Single mother To Do List

Feed munchkins

Laugh with best girlfriends

Verify your identity

Be fabulous

Embrace single motherhood

Pay all the bills

Find all the thrills

Bring home the bacon

Find app to block people in real life not just social media

Eat fruity wine and fruity fruits

Rage against the pale stale males in government

Stand up for girls

Find someone to collect my emotional baggage

Dance like instagram is watching

Drink tap water

Pat the cat

Thank your knees

Eat all the cheese

Hunt and gather

Educate people on the difference between your and you’re and he is and his

Sing like I’ve got 45 million YouTube followers


Smothering Sunday

Today I’m thankful that I still have a mother, but if we’re going to have a day to celebrate mothers, please don’t ask me to:

Bake a cake for a fundraiser

Select a nanna scarf for me before I’m a grandmother

Volunteer for any initiative to improve the lives of already well-off people

Mend garments or

Clean up after babies

Also please don’t:

Buy me ugly socks

Make me a ceramic thingy that I’ll smash

Give me any more craft

Advise me to take vitamins, colonics, miracle cures or go for a run

Rescue another animal for me

Suggest helpful ways to brighten my floors

Today I don’t want to grow, inspire, achieve, strive or nurture, I’m cranky and I’m having a day off. Please quickly bring me a bottle of gin, tonic, lemons and an obedient bar man, then close the door on your way out. Your best present for Mumma is obedience and a big dose of shush.

Mother and Child Reunion Boney M


Handy hints for lethargic mothers

If 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

  1. 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
  2. Stop reading other people’s stupid to do or advice lists
  3. Teach a baby to find her thumb quickly, don’t pick up dummies and sterililse them
  4. 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
  5. Keep the lights off while you clean the kitchen, you can’t see much dirt and you’ll get the job done faster
  6. Life is too short to spend one minute of it ironing
  7. Netball will not help your child become a high achiever, step away from the court
  8. Being a part time mother is great, everyday chores don’t cut into party time.
  9. 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.
  10. 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


Thank you for your time

We hope you enjoyed your stay in our hotel. Please fill out this survey so we can judge your level of customer satisfaction and we can annoy our staff with ridiculous statistics about their performance, even though you had one conversation with them that lasted all of two minutes. These surveys will take longer to answer than your actual stay in our facility. 

In a few days we’d like to call you to discuss the results of our tedious marketing logarithms. 

No!

Don’t call me when I’m feeding my kids

When I say I don’t have time for your idiot questions, I don’t have time, fuck off

Don’t call or email me when I buy a new phone, change my plan, check out of your hotel, buy groceries, fill up the car, change a frigging light bulb!

And stop paying idiots with dodgy marketing degrees to come up with new buzz words du jour:

#disruptor

#influencer

#worldclass

If you have to use the hash tag #authentic then perhaps you’re not

Please join our social networking channels, which have content about as interesting as having a pap smear. Enough. There are too many places to waste time already, I’ve lost track of the names:

Opportunity

Referral Key 

DoYourHeadIn

LinkedIn

Snapchat

Tinder

eBay 

GetYourHandOffIt

How about we all go to a party down the road and argue in real time. I’ll bring a pie


 


mi amiga hermosa

International Friendship Day is a day for celebrating those people whose love and kindness have changed our lives. Our friends are the people who understand our strangeness and love us anyway.

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”

Piglet said,
“We’ll be Friends forever won’t we Pooh?” and Pooh answered,
“Even longer.”


Double duty

Today is Father’s Day and I’m missing my long dead dad. Reading happy family messages on social media on a day like today is tough, especially when you’re doing double duty. I’m loving my strong male mates who are showing up and working hard and being great dads by making their children their main priority. I’m not loving the dads who show off their kids at public social functions but aren’t there for the hard graft of parenting. A part of me wishes that men in Western society would take the men who decide to be deadbeat and Disneyland dads to task. Tiger Woods can treat his wife and kids like shit but still be awarded player of the year awards. In our society it’s even easy to get away with not paying for your kids. I don’t know if it’s the role of government to chase up sperm donors who are not declaring income and crying poor then taking their new families out for dinner and getting on with a newly invented life as though the children they had first are a part of their past that they don’t need to revisit. The Child Support Agency doesn’t seem to be highly effective. I’m not advocating a return to the strict moral code of the 1950s but a few conversations along the lines of ‘mate lift your game’ and ‘real men pay child support,’ I think would help us ladies struggling with bearing the full load of child rearing. Yes we chose to have our kids, but in most cases, no we didn’t deliberately choose boys masquerading as men who have relinquished their responsibilities to their children. Real men man up.


Nursery rhymes for single mothers and others

My single mothering advice is gold, I am full of it. Don’t worry about buying expensive parenting books, for calm children administer nursery rhymes, they are cheaper than sedatives (for you and the kids).

If you see a little bunny and it’s nose is very runny

You think it’s very funny but it’s snot.

Lou Lou had a little girl, she had a bit of colic

She fed her vodka twice a day, now she’s alcoholic

If your children won’t stop crying, sing:

Roses are red, violets are blue, the smell of vomit reminds me of you.

Or what about?
My hair is alive with the bite of head lice

There were three in the bed and the little one said,
Roll over, roll over
So they all rolled over and my feet got cold
Roll over, rollover my super, walk the dog, defrost the freezer, feel guilty about the stuff you haven’t done. Roll over, play dead so you don’t have to change a nappy roll over.

Hey Diddle Diddle, my life’s in a puddle I can’t seem to get enough cash.
My kids need more food, but the rent is due so I can’t afford to splash.
I’ve spent all my dosh on school clothes and books and treated kids to some honey,
Luckily their father has a conscience, here comes my ex with lots of money

No stop me! That one is pure fantasy

Roses are red,
My teenage daughter’s bedroom smells
Not that I care,
But I could if I wanted to


The email plague is spreading

Buying presents online makes me happy. I type in my order and the parcels get delivered to my house. Single mothers crave simplicity and we are happy when life is made easier. I would say we are a growing demographic but that piece of marketing speak makes me throw up in my mouth a little. What doesn’t make me happy is the growing demand for reviews from said companies. Click the link and tell us how we went, your feedback is important. No, it’s not. My daughter telling me she is pregnant or my best friend telling me she has cancer is important, filling out your online survey is not. Your product will not change my life, unless it can give me back the arse I had when I was 16 or the complexion I had on my 20th birthday.

Run away from me if you have the word ‘marketing’ in your job description, or you use the words social and innovation, or on-trend together, or you regularly describe food as ‘textural’. Marketing speak makes me retch. I don’t care about your jargon or your plans for your product. Like many modern working parents, I am overwhelmed, over worked and pressed for time, emails about how a product can enhance my life or make me happy don’t help, they clog up my inbox. I don’t want to hear from your company unless you are telling me about your discounts. Shazam-Wow marketing people can voice their opinion on stuff they have no knowledge of that doesn’t matter to anyone and I’m not going to read the emails. Newsletters are an increasing plague that cause despair. In 2014 I am deleting emails before I read them so I have time for far more important things like helping my children with their homework or looking at hot celebrity photos online.


Girl Power

On International Women’s Day I’m thinking that I’d love to be Emmeline Pankhurst in pearls fighting for equality for all women but I’m a little bit busy hanging out the washing and bringing home the bacon to feed three hungry mouths. So I’d like to say thank you to the ladies who are childless for maintaining the revolution so this mother of three daughters can raise them knowing that the sisterhood is striving to make our world fair. Whether you chose not to be a breeder, or you had the choice taken from you by fate or circumstance, I’m grateful for the work you’re doing. I believe childless women are desperately needed to fight for equality by us sleep deprived mothers who’ve temporarily lost our brain power because we’re helping finish homework. Thank you for organising the petitions, running the rallies, writing the articles, alerting me to them on Twitter and for keeping watch while this mother bakes. Sisters I will join you at the barricades as soon as I can find a cheap babysitter.

“Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they’re rather stupid…”


The end is nigh

Only 10 days to go until my delinquent children go back to the maximum security prison I’ve chosen for them. Mothers, if you’re looking for something to fill the remaining days of torture, no, I mean happiness, I believe that staycations are currently popular. Or as single mothers call them, staying at home because it’s all we can bloody afford. So my kids and I are on trend. Travelling with kids and pets is just moving the chaos and mess to another more expensive location anyway. Or you could try going on a cheap holiday with another single parent; boozing, gatecrashing other people’s parties at the park for food and losing your children at an unfamiliar shopping centre are standard single mother school holiday adventures.

If, like me, the thought of camping makes you dry retch, borrow a tent from a friend and pitch it in the back yard for your kids or even the front nature strip if you live in an apartment. In summer kids can live in a tent for months at a time. Think about this: the money you save on holidays can go towards a cleaner, so you can continue to be a dirty house mother.

The long summer holidays can often look like this: extra kids, 3 broken eggs, 2 sleep ins, 7 old movies watched 100 times, 3 shopping expeditions to the two dollar shop, 3 weeks, sorry, days spent wearing pyjamas, 8 play dates, 37 cupcakes, 15 burnt offerings, dog eared books, hundreds of sighs and ‘I’m-so-bored’s’, 12 paintings that the landlord will want you to remove before you get your bond back, and one over-medicated, cranky, over-tired mother. On the last day of the school holidays, I will have a picnic to celebrate the end of summer, if you can call a bottle of riesling a picnic.