Spending time with my children makes me appreciate my wife. How does she stand them?
Iam so strapped for cash that I have been forced to give up my outside office and start working from home. With three children under five, this is far from ideal, but at least there’s a small window in the afternoon when the eldest is at school, the middle one is at nursery and the youngest is asleep. It is during these precious few hours that I have to write my various newspaper columns, juggle the household accounts and work on the novel that is going to secure my family’s future.
At least, that was the plan. Unfortunately, my move coincided with the start of the Easter holidays and the upshot is that my ‘window’ has closed. For the next three weeks, I will no longer be a freelance journalist. I have embarked on a new career as a full-time househusband.
What makes this particularly trying is that my children are at that stage when they’re mad about board games, but hopeless at playing them. I don’t mean unable to give me a decent match, I mean completely and utterly useless. For instance, threeyear-old Ludo is forever asking to play ‘Noply’ (Monopoly), but has yet to grasp that the object of the game is to bankrupt your opponents. During a typical game, he will bring proceedings to a halt by scooping up the array of banknotes I have placed before him and passing them out to the other players. ‘Here go, Mummy,’ he will say, handing over a couple of £500 notes. Caroline’s response is to beam enthusiastically at him — ‘Thank you, Ludo’ — which just adds to my annoyance. I feel like Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
My daughter, who is four, prefers Snakes and Ladders — or, rather, the version of the game that Caroline has taught her whereby you go up the ladders and up the snakes. When I play with her, I insist on sticking to the rules which means that whenever she lands on a snake she bursts into tears and accuses me of ‘cheating’. The solution is to get Ludo to join in. His idea of how to throw a dice is to hurl it across the room as hard as he can. With a bit of luck, it ends up under the stove and play has to be abandoned.
The one thing to be said for board games is that there is only a finite amount of mess that children can make with them. The same is not true of Moon Sand, an alternative to Play-Doh that is currently all the rage. Billed as ‘sand you can mould’, it is essentially common-or-garden sand that has been treated with some chemical that leaves it permanently damp. Unfortunately, the batch we have is not quite damp gh, so any attempt to shape it into a is doomed. When you lift up one of rightly coloured buckets it is supplied with, the sand inevitably ends up all over the floor. Since nine-month-old Freddie has just started crawling — and consumes everything in his path — this means I have to spend the entire time on all fours, armed with a brush and dustpan.
I have to confess that spending time with my children has given me a renewed appreciation for Caroline. How on earth can she stand it? In the past, I have scoffed at the notion that being a housewife can be considered ‘work’, but now I know better. It is actually a form of hard labour, the domestic equivalent of breaking up rocks with a pickaxe. No wonder Arthur Scargill managed to persuade the miners to go on strike in the face of pit closures. It wasn’t the prospect of unemployment that spurred them on, but the thought of having to spend more time with their families. Compared to childcare, disappearing into a pit for nine hours a day is a holiday in the sun.
Will it get any easier as the little monsters get older? I am told by those in the know that once they reach the age of five they become a lot more fun to be with, though it all starts to go downhill again when they are about ten and doesn’t let up until they are well into their twenties. Given that my wife is pregnant with number four, and exactly five years will separate our youngest from our eldest, that means I have at least 20 years of misery ahead. Does anyone know of any cheap offices to rent?
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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