Walkies

So, gone are the leisurely dog walks, spontaneous dinner reservations and lazy weekends spent in a haze of drunken socialising, replaced with a quick turn of the local playing field, never being arsed to eat - let alone go out to eat, and weekends still spent in a drunken haze but only after 4pm, and alone, as our friends were now avoiding us as though we had a red cross on the door. I'd said goodbye to brushed hair, plucked eyebrows and white jeans and hello to elasticated waists, big knickers and a determined hair sprouting from my chin. Ah, the joys of motherhood; I always knew it was a daft thing to do! Just getting out of the house to walk Heather before lunch became my only objective of the day; despite being woken with the birds, it was an objective which proved more erratic than my hair. Once or twice I actually managed it, with the help of Fifi and the Flowertots and a strategy planned out in meticulous detail the night before. It went something like this:

• Be rudely awakened at 5am and discover I'm not Anna Friel or a lesbian and it had all been a dream.
• Feed Tuna whose screams were that of someone else's baby when I was Anna Friel.
• Go back to sleep while Tuna feeds and hope for a recurring dream (but maybe without the lesbian bit this time).
• Be woken again at 7am having only managed a dull dream about cutting my fringe with a pair of nail scissors - oh wait, that wasn't a dream.
• Give Chicken her Shreddies and attempt to eat a bowl of Bran Flakes with Tuna (a permanent resident of my hip) slapping at my spoon as though food is for other mothers - not hers.
• Feed Heather and watch her sneer at the offering as though it were rotting slug slime rather than Nature's Best lugged back weekly from the homoeopathic vet.
• Spend the next hour wiping Shreddies off Heather's back and Bran Flakes out of my hair. Empty and re-load washing machine.
• 9am (already!): Attempt to put Tuna down for her mid-morning nap. (I still hadn't learnt to ignore Gina Ford.)
• 9.05am: Give up and resign myself to another shower-less day.
• Top and tail Tuna while Chicken amuses herself by poking her in the eye under the guise of scientific experiment before noticing Heather has snuck off with another shitty nappy.
• Retrieve nappy, berate Heather and Chicken for having given it to her in the first place.
• 10am: Dress Tuna before placing her in bouncy chair to amuse herself while I dress Chicken.
• 10.05am: Remove Tuna from bouncy chair and attempt to dress Chicken with one hand.
• 10.10am: Try to catch Chicken.
• 10.30am: Give up and bring in Fifi and the Flowertots in all her distracting glory.
• 10.45am: Review Chicken's attire and delude myself that no one will notice that the dress is on back-to-front.
• 11am: Make another attempt at putting Tuna in bouncy chair while getting myself dressed.
• 11.05 am: Remove Tuna from bouncy chair and hastily dress myself while she screams herself sick on the bed.
• 11.10am: Review my attire and delude myself that no one will notice my dress is on back-to-front.
• 11.15am: Suffer fall out from termination of TV while coaxing Chicken into the bathroom to brush her four teeth by promising a resumption of TV later in the day.
• 11.30am: Attempt to brush my own teeth while Tuna slaps at my toothbrush firm in her belief that clean teeth are for other mothers - not hers.
• Fill bag with spare nappies, baby wipes, Sudocrem, crayons, paper, snack boxes of raisins, water cup with the non-drip lid, sun cream, plasters - sod it - put in the entire First Aid Kit.
• 11.45am: Frantically look for sun hats and Chicken's shoes while Heather whines like an air raid siren in anticipation of her walk.
• 12 noon: Strap them into Phil and Ted's while drowning out Tuna's screams (who won't stop until we're on the move) with Steppen Wolf's 'Born to be Wild' on a loop in my head.
• 12.10pm: Leave the house and take just one deep drag on the cigarette I have carefully positioned in a tin box by the gate before crunching it out and returning it to the box to await tomorrow's deep drag.

Day in day out, my predictable bullet point list varied less than Margaret Thatcher's hair do's. I was lost in my belief that it must be possible to get up, dressed and out before the Shreddies stopped working their magic; I mean, we now had cameras on Mars, advances in medical science were unprecedented - surely it wasn't too high to aim? Apparently, it was. Before I'd even the chance to un-clip Heather's lead, Chicken would shout she was hungry. But faint heart never won fair time to walk dog; out came the snack box of raisins while we dashed around the field in the hope it would placate Heather enough to buy me a guilt free afternoon.

But what was it all for? Had I not had a dog I could have been spared all that anguish, accepting our days would begin and end with only the garden as our contact with the outside world; being lazy by nature the thought was certainly appealing, but also suicidal. Walking Heather gave our days structure and purpose (albeit haphazard) without which I may as well have given in to that determined hair on my chin and allowed it to grow and grow until it could eventually strangle me, a fate I might have welcomed without some semblance of a daily routine.

 

If the point to having children is to make you appreciate the simple act of getting out of the house with your clothes on the right way round and being able to eat your breakfast without it ending up in your hair, then I was getting it like a sharp stab in the ribs. Surely, it begs the question - why didn't I stick to dogs?