My life is chaotic, but that doesn’t mean it’s not perfect
IJUST want a perfect life. Is that too much to expect? When the New Year begins so do my great expectations. I sit down the three boys and give them my January speech.
‘This year’, I warn as they sit looking at me with their here-she-goes-again-faces, ‘we will all be eating all our meals at the table like a proper family, and you’ll be expected to eat your vegetables, and we will be having fish once a week whether you like it or not.’
They nod assent, although I can see they are all holding back sniggers. I keep going. I am determined.
‘There will one hour of television when you get in from school, and computer games only on weekends, and we’ll go for a bracing walk every evening before bed — which will be at 8.30— read, then lights off at nine. You’ll be getting your own cereal for breakfast this year too, and putting your own uniform in the wash-basket. Oh and flossing your teeth. Teeth flossing is going to be compulsory.’
Another year, another set of rules to be flaunted.
Sticking to a routine has long been an aspiration of mine, and January is when I am at my most determined in acquiring one. As a mother this is the time when I make crippling resolutions about my parenting and time management skills.
So I decided to put my work and spend a day in my office doing ‘housekeeping’. Within and hour I had drawn up schedules and maps for how our life is going to be this year. Perfect life here we come.
To time on my hands I decided to clear out my old laptop and see if we can get reconditioned. On it I found a folder marked ‘house rota 2010’ . It was one of my first attempts to get organised. Tom was a baby and Leo at national school.
I had found I was doing all the school runs, so after the Christmas holiday I presented my husband with a weekly school-run rota. When he nodded his assent at its reasonableness, I became crazed with power and divided up the cooking 50/50.
Again, he sensibly approved it. So I decided to go the whole hog with a housework rota. As I was divvying out the hoovering, bins out and laundry duties, I realised that, in reality, he did far more than me around the house anyway — and left it aside. I have never nagged him about school runs since and thank my lucky stars (and his mother) for my house-trained man.
For some people, routine lives naturally inside them. They remember what they have to do, and when. Life just seems to flow in a natural ebb of meals and shopping and working. I don’t have that. My mind is a scattered, confused cacophony of the trivial and the essential. ‘Clean out cutlery drawer’ lives next to ‘Finish novel by Xmas.’
So, the first thing I do every morning is write myself a list. I have to write down everything: ‘brush teeth, take drugs, give Tom breakfast’. ‘Have you got your mobile? Car keys? Purse?’ Niall calls out as I grab a raincoat from the hall and throw it into the back seat of the jeep on top of the four other raincoats that are already there so that I don’t have to remember to bring a raincoat with me into town.
THE next file I opened was a meal plan accompanied by a sample monthly shopping list. Bacon and cabbage on a Monday, then recycle the leftovers for carbonara on a Tuesday. According to this piece of mathematical whizzery, I would know what we were eating every day for the next six months and our weekly food bill should have been €25.75. So why do I spend enough to finance a small country at the local shop by running in for emergency pizzas every other night?
Why indeed? I put the 2010 folder in delete, then put my 2018 in trash after it. I think it’s time for me to accept that I am not a routine person. My working life operates on deadlines and I function as a person on stressfuelled adrenaline. I long to be a peaceful plodder, trotting through life from one task to the next, my working day bookended with an organised family life but I also have to accept that, no matter how hard I try to contain it, chaos is an inevitable fact of my life.
I looked out the window of my office and saw Tommo, a healthy, happy, wild kid, waving at me from the patio. I realised, my life is messy and chaotic? But that doesn’t mean it’s not perfect.