I Need a Screwdriver, Not a Husband

You can probably tell a lot about someone from the junk you find strewn about their kitchen. After dropping DH off at the bus stop last week (he was on his way to Israel for a business trip), I decided to get the Small Girl and the Very Small Boy to help me conduct a morale-boosting spring-clean (we were all understandably upset at the prospect of a week without Daddy). I surveyed the objects on my kitchen windowsill and silently contemplated what they might say about me: half a pomegranate, a soggy carrot-top sprouting in a saucer of water, a colourful handful of beads from one of the Small Girl’s broken necklaces and a pot of gold enamel paint I’d been using for some project several months before.

“We’ll be fine, darling” I had said reassuringly to DH earlier. We’d all been standing at the breezy bus stop, waiting for the airport coach: the silent Small Girl miserably anticipating Daddy’s departure, her Very Small Brother (who currently has a fixation with buses) shouting “BUH!” at the top of his voice and waving indiscriminately but with great enthusiasm at passing vehicles.

“I hate leaving you… but you will remember to put the bins out tomorrow won’t you?” DH had said, illustrating perfectly that delicate balance in marriage between romance and chores.

“We’re fine!” I had reiterated. “Now, have a good trip… and call us when you get there!”.

The Very Small Boy had thought that this farewell was just about the most thrilling thing that had ever happened to him: the combination of close proximity to a bus, an opportunity to wave, and then Daddy on a bus, waving back sent him into frantic paroxysms of excitement, whilst his sister, tears sliding down her face, sat silent and miserable in the car all the way home.

Whatever else you say about me, the fact is I’m pretty resourceful. And it’s probably just as well, because as soon as DH boarded his plane to Tel Aviv, everything seemed to fall apart. The telephone suffered what the phone engineer described as a “catastrophic failure”; the stairgate (which is very much required with a Very Small Active Boy about), fell off; all the clocks in the house suffered a systematic malfunction (making me continuously late); our ancient boiler system ran out of oil, leaving us without heating.

“Oh you should have told me!”, said a friend, looking at the prone stairgate the following day; “I would have sent my husband round to fix it for you!”.

“Well, actually what I need is a screwdriver”, I muttered. “Not a husband. I could fix the gate myself if only I knew where the screwdriver was…”

But in the end, we had a perfectly pleasant week, filled as it was with playdates and fun activities so that the time passed quickly. And it didn’t really matter that everything fell to pieces because by the time DH returned, the bins were empty, the clocks were ticking, the heating was on and the telephone was working. We’d even managed to eat the pomegranate, re-string the Small Girl’s necklace and plant the carrot-top in a smart new plant pot of its very own.