Ladies, do you join me in the following thought: doesn’t it irritate the hell out of you when you’re in a mood, for whatever reason and your partner says tentatively: “pmt?” Pmt? P m f***ing t, (I am in the mother of all moods now). No, it isn’t pm bloody t. I’m in an effing mood because I woke up to Metallica instead of Nora Jones because your phone is shite, the kids are fighting over bloomin’ tights, I have to make 3 different bloody salads to accommodate sodding diets and fads that have shoe horned their way into this house, because the dogs are chasing fat cat and because any second now you are going to piss me off by trying to fix it all. It is NOT pmt!!
When men are in a mood, we don’t jump to the conclusion that their hormones are rising and colliding and playing bumper cars with their sanity, we just presume that something has pissed them off. So that is my gripe: I just want to be able to be in a mood, without it being presumed that it’s attached to my monthly cycle, because I find this somehow patronising. Trust me, things can piss me off any fecking day of the month. Like this morning when I arrived downstairs to make the salads. Daughter 2 is already in the kitchen stomping about with a knife. She is dangerous with a knife at the best of times. She will turn in any sudden direction, forgetting the implement that she is wielding and on several occasions has almost impaled it into someone. We have a small kitchen with a lot of traffic and she needs space – it’s a lethal combination. So this morning she is in a mood with a knife. I remembered that the mood may have carried over from the night before, but unless we move into my des res, I am unable to give her the wide berth that is required. So we are stuck in the kitchen together. A series of curt exchanges regarding a lack of cucumber and the fact I need the chopping board she is using, ensue. There is under breath muttering that I should ignore, but don’t and eyeballs to the ceiling, which are also not ignored. It’s a tense 5 minutes of a battle of the moods. There’s only ever one winner in these battles and on this occasion it was daughter 4, who today took away the gold medal in replacing ‘daughter who mum is in a mood with’, with ‘perfect, pleasant and uncharacteristically helpful daughter’, who can’t do enough for her mummy.