Charlotte Philby's Parental Leave: 'Everything was fine,' says my mother during a curt telephone debrief
A mother's weekly dispatch from the pre-school frontline
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Your support makes all the difference.The kids have been to stay with my mum, to give us time to pack up the house. Time which was, in reality, spent excitedly knocking back a large bottle of Baileys before lying amid empty cardboard boxes and reels of bubble wrap, groaning, but not in a fun way.
"Everything was fine," my mum concedes during a surprisingly curt telephone debrief the day after the children's return. "Oh?" I say, surprised by the absence of accompanying anecdotes about my offspring's various achievements, or in-depth analysis of their toilet habits. There is no regaling of the moment on the Heath when she was accidentally mistaken for their mother – "at my age!" – nor so much of a whiff of the one-year-old's preternatural affinity for bird-watching.
"No, everything was fine," she barks, before launching, skull-first, into the subtext of the conversation: "Well, actually, yesterday morning I woke up at 5.30am to the sound of your son crying, whereupon your daughter asked me, with some animation, why my face was so squashed and whether it was because I was so very old," she continues.
"Well that's just absurd," I reply, "you're clearly very..." But she is momentarily deaf to external sounds: "So then she asked if I was going to die soon on account of being so very old, to which I responded that I wasn't intending on dying immediately, no, if it was all the same to her..."
I sigh: "Well, mum, she probably asked you that because you mean so much to her. You know she loves you very much, I'm sure she was relieved to get it off her chest; how did she respond?" There is a large sniff: "She said, 'Well, if you do die, at least I'll still have Grandma Fleur'."
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