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Ernie is calming down the slightest amount. He will occasionally sit still for up to seven seconds and maybe even play with a toy, before remembering his job is to throw himself into danger and head for the nearest staircase, oven, open fire, undiffused bomb. He’s a fucking liability and sometimes I dream that we only had one child, as Phoebe is much less work.
But not very often. Mainly I am dreaming that I have no children, no responsibility and died of a drug overdose in 2013.
But you can’t have everything. And whatever malevolent being is playing the earth video game and has cruelly chosen to be me (out of all the characters - why?) is going to make sure I am around for the maximum amount of time possible to be tortured by these two demons that sprung from my innocent loins.
Oh, I am joking. I probably only feel like that for 98% of the time. But the other 2% is the purest magic. My daughter is full of fizz and grappling with language. She stopped on the stairs and then went back to her room, “Where are you going?†I asked. “I’ve forgot to turn off the light. I’ve got the whole world in my bedroom.â€
Sounds philosophical, but she’s got a light up globe in there and she’d left it on. I prefer her way of putting it.
I tickled Ernie today and we laughed so hard.
And as I fed him this afternoon I looked into his beautiful blue eyes and was filled with wonder.
We’re generally not as tired as we were. We’re coping better with the madness. It’s still the most exhausting and never-ending job I’ve ever had. But the laughs and the poetry and the light in the globes that are their eyes…
Phoebe decorated her toy tractor with stickers a few months back. She put them everywhere and it’s pretty artistic. Ernie loves the tractor, but he also loves to peel off the stickers and try to eat them. It struck me that between them they are Banksy. If Banksy had the bravery to try to commit suicide with the shredded detritus left behind by his destruction of his own art.
After the kids were in bed we drank old-fashioneds and watched “The Commuterâ€, a Liam Neeson film which doesn’t make a lick of sense, but both Andy Nyman and Clem Fandango are in it and for the longest time I thought it might manage to explain its insane premise in a satisfactory way. But no. But given it’s a film with the worst title imaginable the first hour was fairly gripping, albeit due to the false hope of a sane resolution.
