I had to do it.
I swore I wouldn’t just blog about my kids, or random bullshit only about me. Some of it would be smart – topical even. The kind of thing you could share on Facebook (so old fashioned, I should be SnapChatting I’m told) with some kind of comment like “An Interesting and Profound read”. But I just couldn’t make it happen after such a lazy weekend. Today, it’s not going to be that kind of post and honestly I’m not sure it will ever be. Today, it’s going to be about Mother’s Day.
Alright so I know it was yesterday and your flowers might already be fading a bit, but Mother’s Day is kind of hard to ignore. It’s in the shops, in the papers, on the radio (what would the SnapChatters say if they knew I still listened to local radio?!). And since I’m One of the Mum’s, I figured I had to write something about it. It would be expected of me, surely. No choice.
So here it is. Five Surprising Things That Motherhood Has Unexpectedly Given Me.
- Random Medical Knowledge: At 36 I found out that medically I was a geriatric mum. It’s purely a numbers thing, apparently nothing to do at all with how good your cheekbones are. Less random and more useful is my newly acquired medical knowledge on all the over the counter medicines available to treat kiddy pain, fever, poo or vomit-related conditions.
- Panic that gets you fit and healthy. The geriatric mum thing hit a nerve, one that will probably get pinched more and more as time marches on. I’ve always had a young mum – and I would never be a young mum! But after the panic subsided (it’s true I drank something medicinal) I reasoned I could still be young at heart, and I could be healthy even if I had to be old. The result is that even though my twenty-one-year-old bod is long gone, twenty years on I am stronger and fitter than I ever was then. I blame my kids for both conditions.
- It got me a Tribe. I was never really a ‘tribe’ girl. A couple of friends were around but I just never got the group thing. I don’t know how it happened but somehow I’ve got a mum-tribe. We’re all mums (some with fur-kids) and we found each other either walking prams, rolling our eyes in the kiddie groups or waiting outside classrooms. These women are amazing. They know all kinds of things about kids’ medicine, school schedules, bake sales and Afrikaans homework. Sometimes we even talk about that kind of stuff so others can dismiss us as “a group of mums.” Being a mum unexpectedly brought me friends, the real laugh-until-we-cry-and-feed-my-kids-fish fingers kind of friends.
- Super Powers. Like X-ray vision. I can see through my children. I know exactly when they are trying their luck. I don’t know how I do it but it’s great. Freaks them out. I also have eyes in the back of my head which is so useful with a five year old. Then there’s my Super Hearing. I can cut out the sound of ten children screaming as if it were dead quiet, but I can also pick out that twenty second silence which means that one child is doing finger art on the walls.
- Superwoman breakfast abilities. I can make three different breakfasts (including pancakes), pack two school lunches, drink coffee and scan the newspaper in thirty minutes. I can do all this while saying on repeat “Eat your food, get dressed, brush your teeth, where’s your school bag, brush your hair, take your bag, here’s your lunch.” Sometimes I even shout it after they’ve already done it and we are sitting in the car. True Superhero stuff!
Now there’s a list I bet you wouldn’t have read anywhere else. Maybe not Interesting & Profound but at the very least Surprising & Unexpected …
Have fun while I think of something interesting and profound to blog about next week!
Q
PS Message me if you think of something
