Failure

I am a failed parent.

Spectacularly, epically, disastrously failed parent.

It is even worse than the time when I took him back to school on the wrong day.

They are both gone now, along with their massive pile of luggage and overpriced tuck boxes and assortment of sporting sticks and a little part of my heart, and so today I thought I would go and clear out the tip at the top of the house where it has all been stored and labelled and sorted and discarded for the last two months.

There was a lot of space, and suddenly it was possible to sort through the remaining bits and throw away rubbish and carefully store things like cricket whites ready for next summer.

I hoovered and wiped and tidied and dusted, and was just beginning to get that dreamy satisfied feeling that one has with a job well done, when I espied the corner of a file sticking out from under the bed.

Thinking that it was one of Lucy’s to go in her box of perfect schoolwork which she wants to treasure for ever, I tugged it out and glanced at it.

It said in big letters on the cover: “Oliver Ibbetson. Summer Holiday Homework.”

Inside was a neat stack of carefully prepared exercises and spelling practices and writing practices that I should have done with him over the summer had I not been blissfully unaware of their existence, along with a list of suitable holiday reading.

My heart, my stomach, and all other internal organs associated with enormous, irredeemable, aeroplane-disaster, catastrophic failure, hit the floor with a horrible cold squelching sensation.

Of course I called school immediately and grovelled and made hopeless-sounding “dog-ate-my-homework” sort of excuses and begged for forgiveness from the surprised secretary, whose cool indifference did nothing to raise my crushed spirits: but of course it is pointless.

I have failed. My son will never succeed at school, will not go to Eton and have to get a job in the Co-op or driving a taxi, and it is all my fault.

I phoned Mark, who was at the farm, and cried, and he laughed a bit and sympathised a bit and told me to be stoic and get on with it, which I did, but the creeping knowledge of being a rubbish parent after all has not left me.

It didn’t get any better. After the loft I made my way down, sweeping the stairs and closing the door behind me, to the children’s floor to start banishing the sticky and more revolting reminders of their recent presence.

I thought it was a crumpled Beano stuffed behind Oliver’s bedroom door: but it wasn’t.

When I realised what it was I stuffed it back behind the door and rushed downstairs to phone Mark again.

He laughed a lot more, and said that if I left it where it was he would have a look at it and see whether had been suitable holiday reading. Then he laughed again.

It must have come from Harry’s house, as Harry has got grown up brothers, and been smuggled in between the two of them due to my inadequate parental supervision.

What have I done?

He can’t tie his shoelaces either. I tried again to teach him over the holidays, but he has got the patient co-ordination of a puppy wearing boxing gloves, and I gave up and thought I would try again later, and forgot, and so he has gone off to school quite likely to have a terrible rugger accident due to untied bootlaces, and it will be my fault.

I ought to call Social Services and hand myself in.

All that smug imagining that I might be becoming a member of the middle classes and it turns out that I am as hopelessly disorganised as any teenaged mother of ten children on a drug plagued council estate, and without anything like as much of an excuse.

I have included at the top the picture of Oliver at the paintball centre.

This is not because it is in any way relevant to this post, but because when he came home from the Boys’ Day Out he was enormously proud of the pictures and rushed up to show me.

“You can put it in your diary,” he said, and I promised that I would.

It appears that I would not win any First Class Parent awards at the moment, so keeping my promise seems like the least I can do.