For a woman who doesn’t pray, clean or partake in a certain well-known sexual shenanigan, I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time these days on my knees. So much so that I have recently had to take two pairs of trousers to the dry cleaners to be patched where they have worn through!
Why? Because I spend most of every Tuesday on the floor. Tuesday is “nana day”, when I look after my two-year-old grandson Arlo and operate from his level. Which is mostly very low down, what with toddlers being short-arses.
Occasionally we eyeball each other over the kitchen table when he dismisses my attempts to get vegetables down his gullet with a contemptuous wave of the hand and an imperious “I don’ like that.”
But mostly our activities are floor based, be that sitting on a rubber mat at his drop in singing and activity class, (that bloody bobbin is still being wound up by the way) or in the sandpit. Or on the sitting room floor, where we make up magical jungles and farm yards (dinosaurs included) and get all the jigsaws, bricks, cars, dollies, and plastic cakes out. I do all the voices of all the animals (apart from zebras and giraffes, which are really quite difficult).
It’s the first time I have ever given my full-on attention to a toddler. When my daughter was his age, she was with a full-time childminder and I was fighting for a career: either locked in a study writing filth, or on my way to a stand-up gig. Occasionally, I was pretending the gig was further away, just to spend more time out of the house. These days I don’t work on Tuesdays, unless I’m on tour and it really can’t be helped.
This is my second bite at childcare and I’m savouring every minute. I’m horribly aware in my sixties that these days pass too soon. I’m already noticing my grandson’s shoes looking big.
When I was in my thirties, I found trudging to the park and stopping at every puddle to throw a stone in really tedious: the swing pushing (complete with a fag in my gob) an utter torment. I couldn’t wait for the kid to grow up, speak full sentences, buckle her own car seat, and microwave her own dinner.
This isn’t so now: the world of the two-year-old is so much more interesting this time around, now that I have the time and the inclination to pick up another brown stick and wait 10 minutes for a squirrel to appear. I like witnessing my grandson’s brain cells developing; the penny-dropping moments of new things making sense; the joining in with pointing and clapping songs; his words linking up now, as if by string.
But most of all I like sharing the freedom of his imagination, how clothes pegs can be crocodiles, locking jaws with a rosemary bush, the magic carpet “up and down, up and down” towel, the circular mat “moon”. How puppet piggy is bad but blue rabbit is good; his low-level verbal burbling over small plastic animals; the intricacies of this fictional small world, over which he rules.
Sometimes I wonder if I should feel more guilty about how impatient I was with my own child, how much I resented giving her my undivided attention when I always felt I should have been doing something else – relieved to have a childminder on hand to eat at the fictional tea party.
My own mother was absent from my daughter’s early life, mostly due to geography. But having been a SAHM (stay-at-home mum) to three kids, I’m not sure her desire was really there. In any case, with her full-length calliper (a leg brace due to polio), floor play was always pretty tricky.
Admittedly, my own craving for a weekly hands-on session has taken me by surprise. I’m a changed woman: I can now bake three kinds of cake and for the first time in my life I have purchased a bun tray.
I didn’t even want a boy, I didn’t think I would bond, and I never anticipated the thrill of this small hand in mine, his arms around my neck (of course he might be trying to strangle me).
I am very aware that this love affair won’t last for ever, that I may only have 10 more years, if that. I have developed a pathological fear of the horrible local teenagers: bitchy girls and uncommunicative boys. Where does the sweetness go? How does it happen?
Right now, I have the sweetness. I also have the tantrums, appalling nappies, the blanking of the potty, the screaming for the television, the total non-negotiation over peas, carrots, broccoli and any meat (apart from cocktail sausages), the knowing smirk – and the occasional heart-breaking preference for “Pop- Pop”.
Fact is, I am happy on my knees. Maybe I feel like I’m doing some kind of penance? I might not have been a great mum, but I’m a shit-hot nana. Up until 6pm – at which point nana wants a bath, a glass of wine, and “that child” out of my sight.
This week I’ve been…
Listening… I was on holiday when the al-Fayed story was broadcast on TV but have been catching up on the horrific details via the BBC podcast Predator at Harrods. This is a disgusting tale of money and abuse, and it makes me feel soiled to have ever set foot in Harrods. At what price does that stupid green and gold bag come?
It’s another hideous example of the “little people” (women mostly) being silenced. This stomach-churning five episode series is available on BBC Sounds.
Reading… Clare Chambers’s Shy Creatures. A wonderfully evocative book set pre and post the Second World War. The novel revolves around a trio of secretive aunts, a hidden adolescent and a psychiatric hospital where a female art therapist wrestles with the guilt of an extra-marital affair, and the sudden arrival of an inmate cousin.
I’m about a third of the way through and hooked. Chambers’ writing is intriguing, detailed and sensitive and she has conjured up a fantastic depiction of how the “permissive society” would frequently backfire on women, whilst simultaneously offering them opportunities they never had before. There is a mystery at the heart of this book, and I can’t wait to find out the truth.
Post officing… which is the dismal sport of going to a Post office. I do this with gritted teeth, because the experience is so mind- numbingly joyless. This week I needed to buy 20 jiffy bags, so that I can send my nearest and dearest copies of my new memoir (plug).
The wait was so dreary and long-winded that I ended up sitting on the floor before eventually spotting a chair, at which point, I turned to the queue and in a loud voice asked, “Does anyone need this seat, more than I want it?”. There were no takers, and so I sat.
Jenny Eclair’s very funny memoir, Jokes, Jokes, Jokes is out now (Sphere, £25). For tickets to see Jenny Eclair’s brand new show Jokes, Jokes, Jokes Live!, visit jennyeclair.com
