We have a cupboard under our stairs, which plays host to a vast array of broken, useless and long forgotten stuff. It houses ironing boards with bits missing, prams, odd wellies and doubles up as a vacuum cleaner graveyard.
I don’t know why I don’t throw these vacuum cleaners out, perhaps I hold onto the hope that the husband might one day be overwhelmed with the notion to fix them all, therefore providing me with a different vacuum for every room in the house.
I am also bewildered as to why I have such a high turnover of the things. Am I the black widow of vacuums as well as motor vehicles? Why does everything mechanical I touch turn to dust? These questions and more I pondered as I rummaged about in that dark, spidery closet under the stairs.
And then I saw it. The industrial vacuum cleaner that the husband purchased when I let him off the leash one day in B&Q. A big, angry brute of a thing that sounded much like a jet airplane and sucked up everything, including rugs and small pets. I believe he was sucked in, so to speak, by the pictures on the box – a boiler-suited gentleman vacuuming up leaves on a building site, a woman wearing goggles vacuuming a pond of all things, an astronaut using the machine to hold on to his friend in outer space. The thing was a monster and, for reasons known only to himself, my husband felt that it was right up our street with regards our household vacuuming needs.
The thing could not only handle household dust and dirt it could also suck up leaves from your driveway and there was a reverse button on it which allowed the operator (as in me) to shoot the contents of the drum out at 30mph. For the five years we owned the thing I never did figure out what that particular function was useful for, until now.
The husband has to constantly remind me not to ‘mother’ our boys too much. He’s from the ‘let them find their own way’ school of parenting. Whereas he would like them to make their mistakes, learn from them and not make them again, the mother in me tries to ceaselessly shelter them from the hurt and harm that life can bring.
He allows them to swing from trees, tussle in the garden, learn to box. I, on the other hand, make sure that not an inch of skin is exposed to the elements when we go out, I would honestly prefer they wear helmets and knee pads when they play football and that they do not reach speeds of more than 3mph while running around the playground. I also find it rather difficult not to want to throttle other people’s children when they hurt or insult mine.
Perhaps my way is detrimental to their development but the mothering instinct is inbuilt and at this stage I’m afraid I can’t be reprogrammed. Nevertheless the husband continues to try and train me to stop with the ‘mummying’ so as to prevent my lads growing up to be level seven mummy’s boys.
My training was put into practice this week when the middle boy returned home from playing in the street with an angry red slap mark on his face and his shirt filled with freezing snow. One of his pals had walloped him, close range, with an icy snowball, then helpfully filled his clothes with leftover snow. He was rather annoyed about the affair, and so was I.
My first thought was to go ‘psycho mum’ get that industrial vacuum cleaner from the deepest, darkest depths of the under stairs cupboard, suck up all the snow from the front garden and shoot it 30mph from the front porch in the general direction of the perpetrator while laughing maniacally. My second thought was to stop mummying the boy and allow him to stand on his own two feet.
I spent my later teenage years in a mixed sex school in Strabane. It was hell let loose at the best of times; when the snow fell, it was all out war. Being a teacher’s daughter meant I was a target for the snowball brigade. I had to learn to kill or be killed so to speak. That is where I learnt how to fashion proper flesh freezing, face stinging snowballs. There are people in that Co Tyrone town that whisper of those snowballs in hushed, worried tones. There are people there who will never smile again because of the trauma my snowballs inflicted.
So I bypassed the old aggravated assault with a vacuum route I had been planning and decided instead to teach the kid to make my world-famous, stuff of legends snowballs. As we stood there in the front garden making our snowy ammunition we had one of those universe aligning mother son moments. Here I was giving my son the tools (and the snowballs) to fight his own battles and he felt empowered enough to head right back onto the battlefield that was our street without fear (while I paced the living room floor while biting my nails).
Watch out kids, there’s a new mini-sheriff in town.
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