Rx

Take one glass of wine for each of your current problems: one glass for the husband who is ‘taking time to process things’; one glass for the promotion you deserved but didn’t get because you fucked things up, and not in the interview; one glass for ‘is my daughter being bullied’; one glass for ‘am I letting my son coast because he’s unproblematic’ – but wait until your children are in bed before you open the bottle.

Try counting to ten before speaking

Take one heart healthy glass of red: with the pizza you all love except your husband so you never have pizza because other people can eat things they don’t love, but not him. Ask yourself why not?

Try taking a deep breath before speaking

Take one glass of wine while cooking: because dinner? Again? Think of the Sisyphus meme saved in your phone – The fucking dinner and the fucking laundry. Get your teenage daughter to help – she should know how to cook too. Hold on a minute, what about your teenage son? Shouldn’t he learn life skills too? Dinner will only take twice as long now.

Try practising box-breaths – in for a count of four, hold for a count of four, out for a count of four – before speaking

Take one single paracetamol: before bed, to aid sleep. Like one of anything ever did anything for anyone.

Allow one tear to slide – from the outer corners of each eye while trying to sleep. Notice, mindfully, how it slithers down the ‘smile lines’ around your eyes and ends up pooling first in one ear, then the other.

Take two paracetamol first thing in the morning: Don’t think about your liver and the wine and the headache and how you will have to get up very soon because your husband isn’t there and everything is on you, and that’s unfair, but it’s not really much of a difference.

Allow the type of sadness that erupts: in noise and snot and crying so hard it’s like choking. It is important to do this quietly so your teenage children don’t suspect there’s something wrong – even though you know they know that everything is different, out of alignment, so very wrong.

Try our patented Saturday-morning-formula: one dose of flu medication, one dose of stomach-acid medication, one can of coke. Then get up and make pancakes, fry bacon, smile like a children’s TV presenter, and keep dodging, dodging, dodging awkward questions about their absent parent.

Allow yourself to scream into a cushion: once the house is empty – scream over and over and over, until friends say, You’ve lost your voice, have you a virus? And you say no, no, probably just from teaching, probably just that.