Kids. I love them.
I had spent time one morning hunting down an errant judo kit, and had placed it by the back door, from where we leave to go to school. I had prepared all the packed lunches, and lined them up on the worktop. I had forced Little Seymour Number Two to eat something for breakfast – she is so frickin’ fussy! And I had seen her and Number One off. Two down, two to go.
Fifteen minutes later, we too departed. “Have you got your lunch?” I hollered as we left. “Have you got everything? HAVE YOU GOT EVERYTHING??”
Imagine my mood when we pulled up five minutes later at school, minus the fucking judo kit.
OK, now it is my job, I know, to mop up after my kids. I had delivered a Science book to Big School on Monday of that week, to avoid Number Two getting a detention for forgetting it. I have delivered lunches and cross country kits and homework books after they have been forgotten. I know I am making a rod for my own back. I know. But this judo kit business really pissed me off.
And so, as we departed the Shiny Van, Mini Seymour announced she had not picked up her judo kit (from the door mat she had to walk over!) and we had words.
She was ordering me about! She! The Forgetter of Judo Kits! She was demanding I returned with said kit. Pronto.
I told her no. I said I would not. I had work to do and I would not be rushing around delivering items to her that she should not have omitted to bring. Our discussion became heated. There was shouting. She was adamant I’d be bringing it; I was determined I’d not.
A woman on the opposite side of the road heard our “debate”. She disapproved, I could tell. She shook her head and muttered something. She is clearly the type of lady who’d never, ever shout at a kid in public. For – only crap parents do that.
I, the crap parent, saw her disapproval. And I raised it. With a childish gesture. When she had finished her looking and had marched onwards to the Co Op, I did something I haven’t done for years. To the back of her head and her retreating frame, I gathered my strength and drew myself up before giving her the meanest, ugliest, most childish gurn I could muster.
I may even have stuck my tongue out.
I must admit, it felt really good! For a second. To go back briefly to the 1980s when such faces were commonplace among my dealings with people (I was an unpredictable kid) was liberating. Why should I be bound by the shackles of decency? Who says grown-ups don’t pull provocative faces at each other? Who, I ask you?
Now this is all very well, had nobody seen me do it. The woman was being rude and judgmental, but she had every right to be so. I had a right to reply, but as I chose the cowardly gurn, I only had the right to do that if nobody ever saw it.
I forgot, for a moment, that the village through which I was walking has a very busy road through it. Many cars and vans pass through on their journeys to and from places, and at least several of those vans’ drivers will have been witness to an adult woman, in charge of a small child, pulling the most puerile of faces at an imaginary foe across the way. I can only imagine them recoiling in disgust – for my scowl is like no other.
My sense of victory was short-lived, to be replaced by a smattering of shame. I could imagine my mother being disappointed in me. I knew what word she would have used of my gesture had she seen it: spiteful.
That word! Spiteful. It does things to me. Probably because it is apt. I could be spiteful as a kid, and I thought those days were gone. Clearly not!
But I will admit that, wrong as I know it was, and in spite (!) of letting myself down by being spiteful, I liked being a kid again. I won that argument. Ner ner ner ner ner.
I’m just really glad Mini Seymour didn’t see me do it.
And yes, I took her judo kit in.
Her wrath, I cannot face.
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