The day began with three hours in Accident & Emergency with my fourteen-year-old, having x-rays on what turned out to be a fractured elbow. From there, we went to the warehouse to pick up 3,000 pamphlets that she was due to fold and deliver that afternoon, which of course she couldn’t do due to her injury and the rain.
We came home, and my other daughter was about twelve hours into a fourteen-hour specialist maths assignment the likes of which I’ve never encountered in my entire education. She hadn’t left her bedroom all weekend, other than when I dragged her to a movie as an escape.
Then my four-year-old said ‘Mummy – would you like to wrap up your present?’ He meant the pair of Wonder Woman pyjamas I’d bought from K-mart the day before. He then had some sort of tantrum over the exercise bike which, truth be told, began at my sister’s place during afternoon tea with mum, where he ripped a door off its hinges and was basically rude, cranky and badly mannered the entire time. Back home, our oven element went…
Needless to say, my day resembled the opposite of the expectation, particularly if I went by the myriad images in the piles of pamphlets that have been clogging our house all week, depicting smiling mums—perfect hair, sparkling eyes, delightful children…
On the surface of it, my experience was not glossy-brochure beautiful. You really had to dig around in it, searching for the good stuff. And I found some:
