Old friends and bad habits

I socialise so rarely these days that when I do, it’s hard not to go a bit bonkers. The combination of a job offer, a looming holiday and the chance to catch up with some old faces combined to make me fall off the wagon in semi-spectacular form  (I’m too old and wise to go the whole hog these days), and I’ve been sleeping it off ever since. It’s typical that an unusually busy line-up of social events will be precipitated by by a night on the tiles – a bit like going all out on Christmas Eve, leaving Christmas day a write-off. 

I may have been in bed by 11.00 pm on Saturday night, but my body is, three days later, still playing catch up. My neck is sore and my lower back aches, and I have a gravelly throat from ill advised smoking. It’s a shame. Hangover and weather managed to dampen my spirits for a visit from a uni friend who I’ve not seen in at least two years. I made it through a well-thought out Sunday supper of belly pork and roasted new potatoes followed up by strawberry pavlova, with chaotically constructed homemade meringues, but a social glass of fizz meant I dozed my way through the Wolf of Wall street, unable to pin back my twanging eyelids, and by Bank Holiday Monday, I was tetchy with the kids and crabby with the dogs as my plans to head to the Princess Diana fountain fell apart in the rain. I snapped at Jonah, who was acting out in the car when he was forced to share the back seat with an extra body, causing a elastic tension to tauten in the car which didn’t slacken until we reached the South Bank, where we meet the final member of my university coven, with her young kids for a chaotic lunch in the Royal Festival Hall. Time is slipping by so quickly, it puts pressure on these moments to be perfect, so few and far between that they are, and we were all of us disappointed that the day hadn’t come off as we had hoped, much as we made plans to do it again soon. 

I went home and wept my way through Saving Mr Banks, feeling all too akin to the terse and exacting figure of Mary Poppins creator Helen Lyndon Goff, who, in the film, holds the formidable Walt Disney to ransom while trying to cultivate the memory of her beloved father through her book and the later film. 

My screening for Asperger’s, done by the same psychologist seeing Jonah, resulted in a referral, amid much angst about and focus on my parents, both for their (and my own subsequent) attachment problems but also their behaviour, from my father’s social difficulties and particular genius for detail, to my mother’s family problems, trailblazing spirit and need to keep running away. We talked about my tendency to walk on tiptoes to avoid the feeling of crumbs on the floor and my synthesthasia of fear as pain, like the little mermaid walking on two legs; the fact I can feel white blood cells coming out of my bones when I’m fighting off a virus and the procession of an egg down my Fallopian tube when I ovulate, how I control feels on panic about vacuuming by having a set day, and the fact that I pick at my face when I’m stressed in a particularly gruesome form of self-harm.

It’s a relief, as always to pour it all out into the ears of a stranger in a vacantly self indulgent way, but with a new job starting soon, I will have little time for self indulgence of any kind. The doctor warned me against – another breakdown is more or less a foregone conclusion, but what choice do we have getting by as a family in one of the continent’s more expensive capitals?

I am making plans – for the childminders to pick up my slack, and preside over my newly-prescribed activities to get the kids away from their screens: climbing for Jonah, and painting for Ava. The cleaner has been re-engaged for a week Monday to keep my anxiety about dirt at bay, so all I have to do is relax and try and enjoy a potentially soggy few days camping in the Isle of Wight, trying to maintain the general sense of well-being I’d, until this weekend,  stored up through rest, and time alone to think, and become a better mother, wife and friend.