Exhaustion kicks in. For two days, I am fairly useless unless the task in hand is sleeping. It never is. Nobody ever says "Daddy, can you sleep for ten hours?" The pillows never require test driving, the duvets are all broken in.
C is starting to sleep more consistently, merely waking for a nine 'o clock and five in the goddamn morning o' clock feed. It helps that she's getting mobile, dragging herself round on the floor. Or our bed, usually using our eyelids as handholds. This reminds me, I must trim her nails. My face looks like I've been washing it with a puma.
V is working a show schedule for most of the week, which means she has some mornings off. So I get to crash heavily out on the sofa for one of them, after doing the breakfast routines and dropping F off at playgroup.
God, it's bliss. I haven't had bonus sleep for months. Grunting and shambling is all I'm good for at the moment, everything seems too much. V shakes me awake to say she's going out to the spa after a while, and we'll meet up and do lunch later. I think that's what she says, anyway. It may equally be a dream about how my acting has won a Pulitzer during the Battle of the Somme, I'm not entirely clear.
My phone wakes me - something confusing about a voice job next week. The house is too quiet. V and C are out, I potter about fretting whether I understood the time and date in the phonecall correctly and trying to clear my fluffy head. Once I'm somewhere round the 80% functional mark, I head out to find the family.
V is at the local spa, signing up for a card. "Where's C?" she asks me as I come in.
"I thought you had her?" I say.
We look at each other for a second or two, then I sprint home in a mad panic.
Yes, I left the baby at home. Some of V's message didn't quite get through to me, namely the part where she told me C was asleep in her cot. The empty pram by the door didn't register.
She's fine, of course, happily lying in her cot enjoying the peace. I'm not. I'm rattled. All my parenting skills are immediately called into question. If something as basic as remembering to bring all the family along is beyond me at the moment, what else might I screw up? Correct sealing of nappies? Raw chicken for dinner? Instilling a functional sense of moral and spiritual responsibility that will see them through the nightmarish complexity of today's neoliberalist dystopia?
More sleep would probably help. Luckily, I'm too busy stressing about how tired I am, so I can't have any.
