The lull

I’ve been prioritising paid work over anything I give away for free. Once you’ve got a decent hourly rate going, it makes all other forms of labour – childcare, going to the gym –  hell, even putting makeup on or getting together with friends – feel like a lot of effort for little reward, especially when the returns are diminishing: I have to try harder to look half as good; I’ve whittled down my friendships to those who still love me at my most vulnerable; my kids barely need me, for all I could still be prosecuted for leaving them on their own.

We’ve both really struggled this summer. Piecing together makeshift childcare, ensuring our kids are doing more than staring at screens when our whole lives are so bound to staring at them that I’ve developed chronic eye strain – hence I’ve all but given up writing unless someone’s paying me extra to do it.

We got through it though, by hook, crook and last minute beggings for help that went mostly went unheeded by relatives that, in simpler times, would see looking after grandchildren as their duty (though hats off to my mother-in-law for stepping in twice when we could find no one else to fill the breach).

But then I should know by now that no one really changes- and ultimately, my kids, whatever challenges they present, are on my plate. But it’s hard to feel, then, much empathy for the older generation for getting older when they’ve sucked up all the pensions, and still have money over for holidays and homes and flights abroad, but not, it seems, the train fare to see their grandchildren.

So it was with a touch of schadenfreude that I witnessed my mother’s fear that her Floridian residence would be swept away in Hurricane Irma, caused, the evidence suggests, in no small part by babyboomer overconsumption. And although it’s mainly the poor that will suffer climate change at the expense of the rich, it was almost satisfying to see the Americans get a taste of what the Bangladeshis have suffered for years.

The world may be going to hell in a handcart, but on the homefront, things have settled down since the kids went back to school – Jonah’s taken to secondary like a lunatic to an asylum and seems to be blossoming among a group of kids more nerdy than he; and though his fringe may still reach his chin, at least, unlike another kid in his class, it’s not dyed purple.

Ava’s back to school routine was not quite as smooth, with Jonah’s departure from primary creating something of a childcare blackhole, because who the hell wants to give up an hour a day to drop her home, now the teenager we employed over the summer has decided he has better things to do.

Luckily her primary has finally sorted out afterschool club so it’s not such a zoo as in years gone by- but it’s done so with a worrying new scheme, City Year, that appears to exploit the idealism of young people hoping to get something on their CV by exchanging their labour and goodwill in the dubious name of experience, and less money than it’s possible to scrape by on in any city, yet alone one of the world’s most expensive. Never mind too, that salubrious Victoria Park, where a good proportion of kids live in million pound Victorian terraces, (though to be fair, the other half in rather well looked after social housing) is hardly the inner city project these young people can hope to learn from or much benefit. Still, the scheme benefits their run-ragged parents, also trying to make a living in said expensive city, by giving their kids the benefit of their enthusiasm, if not their wisdom, and the school which has bowed to Tory cost-cutting by sacking all the long-standing (but often dubiously qualified) teaching assistants, and drafting in charitable, idealistic slavery instead.

But between Ava being at school till five, me working at a company where one is trusted to get one’s work done from wherever we happen to be (the wonders of modern technology) and Jonah suddenly independent (at least on his way to and from school), things feel as though they’re getting easier. As a blogger friend of mine said to me over the weekend, for parents like us (she also has a child diagnosed on the autism spectrum) it’s much harder to mourn the passing of childhood when our days with small children were so much more intense than other people can even begin to imagine them to be.

And the knock-on effect to Tom and I is that we’re getting on much better, now the summer heat and friction has passed, and the counselling session we’ve finally booked seems almost redundant – especially given we’ve been too busy to do much more than dash off a hastily typed text asking the other to do something – in the run-up to Ava’s ninth birthday, trying to book next year’s holiday, plan for after-school childcare, and organise an outing for a child who doesn’t like parties, making decisions and having more than one friend at a time, we’ve too much on our mutual plates to squabble.

A very HP birthday

Luckily,  this Saturday’s trip to London Zoo, followed by the shop at Platform 9 3/4 in King’s Cross was well-received by our Potter-mad tweens, with no tantrums to speak of other than a minor one over shoes that was swiftly countered by a brief one of my own, having spent so long planning our outing that I needed to pull meltdown rank). We’d paid to jump the queues to get their photo’s taken in Hogwarts house scarves, pushing a trolley through a wall in King’s Cross, (and believe me, if you’d seen queue, it was well worth it for the VIP treatment – although, to my horror, Jonah chose to wear a Slytherin scarf (Avaself-selected as Ravenclaw) confirming suspicions I’ve nurtured over his character since birth.

Here, she finally chose a wand, having tried them all for size, and feel (Luna Lovegood’s was the most comfortable apparently, and possibly the most apt, personality-wise), and we went for dinner at Camino, a now-chain restaurant owned by someone who lived in the same apartments as us when Jonah was in nappies, who had children the same age. And having gorged on tapas and ice cream, we headed home to watch Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them on Amazon Prime, having parted with more money to the Harry Poter franchise than I would like to consider, and slightly ruing my failed attempt at tween fiction many moons ago.

But with so much attention on Ava (and long overdue given all the fuss Jonah’s received starting a new school and going away over the holidays,) Jonah was starting to display some of his old gripes – perhaps the honeymoon period of his new school fading amid increased responsibility and the sorting of kids into their various tribes, if not fictional school houses.

By Sunday, with Ava entertaining an old friend, Tom busy making a golden snitch cake that would not be out of place on GBBO, and Jonah with homework to get on with, his inability to remember that he too has been spoiled on birthdays passed spilled over into outright unpleasantness – a reminder that, while things can improve, no one really changes, and Jonah will always have trouble with displaying empathy – a Slytherin trait, even if I know (I hope!) at heart he is more Griffindor.

But, well if life doesn’t really come with happy endings, it certainly feels like we’re in something a period of calm after a storm, but in this day and age – and with teenagehood fast upon us, the next hurricane’s always just round the corner.