That Sunday feeling

The problem with weekends is that they are just too short. Well I say that, when I was a WFH mum weekends really only stood out in so much as I could hand over some of my everyday tasks to Mr FDMTG, which was nice, but it was hardly the break that I had come to understand a weekend to mean.

This is a hangover from my school days, when the weekend was the most exciting time of the week. Saturday night was the night for discos, snogging, bar hopping and generally getting into trouble. Hmm, thinking about this perhaps it is no bad thing that my weekends are a touch more sedate than they were in my teenage years.

One particularly riotous escapade occurred when my friend and I decided to put our somewhat shaky command of maths to work on the finances of our weekend drinking. We came up with the bright idea that rather than cough up a few quid per drink in the local den of vice, we should instead buy direct from the supplier (in this case an off licence of dubious repute) and drink our tipple of choice straight from the bottle.

I remember buying the vodka, the first few slugs and then nothing more until I woke up in a hospital bed the next morning, feeling as if I had been run over by several buses and then come down with the world's most earth shattering case of food poisoning.

To make matters even worse I was meant to be staying at my friend's house, with her delightfully straight-laced parents that weekend. On that bleak Sunday morning I returned to the pastel haven that was their home and was promptly shoved into the guest bedroom to puke my way to repentance, until they could return this 'bad influence' back to her own louche parents, never to be invited to lead their daughter astray again.

Tales like this might make you wonder why I recall my school day weekends with such fondness but, mercifully for my liver, such excesses were not the norm. Instead weekends were a blur of dancing at neon lit clubs to 90s dance music. I can't hear Sash Encore Une Fois without instantly being transported to flinging my hands above my head, on a packed dance floor, fuggy with cigarette smoke as me and my gay best friend did our best to pretend that we really were part of the cool crowd.

There was the painfully pretentious bar where we would sip over priced cocktails - the livid green, banana-flavoured Pisang Orange was a firm favourite - as we bitchily ripped apart the other clientele. The cafe where all the ex-pat brats (I grew up in Brussels) would meet to flirt, kiss, drink and fuel interschool feuds. Then there was the crazy few weeks I dated a seriously cute Columbian bar tender, who turned out to have a sideline in dealing something a whole lot stronger than Stella Artois.

The problem with those Saturday nights was that they were always followed by Sunday afternoons, when you suddenly realised that you hadn't even glanced at your homework and you had to be up inhumanly early the next morning with everything ready to  hand in. It is a lifelong trait of mine to leave everything to the last minute, so Sunday evenings were characterised by frantically cramming some project that should have taken two weeks to compete into a couple of hours.

That sinking feeling of impending doom stayed with me throughout all of my years of education and employment. But as a freelance mummy working from home that Sunday feeling hasn't troubled me for a long while.

That is until now, when going back to work reminded me with a jolt just how short weekends are and how futile it is to spend all day Sunday wishing that it wasn't Monday tomorrow.

Perhaps that's why this post from The Daily Mash, which suggests we could all  have a six day weekend if we stopped dicking around at work, made me laugh out loud. After just a few short weeks back in an office I am reminded once again that if we spent less time in meetings talking about work and more time actually,  you know, doing it, the concept of a six-day weekend could easily become a reality. I might just go and set up a Change.org petition to campaign in favour of this, after all Cameron can't ignore the fact that me and all my Facebook pals agree, can  he?

Child of our time

Just watched Child of our Time which has always offered me a little glimpse into my future as the children are just three years older than my eldest boy. Tonight's episode was particularly poignant as it captures all the children on the cusp of teenage. Watching them transition from carefree, twirling toddlers to spotty awkward almost adults was almost physically painful.

I have long been one to agonise over the loss that is intrinsic to childhood, weeping over last trips to baby music groups, playgroups or classrooms. I still recall walking home after my oldest boy's last day in his reception class as tears poured down both our cheeks at the realisation that he would no longer pass his days in that colourful room, with that delightfully welcoming teacher. That he would finally become a big boy.

I am not good at letting go and appear to have developed an allergy to change. I watch as my children grow up and ram my finger down on the pause button. While everyday frustrations mean that often their demands on my time drive me demented, I continually scold myself that one day I will long for the time when they would badger me to play with them, talk to them or simply provide them with a fresh piece of paper to scribble on.

I felt my heart preparing to be crushed into a million scared and bewildered pieces as I watched the onscreen parents attempt to navigate their new relationships with their growing up children. Flailing to cope with the fact that the daughters who had loved nothing more than pink and fairy tales, now scorn them as childish preferring to discuss potential boyfriends and mull over future career choices in which the option of astronaut has been firmly rejected in favour of pop star or actress.

The sons who were only recently the same unformed mess of energy that is so typical of my own young boys, who are now sullen, wrapped up in fashionably flicked hair dos and unfeasibly baggy trousers, who listen to music their parents can't pronounce and have ditched childhood sporting dreams in favour of hanging out aimlessly with their friends.

The grandparents who played such a critical role in the years when the height of excitement was pushing the swing a little faster in the playground or being spun on the roundabout are now superfluous to a teenager's needs. The are too old and too slow to hold the attention of someone whose life is moving forwards at such high speed.

It is the heartbreaking human condition that time marches inexorably on leaving each of us behind eventually, even those all powerful teenagers whose hormones tell them they are immortal and invincible. Who amongst us doesn't blush at our callous treatment of our parents when we look back on our teens with the benefit of hindsight?

It is a strange thing though that for us as parents we are savouring each moment, holding onto them for dear life as our children just as eagerly seek to discard them. Perhaps it will serve as a warning to occasionally stop work or to miss out on that run or that episode of my favourite TV programme in order to just be with them. To drink in their childhood before it runs out.