Keir Royale

Ben has become fixated on the possiblity that his father and I may, one day, in the future or perhaps tomorrow, split up.

He cheerfully says things like -

“If you two split up, who would Hannah and I live with? Would I go with Daddy and Hannah go with Mummy?”

I reply, just as happily -

“No, we’d cut you both in half and keep a bit each.”

And he asks -

“Mummy, if I just lived with you, would you have bought me things like pen-knives?”

“No,” I say, smugly, “because I don’t want you to cut all your fingers off, one by one, and end up sitting in a congealed pool of blood soaked demi-digits.”

“Nor does Daddy,” he retorts, in a way that reveals how tiresome he thinks me.

It may be he’s reaching an age where he’s noticing that some of his friends live with one parent rather than two, or it may be that Mike’s looking after them a lot at the moment - which is throwing our divergent parenting styles into relief.

Perhaps he’s thinking,
“If she weren’t around I’d get to stay up later, eat my favourite sausages every night and saw branches off trees with my uber-sharp penknife on a regular basis.”

But when I got home the other night they were both on the doorstep, in their pyjamas, waiting in the rain.
After the excited squeals of “Mummy!” the first thing Ben said was -

“I haven’t been crying in the night Mummy.”

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