surreymom.com

There should be a rule about people who don’t need to cover their bums when wearing leggings. Like they should only be allowed out at certain times of the day, horded and chaperoned so as not to be allowed to flaunt their pertness. Every day, I spend an infinite 25 minutes walking behind Pert-Ass pertly pushing her kids to school in her cute autumn designer gear. It’s cruel and unhuman. Yet it seems day after day the ass-gods gang up against me and dictate that she hits the road about 20 seconds before I do.

I haven’t been in the area long, and hesitate to generalise, but Pert-Ass seems to typify the local mums I’ve encountered. She lives in a large house on a private road, has a delicious little bod bearing no apparent signs of motherhood. She drives the compulsory 4×4 and sprouted, in quick succession, the requisite two sprogs (thank heavens they’re a little funny looking or else the picture really would be vom-inducing). She’s even very friendly. But my envy knows no bounds.

I dutifully saunter on in my oversized clothes, dodging conkers and the occasional dog turd, feeding dry cereal into little chatty mouths while trying to ignore my obsession with her butt. I vow never to touch chocolate again. I vow never to walk home via Coffee Republic again. I vow to hit the gym with a vengeance not seen since the Old Testament.

I get home and eat a box of Ferrero Rochers for breakfast.

It was lunchtime and I was raising a generous forkful of beef and guinness stew to my lips when the little minx petulantly uttered the words I had prepared myself to confront in about 2013…

“I wish I had a different mommy”.

I concentrated hard not to choke on a particularly generous chunk of parsnip whilst stifling a disbelieving chuckle.

This at the age of three??  I gathered this was her way of punishing me for having refused to replace a hearty portion of veggie-ful stew with yet another bowl of plain pasta.

Thankfully, her poisoned arrow did not pierce this mommy’s heart, and I’m guessing she will grant me many more opportunities to harden myself to such utterances before they’re perfected and delivered with a real teenage sting!

Well, the folks have been here for almost a month now. It sounds like ages, but it hasn’t felt long to me. Their visits always evoke such a maelstrom of emotions as I try to come to terms with their obvious ageing, the frustrating dynamic that exists between them and is thus foisted on our household when they’re here, and the seemingly avoidable flaws in my relationship with them. Mom is the greatest help imaginable insofar as her problematic back allows her to be. She spends hours tidying, cleaning, cooking, playing with the kids etc. and really makes life a lot easier for me. That, she claims, is the purpose of her visit. And while I so appreciate the help, and love the obvious joy she brings to the kids I, on the other hand, want her to see things, do things, have a break and let me spoil her to as great a degree as I can with two sprogs in tow. So from the start we have completely different objectives.

The frustrations, missed opportunities, unexpressed gratitude, fear of loss etc. all come to a head in the few days before they leave again, when I find myself short-tempered, struggling to hide my increasing emotions and wiping away many a hidden tear.

I wonder how many times this reel will play itself out before one of them is quite simply gone, and I’m left with a lifetime to mull over how I could have made things better somehow, or why I just never seemed able to say ‘Thank you. I love you’.

Note to self: never feed vienna sausages to a queasy little girl. Blimey. I fear the stench of regurgitated viennas will linger in this rented house long after we do. And with its now faded patch of over-scrubbed weave, the rug in the lounge will forever taunt us with memories of flying mystery-meat.

The last few months have seen a relentless trail of germs brazenly parading through our home and I hope to goodness this is the end of it. Poor K has bravely battled chicken pox, conjunctivitis, a week of sky-high temps and now this nasty vomity bug all in the last 8 weeks. So much for 13 months of breastfeeding and the resultant thigh-scraping nipples. Where oh where is that formidable immune system we were promised?!?