Nothing hones your multitasking skills quite like motherhood, as Nell Frizzell has discovered over the last year. So how exactly do you manage to have a grown-up conversation and a meal with your friend when you’ve got three small children to entertain?
In the 1840s the French coined the term ‘logistics’ meaning the art of moving, quartering and supplying troops. Well, I may not have access to any gunpowder, canvas or muskets, but as a new mother I’ll bet my derriere that I’ve learned more about logistics in the last year than most military men. I have also, as someone who now often spends 10 hours a day quartered at home, alone, with a non-verbal baby, learned my fair share about loneliness.
So when a friend asked if I was free this week for lunch, and offered to pop over with her two children, I obviously leapt at the chance. Both feet, no socks.
The first thing was the menu. I’m not going to lie: fish fingers have started to play an extraordinarily important role in my life since having a baby. From the four fishfingers I ate in the middle of the night when I was worried that my breastmilk was running out, to the first squished fish handful I saw disappear into my baby’s seven-month-old mouth, they’ve been a keystone to our culinary life. So I would put the homemade vegetable stew on the back burner this time and serve the kids fish fingers, home made chips, steamed broccoli and baked beans. Wipe down my tabard and give me a perm because, friends, I have become my own dinner lady.
I managed to cut and boil the potatoes by sitting my baby in the middle of our tiny kitchen floor, holding a Tupperware click and lock pot full of unpopped corn (rattle), a pan lid (high hat), an empty colander (cow bell) and three wooden spoons (drumsticks). I like to call this one man band arrangement the Jackson 5, in honour of the demo for Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2IzJihXPEM, which sounds like it was recorded on a set of saucepans. Of course, just as I was getting to the point when I had to drain the potatoes, the high point of scalding potential, the baby decided to try crawling up my leg so he could reach into the bin. The bin full of dirty nappies, fluff, uncompostable food and snotty tissues. Then, of course, my friend arrived – physically carrying her two children: one under each arm. This meant that she didn’t have arm space to also carry her bag so when she discovered that her 6-month-old had pissed through his nappy, vest and trousers, I had to put my own baby in his high chair, with a duplo dinosaur, two raisins (never more as any more than one per hand and he starts throwing them on the floor) and a small wiggling wooden snake so I could find her replacements from a clothes pile in the other room.
In order to keep the two walking children entertained while I finished their lunch, I filled the washing machine with all the teatowels, fluffy toys and balls I could find, put a load of balloons in an empty cardboard box and our collection of jar lids in a metal bucket with a lid. This gave us precisely 15 minutes in which to make a cup of tea, catch up on each other’s lives and for me to make a start on our own lunch. As two breastfeeding mothers, the temptation to just eat biscuits is enormous but even I know enough about nutrition to know that you can’t build a second human body on sugar and flour alone. So I decided to make the simplest pasta I could fathom: a one-pot wonder.
Because there were suddenly two new children in the house, my son decided that this would be the perfect moment to freak out and cling on to my knees like a life raft. So, while his lunch cooled, I had to put him in a sling, facing out, and chop the vegetables for my lunch while giving a little running commentary like someone on a cookery show. I call this Mumsterchef and every time the meal involves chilli I spend the entire time freaking out that I’m going to accidentally blind my firstborn. Anyway, I managed to put all the vegetables and uncooked pasta in a pan with loads of olive oil and then topped the pan up with some water every time I smelled light burning. This was how we managed to feed the two older children, while our dinner cooked and the 6-month-old rolled around on a sheepskin on the floor.
After lunch, my baby started to scratch his ears, his eyes started to look like they’d been coloured in with a pink highlighter and he moaned like a sealion. So, totally ignoring my guest, our lunch and my stomach, I took him into our bedroom – one thin MDF wall away from the kitchen, put him in his sleeping bag and read him the literary classic One Mole Digging A Hole, followed by Maisy’s Bus and Avocado Baby. I then walked in the pitch black of our hallway into his bedroom, breastfed him sitting on a hard chair and, finally, put him in his cot. The whole thing took 20 minutes – twenty minutes during which I completely ignored, neglected and annexed my guests.
When I got back to the kitchen, the dinner was dry, the toddler was hitting ten shades of shit out of a plastic drum and my friend was breastfeeding on the sofa while trying to peel an orange. We managed to eat lunch with her two children on our respective laps and had a full ten minutes of adult conversation – catching up on work, sex, politics, houses, family, friends, health and popular culture, before my son woke up, her daughter started crying, and she had to go next door to put her child to bed in the recently-evacuated cot while I entertained the other two babies with a rain stick and book of baby animals.
So, how do you feed two adults, two toddlers and a baby, in a small, two-bedroom flat, while catching up on nearly a year’s friendship? Simple: you don’t. But in the chaos of fishfingers, wooden blocks, damp muslins, size 4 nappies, black out blinds, stacking buckets and overcooked pasta you spend the happiest day of your week just mothering alongside a woman you love. That’s how we did it