my maidenhair

 

The days and nights are getting warmer and windier and the air inside the flat is on balance probably not as dry as the air out on the balcony, so I've brought my maidenhair fern indoors till summer's over. It will be terrorised by the naughty brother, who one day when bored bit holes in all the leaves of my never-never plant and has ignored it ever since, and who chewed all the pups off my spider plant when I foolishly moved it down off the top of a high cupboard last week because it was flourishing so beautifully. But the poor fern can't stay outdoors. 

Lenny gave me this fern for my birthday last year and rightly or wrongly, probably the latter, I took it as a bit of a passive-aggressive gesture on the part of his father who of course assisted him with that purchase. So it has been a point of pride to make this plant thrive and flourish, and of course, they're extremely beautiful when they do. I am careful to make sure I help Lenny organise birthday and Christmas and Father's Day presents, not for Dorian's sake but because Lenny deserves the happiness of giving a gift to his parent. I had to take him to a shop and send him in by himself with money a couple of days before Mother's Day, and it was one of the sadder small moments of novice single parenting. I've done a full year of all those dates now and it's ok. 

The grittiest parts of the week of parenting/work/managing school/staying home 23 hours out of 24 are done, now. I always underestimate at the beginning of the week just how brutal it is going to be, which is probably a survival mechanism a bit like forgetting the pain of childbirth. Modifying my diet means that for every one of the 21 meals in a week at home that I plan, prepare, serve and clean up after, I need to make something different for Lenny than for me, so that has been a huge drag. I haven't lost any weight but I do feel hugely better without empty carbohydrates bloating up my system. I didn't want to feel even a hint of hunger while weaning myself off added sugar and bread and pasta and most fruit (but having all these on hand for Lenny to eat) because when I am hungry, or when I am unsettled by something going on int he work sphere (which happened about nine times a day this week), I find myself standing in the kitchen peeling a mandarine at best, making an unnecessary piece of toast at worst. So I haven't been hungry and I can definitely eat smaller amounts of nutrient-dense food next week without hunger or loss of energy. Actually I really love bread in all its better forms and would be very grieved to never again to go to A1 Bakery and inhale a freshly baked puffy floury spinach and sumac pie. This thing I'm doing is a diet although you are not meant to call it that, because diets are temporary and this is meant to be permanent lifestyle change. But here we are deep into a real shitty lifestyle change, this is a solid lockdown arse-to-couch situation; twelve weeks of dieting will hopefully put my body back to rights and also see me through to a time when I can resume most of my usual exercise and therefore go back to eating whatever the fuck I feel like eating, without paying for it in the form of waistbands that begin to dig into the nice soft flesh of my belly.

I was a bit mean to Lenny earlier this evening after he laughed and said something cheeky when I asked him to bring his own dinner things inside off the balcony. It's a bind really, I wait upon him hand and foot in terms of domestic labour (even though I know I shouldn't) and it is my highest priority in these months to make sure he's as happy as he can possibly be when he's in my presence, and all that takes a lot of strength; at the ragged end of a rough week which ended with a bang in a once-in-a-decade level of disconcerting work situation, I snapped at him, he withdrew, I felt angry at everything on my own for a while, then went and made it up with him. He accepts those overtures of repair very readily - seemingly much more readily than I was ever able to do. I trust that he has some resilience, founded on the steady and consistent experience of love and trust, to tide him over the moments when life isn't perfect. I give him 21 meals a week and only crack the shits at one of them, well, I can forgive myself for that.

This flat is really good but also I'm so incredibly tired of being in it always. Setting aside that stay in hospital in April, the last time I spent a night anywhere but here was when I went to Sydney for work in October or November last year, and before that the last place I spent a night somewhere not-here was the 27th of June which was the last time I slept at the old house. [edited to add: no I don't think this is right: I went to Lancefield for craft camp in September just before the cat circus moved in.]