I don’t do mothers’ day

. . . or fathers’ day or easter, and wouldn’t do christmas if I thought I could get away with it. The thing about christmas is, if you try and ignore it it’s in your face. You can’t wander down to your favourite cafe and expect to get your usual morning cappuccino, you can’t ring up a random friend and organise to do something, you can’t watch TV and find anything normal, you can’t even go to the supermarket without a cacophany of happy christmases and cheesy grins. Cheesy snarls. That latter is me. I do my best but I DON’T LIKE IT.

My family gets together for christmas but it’s usually on christmas eve due to my father’s excessive pandering to the other side of people’s families. In spite of loud cries of dissent from those of us who do not have another side, and even the not-quite-as-loud observations from those who do that there is more than one meal on christmas day.

You could go bush, go hiking in the wilderness, a place where you should never know that the rest of the world is on hold in a glitter of green and red tinsel, coloured balls, and SNOW. But it’s in the air somehow, it descends like a pall over your mood and won’t set you free for 24 hours.

I have admitted defeat of recent and do my best to have a happy christmas day. I have had reasonable success. I love the christmas pudding you get from the supermarket and brandy custard, so I get together with my girls, their dad if he’s in the country and Joshua if he’s available (which he usually isn’t, having an excess of family) and they can supply whatever food they want and I will supply the pudding. They’re not good at that. It’s usually just the pudding, perhaps a few leftovers from the night before, but it’s OK. We love spending time together, although there is that consciousness on this day that it is enforced. Something about the inner-city hush never quite allows you to forget.

All these events are much more exciting when there are young children involved. I used to love mothers’ day when my children would come home from school with a card they had made themselves full of promises to make me breakfast in bed every day for a week, and wash the dishes on Monday, and clean their rooms, and give me a back rub (with skinny little fingers) and a hand massage. Or plait my hair into a thousand little plaits (because I love having my hair played with).

But now that they’re grown up I like normal life best. I must be a routine kinda girl. I used to hate that last week of school when the reports had already been written and we were given ‘fun’ activities to kill time until we could legally be released. It felt like grief to me. It felt as though everything was lost.

I love birthdays. Who’d a thought? Don’t know what the difference is, but I always make sure everyone makes me feel special on mine and do the same for them (minus the prompting). Maybe they’re OK for me because the rest of the world continues unaffected. Don’t know. It’s weird.