Fladun / Out of whack and out of luck

MY children called it our “bad luck week” – one of those weeks when everything just seems to go wrong.

I’m not saying bad luck didn’t play a part, but our work-family balance has been totally out of whack and, whenever that happens, it always seems like everything goes to hell in a handbasket.

I think “balance” really is the wrong word for what amounts to most people’s experience of modern-day parenting. More often than not it’s more like juggling sharp objects.

Our current round of troubles started when I squibbed on the school holidays. Sometimes you can and sometimes you can’t and, thanks to work, April holidays just weren’t going to happen for me. That left my other half bearing the brunt as best he could while still working full time from home.

One consequence was that we were then totally unprepared for the start of another school term which was brought home on the first day when I suddenly remembered the need to put our children in winter uniform and, in a rush, couldn’t find their school coats despite the mornings suddenly turning distinctly frosty.

Not for the first time I felt I was the world’s worst mum.

Worse still was the discovery that only one pair of regulation school trousers now fitted my bean-stalk of a son, which he managed to comprehensively rip on the first day leaving me to do a massively dodgy repair that left his pants looking lopsided all week.

Then, of course, I got sick with some sort of virus and all week I’ve been coughing up a lung, something probably not helped by the fact that we spend a lot of time sitting at the ice rink watching our enthusiastic figure-skating kids.

Then our car broke down and needed towing, not once but twice, and the repairs cost enough for a nice holiday in some warm, balmy place.

This was followed by the discovery of a large extended family of mice that had taken up residence under the kitchen sink.

However, to cap off the week, our portly cocker spaniel is going through a major bout of depression. After an unexpected episode of copious vomiting and diarrhoea (yes, that’s something else that happened), our vet has put it on a very strict diet of particularly unappetising dog food. There are few things more pathetic, indeed heart rending, than a spaniel denied the scraps from the kids’ dinner plates.

I know all these things will pass and, at some point, our run of bad luck and total lack of organisation on the home front will turn around. Maybe in the spring, if we’re lucky.

 

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