Sometimes it all gets a little too much. Especially at the end of the day, when everyone comes together at the table. Incentives piled up during the day and enough had passed by, while I hadn’t quite landed from the cozy barbecue yesterday in the park, with more than 100 people. I was on my way to alarm stage 1.
I had started the morning well. To recover a bit before going to work, after taking my son to school, I went to coffee bru (for the people in Amsterdam East, good coffee!!). I regularly come there with other parents from school to enjoy a coffee together. Now I was there in silence, and I continued reading 1000 Years of Amsterdam by Fred Feddes. Two or three more visits and I’ll be done.
Then it went to work, and it went well. So the babysitter asked to go to the playground after school with my son, so that the peace would be preserved a little longer. When they came back, however, I made a mistake… An Englishwoman had asked for tips about sleeping problems through a Linkedin group and I thought I’d translate the piece I wrote about it recently. And I kept doing that, while my nanny had questions for me; my babysitter’s sister also came by (we are one big family by now), she again had questions for her sister and chatted with my son and with me; meanwhile, my son was playing a game on the laptop, with an annoying tune (games aren’t fun without sound…) and needed help with that every now and then. ‘Mama is still working for a while, don’t talk to mama’, did not enter his brain in any way (also something with stimulus processing, or was that East Indian deaf…). It is not possible to flee to my office for a while, my mother-in-law is over from Curaçao and then that is her place. Good, the translation was successful, time to prepare the food.
Those were leftovers from another barbecue (well, finally nice weather) and an order from the Thai. That means heating up many different dishes, adding some more ingredients, setting the table and feeding the cat. No… then I don’t call for help, because doing it alone really costs less energy than communicating about what needs to be done. The solution ‘ask for help!’ did not fit here. In the meantime my partner came down from work, and my son and mother-in-law. Because she is not there very often, there is a lot of chatter. My son also thinks that everyone is a little deaf, so that counts for three in such a table conversation.
After dinner I fled upstairs, just damage control, nice under a warm shower, to de-stimulate. When I was just enjoying myself, that joker of a son of mine thought that it would be very nice to say ‘Boo!’ yelling around the corner of the door. Successful mission as far as he’s concerned, I let the soap fall from my hands in shock. Next time lock the door…
