I think I see light!

We’re neck-deep in school holidays at the moment, aka The Holidays That Never End.   This endlessness has not  been helped by the kids all now being on different school schedules, so their holidays overlap ever-so-slightly, like a well-made potato gratin (just not as comforting or welcome), meaning what should be a week and a half is now four.  We’re two and a half down, and I’m feeling a bit murderous.  Also,  nothing is getting done – not the birthday present buying, nor the tax-filing, nor the much-needed physical attention (legs, toes, bikini regions) – instead every day is a long stretch of howarewegoingtopassthetime.

I decided to fill part of yesterday – well, an hour – by bringing the Girl for a cycling lesson.   Paying someone to teach your kid to cycle is quite a thing here, propelled, I suspect, by two factors:  the fact that there is no decent, easily accessible  outdoor space where you can safely teach your little one yourself;  and the general lethargy amongst most people when it comes to standing out in the searing heat and blood-boiling humidity yelling at / catching / chasing after your small person.    Also, the teacher is sortof legendary here – 100% success rate, no nonsense local – and he is literally across the road from us,  AND I just want her to cycle so that we can get on with trying to find Things To Do As A Family which don’t make me weep tears of blood, AND the Man keeps talking about teaching her but never quite getting around to doing it.  So I signed up (I can’t bring myself to tell you how much it cost) (okay, it cost $80) and off they went.  She got on so well in fact, that after a few minutes the Baby and I wandered off to the cake shop to ruin our appetites and kill some time.  Something was niggling, however.  I’d forgotten to do something. Something... important...  Which I remembered as soon as the Bicycle Man called me 20 minutes later, barely audible above the screeching in the background.  Dammit!  I’d forgotten to either say goodbye to the Girl, or even inform her of my departure.  Which isn’t the worst parenting in the world  - unless of course you look at it from her point of view: I’d brought her to a block of flats, handed her over to a total stranger, money had changed hands, and I completely disappeared.  Which I suppose could be interpreted as the worst parenting in the world.  (In my defence, I paid him;  if it was the other way around, I could somewhat understand the hysterics.)

And boy was she hysterical.  Screeching like a skinned cat.  So, less than half-way through her $80 lesson, we sloped off home,  her sobbing and distressed, me thinking:  Fuck!  That was an expensive trauma session.  Less than 7 hours later, she was back in the saddle again, and I was another $80 lighter.  Nothing like throwing bad money after  good (or is it good after bad? Either way, there was quite a bit of money being thrown around.) Immediately the hysterics recommenced until, 10 minutes in, the teacher announced (unnecessarily angrily, considering he was getting $160 for  half an hour’s work)  that there was nothing he could do; she was, basically, unteachable.

Reader, I fixed her. Nothing  repairs a traumatised 5 year old like the sweet nectar of a lollipop.  The sugar shut down the malfunctioning emotional circuitry, and we were back on (cycle) track.  (But do you think I got a cut of the $160 for services to bicycling-kind?  Bollox I did.)  It’s still a work in progress, but she no longer shudders when she hears the whoosh of a passing cyclist, so my job is done.

Except of course it isn’t.  I’ve another week and a half of this lark left.  GOD HELP ME.

It hasn’t been all bad however.  Last week I had an epiphany of sorts:  I am through the tunnel! The tunnel of despair. The tunnel of exhaustion. The tunnel of PARENTING SMALL CHILDREN.   This struck me at a toddler group which one of my friends runs, when I looked around and realised that everyone else had lots and lots of toddlers and babies, as well as that blank, glassy-eyed look of the un-dead – and I didn’t.  Not the toddlers, nor the babies, not the glassy-eye.  I made myself a cup of tea and chatted away (as much as you can chat with someone who hasn’t slept in four months) and felt really quite smug.  And then a baby was handed to me and I put him on my shoulder, whereupon he promptly disgorged the contents of his stomach on me.  And this is when the epiphany truly kicked in:  I wasn’t nonplussed or understanding or  unphased.  I was, I’m ashamed to say, a bit disgusted.  

DISGUST!  I have moved past shoulder-cheese! I AM DONE.  (She says, as she spends 2 hours putting the children – repeatedly - to bed.  Everything’s relative folks, everything’s relative.) Woo hoo!