The Awkward Girl's Guide to the Week | In Which There Is Everything Including the (Toy) Kitchen Sink
Also featuring "the most popular thing on the Internet right now". Apparently.
Hi, it’s Amber with The Awkward Girl’s Guide to the Week: your regular look at what I’ve been reading, watching, and otherwise getting up. This post is free to all subscribers, however a paid subscription will give you access to additional, bonus content, keep me out of the Victorian workhouse, and is basically the only reason this newsletter continues to exist, so if you are able to upgrade, you’ll find the button below: thank you so much for supporting my work!
So, I finished my book.
It felt… OK? I guess?
And, I mean, it’s not like in the movies.
In movies, an author who’d just finished writing a book would type the words “The End” (Which you don’t do in real life, because novels don’t generally end like that. It’s kind of implied that it’s the end by the fact that it’s … ended. ) then sit back, and look at the screen, a small smile of satisfaction playing on her lips. Then she would reach for the bottle of 100-year-old malt/something that makes sense to people who actually drink whisky1 and pour herself a generous measure. “Another one down, Jiggles,” she would say, raising a glass to her faithful animal companion, who would simply blink its yellow eyes (Er, it’s a cat, obviously, in this movie. Your animal companion may vary.), then get up and stalk away, whereupon the author would down the glass in one, still smiling that enigmatic smile.
In real, non-movie life, meanwhile, I just typed the last sentence of the %^$%&*& thing, deleted and re-typed it a few times, then got up and went for a shower, because, honestly, I’d been in those PJs all day at that point, and it was starting to get ridiculous, really.
“Oh, I finished the book, by the way,” I told my husband as I was running Max’s bath later that night.
“Cool,” said Terry. “We can talk about it later.”
And that was that.
By the time you reach book 4, no one is particularly surprised or impressed by the fact you wrote a book. It’s just what you do, basically. (Well, that and spend money on stuff you can’t afford. But that goes without saying.) This week, however, it has not been what I do. Because, other than correcting a few typos that Terry picked up on his first read through, I’ve put the book to one side for a few days, so I can start the edit afresh next week.
In the meantime, I’ve mostly been cleaning.
After my big closet clear-out of a couple of weeks ago, Terry also got bit by the declutter bug, so we’ve been gradually working our way around the house, clearing out cupboards, and trying to remember why, exactly, we have such a large collection of rubber bananas.
On Wednesday, the clear-out reached our office, which is also home to Max’s toy kitchen, and the vast amount of absolute junk that’s stored inside/on top of it. Now, Max hasn’t really played properly with this kitchen for a couple of years at this point. He just uses it to store… well, junk, basically. And also all those rubber bananas.
But Max has lots of junk storage in his own room now, so, at least twice a week, I would walk into the office and say, “I really think we should work towards getting rid of this toy kitchen, so we can have a proper office again, with, you know, only grown-up furniture and absolutely no rubber bananas.” And, every time I’d say this, Terry would completely ignore me and go back to whatever it was he was doing.
But then, this week — without me even mentioning the toy kitchen — he told me he’d been speaking to a woman in the street who has a toddler, and he’d offered her the toy kitchen. She’d said yes, her little girl would love it. And also Max’s vast collection of baby books, which he no longer reads, but which are all stored in his room, taking up space that could better be used for books about the Titanic, the Hindenberg, and other great tragedies of the 20th century.
(Aside: this week he found out I was alive when the Costa Concordia sank, and immediately started treating me like an important historical artefact. Which made me feel, ooh, at least 102…)
Max, surprisingly, was on board with this, on the condition that he was allowed to keep the “Deck The Halls” Christmas book, which plays the tune really loudly every time you open it.
“Great,” I said, jumping up from my desk. “When can she take it? Can she take it NOW?”
She could take it tomorrow, apparently. So we got to work emptying and cleaning the toy kitchen, and as we worked, I grew sadder and sadder until the sadness reached a point where I thought that, instead of getting rid of this thing that had been annoying me for months now, I would maybe rather just keep it forever.
It seemed like a solid plan.
Because this dusty toy kitchen was, of course, not just a toy. It was an accumulation of memories. It was the looks on my parents’ faces when they brought it round one day for one-year-old Max. It was his chubby little hands pulling himself up to stand at it. It was years and years of dusting and tidying, and living with something that I would one day never see again, and this suddenly seemed absolutely intolerable to me.
But parenthood is like that, I’ve found. It’s essentially just one long exercise in letting go. In realising everything is temporary: the carefully-chosen little outfits, the beloved toys, the way he used to end stories about his friends by saying, “Click for more stories about Zak.” None of it lasts for more than a few weeks: or maybe a few years, in the case of the toy kitchen. All of it has to be let go. And when you’re right in the middle of it, it can be hard not to feel like the little things are really the big things, and to be unable to accept that this one specific toy will now just be a memory — and for you, rather than him.
There’s a line in the movie International Velvet, which I watched obsessively as a pony-obsessed child, which goes, “Sometimes, getting what you want is a kind of losing.”
And that pretty much sums up my feelings about the toy kitchen, really.
But on with the show…
READING
Yes, I’m still reading the same book and watching the same TV show I’ve been watching for weeks now. It feels like forever, actually. Which kind of makes me feel like I should just retire this part of the newsletter until I have something I can actually talk about.
Instead, I’m going to link you to
which, this week has an interview with yours truly. Keris’s newsletter was the first thing I ever read on Substack — so, like a kind of gateway drug, basically — and I’ve been reading it ever since. It’s one of the reasons I started writing a money diary every week, in fact, and it’s just so refreshing to read about other women who are having (some of) the same issues as me.I feel like this is such an exciting time to be on Substack. There are so many new writers joining right now — some of them very well known ones, too — and so much great writing being produced. While you wait patiently for me to finish the book I’m reading and move onto something else, then, here are a couple of other pieces I’ve enjoyed here this week:
WATCHING
Have you heard of Skibidi Toilet? If you haven’t, sorry for introducing you to this… whatever this is. If you have, meanwhile, I’m still sorry, because I’m guessing you, too, have a school-age child whose peers are all obsessed with a bunch of disembodied heads in toilets? And you have to hear the theme tune so often that sometimes you find yourself lying awake at night going, “brrr skibidi bop bop yes yes”?
Or is that just me?
We’ve been watching — or being forced to watch, rather — a lot of Skibidi Toilet lately. According to Terry, it’s “the most popular thing on the internet right now.” Max has asked to be something called Red Titan for Halloween. I’m mostly just mystified. Oh, and old. Because I have reached that stage of parenthood where everything the “young uns” do just seems like a bunch of newfangled gobbledygook to me, and I guess I’m ready for the urn, basically.
Other than the toilet heads, we are, of course, still working our way through all 10 seasons of Benidorm, so same old, same old. Next week, however, will be a big one for us, because Monday marks the return of Neighbours — a.k.a. my not-s-guilty-pleasure.
I have so many questions. Will they break up Mike and Jane again, because surely they can’t have persuaded Guy Pearce to return permanently? Will Paul and Terese still be married? Will I ever get used to everyone pronouncing “necklace” as “neck-lace?”
God, I can’t wait.
Ooh! I almost forgot! Following on from last week’s newsletter, about influencer morning routines, I came across this, which made me laugh:
This is literally all I can think about when I watch those videos now. Last week there was one where a woman had documented all the times she got up in the night to feed her newborn, and someone in the comments had pointed out that she must have literally had to keep getting up, setting the camera to record, then getting back into bed and pretending to wake up again. And in the meantime, the baby must’ve been like, “WTF? Where’s my food?”
(Oh, and her husband was sleeping in an eye mask, presumably because she had the “big light” on in the bedroom, and possibly a ring light too, so she could capture all of this.)
It’s fascinating to me, the way so many people seem to feel their lives should look like movies, even when they’re doing something totally mundane. It’s 100% a social media thing, of course. Even just ten years ago, no one would have got up at 3am to do a night feed and thought, “You know, this would make a great piece of content. Now, where’d I put that ring light?”
But now they do.
Isn’t that wild, though?
LISTENING
I completely forgot to include the ‘listening’ section in last week’s newsletter, and no one seemed to notice, which means I either got away with it, or literally no one cares. Anyway, I wasn’t going to include one this week either, because it’s been all Skibidi Toilet, all the time, but then, last night I was looking at Facebook, and Counting Crows had posted about how this year is the 30th Anniversary of their album, August and Everything After, which is one of my all-time favourite albums. And wow, now I feel even older than I did after the whole ‘Costa Concordia’ conversation.
I couldn’t even tell you how many times I’ve listened to this record, or how much it’s meant to me over the years. Instead, I’m going to leave you with one of my favourite tracks from it: I still remember hearing this for the first time, and when he gets to the line, “And she knows she’s more than just a little misunderstood / she has trouble acting normal when she’s nervous” I was like, “OK, this is a song about me, and this is going to be my song now.”
And so it is.
In other news…
I wanted to put together a kind of FAQ post — or to at least write some stuff that people would actually be interested in reading — but I don’t want to post a question sticker on Instagram, like I normally do, because there’s only so many times I can tell people what the best red shade of red lipstick is (MAC Ruby Woo), or that I honestly have no idea what you can use to boost your red hair now that the Superdrug colour conditioner has turned awful. Sorry.
So, instead, I’ve put a thread in the subscriber chat where you can ask me anything (at any time, I mean, not just this week or whatever), and I’ll do my very best to answer you.
Until next week,
Making and drinking whisky plays a not insignificant role in my books, but I still know next to nothing about it, because I hate it.
I always type The End when I finish mine. It feels great. (Even tho I know it’s not really the end. Far from it 😭)