Not making enough

I am not a good friend to myself in the middle of the night. I spin my brain around like a roulette wheel, filling it with thoughts and fears and ideas.

On Tuesday night I lay in bed fretting that I hadn’t provided enough food to the family I cook for each week. When I got up yesterday morning I texted the mum to say I’d be whipping her up a roast sweet potato and chickpea red curry to make amends. It’s a wacky dish that I used to make pre-kids, which is served with cous cous despite being made with Thai curry paste. It’s oddly yummy, I hope she likes it.

The youngest thinks I’m totally mad. Yeah, probably. But it felt good to pack up the container of coconutty goodness for my friend to collect on her way home from work.

I’m still not embracing this freedom business – I only left the house briefly yesterday, to get a coffee in the pouring early morning rain. The kids didn’t leave either. I made them burgers for dinner as we huddled near the bar heater. Where did spring go???

But things are hotting up on the work scene. I’ve been invited to a few drinks events over the coming weeks for a couple of brands.

I also have some new contracting opportunities on the boil.

And I’ve finally come into my own as a former gossip magazine editor turned mother of a teenage girl.

The youngest is watching Dawson’s Creek and I was full of juicy snippets. She thinks Dawson is good looking. I told her ewwwww, no, everyone was into Pacey. And she’s like, ewwwww, no, he’s not good looking.

So I introduced her to the iconic Dawson crying meme, which TV critic Sarah D. Bunting describes as being “on the Mount Rushmore of GIFs”.

And Vox recalls: “You’ve seen the clip: James Van Der Beek dissolving into exquisitely artificial tears, his lustrous blond hair blowing in the creekside breeze as his face crumples like a discarded gum wrapper. It’s the reaction gif of absurd sorrow, of tragedy so overwrought as to be funny. It’s dawsoncrying.gif.”

Then I retold my tired old story about going to dinner with Kylie Minogue in Los Angeles, but being more interested in talking to Pacey’s agent in the queue for the toilets.

The youngest is very wot-eva about my brushes with fame in my youth and rolled her eyes in boredom.

I also told her that Joey went on to marry Tom Cruise in real life as part of some sort of secret pact and looked really vacant and glassy eyed until she finally escaped Scientology with Suri.

And that Jen went on to date Heath Ledger in real life and had a baby with him. The youngest was very impressed by that, as she thought Heath in Two Hands was pretty hot.

I rounded out the night by agreeing to watch The Hangover with the eldest. We were a bit freaked out that Heather Graham still looked 25, even though it was filmed almost 20 years after she appeared in Twin Peaks as Agent Cooper’s girlfriend.