Don’t Tell Mum

I’ve just had one of those portals to another realm moments.

    Chatting to Hubbles, not far off 18 now, the conversation lead to our old coffee table. This was a big heavy chunky reclaimed wood beast that served us well for several houses. (Sadly not this small one.) Hubbles said he remembered him and elder brother Boom placing a balloon under one of the legs - and it didn’t pop. Then they got nervous about getting it out again - it has to pop right? Who’s gonna be the one? They teamed up and both survived, as did the indestructable bloody balloon. No amazing punchline, the story itself isn’t the thing - The Thing is how my mind went pop.

    Obviously I know all my kids have their own minds, thoughts, shenanigans with their friends - yet it only just struck me that they had/have an entirely secret world within my own - in the house. With each other, or alone, there is whole Other Life that I am not part of. 

    I know… I already knew. Shrieks and thuds from other rooms are a constant, I regularly found a box of icing sugar at the bottom of Boom’s bed, there was that hilarious piece of film I found… (Oh where is that?) Me and my bruvs had our Other World within Mum and Dad’s World, I have my own secret life from Roving Blade and the kids. All clues. But all of a sudden I WANT TO KNOW what else they all got up to in this other world. This Other World.

    Hubbles thought my epiphany face was amusing and shared how back in one particular house (we judge time by houses as we’ve moved so often) he climbed up on the kitchen counters to get at the medicine tubs above the high cupboards. He would have been between two and eight in this house. The medicine tubs were up high for a reason. Hubbles’ reason however was that medicines made you feel better so he wanted some. He wasn’t feeling unwell, he just wanted to feel EVEN BETTER. So, as difficult as the task was, he managed to get into the tubs and took one of everything.

     WHA?

    At that age he wouldn’t have ever had a tablet, it would have always been a spoonful of something. The little shit!

    Where the fuck was I? Or his dad? Or anyone? 

    Other World.

    I’ve decided I want to create a group for the four kids to swap stories/remind each other of past ventures/share larks - without me in it (I’ll set it up, coz they won’t, then I’ll bugger off). On some significant date I want to be allowed back in to read it all. 

    They’d never pick up a pen - this way they might egg each other on and have a giggle. But it’s still unlikely. One of Mum’s stooopid ideas… If they did it I bet they’d never let me back in - or keep the really juicy tales back. Maybe I shouldn’t know this stuff - maybe that’s the point… There’s a ton of stuff we all got up to on our old Home Ed gatherings that Roving Blade never needs to know. He was a Grand Master-Worrier. Still is. I’m keeping schtum.

    Telling my now 22yo daughter that I once flung her into the air as a babby at Nanny M’s house and bashed her head into a light-fitting spike didn’t get the ‘Ha ha so funny’ reaction I’d expected - she was horrified and made me feel a previously unexplained dent in the top of her head. ‘Oh shit!’ At the time both me and my bruv had gone ‘Oh shit! Don’t tell Mum!’ We were both in our thirties…

    Maybe the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows will have a word for it? There is one for the sudden realisation that the strangers you pass have full lives. (It’s sonder. Son-der. Pronounced sonder.) Is there one for: your kids are even more mental than you think? Is there one for: your mum is even more mental than you think?

    But there was another mind-pop - about that old coffee table. Hubbles wouldn’t have remembered a time before it, it would have been massive to the kids then yet the perfect height for them. It was a coffee table, dinner table, artist studio, lego platform, den, stage, launch pad, kitten zoo, keeper of all discarded treasure, supporter of tired feet, part of my secret world, part of theirs. It lived in four of our houses, and then us practically-minded parents sold it off and sent it away when we moved here five years ago. ‘You lot just dump your shit on it when you come in and there’s no room to get round.’ 

    I hope that old table is well loved wherever it is now. I’ve never liked this house much. It’s never felt homely. The kids don’t gather in the living room, it’s too small and doubles as Roving Blades’ office. At Christmas we borrow folding chairs from Reg next door and wipe down the big table in the conservatory (my bedroom) that otherwise serves as the excess office dump, Covid testing zone, swimming bag station and camera battery graveyard. We only kept that as RB’s desk and got rid of the chairs. He uses a smaller desk now. The conservatory makes a crap office coz there’s light bouncing off the computer screen no matter where you put it. Could we make it into a gathering place? I think it’s too late.

    When my daughter is back from uni in a week or so my youngest will be turfed out of her bedroom and slink back to the corridor laughingly referred to in the estate agent’s bumph as the dining room. I will have to clear all the folding and golf shit off the bed. I’ve never managed to get this house to work.

    In quiet moments you can find me fantasising over pictures of really tiny houses and clever space solutions on Pinterest. In what Other World lives my brain? In Cabin Porn World. In real life I am ramming cupboard doors shut with all my weight and kicking avalanched shoes back up to camp four. Everyone stays in their own pod now. I refer to my dream tiny cabins as pods. 

    RB has banned the word pod.

    Oh the sobbing when he posts up a photo of small savages lobbing cushions at each other in dinosaur-carpeted crash sites. All the mess. Utter chaos. I can hear it. (It was wonderful.) And in the background, there will be the coffee table. 

    It has taken its secrets with it. Ooh if coffee tables could talk… If coffee tables could set up online chat groups… If I knew the half of it… 

    I’d like to reclaim it, rereclaim it, and make a den underneath. I’d curl up in my tiny ((pod)) and ask it, ever so nicely, to spill the beans. I’m imagining I’d look up to find OH SHIT DON’T TELL MUM carved on the underside.