Well January has flown by as I hoped it would.
I’m not one to wish away time but we can all agree this particular month is not one of the better ones. (I’m a Summer person, June and July hit the spot nicely.)
The most obvious reason for this being the weather.
My one irritation with January so far is not the cold itself, but what the cold is doing to my punctuality. It is harming it. The minutes it takes to de-ice the windscreen of my little Golf in the morning are minutes I do not have. (And despite this happening repeatedly, I have not learnt to factor them in yet).
I stand there, like a lemon, chipping away at inches of ice that won’t budge while resenting the fact Joel won’t let me pour boiling water over it.
“It’ll crack the windscreen,” he laments as I boil the kettle.
“We’re 15 minutes late. Crack away I say. At least I’ll have good vision.”
(A Google search revealed he is right, it’s not good for the glass, though my parents used to do this all the time and their glass seemed to survive.)
Occasionally, like this morning, he will bark remarks at me through an open window: “Angie! You’ve got to really give it a good swipe. Put some welly into it. Big swipe.”
He’s dangling out of Maia’s bedroom unnecessarily miming the action, but on a large exaggerated scale, which only enrages me more.
“What? GO AWAY JOEL. GO AWAY.”
The ice is rock solid and seemingly dense, no matter how much “welly” I put into it, it is in fact, frozen. My useless scraper is barely scratching the surface, literally.
Minutes pass by and Maia grows more and more restless in the back: “Mummy we’re going to be late! Mummy can we just go? You can drive in this Mummy, you can see.”
Sure, I can see if I crane my neck to peek through the bottom 20cm of transparent windscreen. But no, I said, I could not safely drive in this.
“Sorry darling, we’ll leave earlier tomorrow, I promise…”
I have learnt to stop making promises I cannot keep. This has happened a handful of times now and can only be put down to sheer disorganisation and failure to get up on time. (Should I ever have to write on some kind of late-note at school, this is exactly what I plan to say.)
Somehow, we still made it to school on time on those icy mornings. By the time we’d got to school, many more organised parents had already left, freeing up spaces along the road.
Well, it worked out most of the time. Friday was not one of those times. I have blocked out the finer details of that morning, probably because of all the shame, but what I can recall is feeling immensely frazzled. And the anger, I can remember Maia’s sadness and anger very clearly. And her disappointment in me.
“It won’t happen again Maia. We will be on time on Monday.” (We were…)
“You said that last time Mummy.”
We were not “Quick, the gate is still open, go, go, go. Love you darling, bye,” kind of late.
We were, “Please walk your child to the school OFFICE” kind of late.
Which is every parent’s nightmare kind of late. A true parenting blunder.
It’s not completely unforgivable, it’s just… embarrassing. For everyone.
Though that wasn’t my main emotion. My main emotions were guilt and sympathy for Maia.
She does not like being in the wrong in any way. And being this late was wrong, wrong, wrong.
I’ve promised myself I will not let it happen again… I bought some de-icer today.
