What is the first thing you do when you get home? Kiss the cat? Open the fridge? Check Pinterest to see what everyone else is cooking for dinner?
Not mentioning any names or anything, but someone I know puts his keys and phone in the red bowl on the top of the fridge, one on top of the other, religiously, before he does anything else such as turn on the lights or shut the front door.
Someone else I know sheds her jewellery, and another her bra and glasses so she can flop around the house in a gentle haze. And then there’s a friend’s partner who goes straight to his bedroom and spends a half hour there by himself, unwinding and rebooting from his day at the office, before he says as much as a hidy-ho to his family.
And I wonder if these automatic, everyday gestures reveal something about us; how we feel about the world we’ve left behind and the one we’ve just entered. Our need to shed our armour or reclaim power over our day maybe.
My kids rush in, make lots of noise, and then one hugs the dog and turns on the TV. Meanwhile, the other does a quick search of the fridge, tells me there’s nothing to eat and runs off to get her iPod Touch in case there are Skype messages waiting from kids she’s just spent the whole day with at school. I’m not sure what all of this means, except perhaps that I’m a pretty lax parent.
Recently, an article in a weekend magazine rang so many bells with women I know that our heads were buzzing like church steeples. The article captured one woman’s habit of pouring a glass of crisp white wine the moment she walked in the door, often before she had taken off her coat. In the end, the association she had with drinking wine and transitioning from career-focused working woman into wife and mum became a bit of a problem.
Talk about resonate. The week it was published, her story became the article-equivalent of The Slap. Everyone was talking about it, because for most busy people I know, having a glass of wine at dinner signals the end of one part of the day and the start of the next bit, the good bit, where everyone under 10 goes to sleep and you can watch MasterChef. In fact, many women I know started drinking only when they had kids.
First thing I like to do when I get home is get out of the daywear and into my PJs. That is, once I’ve deposited everyone’s (goddamn) bags in their rooms, put their lunchboxes in the (goddamn) sink, and done all the other things I’d prefer they did for themselves, but who can be bothered asking them six times when I can do it in a nanosecond and then it’s done.
But then, later, when the lunchboxes are washed, everyone is home and fed and you all have a warm, comfy spot on the couch, surely that’s the loveliest part of the day ever. And reason enough to celebrate with a glass of something …
(And I’m sorry to the lovely person who wrote to me last time I used a religious reference in a cursing way in this column, but when discussing something as frustrating as the everyday non-delivery of lunchboxes into the kitchen sink, it’s hard not to resort to the Biblical. But it would be nice to hear from you again anyway. It’s been a while; time we caught up!)
