Here is a non-exhaustive list of actual things I have said out loud this week:
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“Who put yoghurt in the sock drawer?”
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“If you’re going to lick the wall, at least do it at home.”
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“No, I don’t think the guinea pig needs a raincoat.”
Honestly, motherhood does something to your brain. It rewires you slowly, one soggy rice cake at a time, until you’re no longer shocked by the sight of a Barbie head in your teacup. You just sigh and move on.
It’s not just the children either. I’ve started to worry that I’m becoming that person in all areas of life. Take dinner, for example. I spent twenty minutes convincing my child to eat a vegetable, only for them to burst into tears because I’d “ruined” the spaghetti by putting sauce on it.
I ate toast for dinner. Again.
I’ve also been working from home more lately, which sounds dreamy until you realise that 80% of your meetings are interrupted by a child shouting, “Mum! The hamster did a poop!” right into your microphone. My professional reputation has never recovered from the day my client asked, “Do you need to deal with that?” and I replied, “Only if it gets on the curtains again.”
But I did write something the other day that I was proud of – a blog post about trying to stay vaguely sane when everything feels like chaos. And because the world is weird now and people are suspicious of anything that reads like it was written by someone with more than three functioning brain cells, I ran it through an AI checker. You know, just to confirm that my rambling was, in fact, genuine human rambling.
Turns out I’m about as artificial as a stale hobnob. The checker gave me the all-clear, although I think it paused briefly to offer therapy.
It’s strange to live in a time when we have to prove our humanity to machines. It used to be enough to write a heartfelt blog post and maybe share a picture of a wine glass with the caption “Mummy’s juice!” Now you’ve got to pass an exam set by a robot.
Still, it’s nice to know that even in my unwashed, toast-eating, guinea-pig-raincoat-making state, I’m still managing to string together real human sentences. Mostly.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to Google whether it’s illegal to ban your own child from singing the Frozen soundtrack before 8am.
(The AI says yes. My ears say otherwise.)