In the nearly five years I’ve been writing this column, I’ve sometimes been accused of making up the more alarming things that have happened to me. This is not the case, as many of my more incident-free columns should sadly prove. ‘Please,’ I say to family and friends, damning myself with every word, ‘if I made stuff up, my column would be a lot more exciting.’
It’s just that when something unlikely or horrifying does happen to me, I jump at it with both hands. The sad, obvious truth about parenting is that much of it is very boring. The sad, obvious truth about writing about parenting is that ‘much of it is very boring’ will not suffice. Knowing this cannot remedy the fact that there are simply weeks in which nothing of any interest happens to me at all, and I’m forced to tackle things from whatever angle I can. This was a problem when I had one child, who often did very little or, worse, did nothing but the one thing I’d already written an article about some weeks previously. I’ve so far avoided writing a column entitled: ‘Yet more adventures in potty training’, but I could have done for most of 2022. And now I have a daughter, I find she alternates between doing very little and doing things that her brother has already done. All of which means, to paraphrase Vivian Mercier’s famous review of Waiting for Godot, ‘Not only does nothing happen, nothing happens twice.’
