Jaffa Cakes and COVID parents: Are you Type A or Type B?

OK there are many expletives that I could splatter on the page about the kids coming home for the Easter holibobs. I mean are you having a laugh? Is it just me or have they only just been re-acquainted with having to queue up at the school canteen and address the teacher as thus rather than ‘Mum’. I think it’s a conspiracy against our generation of parents to make the whole experience as vile as possible and while you’re there, we’re only going to open the shops and any form of ‘actual’ entertainment that isn’t licking the walls when they have gone back to the ‘skool skool’. So again, Thanks, Gracias, Merci, Khop Khun Mak Kha (that’s Thai by the way, try it).

For the massive 3 weeks they have been at the buildings where education occurs which we can categorically now say isn’t at the homestead, I have mainly been eating Jaffa cakes or thinking about eating them. I’ve consumed about 11 today (that’s probably a conservative estimate – so add a few). I do it because ‘I’m worth it’ (so say the commercials) and because ‘I is’ special, I decided it’s ‘my time’ or what the ‘other’ mothers call ‘me time’ except I’ve never been comfortable with saying that out aloud because it has connotations of going down a spa (which ain’t open); whereas my version is basically gorging on a genoise sponge base with a layer of orange flavoured jam. You know all the ‘faceplanting’ the kids have done during homeschooling, on the top of the sofa and the like, the times between the times when they were supposed to be on the screens, this was their ‘me time’ or ‘my time’ or maybe ‘face rub, spittle time’. Well, I wanted to know what that’s like, so that’s what I’ve been doing, I’ve been faceplanting and snorting Jaffa cakes. Tilt your head slightly to the side to achieve this. It’s quite nice, plus there is no-one like the geo or sax teacher (who I miss greatly because you get to learn stuff), to judge you.

There’s two types of COVID parents you see:

Type A: Doers (closet megalomaniacs who are obsessed with achieving): they clean windows, make photo albums, write poetry, plant bulbs, get to the bottom of the washing pile (who does that? Oh yes it’s them), cross-reference school canteen menus with their own domestic ones (see last post), they never go on Instagram until after 6pm (so you know they are busy), they organise s**t, they send their kids to band camp and boil wash their white sheets twice a week - you know the type (and you know it’s not me).

Then there is:

Type B: Binge eaters: they eat Jaffa cakes – sometimes they eat them while faceplanting (see above.)

These peeps don’t do the ‘other’ stuff because they spend their time with the orange flavoured biscuit cake. They are on Instagram well before 6pm because they can multi-task with the treat, it’s just they only multi-task with stuff that doesn’t involve doing much.

After weighing things up and, not at Weight Watchers (it took me a while), I feel I am very far removed from Type A – I mean I think about those things – I chew over the options (do you like what I did there?), ‘Oh great the kids have gone to school and now I can: do the washing, the cooking, the gardening, the polishing, the stuff that makes you look like you are a normal functioning human being and not just someone that consumes sugar, it’s just that somehow I can’t translate the ‘thinking’ into the ‘doing’.

I mean I am good at watching other people do that, I am also good at reading about those that do. I high five them and salute them in equal measure. I mean I’m not jealous (well OK, just an ickle bit but that’s mainly about photo albums they have of their kids, as opposed to mine which is in a Cloud somewhere, so the Husband says) but it’s just that I don’t give a damn enough to be them. I’m ‘too busy’ eating. That’s it. My life is about that, take the kids to school, go home, (occasionally pop to work), ‘think’ about things that you could do, don’t do those jobs, eat Jaffa cakes. Job done.

The good thing about the cake consumption is that it has given me time to formulate a plan for the holidays which goes like this: Remove the following words from my vocabulary, ‘When you’ because it denotes an element of choice:

? ‘When you do your homework, you can watch TV’

? ‘When you pick up your pants from the floor, I will become a nice mum’

? ‘When you have gone on a bike ride you can gorge Haribo’

? ‘When you give a damn, I will give a damn’

This is the Type B COVID parent version:

‘Do your homework (and – conjunction init) you can watch TV’

‘Pick up your pants from the floor (and) I will become a nice mum’ (when I first wrote mum it came out as a typo as man which made me laugh, perhaps that’s just me or autocorrect is suggesting I have a sex change.)

‘Go on a bike ride (&) you can gorge Haribo’

‘Give a damn (AND) I will give a damn’

CONTROL – job done. Have a good one.

Toodle pip – am off to snort some more of the circular dainties.

Stats: See (calories) above.