Therapy

All planned activity for the day stopped when Oliver came downstairs this morning looking terribly woeful and saying he felt sad.

He came and sat on Mark’s knee and was a bit tearful.

Number Two Daughter was working, but the rest of us gathered round for a family conference and decided that he needed to restart his life a bit.

We thought a haircut might be a good start, so he went off to the barber whilst the rest of us finished breakfast. When he got back, newly shorn and looking a bit brighter, we went up to his room together to do some reorganising.

We dragged everything out from underneath his bed and threw away lots of things.

It was a hideous dusty mess.

There were boxes and boxes of old toy cars and  broken plastic things. There were toy guns with long-flat batteries, remote controls which no longer had the thing they were supposed to be controlling remotely, and marbles and Lego and aeroplanes and tanks.

Oliver said bleakly that he didn’t want any of it.

We said that was fine, because probably the thing was that he was starting to be grown up and not needing little boy’s things any more, and that maybe he needed to move on a bit, so the haircut could be a new beginning.

We saved some things that seemed as though they might be good for Ritalin Boy at some future date, and threw everything else in the dustbin. We shoved the things for Ritalin Boy in the already cramped corner in the loft. Then we took a pile of comics and toy cars round to Save The Children and sorted out a bag of Playstation games to take into Kendal to trade in at the game shop when I go in on Monday.

We found all sorts of treasures that he had forgotten and thought he would like to keep, like his Rubik’s Cube and a set of toy soldiers from a game called Warhammer. He put them on one side to play with them when we had finished.

We sorted through his books and found some books about soldiers that he thought he would like to read again, and some books called Beast Quest that he thought he probably wouldn’t like to read again, and I was profoundly relieved that I would never have to read any more. We put them in the loft for Ritalin Boy because I think Number One Daughter should not be left out of that bit of being a parent to a small boy.

We hoovered and scrubbed and polished. Oliver and Mark cleaned the bathroom and found some nice soap that he thought he might like to have for washing with, and some men’s shampoo that he thought he might like to use, and some deodorant, now that he is not little any more. It is always much better to have things in your bathroom that you are going to look forward to using, especially if you are not the sort of person who likes having a shower in the first place.

We cleaned out all the boxes and put the things that he thought he wanted to keep back underneath the bed, tidily where he could find them. There turned out to be a big space then that he thought might be good for playing at being a soldier in a trench.

We took the sheets off the bed and turned the mattress over, and remembered the broken slat where the window cleaner had accidentally been too heavy when he was trying to get to the inside of the window. Mark and Oliver took it down to the shed and mended it together, and then Mark helped Oliver to screw it back in himself, and we put the mattress back and put fresh sheets on the bed and put Spider-Man back on the pillow.

Mark put a new lightbulb in to replace the one that was broken, and I put the missing curtain hooks back. Then we all stood back and admired our handiwork.

“How do you feel now?” Mark asked Oliver.

“I feel free,” said Oliver, and laughed.

We left him lying on the floor, grinning at his space.

I still haven’t done the ironing or planted my little seeds or put muck in the flowerbeds.

I suppose there is always tomorrow.