Head fog - an example

Today was supposed to be the first day of my time off New Regime: Get up. Get the kids out. Go for a swim and then sit down and write in the café area of the gym. Prioritise this above all else. Above endless housework. Tidying. eBaying shit. Cooking. My time off work was not taken in order to do endless domestic chores. Part of my ‘unfolding’ is to give space and time for my creativity.

I woke up. Good start. And somewhat surprising, given that I had slept on a too-short kiddie mattress on my youngest’s bedroom floor, owing to having given up on the decorating I started yesterday. Not the best night’s sleep. I would have taken one of the boys’ beds, but the slats keep falling out during the night, meaning that the mattress plus occupant tends to crash onto the stuff stashed below. Getting some planks is on my endless list of things to do. 

I went downstairs to feed to the cats and make a cup of herbal tea. I’m off anything with calories as part of my special Time Off fasting diet thing. I’d decided yesterday that I would go to the gym in my pyjamas as the only set of clothes not trapped in the wardrobe wedged against the bed of the room I have started decorating are covered in paint. So i didn’t need to get dressed. Apart from putting on a bra, OBVS. 

This meant that all I had to do, apart from yell up the stairs every five minutes (TEETH! LANYARDS!! GAMES KIT!!! BREAKFAST???), was put my iPad and keyboard into my gym bag. I recalled having decided to charge my iPad last night so that it would be alive and kicking, ready for the Big Day. Which meant all I had to do was find it. 

Holy Mary, mother of, etc etc. Not in the sitting room where I remembered having picked it up to charge it. Not on the side in the kitchen where I have a charger. Nowhere on the floor in the bedroom where I’d slept; where I might have absent-mindedly put it down. Not in the laundry basket. Not in the recycling with the pizza boxes. 

This was obviously NOT down to me or my incompetence. My Phoenix stirred briefly from its attempted lie-in. DUCKING universe. My shouts up the stairs became more frenetic: I SHOULD NOT BE HAVING TO SHOUT UP THE STAIRS! I SHOULD BE FEELING LIKE WE ARE A TEAM!! THE STATE OF YOUR BEDROOMS IS AN OUTRAGE!!! CAN SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME FIND MY IPAD?!!!!

I did not find it. Distress was coming at me like sheets of Scottish rain. I felt wracked by ageing and incompetence. I don’t lose stuff. I don’t forget where I’ve put things. Head fog. :(

We drove to school in semi-silence, punctuated by a number of new life decisions as they occurred to me: ‘From now on, I am going to turn the internet off at 9pm every evening and you are going to Read Books and Expand Your Minds; Gone are the days of me taking cereal upstairs; You need to fill your own water bottles in the morning….’, followed by a short quiz on COP (Conference of the Parties), because youngest was super-keen to be one of the kids picked to be featured with his school on BBC Points West this evening (mostly, because he wants to be on the telly and not, unfortunately, because the environment is that high up on his agenda). The quiz didn’t last long because all I really know is that we sold out on the wording around our commitment to stop our use of coal (more on this another time), despite having listened to a monumental amount of coverage and spending a fair bit of last week worrying about the environmental impact of my hot tub. And no, I don’t usually drive the boys to school, but the gym is en route and I am having some bicycle pump issues. (Ahem.)

I dropped them outside school. Kissed youngest. Eldest stormed off shivering, because he’d left his coat at his dad’s house on Saturday. Which was apparently my fault.

Then I drove to the gym. Swam. Sat in the café. And wrote this… on my phone.