Terrible mothering moments and grudges

TERRIBLE MOTHERING MOMENTS

Recently, we were sitting around the dinner table together – a rare event in our house with an 18-year-old and two school age boys with multiple sporting activities requiring me to drive white knuckles gripping the steering wheel for hours on end between the hours of 3 and 7.

When I say together I mean me and the three kids because whatever time current spouse (I'm going to call him The Lawyer from now on) tells me he will be home for dinner is always wrong.

One of the children, in a moment of sheer genius, decided to start a conversation about all the terrible things I had done to them as small children. Along the lines of 'remember when mum...' It's amazing they can recall these things in such remarkable detail when they can't remember to hang the bath mat up, but I digress.. This was intended to be funny and it was at first. Here are some of the things they remember me doing:

* Slamming Billy’s hand in the door of the car (fortunately, children’s bones bend).
* Driving over Harry's three year old foot, thinking he was already in the car, and then driving over it again in attempting to get off his foot.
* Slamming a sliding glass aluminum door onto Billy’s heel, almost severing his Achilles tendon, shortly after we moved into a brand new house. Unfortunately, he remembers me mentioning in the car as his sister held a towel tightly around his foot and gagging that I hoped the blood did not stain the grouting on the tiles.
*Leaving a new baby in his capsule behind a counter at a shop and wandering off for 10 minutes before realising (to be fair, I was in postnatal daze).
*Forgetting to pick various children up from various events at various times.
*Being the mother who clattered in in very high heels on a wooden floor to the end of the musical recital, just in time to see my daughter leave the stage (Elle is particularly good at jamming that guilt pin into me).
*Forcing each of them to take piano lessons with my old piano teacher, who was a dragon lady,and had an odd smell
*Not letting Elle continue with ballet lessons on the basis that it was too expensive.
*Resolving a dispute over who owned which balloons in the back of the car by taking a safety pin, popping all of them and gleefully announcing that no one owned them now
None of them remember this but it is family folklore that I lost or drove over five prams after placing baby or toddler in the car seat, getting into the car and driving off. Once, the pram was reported to have been last seen being used by a homeless person and I thought it had gone to a good home.

This was all quite amusing for some time, until it took a serious turn.

Elle turned to me and said 'I've never forgiven you, you know, for not taking me to school on my first day of high school'. I made the mistake of laughing thinking we were all still joking around at my expense. But she was deadly serious. 'I'm serious' she said, eyes brimming with tears. I looked at her and said, panic rising 'but you'd been at that school for 3 years in primary school'. She said it didn't matter, she was so hurt because 'every one else’s' mother had been there for the first day of high school. My mind started racing and I said that I recall that her first day of high school was also Harry’s first day of school EVER. Grade one. She looked at me and said 'yeah, you chose him over me that day'.

If only we mothers could live in Harry Potter world where we could be in two places at one time. Elle is 18, almost 19, and she has carried that grudge for more than 5 years. She can carry a grudge longer than Paul Keating or Mark Latham. By this stage, she had started crying because she perceived me to be not taking it seriously, and her brothers were laughing.

I tried to make light of it, but this just made it much, much worse. What started out as a fun conversation making fun of mum, turned into a disaster because of a grudge held for 5 years. I kept trying to placate her until she screamed at me to 'stop bringing it up all the time'. Which of course I never had, ever.

The boys fled (sensibly) leaving me alone with the grudge holding one in silence.


Motherhood ROCKS

AMFYOYO


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