Category: being a mother (good, bad, indifferent)

Solidarity forever

So, the teachers went on strike, we met some friends in the park, there was an uneven number of children wanting to play soccer, I didn’t like the look of the ensuing conversation about who would have to sit out, so I said ‘how about if I play’.

‘Yay! Yay! ThirdCat’s gonna play.’ The two big girls jumped around.

My boys looked at each other. I’m almost certain they raised their eyebrows. ‘She can be in your team,’ they said.

‘You go in goals,’ the big girls said, ‘cos we’re really good at attack.’

After my eldest boy had scored three goals against us and I had scored one own-goal, the tallest of the tall girls said ‘maybe I’ll go in goals’.

Halfway down the field, my left foot tripped my right foot over. I am a grown up, so must laugh such things off, but fuck, it hurt (and would for days to come).

I scored a goal!

And then, I had to go in time out, because there was a boy, crying on his mother’s lap, his face etched with the etchings of a ball kicked by an inaccurate foot, and his words ‘I don’t want ThirdCat to play any more’ and my boys ‘she’s hopeless, our mum’.

The moral of the story is: pay teachers more.

Nothing a couple of panadol won’t fix

Its enormity, which I believed I understood, has been settling on me in waves.

Like yesterday, as I sat at the side of the bed of a man I love, a woman I have been smiling at all week but whose name I do not know, stopped and said ‘we’re going home’. Her nod, her smile, her look were small. ‘It’s at that point. There’s nothing more they can do for him’. I don’t speak because there is no need and because this time is hers.

I wonder how much more there is I am yet to understand. And how I ever will.

And then, in bed at seven, because I couldn’t stand or sit or think, my boys snuggled in with me. They brought me a glass of water, did sums together, took turns to pat me, and when the mister got home (delayed by fog) they said ‘shhhh…Mum’s got a thumping head’.

And that’s fifteen minutes of my life I’ll never get back

This morning, I have been threading a shoelace through a shoe.

It all began when the dog chewed a significant length of the shoelace. The shoelace was too long anyway. But still.

The shoelaces are not old, but in the shoes of a boy who has fallen in love with soccer, they have fallen into a state of disrepair which, in combination with the efforts of the dog, left them difficult to lace.

I had to use a darning needle, a fork, and a well-time lashing of the mister’s patient follow-through.

But the shoelaces are now much easier to tie, and also do not need a triple knot to keep them almost not long enough to trip over a soccer-playing boy.

Theatre with child

The thing I liked about Nyet Nyet’s picnic was that it didn’t compromise. It didn’t lose the perspective (I know I’m supposed to say lens right there) it came from. Well, as far as I could tell it didn’t compromise. From the lens I was using. White, middle-class eyes. Oh look, and I found something to back me up here.

It was pretty scary. I wondered at times whether I really approved of myself letting (making?) my children sit there. Particularly at the one or two points where my eldest boy was petrified. And who wouldn’t be petrified? I mean look at them. Snuff puppets are enormous. Huuuuge. You’re seven years old, you’re in a big dark cavern of a space and the mother bunyip looms over you. That mother bunyip was, without exaggeration, as tall as a not small house. Taller than our house for sure.

And not to mention the towering man with his head caught on fire staggering about the auditorium and roaring a gutteral roar. A lot of the children (including, I think, my youngest) revelled in the frightening, in the way that people do on the Ghost Train or a rollercoaster. Screaming exaggerated screams as the bunyip loomed overheard.

If Dreamtime stories are supposed to act as a cautionary tales, well, in our house it’s worked. I’m pretty confident my kids won’t be getting too close to the campfire that’s for sure.

Through it all, my boys were on high alert. ‘They could come out from any of those corners, Mum’. ‘I didn’t see where that other bunyip went, did you?’ ‘Is there anything else in that lagoon?’

Bunyips? We believe.

But there were fart jokes too. And poo. What makes fart jokes so funny? I just can’t see it.

When it was finished, I let my boy peek behind the curtain to see the lifeless bunyip. Pretty sure it didn’t look lifeless to him. Pretty sure it looked like it had one eye open. Always.

But like I said to him that night when we were snuggled up together in bed (don’t leave until I’m asleep, okay?) if you can handle Ben10* then you’re up for a bit of Dreamtime.

*Watched it on holiday with his Granny – according to the mister, if I’d seen it, I would have been disapproving. Sometimes I wonder: is that my job? To disapprove.

Mother’s Day

A long time ago, I wrote this short piece about Mother’s Day. It’s not the world’s best piece of writing, but I still feel that way.

Like a great number of people, I don’t go much for the commercialism of Mother’s Day, but I like that my boys made me cards and put on a music performance for me this morning.

My youngest boy also gave me a box which he made at school. He had already eaten whatever  it was that was supposed to have been inside. It was a coffee cup made of lollies – with a biscuit for the saucer, a marshmallow, and what sounds like it might have been a freckle. I love freckles. Apparently, ‘the box is the best bit’ anyway. Plus ‘it’s still got shredded paper’ inside.

And now, I’m off to sit outside in the sun and drink my coffee and read a book for an hour or so.

School holidays. Day one.

So, in between all these bouts of backup madness, I was treated to ‘a show’. The ticket promised that it would be ‘the most halarias show in the world’.

It was called ‘The Disgusting and Rude Show’.

Before the lights went down, I was warned that it was ‘a bit PG’.

Which it was, featuring as it did, ‘the rude finger’ (all four of them) and farts live on stage.

I know I shouldn’t have laughed.

second week of school

I was asleep when today became yesterday and then again when today arrived. The mister, who left for work I know not when, didn’t re-set the alarm. Eldest Boy was too engrossed in the latest Captain Underpants (something to do with booger boys) and Youngest Boy is about to hit the wall after riding high on the wave of excitement which is the beginning of school and so slept even later than I. (I racked my brains for a third metaphor, to try and make the mashing a poetic one, but none sprang to mind, and I’ve got real work to be done.)

Anyway, fifteen minutes after school had started, we snuck past the Guardian of the Book with that most Intimidating of Columns ‘Reason for Lateness’. Though in truth, I’m not scared of the book, and I would’ve been more than happy to write: Mum Slept In.

Tomorrow perhaps I will tell you of my First Regret Experienced while Being 39.

I went shopping and I bought some acrylic paints

When we get out the acrylic paints, Eldest Boy lasts until the first blob of paint is on his hand, at which point he declares himself complete, then races off to the bathroom to wash his hands before he goes and gets another apple from the fridge.

Youngest Boy, on the other hand, goes out of his way to get as much on his hands and his fingers as he can, and spends at least an hour happy as a pig in shit, before he declares himself ‘retired from this’ and demands that I make him a jam sandwich.

I, of course, am the bunny who has to clean it up. But I enjoy the mucky water in the bottom of the sink and the paint splodges that are stuck to the palattes (plastic plates) and the brushes. It makes me feel connected to a world of which I have never been much part.

Also, about fifteen minutes ago, the universe put a tiny little present in my lap, and it makes reaching my deadlines feel much less overwhelming. Ace.

We’d better find a lunchbox

When Littlest Boy knows not what to do with his surges of emotional energy (of which there is a great many in the kind of life lived by Littlest Boy), he runs to the couch (the one against the wall) and does endless handstands on it.

His concepts of time are imprecise, but what he does understand is that today is Tuesday. And that means there’s no more Tuesdays until he starts school. And when he starts school, he will learn to read. And then, I won’t be the only one who can’t read, won’t I?

If you visit, you can sit on the other lounge. After you’ve made me a cup of tea.