This post is mostly for me. That is to say, please read on, I’m glad you’re here, etc etc. I hope you will find something useful in it. At the very least this sausage and fennel seed pasta, that we eat at least once a week in this house. I often throw in some finely chopped kale after I’ve fried off the meat, for iron and colour, but it’s a very adaptable little recipe, very easy, and you can buy the ingredients in your local supermarket. It’s the first thing I cooked after taking a hiatus from the kitchen. I love the process, I love the cooking smells, and I love the result.

Anyway, as I was saying, this post is mostly for me because it will make me feel as if I have done something in the past couple of days. I have a baby who likes to be cradled at all times. Even at 3am, which can be cute it he’s cooing and looking at me in a slightly judgy way as if to say: “Are you going to get off your phone and give me the other boob?”.

Last night after Ray woke for the fifth time in as many hours, I asked Joab to take over. I rarely do this in the night because Joab cannot afford to fuck up in his job, because vulnerable children depend on him. So, he usually whacks on his eye mask and puts in his earplugs before bed. I, on the other hand, can quite afford to make mistakes. I can put the butter in the oven, the surface spray in the fridge, and my phone in a place that I cannot remember until someone calls it, because none of it will really matter. Children won’t suffer.

Joab is 31, which means this morning, even after an hour of rocking the baby back to sleep at 3am, he woke up and looked the same kind of handsome and rested that he always looks. While I looked like I was storing two blue Ikea bags under my eyes.

And because I’ve taken several steps back rather than forward this week so far, it means that a house that was sort of tidy on Monday, and a bathroom that was clean enough for me to casually, unapologetically point any visitor asking to use the loo in the right direction, is now grubby. In the kitchen, every single lid is separated from its container; every surface gives you an idea of what we had for dinner last night; every corner of every room is a holding place for a pile of something - clothes, paperwork, Amazon deliveries I forgot I ordered at 3am, and haven’t put away yet.

I call this house the house of abandoned tasks. And my brain the shed of abandoned ideas.

I wish, wish, wish I could be a happy person in perpetual chaos. I am chaotic by nature, so you’d think this would be easy. But just because I am a naturally untidy person who doesn’t know how to use the reminders or the calendar on my phone, chaos does not make me comfortable.

And a day of doing nothing with a baby is never a day of doing nothing. It is a day of doing a series of small, unfulfilling tasks that set you back.

Here are some of the things I’ve been doing that have not helped me feel less chaotic this week:

TOO MUCH PHONE

I’ve got eyestrain, mostly from being on HURR, looking for potential dresses to hire for my wedding in September, with no strategy for how to search properly or apply filters. I’m being presented with 5,000 unsuitable things. The types of outfit Melania Trump would covet.

I don’t want a wedding-wedding dress. I’ve played with the idea of a trouser suit, perhaps a jacket like this from Bella Freud with some wide leg trousers. But then I end up saying: “I don’t know! Will I look a bit too mother of the bride in that?”

The thing I’ve felt most comfortable and most glam in over the past couple of years has been a wide leg satin jumpsuit from H&M, bought in the 10 minute gap between getting off the tube at Brixton and waiting for the number 2 bus home. But I’m definitely not going to pull something off the hanger like that again, on a whim.

The solution? I’ve bought a breast pump so that I can express milk, leave the baby with Joab and head to THE SHOPS to get hot, sweaty and upset at the reflection of my bum in various changing room mirrors around London.

TOO FEW PROPER MEALS

Ray, in his carrier (often looking up at me as I stuff another popadom into my mouth) looks concerned. Why not have some lunch? he seems to be saying. My snacking turns into one all day-long meal. Ginger cake. Yoghurt. Parma ham. A banana. Some giant chocolate buttons. Toast and peanut butter. Old granola with burnt raisins. My middle son’s untouched sandwich, because he snuck out to eat a KFC at lunch and isn’t hungry. I just can’t bear to chuck good food away. Yesterday I even found myself eating some cooked chicken with an unidentified best before date. This is my version of playing dangerously right now.

SLEEP ENHANCERS THAT HAVE NO PURPOSE ANYMORE

Joab and I used to get occasional bouts of insomnia. Not anymore, my friends. Not anymore. In my head, I’m still living in that time of unexplained sleep problems. Now the culprit is lying next to me, all 10lbs of him, and yet for some reason I’m still spritzing lavender on my pillow at night, taking magnesium tablets, drinking valerian tea. All the things that promise uninterrupted sleep. If only we didn’t have a baby.

What I should be doing, really, is taking something to stop me from sleeping. It’s torture to be in a state of total relaxation, and know I’ve got to sit up, unclip my bra strap, feed the baby, then spend ages burping him. Only to do it all over again less than hours later.

BAD JEANS

Maybe I’ll stop wearing jeans. Like a bitchy or careless friend, my jeans of late just make me look bad. Susie Cave recently said on a podcast she couldn’t remember the last time she wore jeans. Maybe if I, too, stop wearing them, I’ll instantly look as startingly glamorous as she does.

Perhaps the answer is to spend £350 on jeans that are handmade in LA. I hope not, because my chipped front tooth needs some attention.

Now I’m looking back at the list, the solutions to my problems could be summed up very neatly, in one sentence. This is the kind of straightforward advice that Joab always gives, and it’s why I love him:

Put your phone in a drawer, eat three proper meals a day, put the lavender spritz away for a couple of years, and wear those adidas trackies you love.

Who needs a therapist?

I want to mention this: At the weekend my daughter and I watched a very old woman, with a very curved spine smiling as she took photographs of the daffodils.

It’s amazing to think that she still finds such wonder in a patch of flowers, my daughter said. Just like Ray.

There does seem to be a lot of similarities between the very old and the very young. I suppose because at either end of the age spectrum, life has to be lived in the moment. When you’re a baby, you don’t have control of where you go, or what you do, much.

In very old age, or if you have a long-term illness, you can’t dash from a to z, either. Sometimes you need other people to care for you, and you have no choice but to stay still. To find pleasure in what is immediately in front of you, or around you.

Like the woman who was in the park with her young chaperone, taking photographs of the daffodils and smiling, Ray smiles as he watches sheets on the washing line blowing in the wind. To him, they are the most thrilling thing ever.

I’m not sure I can accept standing still in life unless it is totally necessary, but I wish I could, because in the past couple of days I’ve felt frustrated. Frustrated at being stuck inside for hours at a time with a bleeding nipple (I’m on another course of antibiotics), with a baby who cries a lot.

Most of my frustration is directed at myself, for being frustrated. Why can’t I enjoy the sunshine in the garden, and Ray’s beautiful smiles, and full control of all the TV channels, and a fridge full of nice food? All of these things are privileges. And yet… part of my psyche is telling me I need to get out into the world, to DO something.

Here is a poem about going out to the cinema. My sister and I used to read it to our kids. The poet Frank O’Hara is encouraging mothers to let their kids go and watch a film. To let them have their own adventures, and give the mothers the time and space to have theirs, too. This was written decades ago, of course, and the idea of a child wanting to go to the cinema has long been encouraged. Good films are good for the soul. Even bad films can make us feel better about life.

My middle son still goes to the cinema with his friends and cousins and I always gladly pay for his ticket. An afternoon away from his phone screen, or PS5, or TikTok. At least at the cinema he’s watching something with a beginning, middle and end, is what I think.

What have you done recently that has made you feel a bit crap? Or on the contrary, really good.

And please, if you’ve liked this post remember to give it a ❤️ .