Thirsty Thursday: 'I’ve put the children on a traffic light system'
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 16
I’ve put the children on a traffic light system because it appeals to my voter base, who all hate children but who sell children’s’ clothes and toys.
The children get a green light if they are perfect and do everything I say, no matter how pointless or difficult, and in return they get to have three meals a day, no snacks, no snuggles. If they want snuggles they can get a job.
If they are naughty, say if they don’t hang up their towels after a shower or don’t stop in the hallway and tell me that they love my social media content, they are put on an orange light.
Now I have never told them to do these things, and nobody in my family has ever done these things either, they should just know. Surely they have seen this behaviour on television or something and know how normal, good, productive people behave. If they haven’t then I assume it’s because they do too much art and singing at school.
Once they are on an orange light I don’t feed them, but they know where the food is. The cupboards are stocked, brimming, in fact, with quinoa and anchovies and tinned tomatoes and other things nobody else wants that are hard to cook. Some things you need training to make, but that’s not my problem - the food is there if they are hungry. I’m not raising commies.
They stay on the orange light for six months until they are aware that they are bad people and they live with the knowledge that at any time they can go onto red light. It’s very exciting.
Red light, and I’m secretly looking forward to this, is when they have not learned their lesson and are bad babies. Red light means no food. It doesn’t matter how hungry they are, they should have thought about that before they disobeyed my rules. I also remove their beds and they need to do hard physical labour in order to earn their beds back.
They’ll stay on the red light for two years because that’s how long it takes for people to learn a lesson. I learned that from Real Housewives of Orange County, because when David cheated on Shannon the lady at the couple’s retreat (where they pretended to be dead and read eulogies to each other as they lay under a styrofoam headstone) told her it would take two years to forget about the affair, so I’m assuming this timeframe will also work perfectly in this situation.
My voter base will be so proud of me, and will invite me to all the parties I could ever hope to go to. And the kids should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and stop being a drain on the household.
At least the dog seems to have stopped piddling in the same spot in the hallway but of course now that I’ve said that he will do it again. He knows it is naughty but can’t seem to stop himself and I stand in disbelief with paper towels and the dreaded stenchy carpet cleaner and he looks at me as if to say “I acknowledge that you have a difficult role to play and I thank you for that. It has not been easy to mop up some of the mess we’ve had from that” and I’m like “Mate! This is your piss! Right here! You have been told! I did not do this wee wee! Take some accountability!”
It’s my fault, really, I should have been very sharp with him when he first did a widdle there but he was just a wee puppy and I assumed he would learn. And now he’s marked the spot and I can’t seem to break him of the habit. I guess you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
I like the two apostrophes in childrens, Sarah. It's almost as if you were not exactly sure to put the only necessary apostrophe. I don't forgive anybody for putting apostrophes in wrong places, but I will forgive you because you write such unbelievable columns.