Thursday is a bad morning for me. Last year it was Fridays. It’s the day we have to make it to Kinder, on time, and it rarely happens. Instead I always find myself running around the house, like a headless chook, ten minutes after we were due to leave. Jaedon spilt milk on his trousers but refuses to wear any other ones, so I have to wash them off then wave my magic hairdryer over them to get them dry. Alicia-Rae can’t find her shoes. I can’t find my keys. I find a week old banana buried at the bottom of Jaedon’s school bag and now everything smells like week old banana. I need to find another spare set of clothes, just in case. Which Jaedon won’t change into anyway. Alicia-Rae chooses now to do the poop she’s been holding onto for three days. We’re out of nappy wipes. I still can’t find my keys. I’m out the door and have just finished locking up when the delivery man turns up, with a parcel to sign for. I let myself in again, then double-check everything while I’m back inside, to make sure I haven’t left the iron or the coffee maker on. It’s now raining so I have to run the kids down to the car one by one, strapping them into their seats while my back gets soaked. I get held up at the crossing, not by one train, but two. Then the boom gates get stuck, and meanwhile another train comes along. The car in front of me stalls. The next car in front of me does 70km/hour, in a 100km/hour, the whole way to school. Twenty five minutes seems like Sixty. I make up five new words to replace ones I can’t say with kids in the car (not that I say them anyway…). We arrive at Kinder 20 minutes late, and I am agitated, frustrated, wound up, tense, and mad at myself for sleeping through the alarm that morning. I apologise to the teacher, kiss Jaedon bye-bye, and take Alicia-Rae to the nearest coffee shop, where I re-focus on my breathing while inhaling a coffee. I sink deeper into the soft, high-backed seat and feel myself slowly return. Alicia-Rae looks at me and laughs.
I guess it is kind of funny. For anyone else looking in. But I really have to work hard on mornings like this to not let it control my whole day. I’m an emotion-driven person, and it’s an effort for me to control my emotions – I usually just tend to run with them, for good or bad. I’m lucky Matt married me for better or worse.
The flip-side to all this is when my day starts out great, wonderful even, it’s mighty hard to get me down. So I’m making conscious decisions to look for great, and wonderful, things each morning. Sometimes this is simply sitting on the couch with Jaedon, reading through his favourite train book, watching his smile reach the very corners of his eyes, his delight deliciously palpable. I could squeeze him so tight and smother him from head to toe with kisses. And I often do. Which he loves, of course. Yesterday, with the sun already high and steaming by the time I’d finished breakfast, we headed outside, dressed in as little as we could get away with, and laughed. We chased each other up the street. We lay on the grass. We looked for bugs on the pavement. And we placed our backs against the neighbours brick fence and soaked up the warmth, and joy of summer.
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And then, somehow, the end of the day had found us. And kissed us goodnight before we’d realised, with a beauty I carried with me into the new day.
And even though I woke up to a Thursday, it wasn’t so bad as I expected it to be. And I was grateful.
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Narrelle x
{ Melbourne Photographer }