company, but it seems it has been so long since I’ve had the chance to experience my own company that my Inner Resources appear to have buggered off, along with the perkiness of my tits and my natural hair colour.

      ‘Bollocks!’ I thought, as I failed to log in to Netflix, Jane having ignored my pleading texts for the password – Peter claims not to know it as he only watches YouTube. I wished I’d had the wit to have arranged to go out or meet friends or do SOMETHING tonight, but I’d been so sure of those Inner Resources I’d not bothered. I vaguely wondered about being an Independent Modern Woman and going to the cinema by myself, but I wasn’t sure I could eat a whole tub of СКАЧАТЬ