Unhinged

Two hours sleep is not enough to survive on. It makes you slightly unhinged. Margaret Thatcher managed on four, and to be honest that explains a lot.

Last night we had meltdown. I’m still trying to get to the bottom of why it happened, but so far I’m stumped. 120 minutes kip is not sufficient to keep the brain cells whirring fast enough to do the necessary sleuthing. I’m chalking it up to ‘just one of those days’.

My daughter had had a twitchy evening, asking random questions, repeating herself, and nervously sticking her fingers in her mouth.

The volume got louder, the questions more off-kilter.

“Am I going to shrink. Shrink. SHRINK?” was the starter for ten (explained by the fact that her prescription for growth hormone hadn’t been ready at the chemists, so she knew she’d miss her injection for one night).

Next minute, it was “Is Hitler alive? Hitler. Hitler. HITLER!” (this one made me laugh, I must admit. She’d been learning about World War II in her history lesson. Apparently at one stage, she thought he was in the school toilets). 

“No, he’s dead. He died in 1945, sweetheart. Sixty something years ago.”

“Ah, so if he hadn’t died he’d be dead.”

“Er...yes.”

“IF HE HADN’T DIED HITLER WOULD BE DEAD.”

“That’s right.”

This was a bright spot in a dark night.

From this point onwards, my usually compliant, polite daughter clambered into her stubborn shoes and wouldn’t take the cement bastards off.

Getting her to have a shower was a battle I wish I’d never started. Getting her to clean her teeth was another. Persuading her to stop cleaning them was another. She didn’t want to go to bed, she got up six times for a wee, she turned her light back on countless times, searching her room for books she couldn’t find, wandering down the stairs to put them in her school bag and take them out again. All the time, all requests were ignored or given some serious attitude. “NO. I WON’T. I’M JUST DOING THIS. No, no, NO. I will NOT.” Every time I told her off, she giggled to the point of hysterics. Threats to ban favourite toys, and subsequent confiscations, had no impact.

I tried ignoring her because surely she’d flag, but after hours more of footsteps, bangs and crashes from her room, more visits to the loo, her dad ominously putting a shelf-load of books in a black bin-bag, more loud backchat, and finally, the piéce de resistance - wetting the bed (quite deliberately) at 4am, I gave up. Nothing, and I mean nothing was going to stop her mini-rampage. So I left her to it, and snatched a couple of hours kip.

This morning, I was shattered. My daughter, of course, was bright and breezy. 

She smiled up at me, bashfully. “I’m sorry, Mummy. I’m going to be really good today.”

Video is Eels - Unhinged

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Meltdown
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Meltdown

There are some things in life that are high on my list of “Stuff I Must Do More Often.” Standing in a shop trying to keep a lid on my daughter as her mounting panic threatens to spill over into hysteria is not one of them.

The shopping trip started so well. After some heavy Googling she had announced that we could buy her Hello Kitty-branded messenger-style school bag for next term from Argos, just down the road from us. I reserved it online and we headed into the store, while her dad and her brother went to look at the fish in the pet shop next door. I didn’t want him getting overexcited and begging me to buy toys for him. And my little boy’s got quite a bad track record, too (boom tish).

So the system worked. After paying, we collected the bag and I handed it to her in its cellophane wrapper, making the fatal mistake of feeling smug that I’d sorted this out so close to the beginning of the holidays, thus fending off nuclear-grade nagging.

Her face fell. She examined the package closely, and announced it was the wrong colour. My heart sank. I knew this wouldn’t end well.

“It’s got pink trim, sweetheart, just like in the catalogue.”

“It’s the wrong pink.”

“But there’s only one colour.”

“It’s baby pink in the catalogue. That’s dark pink.”

“Well, sometimes things look different in the photograph.”

“It’s the wrong one. There was another one.”

“There was only one bag, darling. There wasn’t a choice of colour.”

“This one is wrong.”

Her jaw was set. Her heels were cemented in. Her voice was getting louder and louder. Other customers turned round and began giving us looks; one woman in particular began to audibly tut. There’s nothing like strangers judging you to really help calm you down in a situation like this, but I ignored her. My daughter was now in danger of becoming hysterical, and I needed to find a solution.

I managed to keep my voice calm and even.

“Let’s talk to the lady in Customer Service. She can tell us if there are any other colours.”

“There are. I can’t have this pink, I can’t.”

This continued for what felt like hours, but was probably around ten minutes. Three members of staff, the Argos computer ordering system, and their bloody uselessly laid-out catalogue were brought into play. My daughter's voice, which when she gets panicky is like an armour piercing missile for the lugholes, reached hitherto unimagined volume levels. Heads continued to turn, but I resisted the urge to give them all a collective "JUST PISS OFF!". The boys returned from the pet store wide-eyed at the sight of our girl standing in the middle of the shop, about to reach meltdown level.

We finally managed to convince her that there was only one bag, and it only came in one colour. I gave her the choice. To be accurate I had to repeat the choice ten times before it finally registered through the maelstrom of her whirling thoughts. “You know we couldn’t find this bag anywhere else online. It’s either this one or you’ll have to have a completely different one from another shop.”

She agreed. Her lip was quivering, her hair was flopping over her face, where it had come loose from her hair slides, her eyes were wild and teary. But she agreed. We went home, feeling like we'd returned from a battle, not a retail experience. 

All is quiet on the Western Front since. I get the feeling I’ve not heard the last of this, and somehow, somewhere along the line, this Company Quartermaster is going to have a mutiny on her hands over the wrong supplies for the troops.

Video is The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots (Part 1)