Return to normal

I am repacking my bags. That's how I feel right now. All today there has been a triangular struggle for power, played out in the kitchen, front room, school room. A three-way split. First it is Shark and Tiger, locked in combat, gripping four hands around one pair of scissors. For the moment the scissors are skewered in the slice between the combatants. The sharp point, thankfully, pointing down to the floor. So only the wooden boards, this time.

Next, a howling starts. That is Squirrel. I can detect it from streets away. It is a sort of whooohooohoo and rises up like the cries of the dead on Halloween. And this time, I'm not watching the duel to the death, thank God. I'm sitting in the office with my head in my hands.

There was once a time when I would have jumped up at this dead cry howling through the house and rushed off to find my daughter, broken legged, perhaps, at the foot of the stairs. Not any more, matey, I think, as my head sinks into my arms. She'll be here in a moment, standing by my desk before dramatically crumbling to the floor in a reenactment of her sisterly embrace. And here she comes, looking red, battered and bruised, with tears washed over her face and her hair strangely twisted so that it looks like the back is at the front and the front is at the back.

An hour later it's Tiger and Shark again, wrestling it out on the sofa. Damage: a book on Julius Caesar (torn cover); the remote control (confiscated) and my temper (blown).

And it goes on. All day. Tiger v. Squirrel. Squirrel v. Shark. Shark v. Squirrel. Squirrel v. Tiger.

Dig says ignore it. He calls this the returning blues. It's really, he says, philosophically, a sort of settling in, an adjustment in the balance of things after a period of change. He says that this behaviour is inevitable. The angry attacks, the sudden weeping, the unprovoked fighting. And he says that once upon a time he had only to bear this sort of behaviour from me.