Category: Home
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Teenagers, Privacy and Door Slamming
A friend once bragged how when her daughter went through that special teenage phase when she used to ram home her opinions by slamming her bedroom door, she finally reached her tipping point one day, found a screwdriver and removed it. When her daughter returned home from school, she explained to her that privacy is…
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Every Picture Tells A Story
I did a job I do about once a decade the other day; I changed the photos in my photo frames. It’s an onerous task that has about as much appeal as cleaning the barbecue or filling in school forms because you have to be a maths genius to work out how to print the photos to…
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Teens Eating Salad, Working Ovens and Medals for Outstanding Parenting Achievement
There’s major cause for celebration in the new house this week, firstly because the oven is still working after Kurt cremated a pizza in it at 4am on Sunday morning, forgot about it, went to bed and if not for the old man’s remarkable sense of smell, (or weak bladder), none of us might be…
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I Should Have Packed The Wine
‘You’re the one that I want…’ the old man sang to me when I got up this morning. A sincere effort, I believe, to calm the storms that have inevitably begun to build up as we get ready to move. He’s been in a suspiciously good mood all week which he has tried to disguise…
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Moving House Again
We’re on the move again. Or perhaps we’re running away. We do this a lot as the relationships in our family, that now comprises of four adults, continue to evolve. The average age for kids to leave home is now 27 due to rising house prices, as opposed to 21 in the past, so I…
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The Eternal Quest For Love
‘Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for’. Bob Marley It would make life so much easier if we, like the simplest animal forms with little intelligence, only had to mate for the sake of procreation, and feelings couldn’t complicate the process. Wouldn’t it? Wary applause…
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Crap Parent Therapy: ‘Consulting’ Rather Than ‘Enabling’
I had to go back for a session of ‘crap parent therapy’ last week, tail between my legs, following another situation with Kurt where the parenting shit hit the fan and the old man and I found ourselves sucked into another potential vacuum of despair. Patiently, the therapist reminded me for the umpteenth time about the…
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Empty Nesting: When The First Takes Flight
NC left for her trip halfway around the globe at 5.30am this morning. She looked somewhat out of place with her backpack and beanie on. It’s not that our girl’s a princess, but she’s not into roughing it either, like her mother. We celebrated her departure last night over much too wine, our favourite Japanese…
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The Fall From Domestic Goddess To Domestic Grossness That Can Happen In Middle Age
Do you ever get those moments when your own domestic grubbiness grosses you the fuck out? I had one of those last night when I used the grill in the oven for the first time in months and there was that much smoke, I’m surprised the fire brigade didn’t turn up. It was a blinding…
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Family, And being Shaped By The Good As Well As The Bad
It has become quite commonplace for many of us to blame the past for all our problems. Perhaps we know too much now. We know that trauma, if it isn’t dealt with properly, at the time, can leave a lasting trail of damage that affects the rest of our lives. There is some proof that…
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The 5 Golden Rules Of Hosting A Teenage Party
We are those foolish parents who agreed to host a ‘gathering’ last weekend, for Kurt’s nineteenth birthday. He requested a party, but I naively thought that if I defined it as a ‘gathering’, his guests would not interpret the event as the opportunity to get shit-faced at someone else’s expense, throw food and chuck up…
LOUISA SIMMONDS 