Читать книгу William’s Progress - Matt Rudd - Страница 48

Step one: you must remain calm in the face of petty marital discord and not let it develop into a proper argument as it may have done in the time before children. Arguments take energy. You do not have energy. Whereas before, you could afford to spend days bickering about Marmite toast, bathroom usage and unappreciated long-stemmed roses, now you must centre yourself and allow these minor annoyances to wash away.

Step two: you must remain calm in the face of stressful situations as well. If you get a parking ticket, you must accept it and move on with your day. If someone, that someone being Isabel, spills red wine on the expensive white rug you bought for Christmas, you must shrug and volunteer to clean it. If you find yourself in Sainsburys still wearing your pyjama bottoms because you were halfway through getting dressed when your child woke up and started screaming (and if there’s one thing you’ve learned, it’s that you can only stop the screaming if you get to the child in the first ten seconds), but in your head, you’ve finished getting dressed and you only remember you haven’t when the checkout girl gives you a funny look, you must simply close your eyes, imagine a calm place, a garden perhaps, full of recently sprayed orchids, then pay the bill and leave quickly before anyone can call the police.

Step three: you must remain calm, even when it makes no sense to do so. Like when you haven’t slept continuously for more than an hour in six weeks, when you get home from work and have four hours of tidying to do before you can have dinner, which you can’t have because it’s then your turn to take the baby because your wife is exhausted and then you find the only way to get your child to sleep is by jogging around with him in a tight anticlockwise circle while reciting ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ backwards in the voice of Barry White. For an hour.

I am still struggling with step one.