Gill Sims - Why Mummy Doesn’t Give a ****

Peter and Jane are not entirely enamoured of my Splendid Plan to move to the country. Although in actual fact we’re not moving that far into the country, we’re still (just) within the catchment area for their school, so they’ll not be further traumatised by changing schools, as well as being from a Broken Home (do people even still say that? I just remember, in Coronation Street , Tracy Barlow shouting about coming from a Broken Home at Ken and Deirdre when they had one of their frequent divorces – not that it really mattered with Ken and Deirdre, of course, as they’d be back together again by the Omnibus).

Despite this, the children were still horrified at living ‘out in the sticks’ and the lack of late buses to transport them home from parties and bouts of underage drinking. Well, at fifteen, I suspect Jane at least has been dabbling somewhat with the Bacardi Breezers, or whatever over-sugared shit the Youth of Today drink. Peter is only thirteen, so hopefully I’ve a year or so’s grace before he too starts on the path of depravity. I live in hope, however, that they might both yet declare themselves to be teetotallers, as I’ve been a Terrible Warning rather than a Good Example when it comes to the Evils of Drink. I attempted to placate them with rash promises of providing plenty of lifts home, and brightly reminded them that every second weekend they’d be staying over at their dad’s flat in town, and so it would be a) his problem and b) nice and easy to get home from parties and the dubious pubs that serve underage teenagers. Simon was there when I announced this, and I must say he did not look entirely thrilled at the prospect.

He has meanwhile found his Dream Flat, the minimalist White Box he’s hankered after for years. He’d practically drool while watching Grand Designs whenever anyone built one of those spare, modern cubes as a house, as he looked round our cluttered sitting room and sighed in despair. There were some rows about his flat too, because, as I pointed out, he could not buy an open-plan loft, because he needed somewhere for his CHILDREN to sleep when they came to stay – something that did not seem to have occurred to him. He finally grudgingly compromised on somewhere that had one decent-sized bedroom, one small room he announced he’d use as a study and put a futon in for Jane (I didn’t know you even still got futons – I thought they had vanished after the Nineties, along with my youth and the perkiness of my tits), and what he optimistically called a ‘boxroom’ for Peter, which Peter and I called a ‘cupboard’. Apart from having to shut his only son and heir in a cupboard every second weekend, from the photos it looks like an annoyingly nice flat, although the sideboard will look bloody awful there, so ha!

Anyway, I might as well get up and have a cup of tea in peace, before starting the lengthy and painful process of trying to prise two teenagers from their pits. There’s a part of me that wonders if it would be easier to just leave them in their beds and let the removal men load them onto the lorry and install them still slumbering in their new rooms at the other end. And also, how long would it actually take them to notice they were in a different house? In fairness, Peter would notice almost straight away when he walked towards the fridge on autopilot, ready to inhale the entire contents in the name of a ‘snack’, and found it in a different location, thus delaying his ‘snack’ by an essential and life-threatening thirty seconds.

It’s a strange feeling to think that this is the last time I’ll wake up in this house. There have been a lot of ‘last times’ over the previous few days. Some of them have been quite sad, like the last time I’d say goodnight to the children in the rooms they’ve slept in since they were tiny. Peter and Jane were less moved by my tearful attempts to tuck them in last night, saying that I was being weird and telling me to go away. Other last times were less sad. The last time I had to adjust the rug to hide the mark on the floor where Judgy puked and his stomach acid stripped the varnish from the floorboards. The last time I’ll ever bang my hip on the stupidly placed cupboard in the kitchen. The last time I’ll have to wipe the countertops and ignore the large chunk out of the surface where Jane threw a knife at Peter in a fit of rage, probably because of some heinous transgression such as looking at her.

But this isn’t the time to dwell on last times. It’s a time for FIRST times, for new beginnings and fresh starts! I hope Judgy Dog isn’t too outraged by the upheaval and settles into his new home all right.

Saturday, 7 April

Well. We’re here. And I’m slowly getting to grips with the chaos and trying to tackle the mountains of boxes!

Yesterday was … interesting. As predicted, Peter and Jane were almost impossible to shift from their beds. Once they were up, they wandered around aimlessly, getting under everyone’s feet, as Peter attempted to unpack bowls and cereal so he could have another breakfast and Jane screamed that I’d ruined her life by having the Wi-Fi disconnected in the old house, and what did I MEAN, it might not be connected in the new house until Monday, and how did I not know about the strength of the 4G signal at the new house, and WHY WOULD I EVEN DO THAT TO HER, and Peter drank all the milk so I couldn’t even give the removal men a cup of tea, so I had to send him to the shop to get more, while he looked at me pityingly and explained that we were meant to be moving and getting rid of stuff, Mum, not buying more , and I howled that if he didn’t get on his bike and get to the shop and return with a pint of milk in the next three minutes, I was taking all his carefully boxed-up possessions, including all his games consoles, and giving them to a charity shop, and if he answered me back one more fucking time I might give him away too, in the unlikely event of anyone actually wanting him. The removal men meanwhile observed all this, expressionless, until Peter muttered something about ‘Don’t mind her, it’s probably her age, and the Change of Life’ as he huffed out the door in search of milk and the removal men all sniggered. Bastards.

Finally – finally – everything was loaded onto the lorry, despite my helpful suggestions about the order in which they might want to put it on, and that maybe if they put the sofa on the other side they could pile more boxes around it. The Chief Removal Man finally said, ‘Look, love, we do know what we’re doing. We do it every day,’ and I quietly seethed about being called ‘love’ because it’s one of my pet hates, especially from an unfamiliar man who is talking down to me (although I suppose he might have had a point about knowing how to pack his lorry better than me), but I didn’t dare say anything in case they decided that they wouldn’t move all my worldly possessions after all on account of me being a snowflake feminist bitch and then I’d be left sitting in the middle of the road with a big pile of boxes and two angry teenagers.

We set off, me chirping, ‘Isn’t this FUN, darlings! A splendid new adventure! We’re going to be SO HAPPY in the new house, I just KNOW it!’ while the children slumped in the back seat and complained it was SO UNFAIR that I hadn’t let one of them sit in the front because Judgy had already called shotgun (it’s his favourite seat – he likes to look out of the window for cats), and I pointed out that I might have let one of them sit there if World War Fucking Three didn’t break out over whose turn it is to sit there every single bastarding time we get in the car, and would they please just CHEER UP ALREADY, because this was a LOVELY FRESH START and we were going to be VERY FUCKING HAPPY.

As we turned out of the street for the last time ever (well, in reality it probably wasn’t the last time ever, because my friend Katie still lives across the road, and so I’ll probably be back to visit her, but it was still a Symbolic Last Time Ever), the new people who had bought the house turned into it. I accelerated slightly, lest they spotted me in the distance and tried to come after me to enquire about the Smell in Peter’s room. I’d cleaned the house, I really had, and in truth it was probably the cleanest it had ever been since we’d moved in, but nothing I did, not shampooing the carpets, not liberal quantities of Febreeze, not all the TKMaxx scented candles in the world could entirely shift that musty, fusty, Teenage Boy Pong from Peter’s room.