Shit on my hands

MH

Some days you find yourself comfortably in the black in the parenting-a-nearly-3-year-old general ledger. You’ve read ‘Lazy Daisy, Busy Lizzie’ to her at least 7 times; you’ve prepared from scratch delicious and nutritious carrot and ginger soup (which she happily devours), and you’ve cleared out the long-neglected toy box so it no longer harbours dust balls the size of small rodents or long forgotten and disdained Pooh Bears. You drift off to sleep over your Joan Didion essay collection smugly thinking ‘I am surely the Rafael Nadal of mothering’ (dimples, luscious brown locks and all). The next day, the credits are harder to earn. You forget to take her to kinder for the second time in two weeks, and she wets herself while you’re drooling over the Aurora Spa Retreat online ‘menu’. And then you have a morning like the one I’ve just encountered where your toddler descends into plain lunacy, and you’re racking up so many debits on the parenting ledger that you’ll soon have to declare bankruptcy.

It was all going so well until the moment she finished eating her gingerbread elephant. Here I was, complacently accepting compliments from mature ladies about my little girl’s excellent behaviour and baby’s beautiful blue peepers, when the aforementioned child decided Hey, wouldn’t it be a lark if I proved these old birds’ assessments of my demeanour to be completely bonkers. She threw my peanut butter-smeared toast on the floor, then picked it up and licked it; repeatedly tried to take off out the door while I paid for her freaking bikky and babycino (both of which, I’m now suspecting, were laced with crystal meth), then lay across the café’s entrance while the fruit and veg supplier was trying to make his weekly delivery, stubbornly remaining prone while I struggled to pick her up (with the five-month-old strapped to my chest, mind), rolling all over the change that was spilling out of my unclipped wallet. ‘You have to laugh or you’d cry’ I told the proprietor, somewhat absurdly, as I was already on the verge of tears. I finally corralled the urchin out the door, only to get 100 metres up the road before having to make a return trip to collect my handbag (luckily still sitting on the café’s floor). In the meantime, we miss the tram. Miss nearly-3 lurches up High Street, dashes into the pharmacy and, I kid you not, upends the intricately organized display of Garnier conditioner bottles. Attempting to restore the display while keeping an eye on the small maniac (who is now ransacking the eucalyptus lollies at the front counter) I manage to only complete the demolition job. Toddler is carried, screaming ‘NO, NO, NO!!!’ to the tram. Only my telling her in no uncertain terms that she is being a turdlet stops the flailing. Our fellow passengers are then regaled with hysterical laughter and shouts of ‘TURDLET’ all the way to our stop.

At least I have the long afternoon and evening ahead to balance that ledger … And I now know for sure that it is complete madness to go anywhere with my children unless they are as securely strapped in their pram as Hannibal Lecter was to his gurney.