How do you do it?

Don't you just love to sit back sometimes and see how other people do things?

I love it, it's better than T.V if you ask me to just take in what's going on around you.
I particularly like watching people try to be a parent 'properly', you know, do it all the right way and get it all right and win a prize. Humph, wonder what the prize is though. How completely and utterly unsatisfactory and downright unglorious is it that if you do the parenting thing right, do a good job, the proof of it is that your kid leaves home!?
Where's the medal in that?
They do though, they realise that you were right and they can do anything they put their mind to and are capable and clever and probably the most gorgeous thing ever born and just bugger off somewhere giving all your hard earned fabulousness to some partner or other that will never have any idea,or care, just how much hard work you put in!
Think back to the pregnancy for a starting point, every book you care to reads will tell you about morning sickness and giving birth but they don't even begin to tell half the story do they?
How many books tell you that you will become a whole new person that actually few people will like very much and one that your husband will almost certainly but if he is wise, very silently, wish he could swap for something much calmer and more reasonable, like a spitting Cobra for instance.
What book did you ever read that told you that on a daily basis you would weep about the most bizarre things? Like being so happy you have a washing machine and don't have to walk to a river and beat clothes with a rock, I stood in complete convulsions of sobbing ridiculousness turning a tap on and off while I wept for all those women who hadn't such luxuries in their lives.
It's probably best if I don't try and explain what happened when I sat having a pee whilst 38 weeks pregnant with Isaac and looked up to see H had thoughtfully bought me a jar of anti wrinkle cream and left it on top of the bathroom cabinet as a special suprise. No, best not.
No-one tells you what you will walk like if you are particularly blessed with a splitting pelvis, or the sounds you will make while you are walking like a penguin with piles.
It's never written that when you give birth you aren't going to be lying on a crisp white bed looking all sort of glowy and serene with an adoring husband gazing misty eyed at you because you are just so heavenly, but actually you will be writhing and sweating with veins bulging out of places you didn't have veins and your husband would have that look on his face that screams of trying to look supportive but actually longing to run as far away from this woman he has failed to understand for 9 months, who is now threatening his reproductive organs with unthinkable torture, in a voice straight from a horror movie about someone possessed.
Then you give birth and awwwww, it's all worth it, you can move mountains and know that nothing will be too much for this teeny tiny person who just came from under your heart.
Until about 5 weeks or so when you begin to feel that you will die if you can't get some sleep and feeling that actually you don't believe you ever planned on having children and cats are just so much nicer because you can put them out at night and sleep, really sleep. And then they smile.
That wobbly half cocked sort of not quite a smile kind of smile that is by far the most spelndid sight ever because you know that everything is worth it and you can do it and you will do it.
Nature has this way of just getting it all so right, every time you feel that being a parent is just the hardest and least rewarding job on earth, the focus of your discontent does something so unbeatably fantastic you forget everything and burst with pride at having created them.
Wouldn't it be great to find a career that was equal to being a kid? where all you had to do to gain years of unconditional rewards and backbending compliance was smile, or make a crappy picture with 'my family is good' on it, even sleeping will bring bonuses the like of which you can hardly begin to imagine.
You look at your tiny baby and can't imagine ever being happy that they will go to school, until it is almost time for them to start school and they are so bored with talking to and looking at you all day that they think up activities to break the monotony , starting with writing on walls and progressing to making cakes on the kitchen floor with whatever they can grab in the 37 seconds it takes you to pee. A true ready for schooler will crash your car into a tree or put the hose through an open window and turn it on just to see what happens.
Hoorah! Get the uniform ,pack the lunch and wave goodbye with slightly less enthusiasm than you feel so as not to hurt their feelings.
Even when they are filling your shoes with maple syrup and peanuts you can still be overwhelmed with gushing love for them because when they are clean and sleeping all that naughty stuff sort of seems funny. You gaze at them sleeping and know that you will die a bit when they leave home.
Marvellous then that good old Nature takes over again and they hit this period when, no matter how cute they are, no matter how funny or beloved, you can look at them and long for the day when they come to visit, leaving their cups behind them. What IS it about teenagers that they are incapable of using the same cup twice? not only do they have to have a clean cup ( and one from a cupboard thankyou, ones drying on the drainer aren't good enough oh no siree) but they lose all ability to pick UP the cup they have used, once they have slaked their thirst ( and it is never the full cup, nope, half the cup/ glass must be left in, especially if there are little children in the house too) all strength leaves the arms of teenagers when they are no longer thristy, so they put the glass down and with shaky and wobbly arms, walk away to leave the cup / glass to be kicked over by a toddler.
It is not only possible but an almost certainty that the day will come when they say " actually I've been thinking of getting my own place" and the oscar award worthy act will be on " oh darling.....are you? When, do you think?"
( WHOOHOOOOO! YEEHAAAAAAA!!)
"dunno actually but I reckon it'll be pretty cool, Jason is going to be working down here and between us we can do it"
" that's great, have you seen anywhere you like?"
( Can I help you pack? do you need plates????)
It's simply astounding that while you hope they will be safe and happy, the feeling of not being able to survive if you can't look at them while they sleep and wanting to make sure they have clean underpants has gone, disappeared under a pile of underpants you wish you didn't have to wash again. When they get to the age when they change their underwear so often that you are sick of the very sight of them, you can be pretty sure they are old enough to be in a place of their own.
So, do your job well and your reward is that they leave you without a backward glance.
It is also amazing that these untidy, lazy, weak armed people, who left you with a certain amount of trepidation and a slight feeling of uncertainty as to whether they would be buried alive under glasses and laundry, suddenly discover how it's all done! HA! That person who appeared to have NO clue how the vacuum worked and if shown, in an unavoidable way, how to do it, would half heartedly swing it around the middle of a room, inexplicably is all knowing in ways of household cleanliness, their flat is a veritable show home with vacuum wires actually wound up, laundry actually put away, in drawers. Dishes done and even put away in cupboards..Dan even has coasters for heavens sake COASTERS! Never mind not putting the cup on the floor but on a COASTER?!?
Jordan has always been a bit careful about his stuff and hangs his clothes up.....I can imagine then that when I visit HIM in his own home he will make me take off my shoes.
Oh hasten the day!