Dear Son,

My feeding chair is bright and yellow with cute white chickens with red beaks. It was more expensive than the Ikea one you considered buying, remember Mother? You had high hopes for this high chair _ visions of slightly messy but wholesome meal times, filled with giggles and the occasional meltdown.

In case you haven’t noticed, it’s Christmas. Time to be grateful and acknowledge the gifts we already have in our lives and all that jazz. Some gifts in the parental life, you’ll agree, just keep on giving. Like getting kids dressed in the morning. “The Suckometer is strong with this one,” I hear you say and I’m nodding deeper than a GIF on steroids. Now, let me tell you, getting a little boy with autism to put on anything resembling an outfit kicks things up a notch to Olympic status. Every. Single. Morning. Aversion to textures, lengths, colours, necklines, joins forces with demand avoidance to create a vortex of endurance testing that eats through your patience faster than you can say Pac Man (showing my age here…). It also eats up whatever little time you, yourself have to get ready. Having trousers on and a top is a MASSIVE achievement. Putting something on your face to ensure people don’t mistake you for the Ghost of Christmas Past is next level business.

Last week was a tough one. The wheels of the crazy carriage were well and truly spinning at never before seen speeds _ work was at an intensity level where all sorts of nuclear buttons were being pushed, the house and its menacing trifecta of clutter, laundry and kid crumbs was threatening to swallow us whole, and the parenting bit was like losing on all fronts. Also I chose this very week to go on a bit of a carb-free run.  In the world of superlatively bad choices that one got all the medals.

Franklin,

Ok so this is gonna sound a bit creepy but I like to watch. I walk onto the train, grab a seat _ there are benefits to being at the start/end of the tube line _ and ready myself for the show. The Victoria line is my happy place. Sure it can get crowded, hot and smelly but so far no one has screamed for biscuits or demanded Hey Duggee at the top of their voices so we’re smooth sailing. Some days I’ll just make like an ostrich or any other sensible London commuter and bury my head in a magazine. But on others, especially if I’ve had little sleep and cannot but avoid all semblance of movement in order to conserve energy to stay awake at work, I just sit and watch my fellow commuters. So far I have seen the same people many times, sometimes on the way out and sometimes , though this is rarer, on the way back. There is the woman with the short skirt, fishnets, burgundy lipstick and eyeliner so thick it could hide nuclear secrets underneath. There is the blind man that gets on the tube with the seasoned prowess of a warrior. There is the woman in her mid forties in the thinning, greying brown hair. She sometimes morphs into a fiercely awake being if chatting to acquaintances that happen to take the same train, using the words of teenagers and clinging on to her FOMO. And then there is Ally Capelino  – she always carries a backpack by this brand and looks like an Ally so I commute baptised her (totally a thing) and her boyfriend.

It was the end of a long day. My eyes felt like puddles of burning flesh and my head heavy, like a container of voodoo dolls being pierced every other second by a vindictive despot. Tolerance was nearing below basement levels by the time I got on the tube.

I don’t know about you but bad meatballs really piss me off.

This could be a post about going on a first long distance plane travel with a tantrumy 3 year-old but why would I want to give you acid reflux and nightmares? I’m not gonna do that to you. You’ve all been there and if you haven’t, DON’T. Sit back, relax and “enjoy” your flight knowing it won’t last longer than three hours. Keep doing it, keep covering the countries around you and don’t venture out any further. I didn’t take my own advice and recently got on that plane with an 8:00 hour journey in front of me. Before that joyous experience even started,  I tried to get my son to sit down, way ahead of departure because the flight attendant insisted he needed to be strapped in to “listen” to the flight safety information. Insert big lols here, both for the sitting down part and the safety info. Is this the bit where you’re gonna tell us to fit our own masks first before helping others? Yes yes, we get it, it’s about not actually dying before being able to put the damned mask on the kid, but still. What mother would instinctively do this? Aren’t we hard wired to put them first at all times?

Your moods eschew the constancy and comfort of my familiar, lazy days spent under the warmth of a perennial sun. Instead you offer yourself in winks and seductive head tilts; a ray of sun briefly and gloriously highlighting a green patch of tender grass, bending softly under the push of a sudden breeze; a fast moving cover of cloud, simultaneously as grey as lead and as white as cold breath, torn and frayed at the edges by the wind that picks up pace.

There is a scene in The Handmaid’s Tale when June is hiding in what used to be a busy newsroom. Amongst her many finds strewn across desks, including pictures of journalists’ families and hastily abandoned mugs of dried coffee she finds a DVD of Friends. For a moment June allows herself to cross over, back to a reality that has now evaporated and seems at once childish, perversely carefree and the very embodiment of humanity.