I’m not a strong person. I look around and see all the Dads and Mums looking after their small children and they seem calm and in control.

Me, on the other hand, I feel constantly out of my depth. Becoming a parent has promoted me above my capabilities.

Add the daily school run to this, and combine that with nights of broken and limited sleep, and my life becomes a strange dream about an embarrassingly bad circus clown trying to wrangle lions because the lion tamer has done a bunk.

The end of the summer term is the light at the end of my tunnel, but getting there is not assured. Each day seems more chaotic, each clown run through the school gate more desperate and embarrassing, one child weeping, one child running off, one child wrapped around my leg making me hobble like a Zombie with a fake morning smile. The head greets everyone at the gate. The “good morning” she gives us seems more judging, more concerned each day.

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Then. Finally. The summer holidays begin. We have a couple of days of illness, obviously. What would the beginning of the summer holidays be without vomit? Then, finally, finally, like people lost in the desert realising that the oasis mirage is actually real, we start to relax. The kids start to have fun. I’m getting a little more sleep, so I’m slowly transforming from a grumpy troll back into a human.

By day four of the summer holidays, the kids have fully embraced the idea that they don’t have to go to school and are tearing around, making incredible amounts of noise, ridiculing me and ignoring my authority voice.

It’s day five. I furtively check my calendar to see how long it will be before school starts again.