Royally Yours

“Morning! How’s the running going?” asked the postman, a fellow runner, cheerfully the other morning when I opened the door to him.
“Good thanks” I replied, taking the package he handed me “I’m trying to do 20k a week, but mostly failing…”
“Ah sure, you’ll get there” he said, smiling and nodding his head in encouragement before leaving to continue his rounds.

Feeling sentimental in the run-up to the Royal wedding, I had ordered online some prints from my own wedding, which the Small Girl (who has a fanatical interest in anything to do with pretty dresses) had also taken a sudden interest in.

“When I grow up, I’m going to have a Woyal Weddin’ ” she had announced, thrilled to be watching a real Prince and Princess getting married on the telly.
“That sounds lovely darling!” I replied “can I come?”
“Yes Mummy, you can wear a fancy outfit and a hat and you can wave like the Queen” she said, pulling her chair up closer to the TV to watch the Queen being chauffeured slowly through the crowds in her yellow dress. Then “Mum?” she asked.
“Yes Sausage?”
“Why does the Queen do that funny wave like that?”

I laughed and scooped up my Small Girl for a cuddle. “Well, the Queen is very posh and very serious, so when she waves she does it very solemnly, like this” I explained, pulling a stern face and giving a slight, exaggerated tilt of the hand

Later, when the wedding was over and the Small Girl was happily playing "weddin's” with her Very Small Brother, I carefully put my own wedding photos into the frames I had bought for them, and studied myself in the pictures. I was a modest-looking bride, never really self-assured enough to demand the trappings and frills that most young people these days require on their wedding day. It’s a characteristic of mine, I realised, to never really make the best of myself, fearful for some reason of the result it might produce.

Still, I was pleased with the pictures, and I called the children to have a look. The Very Small Boy came dashing downstairs, but the Small Girl, for once, was nowhere to be found.
“Come on Prince Charming” I said to him, taking his warm little hand in mine. “Let’s go and find your sister”. And hand in hand, we eventually found her, standing out at the end of the front garden; dressed in her finest Cinderella gown, frowning in concentration, practising her Royal Wave on passing neighbours.

We Could do With Some More Grown-ups Around Here

I made the mistake the other day of Googling “coming off Venlafaxine”. The facts as presented by an army of disgruntled users were alarming, and just reading these horror stories was enough to give me the first stirrings of a panic attack.
“Well, you might as well just burn fifty quid” advised Uncle Queue (who isn’t a doctor but probably ought to be) on the subject of visiting my GP.
“Just open the capsules and halve the contents, a week at a time” was his advice. Which was working just fine until, in addition to my usual duties as Mummy, I found myself managing a fairly major building project.

The first time I walked around our house, I knew it was the place for us. It was badly laid-out, appallingly decorated and almost completely devoid of any kind of warmth.
“Let’s buy it!” I said to DH, as the Small Girl (who was Really Very Small at the time) toddled headlong into an expanse of oddly-placed bare brick in the middle of our soon-to-be kitchen, keeled over backwards and started wailing.

Almost four years on, the entire ground floor of our cosy family house is a building site. Much to the delight of the Very Small Boy (who currently loves nothing more than to don his hard hat and reflective jacket and spend hours climbing about on their digger), The Builders have arrived and are working on our new extension. It’s all terribly exciting, but at the same time it requires on my part all manner of complicated decisions involving electrical sockets, gas piping and whether or not it would damage my credibility to offer The Builders (at least two of whom appear to be rather baby-faced and prone to blushing a deep pink if I so much as look in their direction) a round of pink cupcakes with their tea.

I can’t help feeling that I could manage the whole antidepressant withdrawal thing just fine were it not for the general responsibilities of Being Grown Up. Had I the luxury of spending some quality time lying motionless in a darkened room, for example, the whole process would have passed fairly uneventfully. However when not curled into a ball and sobbing, I have found myself over the last few days wandering aimlessly through the rubble, tormented by roiling queasiness and weird electrical jolts, desperately trying to focus my confused and elusive thoughts.

“Mum!” shouted the Small Girl the other day from the garden, where she and her brother had been playing on the digger .
“Yes darling?” I replied, dashing to the front door and wondering vaguely about public liability insurance in the event of a Very Small Broken Leg.
“The Builders say we’re not allowed to play on the digger unless there’s a grown-up with us!” she wailed.

I stood at the front door, hanging on to the doorframe and looking back over my shoulder, casting about for the grown-up in question, before the dawning of the slow and foggy realisation that actually, she probably meant me.