Ohhhhhh SHIT….

I got a phone call from the Deputy Manager of Apple Court, Marifa's (social services) respite centre yesterday, regarding a daft telephone call one of the carers made to my son's school last week. The Deputy Manager is called Marcus Prickface. The daft phone call, was, he insisted, “a many headed hydra.” What he meant by that is anyone’s guess, but one thing I do know: it was an attempt to look clever that impressed no one but himself. Then he lied. It was a bare faced, stupid, unambiguous porky. A Norway-sized whopper. Boom!

My grievance was this: a phone call — which might potentially have led to Marifa not attending respite that day (and with the break in visiting routine, effectively never again) — was placed without knowledge of the centre’s manager, who was on duty that day. However, Marcus told me the manager, Antonio, was on annual leave that day. Given the email I sent made it clear I’d spoken to Antonion shortly after the daft telephone call was made, and Marifa's mum had handed Antonio his sleep-over things on that very same morning, that was evidently untrue.

A blatant, ludicrous fib. And I exploded.

The minute I exploded, this fool won. The fact he lied is now overshadowed by the fact I was “abusive” – I called him a “lying bastard”, told him he was “pathetic”, and – just before I slammed the phone down in seething rage – to “piss off”. This isn’t personal. My life-partner, a Registered Nurse, describes him as a “jumped up care assistant”. My mother-in-law — a no nonsense working class Yorkshire woman and a former Shop Steward – sneered at his conceit. My daughter, who herself works with learning disabled adults, put it plainly. “He thinks he knows it all, but he knows jack shit.”

I don’t like the idea of my vulnerable, autistic son attending a resource where one of the managers is a fucking idiot. But that’s how it is, and it’s the only show in town. Most of the time I deal with it. So why did I go off like a volcano yesterday? Exhaustion, mostly. Tired of being tired, I greeted the end of the school hols with a declaration I was going to do everything bar climb Mount Everest. And within a week, I’d run myself into the ground. There is no space to recuperate here. This is the reality of my life — a reality Marcus (and our even more idiotic social worker) cannot appreciate, obscured as it is by the shadow of their monumental egos.

The fact is, when Marifa is at school, I must devote my time to mending myself. So I’ll take my morning walk, write my book, and do 45 minutes Arabic every weekday. Everything else that isn’t essential can wait.