Jimsy Jampots #173 - A three-drink problem

In which I wonder what adulthood really is

Things I think

When we asked my friend Catherine what she wanted to do for her birthday, she said she wanted a walk and a picnic in Ilam Park. Done. On Monday - a few weeks after her actual birthday, because it was more practical for everyone - we packed up picnic blankets and homemade sandwiches and took coffee orders for each other and arranged pickup times around the school run and drove the hour or so up the A50, taking what was in retrospect a tremendous risk that the second Monday in September was going to have good enough weather for us to have a picnic without us reliving the opening scenes of The Tempest. As we wandered up the path in our sensible walking shoes, admiring the beautiful rolling hills and trying to identify what animal poo we were stepping over, all I could think about was how adult this all felt. Adult in a new way, beyond what I used to think was adult.

There’s a meme that goes around occasionally about how when you’re a kid you think alcohol is a grown-up drink, when you’re a teenager you think coffee is a grown-up drink, and when you’re an adult you realise that water is the grown-up drink. Well, this was the water of birthday parties, surely? Not cramming ourselves into the back corner of a pub with everyone you know who has never outright said they hated you, not going away for the weekend even though you’re so skint you can barely afford a hotel that’s an uncomfortable mattress on a grubby floor in Brighton with a McDonalds for a birthday tea, not dressing up in your skimpiest, shiniest clothes and trying to get the birthday boy/girl so drunk they throw up behind the Wood Green branch of KFC, no. Just four friends, a homemade picnic, and a National Park. We had prosecco, a flask of coffee, a homemade tarte tatin, a fancy picnic basket, a cheeseboard. This was mature. This was cultured. This was responsible.

Five hours later, I was doing my first ever Jägerbomb in a pub in a nearby town - a pub that my poor husband would later have to do a two-hour round trip to because I left my jacket with my purse in it behind when we came home. The Jägerbomb came after consuming the majority of the picnic, including three bottles of prosecco between three of us, shouting at some passing ducks because they seemed threatening, eating half a three-tiered cake, having a rolling race down a hill in a nearby park, and holding several conversations that were so explicit they made passers-by blush. And I may have been wearing sensible walking shoes, but I was also wearing a bright yellow, frilly dress with a denim jacket I’m slowly embroidering flowers all over, so I don’t think I can really pat myself on the back for dressing appropriately for a hike.

But alongside all of this, let’s be blunt, idiocy, we picked up all of our rubbish and carefully put it in the bin. We took our coffee cups back to the counter when we stopped at a cafe, and made sure we were back at the car before the time we had paid for ran out. The woman who was the designated driver was as giddy as the rest of us, but sober as a judge. When I got home and put the kids to bed - when Garry had to get into the car and drive to rescue my purse because I was still too drunk to walk in a straight line, let alone drive to go back and get it - I baked 40 cookies for Taron to take to school for his birthday, and decorated his birthday cake. Then I cleaned the kitchen, emptied the dishwasher, wrapped his birthday presents and took the bins out. I drank a pint of water before bed. I didn’t have a hangover the next day. I was simultaneously utterly chaotic, and incredibly competent. If I could just get a handle on the maelstrom of mayhem that I exist in, I swear I’d rule the world.

Adulthood doesn’t look like I thought it would. There’s a lot more mess to it. I really thought that the madness with which I lived through my teens would go away, that the frantic pace I threw myself at my 20s with would slow down, and the general ridiculousness of me that I hated (and that everyone around me seemed to hate as well) and that I was so desperately embarrassed about would one day fade. I thought that when I was a grown up, I’d somehow turn the dial of myself down and I would become sensible and acceptable. I really, truly believed that at some point, when I hit this magical “grown-up” stage, I would have my shit together and I would finally be okay.

None of this has come true. I am undoubtedly, with my mortgage and my two children and the “Senior” whacked in front of my job title, a grown-up. But my life is still chaos. I am still chaos. It’s different chaos - less about arguments with friends and late Biology homework and more about keeping up with housework and nursery fees and work projects and birthday parties and repeat prescriptions - but it’s still there. I haven’t slowed down: it’s just the frantic pace is no longer about having multiple side projects and a buzzing social life but about trying to meet the needs, both emotional and practical, of two children and a sick husband and a busy, demanding job while trying to keep some kind of life for myself as well.

And the ridiculousness? I can’t lose it. If anything, I’m more ridiculous than I was before because I’m too tired to hide it - a friend’s husband at a wedding recently commented on how funny I was and how my humour had a lot more “bite” to it than he remembered, but I think it’s just because nowadays I am too worn out to keep the dick jokes and swearing to my internal monologue only. When my promotion was announced, a Lead Engineer at work described me as "outrageous in all the right ways”, which I’ve been gently worrying about on and off for the last few months. My dress sense has gone from unfashionable to full on wouldn’t-look-out-of-place-in-Ugly-Betty levels of colour and print clashing. I don’t mind all of these things, but also, I can’t deny that I’m an idiot most of the time and nowhere near the mature, sensible person I thought I would be when I hit my mid-30s.

But also, I am a sensible person. My kids are warm, fed, clothed, housed, read to, loved. I go to therapy and make sure I fill my prescriptions and buy birthday presents for my friends, even though I have to use multiple lists, calendars and task management systems to keep me doing so. I get drunk on prosecco in a park on a Monday afternoon, and make sure I separate out the bottles from the soft plastic cheese wrappers for recycling. I fuck up and do stupid things sometimes, but when I do I own the mistake, try to fix it, and do my best to take the consequences. Maybe that is what adulthood really is - not leaving the chaos behind, but learning how to balance it with competence.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m overthinking it - in fact, I know I probably am. There’s just something about being 34 and realising that my life doesn’t look like the adulthood I thought I’d have when I was 14, and it doesn’t look like the adulthood I thought I’d have when I was 24 either. I am not doing what I thought I’d be doing, and I actually have no idea what I’m doing but I’m doing it anyway and I’m pleased with myself for that. I’m drinking the alcohol, the coffee and the water at the same time, and somehow making it work. It’s not perfect, but it’s okay, and it’s good enough. What else can you ask of an adult, really?

Things I liked

Oh god this is boring. Sorry. I bought this vegetable slicer (not exactly this one, but one so similar it’s basically the same) years ago when I was weaning Taron, chucked it in a drawer and forgot about it. I recently learnt how to make chips in an air fryer (raw potatoes, slice into chips, put in the preheated air fryer with a drizzle of oil for 25 mins at 200C shaking every 10 mins, boom, perfect chips) and wanted to see if the dicer adapter would work to cut down on the slicing time. It does. Brilliantly. I had chips 3 times in a week because of how easy it was. And it’s also flipping amazing as an apple corer and slicer - it’s making breakfasts and desserts with the boys way easier. So, yeah, if you struggle with making decent chips at home (oven chips are shit, deep-fried chips are a deathtrap, change my mind) then get yourself an air fryer and this slicer and boom, you’re well away. And let me know if you figure out what the third attachment is for, because I have no idea.

I have plantar fasciitis and tight calves and a whole bunch of stuff going on below my knees that makes walking painful. Apparently, my shit supermarket Converse knock-offs don’t help this, and I should be looking at decent, supportive trainers. Fine. Problem is, most trainers are ugly as hell - or they’re these, which are gloriously beautiful but ninety-bloody pounds. Guess I’m just going to have to keep having crap calves.

Thanks for reading, and sorry it’s late today. I could come up with an excuse - genuinely our fridge has broken today and sorting that out has taken up a lot of time - but really, it’s just me being a chaos goblin again and not writing it in time. I hope you’re okay.

Love, Amy xxx

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