Me: Ok, I’m going to tell you my all-time best joke: what did the villagers call Postman Pat when he retired?
Family: What?
Me: Pat!
I collapsed laughing. My family regarded me stony-faced. They’d heard this one a thousand times. My older children (Clio, twelve and Rory, ten) got it, but it swooped way over four-year-old QueenBee’s head, then plummeted to the floor where it foundered, flapped and died a death that all such awful jokes deserve.
How is that even supposed to be funny? Rory asked.
The family was sitting around the supper table, swapping jokes in a very different atmosphere from that at a drunken dinner party where the quips become excessively crasser and funnier as wine bottle levels drop; my favourite jokey situation. (But children do not mix with either alcohol or crude jokes, or – most of the time – even funny jokes.)
Despite tonight’s sobriety and very unfunny jokes, I was surprised and delighted, as I am increasingly of late, to realise how much I was enjoying my children’s company. The older two have lost the demanding, whiny, all consuming ego-centricity of very small children, and are actually quite entertaining pre-adolescents. Their maturity (sometimes) sets a tone that QueenBee, being outnumbered, has to follow.
One of my girlfriends, who also happens to be one of my favourite people in the world, has a two-year-old who is sick. The toddler has had a raging fever for over a week and my friend has had to battle illness, accompanied by sleeplessness and low blood sugar. I cannot imagine her exhaustion. Well, actually I can. I’ve been there. I’ve done that. Got the T-shirt and it sucks. So this is for you, love. Read it and know that these days end. One day, you will look at your maturing child – one who got her own breakfast this morning so that you could have a lie-in; one who’s going to empty the dishwasher for you later – and laugh at the fact that she doesn’t find your jokes funny. In the meantime, hang in there. Give your little one lots of liquids, love and infant paracetamol and know that I’m thinking of you.
Vxx