(Typed on my phone on 30 May 2017.)

I’m sitting in our bedroom, in the chair in the corner behind the wardrobe. The door is closed. I’m halfway through my second mini bag of Haribos.

Things I am trying to escape from:

• A 3-year-old leaping all over me, starting every sentence with “I want”, and shouting at me with the force of someone who’s just broken their leg
• A 16-month-old pinching me hard under my arm because we’ve covered him in so many clothes he can’t scratch his eczema-ridden skin
• The drying rack with two loads of washing on it
• The washing machine with a third load of washing in it
• The bathroom that needs wiping down after a 3-year-old splashed water all over it, despite numerous requests to stop
• The Paw Patrol theme tune
• The dinner dishes in the sink
• The child’s room floor that is covered in an upended box of wooden blocks, a zoo of Sleich animals, numerous saggy balloons from 3-year-old’s birthday two months ago, and various other pieces of useless plastic that tiny hands find interesting to touch
• The Paw Patrol theme tune
• The buggy that needs emptying, raisin removal and decrumbing, and whose canopy is faded from the sun and whose black handlebar is white with tiny fingerprints
• The food that needs preparing for tomorrow, because, between work and having four small pairs of hands pulling at me, cooking is totally impossible before 9pm, plus food that takes more than 30 seconds to get ready after kita results in two large (considering the body sizes) sets of lungs screaming incessantly at me while throwing things off the table
• Paw Patrol
• The kitchen floor that needs dried spaghetti crowbarred off it
• The spiders webs
• The moths
• The husband who has become a coworker in one of the most badly run companies the world has ever seen

The sad thing is, in our bedroom, the place I chose to get away from all of these things, it’s not much better. I’m surrounded by a mountain of clothes, some from a suitcase holiday two weeks ago that, when we finally got round to unpacking, were just taken out en masse and thrown on a chair. The floor needs hoovering too, especially now there’s a 16-month-old with eczema in it. We feel guilty for everything we feed him, dress him in and expose him to at the moment.

I also wouldn’t mind escaping myself. The new me that is a machine of doing things. That shouts at tiny innocent people and tells them they’re naughty and they need to stop and that mama is annoyed and that they need to be quiet and still and good.

I want my sense of humour back. Somewhere, I do know that all of this is quite funny.