Thirsty Thursday: 'Did I do a rizz?'...
Sarah McCarthy’s Thirsty Thursday column is brought to you each week thanks to Invercargill-based law firm Mee & Henry Law.
Sarah McCarthy’s Thirsty Thursday column is brought to you each week thanks to Invercargill-based law firm Mee & Henry Law
THIRSTY THURSDAY 41
The small one was surprised with a new-to-us bike last week and has been pedalling home after school most days, arriving flushed and sweaty and standing taller in his independence.
I love not having to drive down to school to get him (find shoes, wipe food off T-shirt, hoist mainstays etc, etc, edm) but now I hover, nauseated, waiting to hear the tick-tick-tick-tick of his bike coming up the driveway so that I can relax and stop cycling through increasingly hysterical disaster scenarios that range from him caning off and busting his knee and crying for me all the way down the road, to being outright knocked down, and all the way through to him being stolen off the street by someone in a white van and then the inevitable, are- you-getting-enough-sleep “what if there is an alien attack and I can’t find him because he has decided to go down a weird driveway to escape the laser blasts”.
Of course, I stuff it all down as he belts up the stairs and yell oh-so-casually, “Hey baby, how was your day?” as if I hadn’t just been pacing the ramparts like a crazy lady while the dog yelps with happiness and casts about frantically for a bit of old cardboard tube to show him.
Then he does his wee jobs and will sit on the couch until he is moved from there by dinner or his brother, watching the most ridiculous, annoying shit I have ever seen in my life on YouTube.
It’s a dreadful thing, motherhood. Terrible and vast and inexplicable. I’m busy busy busy this week with something on every night (I keep repeating to myself Tina Fey’s assertion that busy bitches get shit done while holding back tears as I drive to Gore for the second time in two days) and I should be elated that I have rehearsals (keeps my mind happy, I feel creative and get to simultaneously show off and upset several teens by saying things like “did I do a rizz?”!) and work (I am making - eking - a living outside the stranglehold of the capitalist system of 9-5 despite being a woman and old and a mum and roundy and a lefty pinko! Take that Former Chief Executive Christopher Luxon!) and fun things to go to (I have lovely, lovely friends who know I will never, ever plan past what to eat for lunch and so invite me to things and even buy the tickets and give me their bank account numbers 10 times without complaint because they love me!) but then being away from home so much makes your children seem (SEEM) delicious and perfect and fragile and I just want to box them up and sniff their hair and tell them how much I love them and make them good things to eat and wear an apron and listen to their endless stories about things I don’t understand and, I dunno, bake a biscuits or something.
But when I’m home and they’re home all the time I hide from them in my bedroom with my phone and my book and my laptop and if they come in to tell me something and it gets too long winded, I ask them if they’re looking for a job to do so that they’ll go away and leave me in peace to doomscroll and have imaginary arguments with Toad Man and fantasise about kidnapping him and give him collagen injections in his lips so that when he talks he’ll have to lick them all the time in case he’s dribbled and can’t feel it, like Kyle from Real Housewives.
Baaaaaaaaaah.
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