One of the most annoying things about being a single parent has been dealing with the conclusions that people seem to leap to. In my experience, when the kids stuff up, it always comes into play somehow that I'm bringing them up solo.
Every so often though, I have a sneaking suspicion that my kids and I don't exactly help matters.
One of mine is a bright, dramatic and slightly ghoulish child who enjoys making people laugh and/or shocking them. (No, I've got no idea where she gets it from either.)
Her new teacher rang this week, ostensibly to touch base but in actual fact to inquire about her liking for "dark" topics.
I wondered if the teacher had ever actually read the Harry Potter series but anyway, after reassuring her that despite the kid's love of writing stories that end in grisly deaths, she is perfectly normal, we parted ways.
Next day I asked my daughter what she had done at school that day.
"Our class fish died so I designed a coffin for him."
I'm still waiting for the next phone call.
I try very hard to make my kids THINK about how they are portraying our family to others. Completely hypocritically, I might add, as there are times when I am the very image of the irresponsible mother.
When they were year 1 and 4, I decided to be organised early about teacher Christmas gifts and purchased lovely bottles of wine and chocolates (I suspect anyone who has taught my daughters needs a drink from time to time and hell, I like wine and chocolates myself).
It wasn't until I watched them walk in the gate proudly carrying really obvious wine gift bags that I realised I'd just sent my 5 and 8-year-olds into a state primary school with alcohol. Which sat under the class tree for the rest of the week. Just as well the Education Ministry wasn't doing spot inspections.
The ghoulish one is an amazing writer and actor but missed the musical gene completely. Her long-suffering music teacher suggested that she could research and present something about a key moment in the life of a famous musician. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, after her class sat through her impression of Whitney Houston dying in a bathtub - it went like this: "And IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII will always love ... glug glug glug" and then switched to her as a reporter outside the hotel saying "we are trying to get pictures of the body" - I started to understand why sometimes people take us the wrong way.
I pointed this out. She said "I really had no idea of what a person high on drugs would be like, Mum, so I told Mrs Roth that I based it on you and Aunty Claire after you've had a drink together."
I realise it's not just single parents who have to do damage control at school. My friend Kelle is a respectable nurse married to a cop and her lovely children attend a Catholic school that insists on that expensive exercise in frustration that is covered books. Friend's daughter was most excited to find a faux fur, zebra print stick-on book covering which was duly purchased and applied after much swearing. It was then they discovered the pattern had aligned to resemble a vagina. A large, faux fur vagina. Apparently one of the nuns is still off on stress leave.
It all just seems so much worse when you're a single parent, or maybe I'm just a little bit touchier about it. We were breaking in a new babysitter once and as I was on the way out the door I heard my youngest child say brightly "we bought a pink vibrator today" to the poor girl.
I quickly turned around and clarified to the by-now saucer-eyed teen that in fact my child was referring to her brand new, bright pink vibrating toothbrush but I fear the damage was done as she was always busy when I texted her after that.
This was the child that kindly included our adult boarder in her year 1 art assignment about her family. There was absolutely no explanation of who the second woman holding my hand in the drawing was and I was so amused by what looked like a lesbian version of the My Family stickers that people put on their station wagons I never bothered to explain it.
The ghoulish child says we can't have those stickers on our car anyway. ''All the mums are either cooking or gardening, and that's not you," she said. "There don't seem to be any with a laptop and wine."
Nope. No clue at all about why people jump to conclusions about me.
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