Remember that promise of lemonade?

Squirrel, Shark and Tiger are behaving oddly. Like agreeably. This outbreak of cooperation has been ongoing for several days. All this mutual support, like a deep underground rumble, is unnerving me, and I ask myself, Are they plotting something?

Are they huddling together in some strange tripletty-mind-pact, wordlessly? Plotting perhaps to lull me into a delusion that right now we have a content and happy home? Allowing me to rest that thought for a moment on my naive and smug backside? Long enough perhaps for me to consider that I am doing an OK job, what with single mothering, home educating, and keeping up with the laundry.

Perhaps when they've put a complacent foolish grin on my smug face, they'll proceed to wipe it off. They might lure me into the kitchen. Here they'll suddenly explode this satisfied atmosphere and Grit's brain into the bargain, by responding to some secret signal and reverting to triplet type. Like that signal when Tiger grabs Shark's head and slams it on the kitchen table hollering SHARK IS PISSING ME OFF! And then Squirrel will start crying that ghastly howling abandoned baby wolf noise that whoowooowooos like an ice pick skewering my synapses. And Shark of course will be fighting back by then, snarling and grabbing Tiger by the hair so she can draw her fingernails down Tiger's sweet face and ruin her chances of marrying into British royalty forever, despite the horse riding and skiing lessons for which we are specifically paying with that goal in mind.

And how will these little triplets justify this massacre of both the happy house and Grit's brain? It will not be of course prompted by something significant like our shared concerns over the collapse of the UK banking system, and how are we going to keep a roof over our heads. No. It will be something more fundamental to our lives, like Where is the lemonade? You promised lemonade! You said last April we would make lemonade and now look! It is October! You have not bought the lemons! And that is why we have to do this right now and put dynamite under the roof of this house! Then Grit will be that normal failing shit mother again; the one who blames herself for this mess and tells herself how wrong and badly she is doing everything and who proves it by wading across the kitchen floor knee-deep in last week's laundry.

But, like I said, none of this bad blame and misery stuff is happening. Not at all. After breakfast Shark, Squirrel and Tiger jump happily into the car. We drive to the woods to listen to a storyteller, which mummy Grit calls an English lesson, and no-one is phased by that, and then we run about and collect leaves and twigs and conkers to help tell stories. Afterwards, we come home and eat lunch nicely with table talk like, Will you pass the apple juice please? Yes! Here it is! Thank you!




Listen! Can you hear rumbling?