I heard the school shoes thudding upstairs and knew bedtime had started to go wrong

Dear Delyara, Some mothers can tell from the sound of footsteps how the next twenty minutes are going to go. I heard the heavy dragging thud-thud-thud from upstairs and knew my son had reached that overtired stage where everything takes twice as long and every instruction starts sounding like an argument. By the time I got up there, one sock was off, one sock was on, his homework was on the floor, and he was insisting that tomorrow was non-uniform day even though I knew it wasn’t. It was one of those evenings where nobody was being especially difficult, but everything was slightly harder than it should have been. I tucked him in eventually, kissed his forehead, turned the light off, and came downstairs feeling far older than the clock suggested. Parenting doesn’t always tire me through drama. Sometimes it’s just the repeated friction of ordinary evenings.