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Every mealtime is greeted by his siren call: ‘I don’t want chicken sandwich/apple pie/sausages/grapes/whatever ‘ and everytime I say, ‘okay, come and eat when you’re hungry’. Because I know how to do this mother thing. I read the books. I rock at this.

The trouble is, he never comes and eats. I like to presume it’s because he’s never hungry rather than because my cooking is intolerable.

Every week though, I make fried rice because I know this is one meal he will eat and I throw in everything I can because this meal is a deal-breaker in maintaining his weight. Because, you know, he was a failure-to-thrive baby and it will be my job until he is 18 to worry about his weight. And after that? I will most likely be dead with parenting-related exhaustion.

After he has painstakingly picked out every miniscule item of stuff he doesn’t want, and then thrown it at me in protest, he will force-feed himself the rest until his poor wee stomach is ready to pop and he takes on the appearance of a foie-gras goose.

Then he burps satisfactorily.

And I think, my work here is done.

Because I’m a mother and I take my achievements wherever I can.

And then I regret he isn’t my only child so I wouldn’t have to cook for another week.

They have gone back to our local village school, the one we removed Harry from two years ago after problems with bullying and the head’s dealing with it. Harry is now quite old enough, big enough and confident enough to hold his own in the playground and it is wonderful to see. I still don’t like the head teacher but the school is good and the boys both know most of their class already because I have not, as many anti-homeschool types like to argue, hidden them away at home the last couple of years but have, of course, maintained friendships and made new ones as we came across like-minded people. So that is all good too.

I have been able to resume my position as a school-gate mother which I mourned a little when we first removed Harry from school. That is good too.

But I still feel William is a bit young for school. Lots of research has shown that children who start formal learning at 7  tend to do better and it is my feeling that 7 seems a good age to start school and that is borne out by William not being quite as confident or settled or ready to sit for long periods and learn as his older brother. And as this is Harry’s third go at school in two years I was worried that chopping and changing between school and homeschool was incredibly unsettling.

I miss homeschooling them a great deal. I miss my ‘job’ and I feel reduced to the cleaning, cooking, nappy-changing role I always did but around the important teaching stuff. I miss them. Homeschooling suited us all and worked well. The children enjoyed it and were learning well even with sometimes quite short hours of formal work.

However because we always wanted to leave the door open for the boys to go to school at any point we in some ways had the worst of the homeschooling life. This is what I wrote when we started

my biggest worry is that I won’t be able to teach him at home. School relies on authority and discipline to teach incredibly boring things to large numbers of children. Transposing that to the home environment is tricky

and it turned out that that was exactly the case. I didn’t have enough faith in unschooling methods, despite evidence that it works, to have confidence that it would give my children enough of an education. I couldn’t find any research which had been done to show that unschooling might sometimes not work and I didn’t feel I could take that risk without further information. Also if we wanted them to go back to school at some point I felt obliged to loosely follow the National Curriculum - which is dull, dull, dull whichever way you try to dress it up or make it interesting - so they would be able to fit back in and be at the same level as their peers. So I had to take those incredibly boring things and try to make them interesting rather than relying on the boys’ innate wish to learn things because they interest them.

I feel simply gutted at the waste of all the hours and hours of research I have done to plan the work we did and were going to do, ways to make the subjects interesting, the waste of money in all the things I have bought, all the books I have purchased (even two of my presents for my birthday last month were homeschooling books - not really a present for me, but that’s how much I loved and valued homeschooling).

So there we are. The last two weeks have been a bit miserable for me but I am sure in time I will adjust and I will certainly have time to do more things with my two little fellas, like toddler playgroups and coffee mornings. I will learn to love these things.

Do I regret homeschooling? Not for a minute. Would I homeschool again? Absolutely yes. Will I get the chance to again? Probably not, which makes me sad.

Do I regret the children going to school? No, because they are happy. Because they are still getting a good education. And at the end of the day if those two boxes are ticked, it doesn’t really matter if they are at home or school. Because at the end of the day, this parenting thing is about what is right for my children. Homeschooling was right for all of us, but school is right for my children too and I’m cool with that.

Why have the children gone back to school?

Am I OK?

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I am grateful to everyone who has contacted me over the last week (and also who emailed me about the sleep training thing a while back and who I have not yet replied to).

Yes, we are supposed to be moving to the US but it is on hold right now.

The children have gone back to school. That’s all I can say here about that right now (hard for me when I am used to writing about anything and everything).

Am I OK? No, not really.

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The baby is having his worst day ever today and I an pacing the hallway rocking him in the sling, singing softly to him. It doesn’t ease his teething pain, nor does the medicine, nor the offer of comfort-milk. But still we rock and sing because some days that’s enough to get you through.

The children are now at school.

Misery level: high. Self-esteem level: rock bottom.

I have my three older children here with me but, lovely and sometimes maddening as they are, they are not a substitute for adult company. I have a husband but, helpful as he is when he is here, society and economy dictates that he needs to work long hours, especially as he is the sole earner in our household. I have my network of friends but as fellow mothers they are busy with their own families. I have playdates but, lovely and sometimes too frequent as they are, they are not a substitute for a pair of helping hands at the worst times of the day or for a pair of sympathetic ears when it all seems to be going wrong.

And then there is how I - as a mother - am valued by society which is, like many other marginalised groups, as a non-entity. That, too, is isolating. This view of mothers as a non-entity is, I think, one of the reasons that mommyblogging has been dismissed as trivial in the past - as a group, mothers are not seen as important. What we do is necessary and valuable but it is not considered important and the same is true of mommyblogging (except perhaps not the ‘necessary’ part, unless you count blogging as a sanity-saving measure). It has been interesting watching the advertisers come around to the power of mommyblogging, but only to see us as a commodity, as a money-maker for them, rather than seeing mommyblogging as having intrinsic value. And despite this increased economic power, mommyblogs still do not seem to have gained any more credibility in blogging circles. Similarly, there doesn’t seem to have been any move to acknowledge that mommyblogging has power as an agent of change either in recording mothers’ work or as a result of giving mothers a voice: yes, we have a voice but still no-one wants to listen. I mention these things because I think they reflect how mothers as a group in society are seen - of value if we take part in the economy, but not otherwise: no intrinsic value in raising the next generation, of little value in society as individuals or as a group unless we are doing ’something else’ to contribute to the economy and powerless in society (even if we are CEO of the home ;)).

Salary commensurate with experience: ha! - not in motherhood.

Perhaps even if I felt that employers might appreciate some of the skills I have developed - the age-old multi-tasking, peace-keeping, organisational skills that mothers have - then I could view motherhood with more - what? - pride? Perhaps if I felt like I could resume some sort of career progression when I return to work. But at what cost? Do I become like my husband, working long hours, only seeing the children at weekends? Who picks them up at the school gate?

For the first time in my adult life, I am also financially dependent on someone else and sometimes that thought scares me. Motherhood, without any income, leaves me little in the way of reassurance if I find myself on my own. It also scares me, in these troubled economic times, that there is only one wage-earner in our household and that makes us financially dependent on someone else (ie Matthew’s company). Motherhood, in this instance, doesn’t seem to pull its economic weight in the family.

Perhaps the problem is with how I perceive motherhood, even though I love it and love staying at home with my children. Is it possible to think this is the best thing I have ever done, I am ever likely to do, possible to love my children more than anything yet still not ‘rate’ motherhood - the unpaid, boring, lonely, stay-at-home version?

Perhaps the problem is with who I’ve become. Perhaps I should have worked my way through my children’s babyhood. Perhaps then I could view motherhood with slightly more detachment. But how to reconcile that with my need to be at home when they are small? Is it achieving a balance - some work, some mother-at-home time - that brings out the best in some of us? And if so, why is society not valuing both of those things rather than just the ‘work’ thing and why is our economy not paying the work thing better for mothers that want to work part-time so that we can achieve that balance to bring out the best in us.

Perhaps the answer lies in something less achieveable: if I could physically run my own business and at the same time look after my children that would seem to me to be the best possible arrangement - take away the chores, the loneliness, add in something that feels like I am doing something of value, yet still spend that gorgeous time with my children. But then I would have to be outsourcing wildly and managing an army of accountants, staff, cleaners, nannies etc and then am I not really doing anything at all?

In the end it comes back to one thing: motherhood - especially this stay-at-home version with lots of small children - is rewarding and wonderful but also hard, lonely, undervalued and unpaid.

So, yes, I have hunkered down to get through because, if not literally on my own, I feel figuratively on my own. And although I’m coming out the other side now, with my eye on the future as something other than ‘just a mother’ (even if that is still some way off for me), it seems a shame that I can’t imagine any way that things can change in the future to make motherhood not rewarding, because it already is, but valued.

We get back and Ben, my routine-loving toddler, starts to close all the doors. I watch him make his way to the front door, pulling the loo door open towards him and manoevering himself into the corner of the hallway by the stroller. There, by the front door, he waits, looking through the distorted glass at the flickering pumpkins outside. I leave him to it, knowing he will be a good five minutes or so before his diaper needs changing and go upstairs to get other boys down from a party high and ready for bed.

A few seconds later I am immersed in a different dirty diaper and so when the doorbell rings I figure I’ll have to risk the trick rather than deserting ship to risk handing out the treat. However I need not worry; my assistant, in the form of my overly-sociable Ben, is taking care of things for me. ‘Hello,’ I hear him shout through the front door. ‘Just busy. I DOING A POO! Go away! Coming! I DOING A POO. HELLO? Hear me?’

I cannot risk opening the door now out of embarrassment and I cannot risk opening the door because of the smell. So I hide upstairs while my son shouts out his scatalogical news. To a bewildered audience that wasn’t quite expecting that sort of treat.

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I no longer count my sleep in how many unbroken hours I get but in how many extra fifteen minute intervals of sleep I can accrue.

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Matthew has returned from another trip to the US, jetlagged as always. He will have trouble staying awake for the next couple of days.

I am chronically sleep deprived. I too will have trouble staying awake for the next couple of days and possibly the next couple of years after that.

But a trip is unavoidable. So we get in the car and we assess who is best to drive by who is less likely to kill us all as a result of tiredness-related driver error.

************

Sometimes I stand in the kitchen and I have no memory of what I am doing, and often, no memory of how I got there.

Sometimes I wonder if I have actually been asleep standing up.

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So much is going on but there is no time to blog it. I only wish it was because I was spending so much time asleep. Ugh.

The baby gets the cold first and then the rest of the household follows. This must surely be the worst bit of having a household full of men: when they get a cold, they are all practically dying and I am the only one who doesn’t fall apart.

The baby is pretty miserable: it’s the first real cold he’s had and it’s hit him pretty hard. The rest of them, I don’t feel so sorry for, not when I have the same cold myself and I’m still working, looking after them all as they lounge around on the sofa in varying degrees of assumed poorliness.

It’s not that I have no sympathy, it’s just that I have, well, no sympathy. But I’ll make them all hot drinks, replenish boxes of tissues, tuck them up on sofas under duvets, because then, next week, I will go shopping - perhaps all day - without any of them and when they complain, I will remind them of this week.

The way things are going round here, we’ll have visited every department in the hospital by the time the year’s out.

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On the upside, Edward has decided that he does require at least a little bit of sleep and last night I had five hours of unbroken sleep. When I woke up I felt like I should take over the world or something, what with all that energy. It was a little misplaced however, as by lunchtime I was almost asleep over my coffee; one short night’s sleep obviously doesn’t make up for months of sleep deprivation but it’s a start and a sign - hopefully, please hopefully - that he is thinking of sleeping longer than he has been. I’ve been a prize bitch recently and that’s no fun for anyone round here.

But now I’ve publicly declared that Edward is sleeping more, I’ll have to stop being so bloody rude.