My typical work day starts at 6am in the morning and ends around midnight. It involves 2 different cross-country drives and being packed in the ever-crowded East-West train on my way to and from work, carrying a cooler bag containing multiple 150ml baggies of breast milk, speed reading through everything, even at lunch time, because of the need to leave work at 6:30pm sharp.

I typically get home at about 9pm. I will then wash and boil all of the milk-expressing equipment and bottles, take a shower, and start putting the Peanut in bed from 10pm onwards. Oftentimes I fall asleep before she does and she ends up spending the entire night spread out on my chest, nursing as and when she wants to through the night. I then inexplicably wake up at 4am to put her back into her cot.

My typical Saturday starts with teaching piano, then bringing the Peanut over to my mother in law's. My typical Sunday consists of lunch at my father in law's. At both of these places, my Peanut will be taken away from me and fussed over incessantly and will not be returned to me unless she's hungry, even when she cries non-stop because everyone but me know what's good for her. When it's time to go home, she is reluctantly returned to me with one last lingering pet on her cheek. I have a lot of resentment that I know I really shouldn't have. I swallow it all. It accumulates in a dark place at the pit of my stomach and festers. Then I try not to burp up the noxious fumes drifting up and up through my oesophagus.

So yes, I am really really tired. But there really isn't much to be done, is there? I can't complain since I am not the one who does the driving on the road.

But then I am more alive than I have ever felt. At work I am speeding everywhere doing everything all at once even faster than before because I only work half the week. My anal retentiveness and my complete lack of sympathy had apparently been missed muchly while I was away. Then again, maybe everyone just missed having a work horse around to whack. On my days off I spend hours with the Peanut seated at the piano. We talk and sing and take naps together. She laughs and it makes me laugh too. She is a really special little girl. She will grow up in a world where a lot of people love her and dote on her and I wonder sometimes, watching her sleep, whether she will have time for her Mummy, in between all of her other activities with other people, when she is independent and doesn't depend on Mummy for sustenance any more.

It is now time to go to bed again. I will have to pick up the Peanut from her cot where she now lies cooing at her mobile playing a Chopin Etude on repeat. Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning in an ever spinning reel; as the images unwind like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind.

When you knew that it was over were you suddenly aware that the autumn leaves were turning to the colour of her hair?

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