My kids hate me. I’m sure they don’t deep down but this week they are saying it a lot because I have just gone all Gwynyth Paltrow on their arses! Yup. I am having a spring clean. Usually it’s just me that gets all detoxy after a big Easter chocolate binge and holiday laze-about but this time I’m getting the whole family on board. Did I mention that the kids hate me? Well my husband hates me as well and when I spout Paltrowisms at him he reminds me that Chris Martin ended up consciously uncoupling from G etc.
It’s not a big deal. It’s just some dietary/lifestyle housekeeping. You know, like no sugar, dairy, wheat, alcohol, caffeine, complimented with daily workouts and meditation and family bonding sessions and gardening (because apparently it’s good for the soul and also my garden is overrun with weeds and I can’t afford a gardener). At first they climbed aboard begrudgingly, after I gave an impassioned speech about how this is a family project that will bond us all closer because our current arrangement has the grown ups working around the clock while the teens get home from school and plug into devices and stay there until they are asleep with drool running all over the headphones. I don’t want much – just the perfect family. Now that it’s sinking in and they can tell that I’m seriously serious, they all look a bit shocked and clammy and terrified.
My hip nags at me and I have something seriously wrong with my joints…it might be arthritis or perhaps carpal tunnel syndrome. I’m loathe to go to a medical practitioner as I’m pretty alternative and have always been able to heal things with dietary adjustments and my go-to for everything TURMERIC AND MANUKA HONEY. My teen daughter is a chocolate addict who will eat nothing but chocolate, white bread, pasta and cheese. My son eats anything. He is more confident that he can pull off this detox fortnight. My daughter says she will die. My husband alternates between those two. His mouth says he’s up for it but the look on his face says he will also die.
I just made up this week’s shopping list and it looks like something the Goop-Meister would be proud of – I have sheep’s milk yoghurt, buckwheat pasta, every vegetable under the sun including Jerusalem artichokes. I have kimchi and blueberries and almonds ready to be activated (I’m not even being silly…I’m going to try that). I have quinoa up the wazoo and things like vegannaise and kombochu. I have so much produce there that I think I’d better stagger the shopping over the fortnight or I’ll end up with stinky, rotting veggies in the crisper, floating in their own soupy, moldy slime!
School lunches will be fun and I don’t doubt that my little darlings will beg or steal their mates’ lunch-time treats and lie to me…..to my actual face. Each one has been given an exercise pad to record their daily feelings about the process and every day there will be a creative drawing exercise…today we must all draw a tree. Drawing is also apparently good for the soul. Husband draws a stick figure tree and I think that’s a vulture sitting on the branch…that may or may not be symbolic of something.
I’ll keep you posted. Either this will be the making of us and I will change my daughter’s name to Apple and lose my round tyre of fat impersonating a belly (maybe Fat Bastard’s) and my opera-singing husband will release an album of emotional songs that all sound the same but sell millions and I will win that Academy Award and we’ll all look like those folks in knitted sweaters on Christmas cards or it will all go to hell and we’ll kill each other or there will be a mutiny and they will all gang up and kill me.
I’m really positive. I think it will be fun. Also my new book is rollicking along…okay it’s not really…I’ve written one paragraph and I’ve now decided that it won’t work to tell the story from the viewpoint of a Blue-Jay…so this detox can clear me of stupid ideas and fill me with some new good ones.
Don’t tell me to break a leg….you know….wishing me luck…because I think the demon of osteo might take it literally…..
Cheers. Clink glasses of goopy green juice with lots of KALE and ginger and other weird shit!
Nik x
nikki mcwatters 