Love in the time of blended families
Posted: January 14, 2018 Filed under: D.I.V.O.R.C.E, LOVE, MARRIAGE, Politics, Single Motherhood | Tags: horse and carriage, love, Marriage, parenting advice, parenting poems, single mother advice, Single motherhood, step mother, step parenting, wicked step mothers, William Shakespeare quotes, William Shakespeare sonnet 116 1 CommentA poem
We say I love you, and if we’re still together on Boxing Day, Easter Wednesday, the day after the kid goes back to school we may survive as a couple by detaching from your teen’s nightmare behaviour
Your son looks like Elvis but he sings like a drunk footballer
I adore you but your brother’s second wife’s extended family will poison me slowly with their frozen coleslaw
I’d really like to grow old with you but your son’s new girlfriend has a voice that curdles milk and I can’t bring myself to help you raise her kids
Your touch is tough to resist but the complaints from your mother and her coven of neighbours about my cooking have reduced my brain capacity
You soothe my jangled nerves but your child’s penchant for snakes is a reptile too far
I really like your daughter but another netball match will kill my will to live
I love you but I can’t add another mother in law to my collection
Shakespeare described step parenting best:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom
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Cyclone warning
Posted: November 29, 2017 Filed under: LOVE, Raising Hell, Single Motherhood | Tags: love, my favourite daughter, parenting teens, Single motherhood, Smotherhood, Teenagers, youngest child Leave a commentCyclone Senza exploded into my life 13 years ago, after I’d been at the hospital in drug-free childbirth hell for 25 minutes. She couldn’t wait to get the party started.
Or trash our house. She has painted on the walls of every place we’ve ever rented. And they’re good paintings, so I can’t get mad. Senza leaves a creative mess in every room she enters. It would be easier to parent her if we lived in a castle with four maids, a butler and a housekeeper.
My girl, you are the funniest person I’ve ever met; entertaining, smart, animated and kooky, you have only two gears, full throttle or passed out on the floor You struggle to use your inside voice but your astute observations about supposedly mature adults are always worth hearing.
Looking at a box of unpaid bills you said,
“Mum, that is a box full of nightmares.”
You are physically courageous; you surf, swim, climb trees, duck and dive. You’ve had breathtaking bodily self-confidence from the moment you were conceived. And you have a kind heart. This year you cared for babies in a Thai orphanage like they were your own family.
You are fast, furious, full of attitude and love for your friends, and easily bored. I hope your adventurous spirit takes you all over the world. You run head first at life, without fear. Your courage is everything I wish I could find in me (but with less back chat).
You kid, are everything. In your adolescent angst phase, don’t let teen bitches, dopey dudes and unenlightened teachers snuff out your fire.
Happy 13th Birthday to my beautiful hurricane #teenager
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I’m full of it
Posted: September 17, 2017 Filed under: LOVE, Parenting, Self improvement, Single Motherhood | Tags: Advice, devoted parenting, expert parenting advice, fabulous parenting from one who knows, fitspo, handy hacks for lazy single mothers, handy hints for neurotic mothers, inspo, love, nutso, single mother life hacks, single mother tips, single parenting advice, take your advice and shove it, well-meaning advice Leave a commentThe world has gone to hell. There’s a mad man in the White House threatening war, unChristians attacking the gay community with lies and bombers killing and injuring young people all over Europe.
Meanwhile crazy breeders like me are still bringing kids into the world and hoping they’ll be able to breathe clean air when they have children. I’m too selfish to be a grandmother, but I’ve got so much great advice for new mothers I can hardly keep it to myself; on the bus, at supermarkets or the park, parents of young children love me handing out my wisdom.
Here is my latest, state of the art, world-class, incredible, inspirational, never before thought of hints for new parents who really need all the self-help they can find:
- An immaculate house is the sign of a wasted life, think of all those Youtube clips you could be perving at instead.
- Road kill is best barbecued
- Children can amuse themselves
- Refrain from smoking over your baby
- Be civil to your children’s teachers, they are making you look like a good parent
- Allow rich relatives to send you large, tax-deductible charity donations
- Find suitable children for your kid to play with, i.e. imaginary friends
- Stop talking to your child lest they inherit your neuroses
- Write lots of #inspo #fitspo TO DO lists
- Ensure you live at least 500 kilometres away from monster in law, unless she will clean your house, not brag about it, nor tell her mummy’s boy son you’re a slob
I could write a book. Here’s my I can’t believe I haven’t got millions of followers guru face:
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Handy hints for lethargic mothers
Posted: September 10, 2017 Filed under: LOVE, Self improvement, Single Motherhood | Tags: devotion, handy hints for lethargic mothers, love, parenting hacks, single mother advice, single mother sanity savers, single mother tips, single mothering hacks, Smotherhood Leave a commentIf you’re coming home to a house full of little horrors, follow my fab advice and you will know how to stay happy while raising a child to adulthood without taking them back to the pet shop for a refund
- Any food item that cannot be left in the oven and baked within an inch of its life is not worth feeding to a child
- Stop reading other people’s stupid to do or advice lists
- Teach a baby to find her thumb quickly, don’t pick up dummies and sterililse them
- Stop your child whingeing by feeding them treats. Send your kid to bed with chocolate milk. When they are toothless at age 15, tell them they can’t have their cake and eat it too
- Keep the lights off while you clean the kitchen, you can’t see much dirt and you’ll get the job done faster
- Life is too short to spend one minute of it ironing
- Netball will not help your child become a high achiever, step away from the court
- Being a part time mother is great, everyday chores don’t cut into party time.
- Dive into a charity bin when your child needs a new outfit; great for emergency babysitting too, especially if you find a shady one; lots of toys for kids to play with in there and cheaper than day care. You may occasionally come back from your break and your child is cuddling a dead possum, but every parent makes mistakes.
- The dishwasher is God’s gift to lazy mothers
Praise Marion Donovan, the inventor of the disposable nappy, she is the patron saint of slothful parents
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To Pollard
Posted: August 20, 2017 Filed under: LOVE, Parenting, Single Motherhood | Tags: Jack Pollard, Lou Pollard is Not Suitable For Children, Lou Pollard writer, Maintaining a Pollard, Parenting Pollard style, Pollard children, Pollard parenting plan, pollarding, pruning or Pollarding, Rejuvenating a Pollard, to Pollard 2 CommentsPollarding is a method of pruning that keeps trees and shrubs smaller than they would naturally grow. It is normally started once a tree or shrub reaches a certain height, and annual pollarding will restrict the plant to that height.
In the interests of fine single mothering, I’ve decided to Pollard my children. Minimal feeding means that my kids won’t grow too tall, thus saving on expensive sports shoes and fancy undies, and keeping school uniform costs to a minimum. My food bill will be reduced, thus Pollard will be kept in the fine style I would like to be accustomed to.
Maintaining a Pollard
The Pollard method is useful to maintain the size of a teen who is in danger of growing too big for a small, single mother budget sized apartment.
Rejuvenating a Pollard
Summer can be a suitable time to Pollard. This method requires the removal of parasites or weakly-attached branches of the family tree. So out with the toxic monster in law and deadbeat dad and in with promoting attachment to healthy adult role models. According to Dr Google, “It may be possible to remove the branches that have grown from the stumps of old Pollards.” Yes! I am well rid of my STDs, the sexually transmitted debts that kept me weighed down for too long. Bring on summer.
If you’re happy and you know it, learn to Pollard
Look how little and cute my youngest favourite child turned out.
(C) Pollard Perfect Parenting Plan 2017
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Avocado free zone
Posted: July 30, 2017 Filed under: Single Motherhood, Uncategorized | Tags: A Real State, end negative gearing, house prices, real estate, real estate greed, smashed avocado, Sydney real estate, Sydney real estate agents suck, unreal estate Leave a commentLucky me! I’m househunting again. I’m a professional Sydney real estate agent stalker. My kids and I have moved about 20 times. Months without buying avocado toast mean that one day I may be able to move to a home within 50 kilometres of an area I’d actually like to live in.
I have so many questions to ask a real estate agent:
Where is the step father accommodation?
Where is the step sibling spare bedroom?
Is there a sibling fight room away from the main house?
Can the main bedroom detach from the house and move 10 metres into the garden when the teenagers get too much?
Can the cat annexe the house?
Back in 1995, when I was drunk every night and kissing girls because boys asked me to and wearing absurd feathered dresses and talking shit until 4am with guys with ironic facial hair, I could have been buying a house for $250,000 and set myself up for a much more comfortable cranky middle age.
But now, thanks to negative gearing and government greed, I’ll never buy my own home. The only way that anyone earning under $250,000 i.e. single mothers, students, commies, pinkos, leftos, nurses, ambos and waiters will be able to buy a house is for one of these miracles to occur:
Winning the lottery
Overthrowing capitalism
Conducting a scandalous affair with a billionaire
Or the most ridiculous:
Voting for politicians who have the bollocks to help workers afford vermin-free housing in big cities
Jokes. They don’t exist
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Am I really a single mother?
Posted: May 14, 2017 Filed under: LOVE, Single Motherhood | Tags: Advice for single mothers, auspol, Australian Federal Budget 2017, divorced, love, Malcolm Turnbull, matchmaker, MOTHER'S DAY, Mothering Sunday, old cat lady, Scott Morrison, separated, Single motherhood, single mothering, tests for single mothers, unsure 5 CommentsHappy Mother’s Day! Single mothers will now have to provide ‘verification’ of their relationship status in order to claim Centrelink’s Parenting Payment Single. Single mums who leave parenting Payment Single and then return to the payment will also have to send the Human Services Department a photograph of themselves sitting alone crying into their one glass of Aldi wine on a Saturday night.
“From 20 September 2018 new claimants seeking Parenting Payment (Single) or single parents claiming Newstart Allowance will be required to have a third party sign a new form verifying that they are in fact single, then we can tattoo their scrawny necks and microchip them before we release them back into the wild,” the government announced as part of the 2017 Budget this week.
To be rewarded with vast sums from the government’s welfare-bludgers’ prize pool, I will have to find someone whom I don’t want to share the horizontal tango with, to verify that I am in fact raising my children single-handedly. I’m really not sure who I’m going to ask to help me with this. Will it be the merchant banker who picked me up at an art gallery and then took me on an incredibly boring date? The 22-year-old man working at my local servo who thought if he gave me a free juice and a bag of chips, that I’d go on a date with him? The guy who sent me ‘sexy’ pics of himself late at night on Facebook while his wife was asleep? He may be my best choice. Hopefully, he’ll get confused and tell the authorities that he and I have been shacked up for years with my children, his kids from three relationships, our cat and a feral budgie. Apparently, the penalty for making a false declaration is up to 12 months in jail. Which could mean I’m in for a nice break (Wentworth prison here I come) from mothering and working if my dreamy battler beau brags about our imaginary sexy times on social media.
“This is offensive and deeply disturbing,” said Terese Edwards, chief executive of the National Council of Single Mothers and their Children.
“Who verifies? Do children get asked? Is there a neighbour watch alert? This is a slippery slope back into the dark days. I’m proud of our single mothers, they are doing a damn good job and don’t need the burden of Government prejudice.”
Terese is right, single mothers are doing a damn fine job, they’re the hardest workers I’ve ever met. But I quite like the neighbourhood watch idea as I’m a bad picker. I could have a panel of people telling me if I’m going out with the wrong dude. My neighbours could shout out to me, “If you bring that guy home, we’ll tell Centrelink,” and I’d be dissuaded from making a bad move on Tinder. Happy Mum’s Day from the Liberal Government. Scott Morrison what a generous man you are, you have saved me from a lifetime of bad relationships. I think I’ll stay home tonight knitting myself an old cat lady chastity belt.
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Cooking fails
Posted: May 6, 2017 Filed under: COMEDY, LOVE, Self improvement, Single Motherhood | Tags: Australian female comedians, comedy, Comedy Shows, comedy writers, Funny females, Laughter, loupollard, single mother comedians, Sydney Comedy Festival 2017, Sydney Comedy Festival shows, Sydney female comics Leave a commentMy new solo comedy show Kids In The Kitchen opens tonight at The Factory Theatre, Marrickville for the 2017 Sydney Comedy Festival
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Kids In The Kitchen
Posted: March 19, 2017 Filed under: FOOD, Single Motherhood, Thought For the Day | Tags: baked beans, comedy, cooking disasters, cooking fails, crap cooking, Lou Pollard comedy shows, Lou Pollard stand up comedian, low budget cooking, mother was a good cook too, single mother comedians, Smotherhood, Sydney Comedy Festival 2017 1 CommentApparently you have to feed kids good nutrition to help ’em grow. But frankly, I’m sick of cooking. Once upon a time I worked with a woman selling merchandise who wasn’t brilliant at customer service. We used to jokingly say to her, “This shop would run smoothly if these stupid customers stopped coming in,” and I feel the same about my kids coming into the kitchen. I’d have a clean house if it wasn’t for these grotty teenagers. So at dinner time, my kids get two choices, like it or lump it. My daughters usually swap the inedible contents of their lunchboxes for their unsuspecting school friends’ more tasty morsels.
I’ve written a comedy show about my lack of enthusiasm for being left in charge of catering, frankly it’s a job that I’m underwhelmed and ill-equipped to handle, but it has provided my children many opportunities to laugh at me. And made them good cooks.
I’d love you to bring foodie friends to my funny show as I embark on a quest to outsource the catering. You’ll laugh your guts up as I enlist the audience in my hunt for a personal cooking slave. This show contains bad cooking and more culinary disasters than a season of Gordon Ramsay, along with sensational stand-up and me singing a few tunes. If you’re tired of smashing your own avocados, come to Lou Pollard in Kids In The Kitchen for the 2017 Sydney Comedy Festival at Matchbox – The Factory Theatre, 105 Victoria Road Marrickville on Saturday 6th May at 5.45pm and Sunday 7 May 2017 at 4.45pm
Book tix: 2017 Sydney Comedy Festival tickets for Lou Pollard
Lou Pollard’s Looking For Mike Brady show is a joyous, wonderfully warped, true, raw romp through the minefields and thickets that beset dating, single parenthood and the predations of ageing.
**** Four stars – themusic.com.au
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There’s a name for it
Posted: January 22, 2017 Filed under: FEMINISM, Single Motherhood | Tags: housing affordability, housing crisis, housing distress, housing poverty, hpuse prices, insomnia, rent, single mother debts, single mother poverty, Sydney rental prices 2 CommentsI received an email yesterday:
We are worried about the future of your mortgage
What mortgage? I thought as I lay awake at 3am. Then I found out that there’s a name for the cause of my insomnia: housing poverty. I pay 65% of my income in rent every week. I’m not in debt but I’m about three pay days away from severe financial distress. So most nights I wake at 2am wondering how I’m going to manage and stay awake until 4am.
Housing poverty occurs when people who fall in the bottom 40% of wage earners put more than 30% of their weekly take-home pay into housing, which reduces their capacity to save money and thus their financial resilience.
According to an analysis by the Council to Homeless Persons, those paying rent alone on the average weekly wage for women would be priced out of all but one inner Melbourne suburb and even outer Sydney.
Jenny Smith, the chief executive of Council to Homeless Persons and chair of national peak body Homelessness Australia, said the situation for many single women was untenable and left them vulnerable to homelessness in the event of a crisis, like losing their job or a high medical bill.
“When you look at your average single woman on an average wage, you can see it’s very, very difficult to rent anywhere reasonable,” Smith told Guardian Australia.
“If you do, you are essentially putting yourself into a poverty situation.”
Sydney is a wonderful city, offering so much, but how can we revel in art and music and the joys of life when we financially stressed to breaking point? Single motherhood can be an exhausting cycle of taking time away from work to focus on motherhood, then overworking to earn enough money to pay back debt. And this is compounded when children have any kind of health issues. Maternity leave when kids are small and most need an involved parent impacts women’s ability to earn enough to support their children. My financial stress is caused by:
- Ridiculous Sydney housing prices
- Father who doesn’t pay for his children
- Working in the highly rewarding but low-paid arts sector for my entire career
- No politician with the balls to take on negative gearing/capital gains tax and make affordable housing a priority
Single working women on average wages in Sydney and most of Melbourne cannot afford to live alone. Men can. Does that seem fair to you Bernard Salt? I’m going to keep eating smashed avocado as I can’t pay for my own home with room for all my kids. Oh well. I could possibly live in a bus shelter when I’m old and it will be peaceful sharing with our cat.
loupollard 