Why Mummy Drinks at Christmas by Gill Sims

Author:Gill Sims
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2023-09-14T09:22:09+00:00

Present day

The dream about James on top of the brutal hangover had left me discombobulated, to say the least. I tried my best not to think about him, and certainly not in the context of anything like the dream. It was a guilty and shameful time of my life, but in some ways I was strangely grateful to James. The unfortunate interlude with him had reminded me that I did really love Simon and that I didn’t want anyone else. Without that wake-up call for me, I’m not sure we’d have made it through those years with small children.

The James thing had made me realise that I was as responsible for the distance between us as Simon was, that I needed to stop nit picking and shouting at Simon all the time, and let him make his own mistakes with the children. It hadn’t always gone to plan, of course; he’d continued to miss swimming lessons with abandon and my attempt to take a step back from that had been to shout at him that I hoped his conscience wouldn’t keep him awake at night when Jane drowned IN A RAGING TORRENT, and also did he know that you could drown in TWO INCHES OF WATER, but it had certainly made me more tolerant towards him for a while anyway, until we were over the worst of the early years.

But I’d been pushing him away again recently, shutting him out, being so focused on my ‘what about meeeee’ empty-nest pity party, that I’d rather forgotten that Simon was probably also missing the kids and worrying about what we did now, after all these years of parenting.

It was all quiet when I got home (I’d let everyone else go home at 3 p.m., but thought I’d probably better at least pretend to do some work before I buggered off). I found Simon asleep in the sitting room, all three dogs, including Barry the giant horse dog, snoring on top of him.

‘I finished early,’ he said blearily as he woke up. ‘Ellen, we need to do something about poor Flora.’ He gestured at the ancient and frail little Border terrier. ‘She had another accident today.’

I opened my mouth to protest that was no reason to ‘do’ anything about poor Flora, who was happy and comfortable, if a bit leaky, but before I could, Simon went on, ‘I’m going to talk to them on Monday about working from home so I can be here with her. With all of them, really. None of them are getting any younger – even Judgy’s showing his age these days.’ Judgy, my other Border terrier, shot him a malevolent look for being so rude.

‘You’re going to work from home to be here for the dogs?’

‘Yeah. I know you can’t, but apart from meetings, I don’t need to be in the office all the time. It makes sense.’

‘You’re rearranging your working life because the dogs are old and incontinent and need company? The dogs you always insisted were my dogs?’

‘Is that a bad thing? And who am I kidding? They’ve always been our dogs.

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