State of mind: Frustrated & frazzled
Am officially the most hated mother in Greece.
Serves me right for giving a damn.
Spent most of morning having the screaming ab-dabs, trying to get No.1 to put a bit of effort into his school work. He can do so much better, with a little thought and imagination. Am creative wordy type so take it as personal insult when son of mine thinks he can get away with starting essay about his High School with "My school is very nice..." (He churned out better stuff when they wrote "My Day" in first year of Infants.)
Read his first effort, and a red haze descends on me. Loose my cool, rip page out of exercise book and scrawl comments all over it. Explain (sweetly but very firmly) how it could/should be done.
No.1 looks at me like I'm (a) clearly certifiable and (b) have no idea what I'm talking about. Obviously, he considers that woman who has earned her daily bread with the written word for the past 25 years can't possibly know a thing about how to put together an essay.
What do I know? I'm over the age of 20 - and therefore brain dead.
Resist the urge to strangle him and insist, at rate of many decibels, that he re-writes.
After just two hours - interspersed with Saturday morning brain-melting cartoons, scratching at his electric guitar, computer games, corridor football and random animal noises - he presents Crap Essay 2.0.
It's an improvement, but still not up to scratch. Sigh. Take a deep breath and count to 10... then 100... and 1000...
(Just wait til your father gets home, kiddo.)
Now he has English homework and revision for end of term geography test on Monday. Is he doing it? Is he 'eck as like! He's sitting in his room, perfecting his Green Day impersonation. I remind him that he has to do it today. He yells "Yes, I know! You told me!".
Ah, domestic bliss.
I'm plodding my way relentlessly towards senility, and No.1 acts like everything's cool. Little does he know that tomorrow he'll do Crap Essay 3.0 - and I shall snatch back from Cruella DeVille the crown of world's most hated woman.
Oh, the joys of parenthood! The only (unpaid) job whose sole purpose is to render yourself redundant, and at which you don't know if you have succeeded until it's too late to do anything about it.
Just you wait, young'un. One of these days, I'll be old, grey and ga-ga... and then it'll be MY turn to drive YOU round the bend.
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