Two of my four children, oldest and youngest, are coming tonight.  Back in England, when they came home I really did do something akin to preparing a feast worthy of any number of prodigals.  And if I didn’t exactly kill a calf, I practically bought a cow, since the girls are inclined to drink at least six pints of milk a day. (That’s British pints – 20 ounces each.)

Here, I reckon there is nearly a whole calf in the freezer anyway, and I didn’t shop.  I’ve got a handful of excuses: the car is out of petrol, with just enough to make it off the island and to the station if I don’t get lost, and I am bound to get lost.  But the real reason is I can’t remember what my children eat.

In the days when one or the other of them needed new shoes every few months (which I recently worked out went on for about 25 years, at at least 30 quid a throw) I would take them to a very posh, old fashioned, scoldy, shoe shop.  It was the only one in Oxford where I could buy their shoes, because they had freakishly thin feet (I don’t know, maybe it was from being half American).  The shoe fitter would say, What size is your child wearing now?  And I would look sort of dumb and peer hopelessly inside their shoes at the rubbed out place where the size used to be printed and confess I didn’t know.  Then she would glare at me as if to say, What kind of Bad Mother doesn’t know what size shoes her children wear?  (That would be me.)

What I do know is they won’t eat the same food.  Two of my children eat little or no meat and two of them eat mainly meat (although one apparently has a programme for giving up meat and I’m damned if I know where he is on the timetable).  At least one won’t eat pasta but likes rice, and one eats mainly pasta, but never, ever rice.  I think some of them sometimes eat potatoes, but frankly I haven’t a clue which ones.  And now Silverbridge (oldest, natch) has a lovely new wife who, as far as I can make out, eats absolutely nothing.  The Lawyer Sis is coming too, but she’s easy because she mostly eats mayonnaise.

The Baby is flying in from England, and I haven’t seen her since mid April (what kind of Bad Mother abandons a child who is barely sixteen and buggers of to an island thousands of miles away just because she takes her midlife crises really seriously?  That would be me.)  Silverbridge and his wife, who have just moved from Las Vegas to Seattle, will pick her up at the airport and bring her here. 

And then what kind of Bad Mother would so indulge and spoil her children that she will cook up separate meals for each, exactly to order, and wait on them hand and foot? 

That will be me.