Shhh It’s A Secret

I’m Not Very Good At Being An Adult.

by Lori Dwyer on October 21, 2013 · 9 comments

I know I’m not the only one, who has trouble with this ‘being an adult’ thing. So this post is for all of us, who hate making phone calls and wish Real Life would run itself sometimes.

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I’m not sure I have what it takes to be an adult. It occurs to me, every now and then, that I’m not very good at it.

I hate making phone calls. Talking to insurance companies and making appointments is like a slow form of torture.

I’m also awful at returning phone calls, and text messages. Texts can sit on my phone, unread for days, before I finally take a peak at them.

I really intensely dislike vegetables. And washing up.

I leave most things- especially the important ones- to the last available minute.

Most of my socks have holes in them, and I don’t own a single pair of matching bra and undies.

I don’t unpack my groceries as soon as I bring them home.

I get parking fines and library fines on a semi-regular basis.

I go for days without washing my hair. I forget to floss and I rarely wash my face before bedtime.

I’d rather ride my bike than answer my email.

I’ve never even once mowed my own lawn.

Even though I don’t dread school pick up as much here as I did in the TinytrainTown, I’m still not very good at making small talk.

I’d rather surf Reddit, or get lost in an hedonistic session of book reading, than fill out Centrelink forms or do the washing.

And I need to cut my toenails.

That one, I should be able to manage today, surely.

But if not… it can wait. Until tomorrow.

Or one day next week.

 

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Softly.

by Lori Dwyer on September 19, 2013 · 2 comments

Softly, softly, softly. That’s how we do it here, every day, for now.

I watch my children adapt and warm to living with a new person in our lives. I watch with amazement as they take things in their stride, as they assess what goes on here and assimilate it into their tiny frames of what life is like.

As those of you who’ve done this before me know, introducing a new parental figure to the family mix is done with care and trepidation, and a definitive sense of not pushing things too far. 

Softly, softly.

Small invitations to intimacy are made. The Most Amazing Man offers the Chop a hug before bed, and he responds with his arms wide open. I see the hesitation more with my son than with my daughter. My Chop is hesitant to trust too much, to get too close. He remembers what it’s like to be left behind.

“I will leave you!” The Most Amazing Man says to me, taunting and joking, and I poke my tongue out in response.

Neither of us realised my son had heard that exchange, until his head pops up with shock and he asks “What? What did you say?”

“Joking, baby. We were joking, I promise. The Most Amazing Man is not going anywhere.”

Everything is done in tiny pieces, tiny increments of trust and discipline. Tiny offerings- a hug, a bedtime story, a family day out. All those ‘normal’ things you do with a dad, that my children have been missing for years.

Softly, softly. One tiny baby step at a time.

 

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Spiteful.

by Lori Dwyer on August 15, 2013 · 17 comments

If you went to high school in a small enough town, and you stay there- or return to there- until your children are old enough to attend school themselves, it’s logical that some of your children’s classmates might just be the offspring of the same people you yourself went to school with.

Having not particularly enjoyed going to high school in this area, that wasn’t a very comforting thought. But, hey, we’re all thirty years old now, right? We’ve all grown up a bit. Or so you’d hope.

Over the course of the last six months worth of the dreaded school pick up, I recognised one of the mums who was milling around the school courtyard, waiting too. Her daughter was in the same class as my son. I know I went to highschool with her. But that’s about as specific as my memory gets. I can’t remember her name, or any particular interaction with her. I do remember that we didn’t get along. There’s been too much life happen in between then and now… the memories weren’t important enough to keep.

Obviously I made a bigger impression on her than she did on me. She remembered me well enough to pass on to her daughter that she knew me, that we’d been to school together. That she didn’t like me.

And, kids being kids, her daughter passed that information on.

I was a bit dumbstruck when the Chop told me, “So and so’s mum went to school with you and she doesn’t like you!” He said it nonchalantly, a point in his rambling list of Things That Happened That Day. I don’t know why it bothered me, because it didn’t bother him. If he’d been upset about it, I might have been, too… I wasn’t, so much. It just bugged me.

Just… for f*ck’s sake. As if there isn’t enough turmoil in the social lives of five year olds, without adding high school bitchiness into the mix. I wonder, vaguely, how much life has happened to this other mum in the years since we finished high school, for her to be able to hang onto that hate so much.

In the end, I just tell my boy that maybe that other mum “needs to grow up a bit”. I’m thinking the tumultuous kindergarten grapevine means that reply get passed on, too.

The spiteful, five-year-old part of me hopes so.

 

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