Keep It Together, Girl

Not so long ago, around two months into our kitchen extension, DH was unexpectedly called to the States for a week to work, and I was left alone, living in a building site with two children. We had no hot water, the entire downstairs of the house was unusable and the constant and deafening drilling meant that we had to be out of the house every day from 8am to 6pm.

“Keep it together, girl!” said Ken the Builder cheerfully one morning as he stood, sledgehammer aloft, in the rubble of what once had been my kitchen.
“I’m trying”, I sighed, attempting to prise an enormous screwdriver from the Very Small Boy, who was jabbing it alarmingly into the salmon-pink smoothness of a freshly plastered wall.

I gazed through the hazy dust at the scene before me. Despite knowing that the three builders, two plumbers, two plasterers, a roofer and an electrician were carefully orchestrating the various complicated stages of destruction and creation, all I saw was a grey mess of ugly wires protruding from bare breeze-block and copper piping sticking out of drilled-up concrete; everything covered in a thick layer of dust and great blood-splashes of plaster.

I suppose I had expected some kind of grand finale - an unveiling - but of course it didn’t end like that. We lived a few weeks with the kitchen half-finished. I fretted quietly about painting the woodwork and putting up shelves. The constant stream of workmen slowly decreased before ending finally, undramatically, with an electrician calling by one Saturday morning to fix a boiler problem.

And now, when friends call by and admire my beautiful new kitchen (“the skylight!” “the worktops!” “the fridge!”), I can’t help feeling slightly uncomfortable to be surrounded by such excess. And I realised today that, although I'm thrilled with it, and the new kitchen has made my life easier and much more pleasant, it’s not the source of real, unadulterated happiness that I thought it might be; it's more a pleasing background to the things that make me truly happy.

A couple of days ago, the Small Girl (who’s on her summer holidays at the moment) came with me to pick up the Very Small Boy from Playschool, and after strapping them both into the car, we set out back home.

“What happened at Playschool today darling?” I asked the Very Small Boy as we drove.
“We played with shaving foam!” he cried gleefully, before adding thoughtfully “And Samuel did have hair like Jedward...”
The Small Girl looked up sharply from her Barbie. “Jedward?” she asked

And they both burst raucously into song: “She’s got her lipstick on, here I come, da da dum…”

I laughed out loud, and I was still smiling to myself ten minutes later when finally we got home and, still singing, they climbed up together to the new breakfast bar to wait for their milk and cookies.