it's been a strange week

It has been a strange week and you might wonder where I have been. I don’t think you need to know EVERYTHING, particularly since a lot of it will not be of strong interest to you or anyone else, plus I like to operate on a need-to-know basis. I have been in Griffith, and in Cootamundra, and Junee, and all of those places did, I think, benefit considerably from my wise and sensitive presence, spreading a little touch of sophistication and gentle intelligence which god knows the Bush needs so much. I was also in Canberra which, once again, is kind of pretty much the greatest place on earth, and I loved my time there, big shout outs to Gus's and the crazy guys at the NLA! I have also been in a bit of a fug, partly from driving too far too much at night – that knocked me out for a day, pretty much. So it’s been a bit hazy, overall.

Tonight I am writing this babysitting April. It was not a great sit, and I am not a tremendous sitter. I go for the easy options: DVD on (it was Yo Gabba Gabba – pretty amusing), get a bunch of books together etc and try to get her into the idea of being read to as a preliminary to going to sleep (though she forcefully told me a couple of times ‘I’m not going nigh-nighs’; how I hate to hear those words, from anyone). We read a lot of books, she has quite a selection, some of them wordy as hell, others not a bit. Some of them just numbery-lettery books with no stories and just pictures (god, April has an amazing vocabulary, though she did early on tell me she couldn’t find ‘the thing to put in the thing’, and I had to get her to show me that she meant the array of plastic popsicle makers – truthfully, I had to struggle a bit just then to figure out how to describe them, so fair enough). I actually thought she was probably going to sleep, then she got up and wanted to watch Yo Gabba Gabba again, and then she also wanted to push the doll’s swing against the television and ask me the tough questions about her destructive activities in the living room (usually, ‘is that funny?’, to which I would truthfully answer, ‘no’). Then she took her nappy off and went to the toilet (I mean literally – she sat on the toilet) which wasn’t what I wanted to happen (the first part particularly) and then she started grizzling for Mummy, and by this time I – look, I have no excuses, I’m just a piece of shit – said ‘Mummy’s not here, she’ll be back later’, how callous! And then she said she wanted to open the back door and I said we can’t open the back door, why do you want to do that? And she said ‘To see Mummy’, and started crying, and I’m like jesus, and then she left the room which is to my mind a kind of control thing, little kids will leave the room to test you and make you follow them, so I always wait a little before I do follow, which I always do because I am so freaking scared they will hang themselves or something. And she was in earshot (so, alive) crying for Mummy etc and I thought well – she’s gone to bed, that’s good. But then when I went and looked at her she wasn’t in her bed, she was in Mummy’s bed. So you do some kind of sum, of course, along the lines of, she’s in bed that’s good, it’s the wrong bed that’s bad, without a nappy on that’s bad, but she did go to the toilet recently that’s good, she’s sleeping soundly that’s good, and so on. I just went and checked on her again and she still is, like a little angel, probably pickling in her own piss in her parents’ bed and they may not necessarily thank me for that, though if I know anything about being a parent, and I don’t, it won’t be the worst thing they go through in a particular week.

And now I am sitting here feeling mildly ill and very sleepy, and hearing weird whoops and shouts and even cackles in the street outside and thinking that’s all pretty odd, and do I have anything else to tell you? No, I do not, or if I do, I’ll tell it to your face when I see you next.

* Later. Yes she did wet the bed. April, if you're reading this in ten years, I can delete it if you want. Also: the whoops and shouts were from a party across the road.