Parenting – Tara’s thoughts

Worms

Once you notice the worms you can’t un-notice them. After every rain they’re there, glistening, flesh-pink and naked, crawling with great determination towards drowning in an overflowing gutter, as blind and vulnerable thing as has ever existed. And once you’ve helped one, picked it up with the stem of a nearby leaf and popped itContinue reading “Worms”

Balloons

I watch my mother tie the end of the balloon shut in a practiced movement of her small, strong fingers. She wants to teach me how but I am too scared to try.

Birth Story

After dinner that night I took a pill for the surgery then went nil-by-mouth. On Friday we woke at five, I fought through the morning sickness that still plagued me at 38 weeks pregnant to take a shower, and we got in the car and drove to Wellington hospital.

Those People

Warning: poos. The other day I was on the loo and the kids wandered into the bathroom to see what I was doing. I used to shut the bathroom door as a line-in-the-sand type move, figuring I was at the very least owed a few minutes of privacy. But these days they hit each otherContinue reading “Those People”

A-holes

I never thought my kids would become a-holes so young. I mean, I know that a lot of people say that toddlers are a-holes but I thought that was kind of, you know, they are always needing and wanting things and they are really noisy about it, a-holes in that kind of way. But no,Continue reading “A-holes”

Apricots

SCENE: We are all in the kitchen. I am trying to start the chocolate custard for the Christmas trifle while Barns makes the kids’ afternoon tea. Nora and June (both 2) are tootling around underfoot. Me: I’m not really feeling the Christmas spirit this year. It’s like I just don’t have room in my brainContinue reading “Apricots”