Days of our lives.

There are mornings when you cannot wait to drop your kids off at school, every minute that creeps towards drop off is like an eternity.  Looking up at the kitchen clock I calculate the difference between the earliest permissible drop off and the time it takes to drive to the school gate.  I still have 45 minutes to go.

It's usually these mornings that you find yourself yelling till you are hoarse, well at least I do,  and at the same time being vaguely aware of just how futile and pathetic the situation has become.  I sometimes wonder what a more Buddhist approach might be.  I try a deep breath and invoke all the love and light in the world,  I repeat the mantra "this too will pass" but bloody hell, it's just not passing quick enough.

Everyone woke up loud today.  Eldest is yelling at youngest for the milk cap.  I suddenly, and unexpectedly, thump my hands down on the breakfast table in front of them and scream, in a sort of crazy women impersonation, "WHERE IS THE MILK CAP, WHO'S GOT THE MILK CAP?".  This provokes a cacophonous round of hysterical laughter, there is, however, a nervous edge to the hysteria, they're not sure whether Mum really has slipped off the edge this time.  Safer to laugh.  My throat is sore.

There is nothing quiet about this morning.  The latest game is all about putting someone in a suitcase and wheeling them around the house across the wooden floorboards.  It's sure to end in tears.  The conscious parent would get up from their attempt at a quiet cup of tea to attend to possible disaster.  However,  I prefer the unconscious parenting approach, the one where you have the the cup of tea and try to zone out of the mayhem.  I wait for the tears.  I discover youngest not only zipped in the suitcase but also zipped in the backpack which is in the suitcase.  Maybe I should pay more attention to those helicopter parenting manuals.

Talking about helicopters, I am convinced I am carrying the helicopacter pylori bacteria, a side effect of consulting far too many of those online medical diagnostic tools.  It could also just be anxiety.  Interestingly, helicopter gains its name from the Ancient Greek "helix' meaning 'spiral' or  'coil', the very same sensation anxiety provokes in the stomach.  So consequently I am bargaining with my conscious about whether I can sneak a coffee in this morning.  My latest detox has left me with the pesky residue of  questioning each and every toxic substance I crave.  This adds to my anxiety. 

Another chain of events this morning leads to youngest needing emergency hairstyling with the nail scissors, which now has her sporting a fringe shorter than a 1920's flapper.  Fortunately she can pull it off.  Eldest comes running in from the car where he had been claiming the coveted front seat for the journey to school.  With his hand held out in front and the look of horror and disgust displayed across his face, he runs to the bathroom dry retching.  I can feel the anxiety rising, those helicopter chaps in my stomach are really tripping now with all that acid producing panic.  Is it a bee sting, a spider?  Half the container of pump soap is now cupped in his palm and he begins washing furiously.  Middle child has left an apple core in the car door handle, it's been there for a while.  Added to that, the car window had been left open a few days before during a torrential downpour.  The apple core and the rain combined to make a festering pool of putrid slush in the door handle cavity.  I had briefly wondered about the origin of the odour the previous day, I figured perhaps a pair of weary school shoes, battered and bruised after a full year of service.  Whilst all this drama evolves, the youngest has wound a comb into a huge tangled knot in the front of her hair.  Like a highly trained military soldier I have to make a quick tactical decision about which dilemma to attend to first.  In this instance I make the wrong move. Whilst syphoning the fetid pond from the car door she takes the kitchen shears and cuts the comb free of her tangled locks.

A number of unspeakable childhood crimes have been committed this past week and appropriate punishments attempted to be applied.  It's no different to any other.  Whilst summing up the week to the errant husband and Father I decided to finish on a high note.  One of those little moments you could easily skip over and lose in the messy disorder and chaos of family life .

Our eldest, quite uncharacteristically, decided to make me a cup of tea one evening.  Sometimes the wisdom and depth of a child's perception is beyond comprehension.  When he brings me my cup of chamomile tea he presents it upon a note and served in the cup made by my husband as a child.  The note reads; " to remind you of Dada".  In that moment I am not counting down the minutes but wishing the moment could last just a little bit longer.

What's with the Kookaburras?

Travelling up to Sydney from the south coast of NSW, my Mother and I stopped into an antique warehouse in the charming township of Bowral in the Southern Highlands.  I share my Mother's love of old things, antique jewellery was her passion. She'd once had an antique jewellery business, Greentree Antiques,  housed in a corner of an old theatre in Windsor.  A cavernous and magical place filled to the brim with the most fascinating objects.  A place you could spend hours and still not feel like you'd seen it all.  My sister and I would get lost in that theatre during school holidays.  Upstairs there was an area which was off limits to the public to house the overflowing horde.  It was, of course, the most intruiging place of all.  There was a heavy dusty theatre curtain that drapped across the stairwell to stop customers going up.  We would sneak up there whilst nobody was looking and spend hours trawling through boxes and admiring obscure curiosities.  It was here we once happened accross a box of vintage erotic photography.  We'd never seen anything like it in our lives, little eyes popped out of their heads, we swore ourselves to secrecy and emerged unusually sheepish from our regular adventures.  That old school erotica is still so much more exciting than the modern adaptions.  It was an era when less was more, the imagination was allowed to create the fantasy.

That day, with my Mother in Bowral, was probably the last time we mooched about an antique shop together.  Some months later she was gone.  I'd been searching for little bits of Australiana to take home to London, it had been the general theme of my holiday purchases.  It was in that antique warehouse in Bowral that I came across an old painting of three kookaburras sitting on the branch of a gumtree.  A little rough and a little damaged but framed in a beautifully carved wooden frame.  I fell in love with its rustic Australian charm and had to have it to brighten the walls of my dark basement flat in London.  It would be a little reminder of our sunny roots.  Mum had always been a brilliant business woman, clever and charismatic, I called in her help to negotiate a good deal.

That painting has adorned my walls ever since.  It's a symbol of so much more to me now than my Australian heritage.  It represents family and memories, respecting the past and taking care of the future.

The kookaburra is a family orientated bird living in small units with the older generations taking care of the youngest.  The famous kookaburra laugh is both a greeting and a territorial warning, but once one group starts off it seems the whole neighborhood will join in, often just as the sun is rising or setting.  I like to think that both ends of their day are marked by this calling to one and other, a good belly laugh enjoyed with family and friends.

Where I currently live in Australia we have a family of kookaburras in our backyard, they seem so confidently assured and majestic in their domain and I feel somehow that we have become a part of their family too, so intently they keep watch over us.

So why have I called my blog Kookaburra Laugh?  I felt like life with a family of my own was constantly throwing up a variety of amusing and often challenging situations.  At the end of the day it's often a case of: if you don't laugh, you'll cry.  I prefer to take a leaf out of the kookaburra's book.