Desperately Wanted / Desperately Unwanted

I am so looking forward to day that I am not woken up to cries of

“ Mummmeeeeeee, can you wipe my boppom?!”

I groan, and lie there in the dark for a moment, feeling disgruntled and thinking, yes, I can, but so can you, before admitting defeat and rolling out of bed and downstairs to the waiting bottom.

It won’t be long now until this phase, like the nappy era, is over.

No one is going to wipe her bottom at school in September.

I remember as a child just not seeing the absurdity of the question I asked my Mum in the midst of this phase; “Whose bottom do you like wiping most?”

There is a lot of talk in my house about whose job it is to do certain things. Ben isn’t at all flexible and will refuse to do a job, if it is not written down under his name on the meal time rota for that day. And yet he will think nothing of getting Patrick to take out the recycling or tidy his room for him, tasks which aren’t written down at all but are generally expected of Ben.

I insist that getting Emilia’s hairbrush is her job, she thinks it is mine.

One morning she was howling about the injustice of having to go upstairs and find it when I had apparently just come downstairs and could have got it for her. I was ignoring the noise which had, without missing a beat, turned into being about another issue as she fell over on her way to her room.

“Mummy, you don’t care.....I hurt myself” she wailed.

“I do care” I replied, “but you are always wailing, how do I know that you have hurt yourself? You are the boy who cried wolf, so I don’t take any notice, especially when I am busy getting things done before school.”

“Mummy, you’re only busy with us in the morning, then you have the whole day to do what you want, I have to work hard at school all day....(woe is me, etc, etc.)”

It did make think though. Does she really believe that without her and the other children around I am completely redundant and my time is my own? (9.15am until 12.15pm, all of 4 mornings a week.) Therefore, by her reasoning, outside these times I should be completely pandering to them.

Interesting theory.

They won’t always need me to the extent they demand now and I got a little glimpse of the future recently. As an incentive to get themselves ready on a school morning, I say that once everything is done that they can do as they like until 8.30am. Inevitably this is screen time.

At 8.30am I looked in at our open plan living room/ dining room to see in every corner someone on a screen. Ben was computer programming on the desktop, Patrick was playing on the Wii, Emilia was writing a story on my laptop and Rachel was watching television.

“Time for school” I announced brightly.

There is not a flicker, no one reacts, they all just continue staring at their screens as if no one spoke. I am completely ignored. In fact it takes several nagging attempts and a power shut down before I can tear them away and get them all out of the door.

This is how you go from being desperately wanted to desperately unwanted in one short morning. Could this be the shape of things to come? Straight from their bottoms to the back of their heads.