I’m having one of those days. I’ve just sat down to drink my tea, a moment of salvation that I was hoping would give me the strength to get through the next couple of hours (or minutes at least) and what do I see? I see that a urine-soaked tea towel has been stuffed in the top of my cup.

We are potty training. Well we (read I for the most part) are attempting to. But today has been one of those days. One where there has not been a single sticker assigned to the potty training log (no puns please). I sigh. I was thinking we’d pretty much nailed it with the little boy one, but even his high standards of 3-dots-and-1-butterfly-sticker a day have fallen by the wayside today. I look back to my ‘tea’ and muse that there must be a joke about throwing the towel in there somewhere. But the ‘there’ involved is my brain and that’s past being able to construct jokes. So although in its deepest corners it registers there is the potential for humour, it otherwise stays still and numb. And no glimmer of a smile crosses my face. I just can’t muster enough energy. Frankly it’s the last straw and I’m now beyond laughing.

I’m also beyond cleaning up the six hundredth wee patch that is under the table (and partly on my feet). I’m also beyond cleaning the sofa for the six hundredth time to try to rid it of what is a distinct smell of bottoms. It’s ‘Mummy’s hit a wall’ time and this tea was going to be the thing to give me the extra gazumpf to break me through it. I feel like my senses have been numbed and I am running on some 20 year old petrol that someone found in the shed that no-one’s sure is still going to work. Well I can confirm that it doesn’t. I am at that stage where I am aware that I am not being the patient, fair, soft-spoken earth mother that I would like to be. Instead I am bouncing between forced earth mother softly spoken patience and severely impatient, snapping, angry I’ve-lost-my-methadone-prescription style mother that I’d really rather not be. And do you know what goes through my mind? Yes, that’s right. I’m thinking that my mood swings are going to cause my children permanent psychological damage. Now isn’t that a productive and helpful way to occupy my mind? Is there any scientific basis for me to start worrying about this? Well there might be something out there, but the reality is that I will have read something, somewhere at some point that suggested something that might have slightly been along those lines. But of course I’ve conveniently forgotten the details of the article. And therefore forgotten the bits of the article that make this fairly unlikely.

I start cursing my inability to retain information and then just in the nick of time before I beat myself up completely for being useless again I swerve. I swerve towards the light and think one very clear thought. That reading is bad for me. Well reading anything relating to being a perfect mama anyway. I am going to go back to baser methods. I am going to trust my instincts. Because when I’ve failed in the past it’s because I haven’t trusted them sufficiently. So what do my instincts tell me? They tell me to put the kettle on, give myself a pat on the back for not killing anyone today and reach for the pack of nappies.