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It’s our fault, for settling so far away from our families. We could have stayed Up North, I suppose, to have grandparents near at hand. But then, they too moved to the South West in recent years, near to my sister.

A few years back, my parents would take the children for a couple of days in the summer, so my wife and I could take a romantic weekend away to celebrate our wedding anniversary. But that was when the kids were small. It hasn’t happened now for years.

This is what I struggle with. There’s no respite. We’re on duty all the time. Now that they’re older, we sometimes get away for a walk in the countryside for a few hours, or dinner out, just the two of us. But we need more than that.

Sometimes I just want to get away from it all. To rest, recharge and recuperate. Even more so in the hours after another fractious meltdown, freshly chastised for ruining their life, the house smashed to pieces, hearts in fragments.

In these frenzied moments, we feel like walking away for good, and just giving up altogether. But in truth, we know we just need a good rest. A weekend away. A week if we were allowed. Some time out, away from one another.

It never comes, however, for we’re cut adrift, far from extended family and siblings. We find ourselves counting down instead, hopeful for the day they emerge sensible and independent, capable of making their own way in the world.

“Don’t wish their childhood away,” my mother once said to me.

What am I to say? Could we have imagined days like these, as we attended appointment after appointment at Hammersmith Hospital, desperate for children? Or during those adoption assessment meetings in Ealing?

We had such high hopes all those years ago, dreaming of becoming parents.

But now? We just can’t wait for the fifteen year-old to turn eighteen, and leave us. It no longer bothers us if he goes to university or not. He can do an apprenticeship for all I care, and become a brickie, a plumber or a sparkie. It’s an honest living.

These the wearied conclusions of parents completely worn down by the years of mindless, explosive tempers, shattering our inner peace. Just another Monday morning after just another Sunday afternoon.

These the grumpy lamentations of one for whom there is no respite. May God grant us patience and relief.