raising willow… and dexter!

Raising a family without my family here is so fucking hard. Please excuse the bad language, but I’m really over it. Perhaps it is because I know how different things would have been if Mum was still around.

Willow threw a tantrum last night before bed. She tipped a jug of water over Dexie, which we’d told her not to do, time and time again. So I scooped her up out of the bath and gave her to her father. I finished off bathing Dexie, but all the time A was getting her ready for bed I could hear her yelling and screaming for her grandma. Hmph. Then she started squealing for her grandpa, but I suspect that if her grandpa was present he would have had a nervous breakdown with all the noise.

I pulled all of my photo albums out over the weekend. The way things are stored in the house needs to be rearranged, to put it mildly. It seems Dexter might go into his own room sooner than we anticipated. Willow, on the other hand, would happily be co-sleeping now. So I started going through the leadlight cupboard in the dining room, I was storing a heap of my mum’s craft books in there and the family photo albums.

I pulled the albums out with the intention of getting rid of the ones that are meaningless to me. Dad took lots of photos in his time. Obviously lots of them are meaningful to me. There are some good photos of Mum, which A was interested to see. I have to admit that it was strange to see my life before me, on little pieces of coloured paper.  I wonder about what my mum’s life was like when she was my age.  She had a 12 year old and a 10 year old.  Do I parent like her?  Would hse approved of my parenting?  I suspect the answer to both questions is yes, but I’d give anything to know for sure.

Dithering about what to do with them, I let Willow look at them. She seems to accept who the people in the photos are -my mummy and daddy, but she doesn’t ask about where they are now. I am so scared that she will and I’ll have no idea what to say to her. We looked through each album, with me explaining to her what the photos were of. I took some albums into the lounge room to show A. I stacked all the albums back on the dining room table, and finally back into the cupboard again.

I’ve chosen four arial photos of Adelaide in the 1970s to frame and hang up somewhere. Apart from that, I can’t decide what to do about the meaningless photos. The ratty old photo albums in themself are half the memory.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 10:13 pm and is filed under mummy stuff, my mum. You can follow responses to this entry through the Comments RSS Feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.