I get the look!

If you've got four (or more) children, you know what I'm talking about. Tell someone how many children you have and ... you get The Look. The Look is more than just a facial expression, it's a full narrative of someone's mental state from "Stop joking", through "You're kidding me", through "Pity for the insane" and then a facial expression that doesn't have an adjective you'd use in polite company but is probably one that lepers used to know well and is summed up by "I feel sorry for you but don't get too close in case some of it (or some of whatever's coming out of that kid's nose) rubs off on me".

That's The Look.

But I tell you it's nothing compared to the facial expression you'd get if someone who doesn't have kids at all had to live in a home with four of them.

We don't get much time to watch TV, my wife and I, but we always get a good laugh at cleaning product commercials. I think you know the ones. Mum's at home in a sun-drenched open plan kitchen, kids come bouncing in from school - miraculously remembering to wipe their feet and not already half-way through round one of the afternoon bicker - and they line up their improbably clean faces at the bench, ready for their healthy afternoon treat.

(Why do organic people always have curly hair?)

The funny part comes when a child spills something - say a small blob of pureed organic watermelon in a suspiciously small quantity on the clinical benchtop and mum leans over, with a wry smile, and wipes it away with a mere flick of the cloth and a spray of the magic spray.

Funny because I don't need the magic spray and a cloth - they are for naive beginners - in a house of 4 real actual children, I need to be kitted out like Lara Croft - ready to deal with the mummified grave goods that will emerge from the bowels of the school bag - like a cursed menace from the First Dynasty - which are just vaguely recognisable as morning tea from Tuesday on week 4, two terms ago. 

BTW - why is is that ad-families always seem to have angelically clean homes other than one thing - a floor, a toilet - which has been allowed to degenerate to a state of cleanliness more usually associated with abandoned-public-housing-project chic.

Even funnier are people who opine on how much better families would be if only the birch of law and order was wielded more firmly by parents.

Let me tell you that there is certainly law and order in my house. I give the orders and the law - or at least the four lawyers my wife seems to have given birth to - find ingenious ways around them. The cases for the defence include:

1. I'm still carrying out the last order. Which was to pick up a pair of socks, and was issued sometime around Michelmas in the Year of our Lord 1573.

2. I didn't hear you. But I did hear when you whispered "Would you like ice cream" with your head deep in the freezer.

3. It's not fair because [other sibling] doesn't have to do exactly that thing at exactly the same time as I do it and I will be subject to ridicule by said sibling as they lounge, eating grapes, and mocking my servitude.

4. I am physically / psychologically / emotionally incapable of carrying it out. I can carry twice my body weight in Lego to any destination you like but the specific gravity of my school shoes prevents me from moving them even slightly out of the kitchen doorway.

5. It would traumatise me. In fact, I'll show you right now - with a quick burst of slammy door - just how traumatised I would be if I had to have a shower and clean my teeth.

6. Eating that would be a breach of my ethics and beliefs - formed just this instant past - to be a vegetarian, a meat-i-tarian, sauropod, theropod, have a deep and abiding conviction that I'm allergic to peas or have a general and non-specific stomach complaint what would prevent me eating anything that isn't at least 50% sugar.

And so the long court case wears on. Most of the time it would be quicker just to have an extra shower myself and console myself - in the way that guilty parents do - that there is a universal balance in these things and that I'm just doing it - this once - because the kids have had a tough day.

Our opiners are not asking for law and order, they're asking for militant dictatorship. And only someone who doesn't have kids would think that that was a possibility. Saddam wouldn't even get the first statue up before he was ousted, roasted, toasted and beheaded by the righteous citizenry. You can take a child to water but you can't make them wash.

There may be some justification for The Look!