I was listening to the radio the other morning, watching the bread defrost while the rain splattered the blackened window panes. The presenter was saying that midweek, mid-November, is when we northern hemisphere-ites are at our lowest and most prone to despair.
It was one of those mornings where the fridge stares back like a hungry ghost, the cat gets cornflakes for breakfast and the transactions on which life, or more specifically parenting, is predicated, feel awfully fragile. Slumped there, in a cast-off T-shirt and a pair of inelegant slipper socks, wondering where the dawn was and more importantly what possible combination of passata and banana might make a suitable sandwich filling for the lunchboxes, the newscaster’s words hit their target.
There is a popular construct doing the rounds that happiness is shaped like a U-bend. We start out youthful and optimistic, then slalom downhill as we age and are obliged to negotiate the perils of career, marriage, children, money, ageing parents, middle-aged spread and long nights in front of the rolling news with the Chardonnay bottle.
Then, somewhere around our mid-40s, maybe early 50s, we hit rock bottom; we arrive at the base of the bend, and disembark at a station named Nadir.
The same research also contends that people without children are generally happier. This surprised me: surely that flies in the face of all the cosy images of fulfilment we cling to, right from buttoning our offspring into their first Babygros to shelling out for a pair of size-nine Dr Martens.
Lobotomised in slipper socks
Maybe the research is right. Maybe we get so exhausted by the demands of parenting that we burn out. Maybe we end up lobotomised in a pair of slipper socks, staring at a carton of passata and a bunch of lime-green bananas, wondering how we ever got here.
We educate and nurture our children. We go grey, wrinkle, lose the car keys, lie awake worrying about exams and points and our shrinking planet and random acts of violence on the night bus.
And, if we’re lucky, they’ll survive the ride home, and the damn exams, and get to sit around on fountain ledges in European capitals for a couple of years, rolling their Rs and their cigarettes.
Or maybe that’s not enough to aspire to. Maybe your kids are ironing their lab coats and singing in French to your Labradoodle and making their own tuna salads for lunch, their futures mapped out, lines drawn, pencils sharpened.
I knew a woman who, when her children were little, systematically rotated their toys every month, punctually putting away the jigsaws and the Play-Doh extruders and the bucking plastic donkey; boxing away one lot of perfectly intact toys that she had wiped clean with a damp cloth and a squirt of eco-friendly washing-up liquid, replacing the trove with another previously neatly stored cache.
“Ooh,” breathed her efficient children in humble delight, clasping their nimble fingers together in anticipation of hours of stimulating fun, their synapses firing on all cylinders as they rediscovered their hibernating My Little Pony set complete with tail brush, or their squeaky-clean dough-maker, or their talking globe that jauntily told them the capital of Mongolia and the surface area of the Great Sandy Desert (without mentioning rising Arctic sea levels or polar bears in bikinis).
She invited me into her home once for a cup of something organic, possibly blended from pomegranate seeds and beeswax. She looked at me through her solemn blue eyes with disappointment, delicate fingers hovering over a plate of pecan wedges dipped in sanctifying grace, when I told her that I’d more hope of somersaulting down Grafton Street with my knickers over my tights than finding the time to rotate toy boxes. In our house, on a good day, I told her, we just about use our own toothbrushes.
Anyway, the good news, according to the research (carried out by people whose mothers rotated the toy boxes) is that life takes an upward swing after the U-bend. Self-acceptance and an appreciation of simple pleasures will magnetise us back up again.
Despite the findings, I suspect that seeing our children break free from the caul of exams and points and the endless calibrating and recalibrating of their future within the tightening margins of our education system will fire us towards the light.
“The only way is up,” I told the man on the radio, as a watery sun started to break through and the cat put her bowl and spoon in the dishwasher, and bleak November shed another black morning.