Over the past seven weeks, you have been touched precisely 6,860 times. PER CHILD.
On the last day of the Western Australian school summer holidays, I want you to sleep on these unshakeable truths:
You have not permanently lost your mind. Temporarily, certainly. A small amount of your mind will return in time for it to be misplaced on Good Friday. But still, it’s a consolation.
You had one too many children. Even if you only had one. That’s still too fucking many.
Over the past seven weeks, you have been touched precisely 6,860 times. PER CHILD. I worked it out. That’s 140 times per day, which equates to 980 times per week. If you have three children, as I regretfully do, this totals 20,580, which is only marginally less than the number of times you’ve heard the word MUMMY, and only slightly more than you said: “I’m going to change my fucking name,” and only a teeny fraction less than you said, “This is not a fucking café.”
You are done. Exhausted. Spent.
There ain’t no queue like a Kmart queue on the last Saturday before school goes back. Except, maybe, an Officeworks queue. Fuck me. I poked my head in the door to look for a library bag, only to retreat, swiftly. It was like a war zone.
Speaking of library bags – NO LIBRARY BAG, AT ANY PRICE will be good enough for the library lady at the kids’ school, who tests the waterproof nature of each and every library bag by pouring water on each and every one. I applaud her commitment to the cause.
Teachers, eh? I don’t have the words to express my gratitude to teachers and their fine assistants.
You might have spent the school holidays showing your children the finest sights on this fair earth – the Queen might’ve been round for fucking tea – but when their teacher asks them what they did on the holidays, they’ll recount the gripping tale of the free WiFi in the gym’s creche. That’ll be their fucking highlight.
A 14-year-old boy can spend days – nay, weeks! – moving nothing but his thumbs. It would almost be a talent if he didn’t smell so fucking bad.
Your mum will get really, really wound up around about NOW (check your phone) because the kids haven’t had back-to-school haircuts.
You love your children fiercely and intensely, but you will fucking RUN out of that school tomorrow. You never thought you’d be that mum, but by the same token, you never thought you’d have such feral fucking children, either. Know your truth. Run from that school. Do not look back.