And the 'Best Mother of the Year' goes to...

If you are a single mother and there is a deadline of some sort looming on the horizon your house looks like this:

The sheets on your bed are stripped and curled into long convoluted ‘snakes’ that hiss and jump at you on every corner. Don’t you dare touch them, their keeper will let you know where to go. The high chair is covered with crumbs of last night’s leftovers, beheaded markers, paper sheets, paper dolls and paper cuts, colouring pages, spare parts of a fallen helicopter. Clothes of all sorts are scattered all over the floor. Your pillow, also on the very unbecoming floor, is converted into a bed hosting two doll babies, snugly tucked in, with your only good dress for blanky. Your child is sporting an asymmetric bob and it’s not because you took her to a fancy hairdresser. Your child has intricate tattoos all over her body, nails and toes painted blue. Your child is wearing: a pair of grey leggings, a pair of orange shorts, your best high heels, a pink summer dress, a Christmas decoration around her neck, beads of watercoloured pasta, Santa’s hat, a summer hat, mittens, a fake sheepskin you got her last year, a velvet pouch, multiple bracelets and beads. The impressive frescos in every room of the flat are getting more ornate and complicated. There are four boots lying on their sides in the hallway, two black, two pink, pools of salty sandy water mushrooming around them. The two coats, one white, one pink, are also on the floor. The doors of every wardrobe and cabinet are flung wide open. The children’s room is one massive pile of stuff: toys and clothes, books and paper cuts. If you have to get to the window, just shove your way through, you should be getting used to that, with the snow we have this year. Whatever happens, you do not go near the bathroom until you’ve had your evening glass of the cheapest semi-sweet in town, and you know that as long as you pee in the dark, you will be fine. You watch where you step – there is always something in your way, a buggy stuffed with dolls and books, cars and play sets, an empty can of milk, a summer bag full of fake food (you hope) and play money your child never stops throwing at you (at least there is something you are doing right). The kitchen is a war zone. All surfaces are covered with still more paper cuts, dolls, tubes of watercolours, sausages of play dough, jars of make-up, old garbage bags, the novel you have been trying to finish for the last six months, face down, in the corner, once frozen cherry corpses, drowned in pools of their own blood, chocolate wraps, paper dolls, more clothes, more paper cuts, cucumber rings, empty Red Bull cans, Japanese takeaway containers that smell funny like everything else (old garlic squeezed dead and turned green in the squeezer, sweet pear, wasabi, fish of unknown origin, honey). There is not a single cup, plate or piece of cutlery in the house you can use. Every time your child screams for ‘woooodaaaaa’ you have to be inventive. There is stuff on every doorknob in the flat – the doll bag, the snowflake from the ever-thinning fake tree, the mobile charger cord, the string of your best beads, the fancy scarf. Everything twinkles, shines and pisses you off. There is a 3D sticker stuck to the sole of your flip-flop so every time you make a step it sounds like you are murdering an oyster. Murderer! There is another sticker stuck to your ass. You don’t care. It pops every time you sit down and it squeaks every time you try to get up. You don’t have time to unglue either. As you are typing away, scrawling through documents, sending out emails and trying to keep it together, your child plays hairdresser, standing behind you on a stool, chattering away in perfect bliss. You learn that meat tenderizers, potato graters, kitchen scissors, bottle openers, peelers, pizza cutters, corkscrews, skimmers, ladles and whisks make great hairdressing paraphernalia after which you need emergency hair treatments you can’t afford. Your toddler helps around the house to her best ability: sweeps the floor, sorts the garbage, washes the dishes after which you need to wash the toddler and the place being attended to. For which, again, no time.

Don’t get excited and fly dialling the social services number with a shaking hand. I will not go down in silence (having good lawyers also helps). This happens once a month. Or so… It’s just that the last incident was so colourful, so picturesque I decided to cherish its glorious image before it evaporated into the mists of memory forever. Because when the day after that comes, the dishes have been stacked away, the different body parts of dolls inserted into corresponding perforations, the floor vacuumed and the air fragranced, I may just as well miss the spontaneity of it all, the chaos, mirroring what’s happening both outside and inside of me with freighting, sobering clarity.