I will stop complaining about the task of opening Chupa Chups lollipops whose wrappers were clearly spun from plastic by the T-1000 from Terminator 2. Or the difficulty of reading, and remembering, each of the various all the emails I get from the school about all 136 non-uniform days that take place each calendar year.
I will cease moaning about the horrors of parenting while sick myself, in the manner of someone who believes there is a government department that should be swooping in to take my place, or the chore of getting my children to eat anything other than cheesy pasta and cake, and the attendant hardship of having to suffer their constant requests for more pasta and more cake.
On that point, I will take greater pains to make them a more diverse menu of dinners and lunches and stop acting as if I am one unpaid freelance bill away from hiring the personal chef who will solve this dilemma for me. I will monitor their viewing diet also, and never again have to explain to my six-year-old son what a ‘death squad’ or a ‘Hawk Tuah’ is. I will be a more vigilant (but less frequent) contributor to the rocketship-shaped piggy bank that acts as a swear jar in our kitchen. I will occasionally use said swear jar to buy nice things for my children, rather than raiding it to buy toilet roll or wine at short notice.
Oh, I will be a font of improvement this year. I will devise a way of zipping up my children’s coats while facing them, rather than forcing myself to stand behind them so I’m doing the same movement I do when I zip my own. Ditto their shoelaces. I will cease taking laundry from its place of drying to an intermediary holding point halfway up the stairs, in a putrid lie to myself that and this guileless charade represents a job done.
I will cease negative behaviours, namely: my constant practice of wondering aloud how much Bluey’s home – an entirely fictional, drawn house in a cartoon set in Brisbane, Australia – would be worth in British pounds; fretting over the preponderance of pockets in my toddler daughter’s clothing and loudly opining on what possible non-disgusting use said pockets could achieve for a two-year-old, reacting with refreshed horror upon every discovery of a mulched oaty bar in said pockets, as if it is a slight on my person I could not possibly have predicted.
And I will endeavour to cease taking joy from the misfortunes of children who I’ve judged to have treated my own kids poorly; the misfortunes of my own children, should they fall or otherwise enter calamity in an entertaining manner; the freedom offered by their sickness, in light of the opportunities for low-wattage parenting it affords; and the small sliver of unkillable satisfaction I take from any bad things that happen in my life, be they mid-journey vomits or inopportune infant swearing, on the grounds that for you, dear reader, they’ll make for a good column at least.
