Two jobs, both badly

I am going through one of those life phases where I am doing everything Wrong or Badly. I am overwhelmed, out of control, and powerless.

Detecting these failures, the crockery is conspiring against me. Ikea plates are throwing themselves on the floor and wine glasses are hurtling to the crock sink, driven, I am sure, by a mean desire to smash themselves to smithereens simply to tell me how hopeless a household manager I am and to make my domestic life as miserable as possible. Give it a day and the knives and forks will be whispering to each other and turning on me. Worse, someone has stolen the door handle to the garden door so I cannot escape to the Wendy house. Add to that the roof in the office kitchen which has sprung a leak, the toaster, the gate, and the kitchen floor, and you have an all round view of personal failure and domestic misery. I am now, in fact, so overwhelmed by household disrepair that I try not to be mindful of the poor bloke who took himself off to the local woods to hang forlornly from an oak tree because the oven wouldn't work.

I know why this is, of course - this feeling of being out of control while everything about me disintegrates. This is because I am working. I am six metres away from the kitchen table, sitting in the office, typesetting Twenty Not Very Interesting Chapters About A Sentence. (OK, it isn't called that, but it may as well be.) Print run 400, in your university library soon. Some desperate graduate sweating over a thesis might request a copy in 2012. We can always hope.

Because while I am focused on this, I'm doing nothing else. I'm not being a mummy, nor a home educator. I'm not hovering about the kitchen for example, picking unicorns up from the floor and complaining. I'm not monitoring usage of toilet rolls, or watching for fingers in the sugar bowl, and I'm not screening access to a range of household objects nor selecting fun books for a reading session. And the inevitable happens. Left alone, without a minder, Shark, Tiger and Squirrel are destroying what's left of my home.

When I re-enter the kitchen from my working life in the office (two hours negotiated time at a cost of £60*), I can barely open the door. On the table are spirits, apparently. They are composed of toilet rolls, plastic tape, pipe cleaners and various 'found' objects. These found objects - I'll list them now should I wonder where, in future, they have gone - include the centre of the tape dispenser (without which the tape cannot be dispensed), half a pack of sanitary towels, a toothbrush, one rubber glove and the only key to the bicycle padlock, bought last summer by Dig for my mental health when dealing with the au pair who had already lost the keys to the entire house.

Selecting and combining this assortment with the contents of the craft bucket has kept Tiger, Shark and Squirrel busy since breakfast. They have produced a river spirit, a wood spirit, a water spirit and a rock spirit. The floor is covered in a layer of clippings, offcuts, and reject spirit-making material.

I look at their happy little spirits, indistinguishable from junk that I would sweep into the bin at a moment's notice - at least before the centre of the tape dispenser caught my eye - and know that it is not only the mess and the unhappy knowledge that I cannot be in two places at once, it is knowing that I have the educational responsibility of three small children. I should have been here, a home educator, helping, not there, in the office, staring at Chapter Three. While I have sat there, the children have been alone, amusing themselves with everything but the bleach. And only because we haven't got any. I should have been reading poems about tree spirits while their little fingers were busy with glue and silver foil; I should have been telling stories about Old Man Willow who follows us mumbling, or planning our walk to the willow fields. And now I am in pain and guilt and misery all over again, knowing that while I am clearing up in the kitchen, I am sure I am doing this home education thing all wrong again, and while I am working in the office, I am giving it my half attention at best, partly because it is worthless, unsatisfying work, and partly because I am itching to be away from it.

In truth, catching sight of the spirit land leads me straight to one of those regular soul searching moments I probably share with many other home educators. Why am I doing this, and leading myself to failures? Why don't I shovel them off to the school down the road, get some free childcare everyday, put the house of chaos to order, mend the oven, the toaster and the gate, redecorate, work in ease, wear smart clothes, get the kids to bed early, reclaim my marriage and life, do a day's work properly, rebuild a career, and earn enough money to buy new shoes?

I can't answer all those questions right now. Because now I need to sweep the floor, wrap the shattered glass in newspaper, pick up the unicorns, consider things could be a lot worse, load the dishwasher, photograph the rock spirit, avoid looking at the front room, flush the toilets, not think about the oak tree, and go and kiss Shark, Squirrel and Tiger night night, say it is OK about the 30 metres of kitchen foil, then go back to work and listen to the plop plop plop of the rain in a bucket while I juggle jobs badly and typeset Chapter Four.

* See entry 22nd April