A slow week as it happened; by choice, but still I get to 9pm every night and think how the day just ran away and I got nothing useful done. Useful stuff like cooking and cleaning but not useful stuff like building an empire. I take solace in reading books, I have a pile just so high by my bed and I dip into three or four at a time. I think to myself: these writers had weeks where they got nothing useful done. I try to listen in to the struggle that went on in their lives as they wrote those words, constructed that story, located their written voice. I read book reviews online; of books that I don't think were any good. I wince at the critiques and wonder: it is better to write a bad book than to write no book at all? It's these moments of self-doubt, how they creep when I have not done anything useful all week.
But then I think, actually no. I made two recipes that went down a treat and were super-healthy and super-tasty and I found that if I just get a little nudge I can rediscover an interest in cooking and not dread the hours from 6pm to 8pm where somehow, over the course of time, it's become expected that I will produce a crowd-pleasing dinner for four (or three) each night! This week, I triumphed. And oddly I did it without meat. I am wondering whether we really need to eat meat? Meat (with the exception of The Sunday Roast) has become an addition that has not really earned its place on my plate. Not even sure why it is there, a protein fix? Lentils work much better and then I don't get the guilts when I pass a lorry-full of sheep, crammed in together in a claustrophobic, nightmarish last huddle. Not one to dwell on.
Useful things? I installed a desk in my daughter's room so she can do homework there - instead of hunched on her bed, periodically checking her phone, as she describes the differences between Stalin and Mussolini in History.
I cleared a cupboard or two. Fluffed and folded. Drove about. Walked the pup.
There is something wonderful about having nothing useful to do. I really can't knock it. My friend has returned to work in our (my) old profession after a 14 month break. She described sitting at her new desk, feeling self-conscious about taking a lunch-break, clock-watching till 5.30pm when she can hurry home and get on with that 6pm to 8pm dinner production and get her kids to bed. I don't miss being a working mother for that very reason. I admire her tenacity. This life of housewife and mother carries on and on; work can be a welcome interlude. But it's by no means easy for either the working or the stay at home mother. I see that I am a novice in this new life really. I still sometimes wake up and think I have a presentation to give or a paper to write. Muscle memory of the corporate kind.
So it's Friday; the weekend ahead with that subtle (although not significant) differentiation from the working week. We have unseasonably warm weather - well at least it's double figures in temperature for the first time since Autumn. The yearning for Spring grows each day...I think that one day, it will be possible to wear cotton and not wool. To have bare ankles. Or to leave the house without a coat (padded shroud)! One day...
