tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-39836035816086124402024-02-08T10:28:50.563-08:00fat bad housewife writesSandrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00679010667380926214noreply@blogger.comBlogger16125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983603581608612440.post-16389680852853399282009-03-17T19:04:00.000-07:002009-03-17T22:08:04.953-07:00Life stories from our unfashionable dining room tableI'm eating a late night snack with a choice of literature in front of me. There is Hairy Maclary's Caterwaul Caper, which isn't much fun without someone on my knee practising her new vocab.<br /><br />There is the terms and conditions of banking published by kiwibank. I thought John Key might kill kiwibank but it seems that this year you just wait for banks to die all by themselves. <br /><br />Also on the table, a Spot What? book, a rugby league mouthguard, a toy motorbike and a torch. You need all of these accesories to be interested in the Spot What? book.<br /><br />Beyond the sudoku, the sunglasses, discarded tissues and the join-the-dots book, an old Guardian Weekly proclaims that "Middle age needn't be miserable for women." I've already read that. It's partly about hormones. Once is enough.<br /><br />My own choices at the table are a magazine on garden herbs and a book on twentieth century New Zealand Art. I've hammered the herb book before and jab yet another mental note to myself about eating nasturtiums and making el cheapo pesto.<br /><br />So, Towards Aotearoa. The art book. There is a painting on the front of lots of stones, a tractor and a mountain. Taranaki? I look inside to find out. It's Michael Smither. Of course it isn't of a particular place. How uneducated of me. I watched a tv programme on Michael Smither once, during a brief stint when we had a tv. He was in a cold hut in Central Otago with no money and lots of small children and when his wife got fed up and asked him to do the dishes or change a nappy or some other reasonable thing, he sat down and painted a picture of her looking grim.Sandrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00679010667380926214noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983603581608612440.post-85830774278646445782009-03-15T00:51:00.000-07:002009-03-15T01:11:12.573-07:00Divine tasteInterior decoration.<br /><br />A priority for the stylish. Not to be confused with exterior decoration, which mostly seems to be about dieting and jewellery and finding that the jeans you bought last year and never quite fitted can now be abandoned in the interests of the next new look. The next new black which mostly turns out still to be black.<br /><br />So anyway, enough of fat and the jeans which other people take to St Vincent de Paul which fit my out of date image for years on end.<br /><br />Interior decoration is not about drugs to realign your brain. I don't even need drugs for <em>that</em>. All I need to do is to parent alone for more than ten hours at a stretch.<br /><br />Interior decoration is about taste in your home.<br /><br />You can't even begin to qualify if you have fleas. Due to the infinite mercy and serious killer drugs of Piner the Pest man, I can indeed redirect my energies to the lounge. If I had divine taste, it wouldn't even be the lounge. Living area perhaps, like the real estate agents trumpet, or something else entirely if I was remortgaging two years ago and thought I'd tip the house upside down and backwards all in order to still eat, sleep and poo in the same house but facing different compass directions. <br /><br />Anway, or lounge, as the word befits the era of our wallpaper, is in need of a refit. I have grand plans for this lounge. I've had them before. The plans all start and finish with not using it as a clean laundry station and eliminating 85 pieces of train track and 93 hot wheels cars. Since these grand designs started, fitfully and never with much traction beyond a week, we now have extra design challenges. Dolls. And their socks.<br /><br />But no. There's more. This time I am binning the dinge. Literally. We stripped the wallpaper off, my delightful children who had been practising in the rest of the house against all injunctions for years and I, and we put it all in a big black sack for the big hole of consumer baggage out on the edge of our town.<br /><br />So now we have a light filled room. The laundry looks sparkly in it.<br /><br />I hear of women with divine taste in my town. Absolutely divine. As for me, I just need to persuade my family to join a nudist group come rain hail or shine and then we might paint the couch and the chairs. Or re-cover them. Or take them to the women's refuge or the sallies or back to the Anglican church fair where we first found them. Oh the step up they provided when we could start sitting on chairs instead of the floor.<br /><br />Can't have done any washing that first day....Sandrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00679010667380926214noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983603581608612440.post-6723199289050776012009-03-14T23:39:00.000-07:002009-03-15T00:00:17.156-07:00deadlineThere is a deadline, all of my own doing. No one made me join writers' group. No one made me have children or said I had to become a mass group youth torturer either. I struggle with deadlines for them all. <br /><br />What shall I write on my get out clause, or excuse for not doing my homework slip? Sandra was unable to complete her homework as she was busy dealing with silverfish, headlice, fleas and mice. Hmmmm, boy do I wish that was a lie.<br /><br />Sandra was unable to complete her homework because she was making assorted kinds of bread, none with a recipe and then wondering why they turned out less than perfect.<br /><br />She was also unable to complete her homework because she was swanning around the environs of Fox Glacier, hauling her daughter up away from the actual glacier from time to time. That is an acceptable truth. On the palatability of experiencing it scale.<br /><br />Sandra will be unable to complete her homework the night before writers' group because that will be St Patrick's Day and the beer coasters will be too wet to write on.<br /><br />I do know I have to front up because this month I finally got organised and rang the nice lady from the West Coast Messenger. I usually meet Jo Keppel while I'm doing motherish things like toy library and sewing nappies. I've quit both of those things of course. So now people see me in the supermarket and tell me they saw about me in the paper. I usually smile and flee because the first time I did not, someone asked me what I wrote. <br /><br />well.<br /><br />shopping lists.<br /><br />Um, about domestic stuff.<br /><br />Er. um. I wrote about my washing machine once.<br /><br />Then I hit the warble button on my brain - I have several such buttons, all easily pushed. Well, you know, it seems an intrinsically good idea. To have a writers' group in Greymouth. We started it after the Kate do Goldi workshop. Where I had the flu. At least it gets me writing.<br /><br />My questioner glazed and started to check her son's nappy. <br /><br />Sandra needs a writers' group to make a shopping list. For the good of the community.<br /><br />Roll me out the insane people please. They will be so much better to communicate with.<br /><br />So if you see me in the supermarket and tell me you saw about the writers' group, please don't take it personally if I rush on past instead of encouraging you to join. It's just that I've clocked that the washing machine hasn't broken since the last piece of writing, I'm still too traumatised to talk about the fleas and now half of Greymouth thinks we have a proper writing group. Please look to your left (or right) for someone to give you more hope than Sandra.Sandrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00679010667380926214noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983603581608612440.post-65130791590329676712009-01-20T15:40:00.000-08:002009-01-20T15:43:31.053-08:00You are an object of someone else's devotionI look at your arms and chest intently. <br />In their direction, that is. <br />I am admiring your jerseys. <br /><br />A different one each time I see you. <br />Hand knitted, patterned, coloured. <br />Hours and hours of devotion.<br /><br />You say,<br />your wife has no interest in your writing. <br />I think,<br />she is a talented woman.Sandrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00679010667380926214noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983603581608612440.post-58034874224691970352009-01-16T11:27:00.001-08:002009-01-16T11:47:30.696-08:00alternative therapistsIf your life is a rut, then you should go see an alternative therapist. They will make the rut more interesting. Maybe even give you some jumping juice to get out of the aforementioned rut.<br /><br />This, as a service, has to be far more interesting than trying the GP. If you tell Dr Patel that you are fed up with your life, while a queue snakes around past the small box of broken toys and the stop smoking posters and the pharmaceutical company advertisements, he might not even bother answering you. Which would suggest he wasn't listening. Which is probably why your life is in a rut anyway, because no one listens to you.<br /><br />It doesn't especially matter which alternative therapist you choose, most of them having something new to tell you and a good deal of them are good listeners. Yes, you have to pay for someone to listen to you at some points in your life.<br /><br />I have preferences though. I like osteopaths, homeopaths, reiki, shiatsu, reflexologists, naturopaths and herbal therapists. I've never tried all of them at once or even more than one in a month, but if I was rich I would. For fun. How could I be in a rut with that many therapists?<br /><br />I don't go in for counsellors. What's the point of them if my neck hurts and I haven't slept much lately? I'm well aware that I argued a pile with my mother - I'm visiting remarkably similar issues on my own offspring thank you.<br /><br />My latest alternative therapist has psychic skills. I heard that along the grapevine, specifically when someone told me I should take my son to her to find out why he had eczema. Took me years and a bad bad headache on a deep rut day to get past that little piece of information.<br /><br />So I've been twice now. Two dead people visited the room during the first session and that turned out not to be so freaky after all. Particularly as only the therapist could see them. Last week was session two. I warbled and wafted on and you know, someone was paid to listen to me being indulgent! I have to eat 75% fruit and vegetables and give up bread though. No such thing as a free moan. Even if you pay for the session.<br /><br />Which is why there is a pomegranate on my kitchen bench. Even the children haven't tried to eat it yet.Sandrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00679010667380926214noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983603581608612440.post-91197891363399007712009-01-15T18:33:00.000-08:002009-01-15T19:01:42.244-08:00When I am finishedWhen I am finished being a solo parent, I shall go to the toilet alone. No child shall dangle a nectarine precariously above my knickers while they pull reams of toilet paper off and gesture towards wiping my bottom. While smiling. Don't tell me toddlers can't multi-task. No older child shall loiter in the door frame telling me how many hot wheels cars he wants, jabbering on while the nectarine which shouldn't be near the toilet anyway tortures me. Threats and shouts and bribery are all useless - I used them up before we even got to the toilet. We indeed, as it seems I am not allowed to defecate on my own. They know my limits. They know, both of them without discussion, that I will not waddle through the house with half delivered poo carrying either of them. They know that I really want to go swimming as well, so that is a non-threat that the mother should have given up two hours ago.<br /><br />So I sit on the toilet, with my smiling assassins keeping guard, guarding against any independent move on my behalf.<br /><br />It's a fun filled lark, being a solo parent. yes I know some people do it all the time. They get lambasted on the news regularly as though they should have the strength to bring their children up perfectly on five dollars per day and be there for them whenever they need it and when they don't as well and find paying work so they are not a burden to the state. In case you think like me that prostitution is probably the only thing with flexible hours, it turns out that that is bad for your children as well. Haven't those know it all types ever had sex with someone who turned out to be unsuitable? Oh let's not even answer that one.<br /><br />That is all irrelevant, because I am only solo parenting for four nights and five days. So far I have done three nights and three and a half days. Through some incrdible quirk of wonderfulness, one is asleep and the other is entranced by Postman Pat on the CD. And I'm here writing because I can't face the kitchen. <br /><br />I'm not that keen on the bedroom, because it has a lot less wallpaper than this morning. I fancied reading and Brighid fancied interior decoration. I'm not that keen on the dining room because it has the greater part of four pottles of yoghurt all over it. I made a cursory attempt to clean it earlier which prompted Brighid to tip three cups of water like a waterfall down herself, the high chair, the table and the carpet. Worse, she found the cleaning spray and came up to the bedroom where I had run and hid, wielding it like an axe. Those education types who talk about how good it is for your children to see their parents read - they never describe how it is for parents to try and read with an audience.<br /><br />I'm not that keen on the lounge, because if I poke my head up there, Fionn might notice me and remember that I exist solely for torturing purposes. And for producing food. <br /><br />But, the good news. I have done some nice mummy things this week. I took the children swimming. I drove forty kilometres to do so. I smile with ease at the teenagers swaggering in the streets of my small town. I say hello by name to the ones who have had the personal challenge of knowing me in the classroom. It is summer, and they can imagine with some relief that they might get a different teacher next year. But togs is a whole nother matter. I am not baring such expanses of flesh in front of people whom I last saw when I was making them remove bright pink jerseys in the name of being a school uniform nazi.<br /><br />Anyway, we get to Hokitika pool and we all swim and for an hour it seems that I might be doing okay at this parenting lark. Not only are the alive and doing legally appropriate things but we are all having fun and I'm not skiving off into the garden. Some of the other mothers and grandmothers are a bit fat as well which is nice. It's never nice to be the only fat person at a pool. Back in the changing rooms, a skinny mum's child is having a tantrum. Not all roses that skinny thing. I try and ignore my children's interest in the tantrum. If my child composes a lovely story, or song or picture, it is wonderful. If they watch another child tantrum and then share their own personal version or duet versions have been known, with me, it is not wonderful.Sandrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00679010667380926214noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983603581608612440.post-26619853445492295172009-01-06T22:35:00.000-08:002009-01-06T23:09:29.194-08:00Viscous courageViscous liquids are thick but nevertheless run down hill don't they?<br /><br />I've been thinking about all the things I have quit. I thought about calling it an anti-CV. A backwards cv is a VC though and in New Zealand that is linked to being very good and earning the Victoria Cross for extreme bravery in war. When I was eleven, the deputy principal read us a book about Charles Upham who received the Victoria Cross for escaping from prisoner of war camps - twice I think. Twice for the escapes and probably for the reading of the book by the deputy principal. The same man who once advised me to count to ten before opening my mouth. Ten!<br /><br />Anway I settled on the idea of viscuous courage, a VC which is a sort of slow downhill descent of good intentions into a run, an escape.<br /><br />I was brought up properly. Clean teeth, lots of church, mashed spud, cabbage and sausages every week with carrots cooked for 45 minutes as well some times. Quitting was not discussed. Occasionally I attempted to quit my responsibilities by losing things. A beige jersey once and then on another occasion I managed to lose all twenty-something punishment sheets meted out for me to copy as a punishment for talking too much. Losing things was not an effective way of quitting though. Not with vigilance and a proper upbringing. I could try and mete out the same stuff to my children, but my son has observed more than once that I am hopeless at remembering things. Maybe they will escape propriety.<br /><br />When I was at intermediate, an odd term for being 11 or 12 and at school in New Zealand, my piano teacher forgot to enter me into the theory examination. Hmmph. We all knew he only took lessons for the money. What carelessness. Anyway he rang and apologised to my mother, a feat of some strength in itself, and offered to pay himself for me to sit the examination at the next opportunity.<br /><br />Ladies and gentlemen, I was given the opportunity to further myself, to advance the credentials on this vital document known as my CV and talked about even when I was eleven, and I declined. The rot had set in, fermented by wild yeasts from outside of my proper home.<br /><br />From then on and for ages, memories of quitting are a bit blurry. Frankly I should have quit a few more things, like unsuitable boyfriends.<br /><br />But since we moved to smallwettown, I have taken up quitting with renewed enthusiasm. First, some things to quit. Playcentre was first up. I fancied myself as a bit of an earth mother and all that consensus sharing and loving for the benefit of our little darlings might be right up my alley. Might. Might indeed. In just a few months, I managed to quit not one but two playcentres. Consensus my foot. A wavering wandering waddle of women who vaguely want to do something good for their children lead by women who should have been in the army. I hear Jenny Shipley started out her entry into public life and organisation through playcentre. I can well believe it.<br /><br />So I got out of playcentre. But there was more to get out of. Gymnastics was easy. I sneezed through the entire first session and cried for the lovely one in London where us mums sat and yakked while we watched the children. This kiwi version involved walking round with your child constantly and there was no music. No second time for us.<br /><br />Next up Parents Centre. Who needs church when earnestness is available elsewhere? I guess the truly good like a bit of earnestness and then a bit more. After the meeting where someone groomed and ever so nice from Wellington carefully explained how to set up a charter of rules for the meeting before we even had the meeting, I knew I was dead in the water. How could I possibly find the drive to leave the house and go to another parents centre meeting ever again?<br /><br />I went back to work again after a while but that was easy to quit because I was about to have a baby. Babies are permission to quit a few things.<br /><br />I stuck it out at kindy, mostly because I found that if I played around being librarian, then I could avoid wielding a broom at the end of sessions and not lose points on viurtuosity. There is a lot I'll do to avoid a broom.<br /><br />I know these things are supposedly all about the child, not the mother. Well for the good mother, they are all about the child. That is not what you are reading about. Go find a plunket book if you want goodness.<br /><br />I have another thing to quit. Book group. A very rude man I know told me that book group was a bourgouis activity last year. Naturally I told him he was wrong. Unnaturally, it turned out that he was possibly right. We used to have it at the pub. Wine, gin, chippies, peanuts, beer. A bit of talk about the book and rather a lot of talk about everything else. This year, we are to have it at our homes and provide nibbles. Sweet and savoury. The etiquette of providing drink has been discussed, decided upon. <br /><br />Do you know what this means?<br /><br />It means cleaning. Behind doors and including the chair in the lounge where everything goes during the other big cleanups we have. Cleaning the entire house as there are ten women in the book group and the odds of none of them needing the toilet is rather high. The toilet is at the other end of the house to the lounge. This is beyond my realm of ability. Book group ladies, it was lovely and now I must depart.<br /><br /><br /><br />My first little opportunitySandrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00679010667380926214noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983603581608612440.post-88647483886268801002008-11-26T01:41:00.000-08:002008-11-26T01:47:35.636-08:00Session FourTonight was the fourth meeting of our local writers' group. I wrote about the most exciting aspects of my life, with special accord given to the toilet door, in preparation for the meeting. Was it fitting that I then forgot about it completely until I was sitting on the toilet hoping I could get the washing in before the children's bedtime? What a tragic remembering that was. A cheerful swish of toilet paper and I could announce with genuine urgency that I had to be somewhere else - fifteen minutes ago.<br /><br />So I swished into town like a girl released from childcare and we shared our writing and we even made some plans to do public reading early next year. Then we went to the pub. hahahaha it's all about the pub. Have a nice Christmas.<br /><br />That may be the last nice thing I say relating to Christmas. You have been warned.Sandrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00679010667380926214noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983603581608612440.post-37860171786659532752008-11-24T21:36:00.000-08:002008-11-24T22:32:45.444-08:00Toilet doorsWhen I was at university, I did a course on post modern theory. It was about everything that being a mother is not. Signifiers and signifieds for a start. We were all young and fancied ourselves a tad clever. I think it was Roland Barthes who wrote about how the word 'ladies' on the page meant one thing and yet the word 'ladies' stuck on a door meant quite another. We discussed the ideas like they were really relevant to our lives, getting slightly less convinced when we had to do the one on dream sequences and our lecturer dreamt about mini cars and then explained how that really meant he was dreaming about having breakfast with his lover in France. Naturally, I was full of conviction at that stage that I would be living in Greymouth washing lots of dishes 16 years later.<br /><br />Also at university but not actually at university, I discovered that toilet doors mostly don't work in pubs. I'm not sure if I've missed something really transformative, but I still have yet to experience the kind of state that makes me want to rip locks off toilet doors at the pub. Up adnd down the country there is evidence that I am, if not a minority, then at least not the sole blueprint for how to enjoy a night on the piss.<br /><br />The rest of the time, pre children, toilet doors were quite unproblematic. Sometimes people had naff sayings on theirs and others had calendars, either from the local hardware shop or from their relative in Canada.<br /><br />We have a picture of native ferns on ours. It's on the inside, so you can look at this serene image, cut from last years' calendar from my grandparents of course, and feel at peace with the world.<br /><br />There are however, some things which may make serenity and peacefulness difficult. One is if you saw a mouse in the wash house which the toilet is inside, just the night before. Another is if you are sick and thus looking the other way and remembering at quite the wrong and far too late time that good persons clean their toilet frequently for a useful purpose.<br /><br />The main reasons for lack of zen behind or even in front of the toilet door relate to small children. They object to being shut out, they object to not being able to tear toilet paper off for you, they object far too noisily to my refusal to let them wipe my bottom. <br /><br />I don't know how skinny people manage to sluice dirty nappies without helpful hands getting far too close. When I have my frame blocking entrance to the toilet while I dispose of poo, it has to be one of the times I feel that fat to be really rather useful.<br /><br />Other options include children arguing with each other outside the shut door to establish that indeed a few moments of basic bodily expulsion is more than a mother can expect to experience alone.<br /><br />Possibly the prizewinner is the older child who needs a poo always and only when I am on the toilet. The moral order of the universe seems to be that as a child, he cannot wait and I must have superior bodily control to him. No I don't fit on the potty! Such is the beauty with which we start our days.Sandrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00679010667380926214noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983603581608612440.post-49942208182477884972008-11-22T15:51:00.000-08:002008-11-22T16:15:16.672-08:00YesterdayYesterday the telephone rang. In the middle of <em>The Tale of Ginger and Pickles</em>, as I sat in the middle of my chidlren, the phone began to ring and I knew an adventure could beckon. My big boy ran for the telephone and as I attempted to sound like a lucid adult, the children clambered and giggled and whispered and sent messages to me in ever more urgent ways.<br /><br />We want to be in on the fun! their bodies and hands and the rocking adges of Peter Rabbit's Giant Storybook said. I tried not to hiss and I tried to listen carefully and I stopped and I started and gave up on guessing. Eventually with much excuse mes and more excuse mes and the nicest kind of chiding of children I could muster, we established that Alice and her crew of immediate relatives would be visiting in just seven hours.<br /><br />So the cleaning circus began. We vacuumed and swept and wiped and folded and tidied. We folded perhaps one thousand and seven items of clothing and marvelled that tonight, for the first time since the last entertaining adventure, people would sit on the couch. Directly on the cushions of the couch.<br /><br />I could tell you the story of our church fair couch and the memory of our favourite friend Brian, but that would detract from the real story of the kitchen. Eggshells were being unearthed from beneath pots of Friday night's food project. Banana skins were resurrected from dangerous places where children think they should go and no one else agrees. Pots and pans and bowls were cleaned. Stickers representing where every banana, apple and orange came from and the capitalist giant who made all the profit were rehomed to the rubbish bin.<br /><br />Throughout the house, shoes were collected from every corner and in the middle of many places as well. I would like to have had a Pied Piper to collect them by playing his flute. Alas he was not available and each shoe was moved by a grade one process of torture. Many many many many many many many sentences began "If you want Alice to come..."<br /><br />One of us did not like this cleaning game. Not one little bit. She saw all the fun things retreat, get re-ordered and reviled. She witnessed the removal of the banana skins as the sign of parents gone overboard. But silently, stealthily, she worked out a plan. In the room of the toothbrush, the madness had yet to begin.<br /><br />Brighid had ideas and saw in the soap, a final opportunity to play and to poke. She thought about hair knots and knew what to do. Hairbrushes would work so much better with the addition of soap.<br /><br />Imagine the rage when Mum did not agree. The soap was evicted and so was the girl.<br /><br />Bouyed by achievements throughout the house, I opted for cleaning my body as well. Just as I thought the project was complete, I heard the crunch of gravel on the driveway. Sppedier than a moving banana skin, I donned tops and bottoms in the right places and smiled at the door.<br /><br />Alice is here and the carpet is bare and the fun and the games can begin.Sandrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00679010667380926214noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983603581608612440.post-80103962962204667012008-11-22T15:27:00.001-08:002008-11-22T15:47:07.297-08:00The pub ladyI am in the world of adults. Men and women adults. I am there as an illegal indulgence, tiny and less tiny children running around just slowly enough that no one yet asks us to leave.<br /><br />The pub is my own little bribe to help me through the after school hours of a not-really-proper-working day Friday.<br /><br />We go to swimming lessons first thing after school and I take great care not to stop at the pub afterwards. At just 4.15, there are too few ticks on my report card.<br /><br />We've just started swimming lessons recently. They are what proper parents do. Extra-curricular activity. Kind mothers and fathers explain about the necessity of swimming lessons. For safety apparently. I straighten my frown out. Too late, I've already blurted our less cautious truth. Fionn has asked for swimming lessons every week since the infamous, inaugural swim week back in February, which is well over two hundred days ago. We are here for fun.<br /><br />I organised swimming lessons with a contact from one of my proper mother friends. All of my mother friends are proper mothers with busy after school schedules. Now we have schedule thing too.The child with no tv, no playstation and apparently considerably fewer toy cars than any other child in the entire world, gets to frolic in a wetsuit.<br /><br />Post swimming lessons we get home without recourse to the ice cream shop or the pub. Two ticks for the mother. While the children play bike races alternately with destroying my garden, I behave quite nicely. Dinner, chooks, washing, nappies and you can go to the pub at six. Dinner-chooks-washing-nappies-six o'clock finish.<br /><br />At 5.15 I've done dinner and the children must be happy because they haven't grizzled for their father. Technically I haven't grizzled for their father but in practice I can tell you that in forty-four minutes I'll be sharing the load and it won't involve looking at the dishes bench which is never, ever empty.<br /><br />My mummy friends don't drag their children to the pub. None of their children announce "I pinched the principal's bottom at the pub." They're all at jujitsu or gymnastics.<br /><br />So six o'clock rolls around and I find shoes for us all. I'm not without some aspirations to respectability. Kindly Dad buys us drinks and chips and I make a note to myself to switch back to beer next time. Gin and tonic looks very much like the children's lemonades.<br /><br />The Sally Army lady is on her pub crawl. I know this Sally lady and this is the beginning of my undoing. The lovely Muriel has stepped between my worlds and exposed my facade. Muriel is a great friend of my beloved elderly cousin. At Cousin Mary's, I am a good girl. I visit often, the children behave there, I even remember birthdays and special occasions. <br /><br />Muriel brings her box round our table. Once again, I only have my money card and that suddenly seems not innocuous but bad. The children interrupt and I hiss at them. I see it all from the good lady's eyes. Children needing a bath and a bedtime story and instead the mother hisses at them over gin when they dare to ask for some attention.<br /><br />So then it turns custardy and the un-nappied child needs to poo and the kindly Dad is outside burning his lungs. The three of us traipse to the ladies and girl dances on the landing while the boy is on the toilet and I figure we should go home but I have one more drink and so does the smoker and before we know it the chidlren are running wild which we said they couldn't and oh cripes we really had better go home.<br /><br />So like the final recessional hymn but with more hissing, we bundle out the door and Kent is home to put the children to bed which was a good half of my plan anyway.<br /><br />Adult conversations? I think I had three. Evidence that I have the stamina for parenting properly past five o'clock Friday? Not much.<br /><br />Women's Christian Tempreance Ladies, is this what you envisaged when you fought for universal suffrage in the run up to 1893?Sandrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00679010667380926214noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983603581608612440.post-91023556262748613472008-11-08T22:47:00.001-08:002008-11-08T23:18:02.703-08:00We're all class in this houseIt's Sunday night. After the fiftieth airing of that particularly endearing question: "What shall we do now?", it occurred to me that I could get my eldest precious darling to do some homework. This is a novelty activity in our house. I suppose it means he won't get ahead or hold down a good job or maybe he'll become a drug dealer. Don't assume his voice has broken yet or even that he has a set of adult teeth. Homework starts early in these ambitious and insecure times. I suppose it started back in the Industrial Revolution, or the Reformation, or whenever it was that people decided that a satisfying life involved something other than growing food and eating it. Among his peers, I don't think they talk about homework. Among my parenting peers down at the school pick-up, our family is way behind. Or in the parlance of my some-time drug dealer, "lazy-as".<br /><br />So homework involved finding words ending in -s. We got ten words, including Guinness but not including poos as the five year old vetoed his own idea. Mrs Doocey has class - you don't sully anything she has to read. And of course if you grow up in our household, then you have no idea that most five year olds don't routinely chat about Guinness.<br /><br />We went to a sixth birthday party in the afternoon. Children's birthday parties are mostly ghastly. Mothers and fathers spend a lot of time and money encouraging children to be badly behaved. Without any help from Guinness. But at birthday parties, if you are really unfortunate, you can learn what other children are doing at school. Winning principals' awards which were stolen from under the child's nose. The child who wrote a story with 21 sentences in it. Twenty One! I jolted forward on the third repeat, suddenly clicking as to what was expected of me. "Wow! That is clever." I'm a bit thick like that, not realising when to make appropriate admiring noises. It comes from having admired 85 pieces of sand already that day. Often I don't bother to look. That brings it's own problems when I eventually notice that it wasn't a sandpit concoction at all but the now destroyed contents of my seedling tray of brassicas.<br /><br />On the subject of admiring things, I am wondering if I should get a citizens' referendum going against stickers on fruit. What was wrong with having one Dole Sticker on an entire bunch of bananas? When did people get so thick about food things that every single apple had to be labelled with it's variety? You might come up with some compelling reasons for this ridiculous practice, but before you do, I want to know how many of them you have extracted from a toddler's nose this week. If the answer is less than seven, then I won't consider your ideas to carry any weight.Sandrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00679010667380926214noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983603581608612440.post-86020755756265905062008-08-25T18:22:00.000-07:002008-08-25T18:29:42.979-07:00Sugar on the floorIckity stickity sugar on the floor<br />It dissolves in part on my socks. <br /><br />Sticky socks throughout the house.<br />They follow me in my frenzied cleaning burst. <br />Behind the vacuum cleaner little pieces of sugar<br />Stick and shift,<br />Signatures of disarray<br />Throughout the house.<br /><br />My son spilt the sugar.<br />He filled up the sugar jar while I ladled porridge.<br />His idea of housework perhaps.<br /><br />Tiny pieces of my children attach to me<br />I leave smudges of them throughout the rest of my life.<br /><br />I can't see the madonna's feet in any famous paintings.<br />That baby must have stuck to her too.<br />Left his signature.Sandrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00679010667380926214noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983603581608612440.post-64592472910070004632008-08-20T03:41:00.000-07:002008-08-20T03:59:12.713-07:00Washing machineNo, I don't have a special name for my washing machine. I don't have a pet name for God either. They both get things done in mysterious ways.<br /><br />I don't know if God goes on holiday and that's when the devil gets moving and shaking and the tsunamis roll. Maybe God is at the Olympics right now and the devil is rocking on down in Georgia. I don't see redemption and salvation in Osetia on my news channel.<br /><br />I do know that my washing machine got appendicitis. It did. You get washing machine appendicitis when you swallow socks into the wrong places. It doesn't have a Latin name this illness because washing machines weren't invented back when learned people spoke mostly in Latin. It's just ordinary washing machine appendicitis. Expensive dicky tummy as an alternative.<br /><br />So now I know how to check the filter on my washing machine. Front loader you see. That's what greenie types who hung out too long in the UK like. If you haven't considered your washing machine type, then you don't wash enough and you don't have children. Go back to sleep. There will be someone more urbane on soon. Perhaps a metrosexual type for you non-school lunch makers in the audience.<br /><br />I also know that the washing machine filter is not filter enough. There are some people at Ellerys who now know a lot about my washing machine. I imagine it's a bit like having a caesarian. Lots of women give birth without stomach lining being inspected but if you give birth enough times or have other deep and dark complications, the doctors will see your stomach lining. They'll cut it up no less.<br /><br />So now we have the washing machine back. We also have a wee plastic packet of slimey mouldering socks. They don't live on top of the pressure switch any more. So now I know that washing machines have pressure switches. I have a pressure switch too. You'll know about it if you press on it when the school lunches haven't been made and the baby poos and the reading folder is nowhere to be found and my big boy announces he wants to wear a clown suit to school and you work for Expertly Irritating Market Research Consultants and you ring me. Just fifteen minutes you say confidently. Off your life expectancy or mine?<br /><br />My washing machine is occasionally expensive and mostly very obliging. I shall henceforth think of it as my wife.Sandrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00679010667380926214noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983603581608612440.post-21457762529111127502008-08-20T03:37:00.001-07:002008-08-20T03:41:36.538-07:00report on writers' group #1We all met this evening. Four teachers and a midwife. Great writing and empowering. I don't feel so crap and I don't feel like my whole life is about dishes and nappies. <br /><br />We are going to do a series of public readings. Soon.<br /><br />>Insert expletives of terror<<br /><br />Although I do concede that having to read publicly is a great way of <em><strong>making me write</strong></em>.<br /><br />I'm beginning to suspect that I'll have to write all this domestic stuff out of my system before I can get creative outside of it. Watch this space for more on the washing machine and the chooks.Sandrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00679010667380926214noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3983603581608612440.post-18062958573248953222008-08-19T16:16:00.000-07:002008-08-19T16:29:35.696-07:00Writers' group meeting #1And it's all about me. Too self absorbed to write fiction it seems.<br /><br />----<br /><br />Once I was new. Tiny and beloved and I slept and ate at the right times. Later I was medium sized with long blonde hair in a neat ponytail. I read the books at school and learnt my words whncih were kept in a red and gold tobacco tin.<br /><br />Later still I wrote stories which I never finished which had something to do with me starting far too many minutes after everyone else and something to do with endings being difficult.<br /><br />Then I got to be a big kid, with periods and acne and books a window out of small town, small home. Poetry was useful at school because you didn't need endings for it. Once I wrote a poem about women bitching on the telephone and they put it in the school magazine. Dad was horrified . How could I do that to/about my mother? My German tetacher really liked it. But then my German teacher left his wife and hooked up with the psych teacher. Whereas Dad stuck with Mum and even took up Catholicism.<br /><br />I went to university and wrote essays. A lot of them. I hung round and wrote longer and longer ones. That's why I can write MA after my name. Although I don't because I think it could just as easily stand for Middle Aged.<br /><br />I got a real job and then a longest ever boyfriend and then a ring on my finger and then we went to London and went travelling. And that is my best ever memory of writing. While husband went up hills like Heidi, I sat near the bar and drank red wine and wrote. The campsite owners thought I was a real writer. Of course I never finished anything. Two chapters of a novel imagining how my great great grandparents met across the Canterbury plains. I'd been building up a starring role for the Catholic priest.<br /><br />Then I had children. I became some kind of housewife. The children are still thriving and have no suspicious bruises. What I have become spectacularly bad at is housework. I have raised it to an art form. Even the mice have scarpered. I suppose there is a neighbouring cat to be thanked somewhere. <br /><br />I do something else for money. I supress children's talents. When I have tired of supressing their talents, I repress their personalities. It's called education and I don't recommend any of it.<br /><br />Another thing about me is that I've let myself go. It;s one of the many things my mother warned me about when I was still her financial responsibility. Fat tummy and dowdy clothes and half dyed hair. And no war paint.<br /><br />So this is me, Sandra. Fat bad housewife with a tiny glimmering residual memory that I used to write once.Sandrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00679010667380926214noreply@blogger.com0