I have the great good fortune to have a wonderful friend called Sally who has a thoughtful span of kids, currently aged 8 to 20. She has been there and done it all in the arena of motherhood and parenting and so have her kids. Any time mine try to do something shocking or terrifying, I can rest assured that Sally’s have done it all before. Suspected Meningitis? Yup. Learning difficulties? Oh yes. Trouble with teachers? Neatly resolved. Husband made redundant? Now employed and happily so. Boyfriend/girlfriend issues? Calmly dispatched. She is my shining beacon in the dark stormy seas and I rely on her words of wisdom even when she is not available for me to speak to in person.
Sally coined the phrase: “blue cup day” when her second son, now a delightful teenage lad who has battled and to all intents and purposes beaten Asperger’s syndrome (through many countless hours of patient training from Sally), was going through a particularly awkward patch. She knew that he wanted to drink from a blue Ikea cup at every meal. She also knew that she needed for him to be accepted by his peers and also that he needed to learn how to be perceived as “normal”. There were those days, she told me, where she would arrive at the healthy, nutritious and delicious evening meal (made within the family budget from fresh wholesome ingredients of course) children sitting expectantly at the table and open the cupboard to discover that there were enough blue cups for everyone to have one which meant that no one would be obvious by their inability to drink their milk.
We adopted this as a term for those days when inexplicably everything goes just the way you would like it to go. Not one of those days (as termed by the Mum’s the Word ladies) when you wake up as Mary Poppins but in spite of your best intentions end up as Cruella DeVille. Instead, a blue cup day is one of those days when you float effortlessly, the perfect mother, a true domestic goddess, from dawn to dusk. Your children behave, your husband is grateful and brings home flowers and you manage to find two shoes that match and get a hairbrush through your (possibly clean) hair before going to bed with a smile on your lips. Motherhood’s not so bad, now, is it?
I am happy to pass on this phrase in the knowledge that Sally will be pleased if it enters the lexicon and allows other women to communicate with each other with the ease that we have. If you have a blue cup day, for goodness sake, spread it about. It’s important that we tell people when things go well in addition to complaining about all the days when the baby poos on the wall and the dog and your husband are both humping your legs for attention while your toddler paints the bathroom and herself with sudocreme. (it doesn’t really come off, in case you’re interested)
I spoke to a client today who said that she seems to have a blue cup day every other day. I questioned her and we soon discovered that her good days coincide with the days her daughter sleeps in the afternoon. I did try to reassure her that it does get better. There are things you can do to manage the situation (see my top tips) and as your kids get older you do start to resemble yourself again and that is a beautiful thing. You may not be who you were before all this started, but you can be someone new in your own right and it is a great relief after all those hours you spent on the loo with someone sitting on your knee. And that was just your husband.
Blue cup days for Sally now consist of having matching underwear. And I don’t just mean her pants match her bra, I mean that her underwear is colour co-ordinated with what she is wearing. I have that held in front of me as a new, brighter beacon of hope. One day I will care enough, I say to myself. Until then I am just relieved when the blue cup day comes, confident that the non-blue cup days are necessary to make sure I recognise the good one.
(By the way, Sally has said that I forgot the end of the Blue Cup Day story... it sounds familiar so I am sure she did tell me the whole story, but in my mind, the myth was complete at the children gathered all together, quietly eating their delicious supper... Sally reminded me that: "having sat down at table with the afore mentioned blue cups I found the rabbits had escaped and were playing in the traffic, at which point I abandoned my baby with the child with aspergers and took the other two into the traffic to retrieve them. Blue cup days often have a sting in the tail!!" So even the saintly Sally can have bad days and possible lapses in judgement...)