Guide to Motherhood

I haven’t poisoned them, given them salmonella or stomach infections, knocked them out with frying pans or drowned them – even unintentionally! The car’s still in one piece and the garage door is still attached to it’s hinges, the house hasn’t burned down and despite my best efforts, the dog still dares to come near me. I guess some things just won’t change.

Anyway, 2 weeks, 2 days, 16 hours, 49 minutes and 23 seconds into this spontaneous and completely absurd but life-changing lesson of independence and practise in motherhood and so far so good! Still alive, non-paralytic, exchanging more than two words of French at a time, and surviving the metro.

This job should really come with a warning attached to it – the skull and cross bones ‘toxic’ sign seems to apply itself quite well! Being able to look after a house by yourself whilst parents are out is a kiddy-spit into a tourist-packed seaside near Disneyland, as au-pairing pulls your eyelids to shreds with the toughies of mothering (and none of the ‘good’ bits like holidays and family time...). One must learn the art of patience. Not waiting for the bus, or putting up with the motorbike that’s pushed in front of a mile-long line of cars at a petrol pump, or even surviving maths on a Friday afternoon. But sitting at a table watching the steam from three full plates of food slowly disintegrate, and seeing the pasta sauce you spent ages making start to congeal round the edge of the plate whilst they have ‘just one more minute’ of FaceBook chats and music downloads. (Here’s the new world of ‘Cyber Mom’, where we actually know what the kids are up to in their rooms and on the internet! Chat Roulette and being ‘fraped’ are no longer vocabulary from ‘youths these days’ which generate quizzical looks from parents, but automatically have meaning and the desired response.) Patience is driving back and forth three times from school in one morning because they can’t all get up and eat breakfast together. Helping them with their homework which they’re reluctant to do, having asked you for help but still continue to be unresponsive and defiant and regardless of the fact that you might not either want to sit down and do homework set for 9 year olds. And you thought those days of homework were over! Prepare for a complete re-sit of your GCSE years and A-Levels (without actually taking the exams, but all the knowledge to pass after helping and then tidying away topic work and revision notes), including the build up to the exams with raging tantrums, even louder music (‘to help me revise!’), kitchen raids (‘so I have energy to revise!’), hour-long phone calls (‘I need a break from all this revision!’), friends over (‘so we can revise together!’) and overall, a cloud of stress sitting determinedly over your home (and not really much revision going on). 

One must learn counting. Not the number of times you’ve bashed your head against a wall in total desperation, or even the number of times you considered bashing theirs, but really just taking some (extremely big, wolf-and-three-pigs-scenario) deep breaths, counting to three (or three thousand in worst cases!) and continuing the daily battles of not going to bed, won’t go to bed, not getting out of bed, not tidying their rooms, not cleaning the kitchen after ‘cake making’... Counting is also necessary every so often to check you still have the right number of kids you left the house with!

Fortunately, as an au-pair and not a mother, I don’t have to love these phone-gabbing, hairbrush-bashing, music-blasting girls (however lovely and charming they may be!). Does it make this whole thing easier to watch your own flesh and blood grow up and make decisions, and feel pride, accomplishment and love for them? Or harder, because you can’t just shut it out at night and ‘think of the money’?