The
biggest clue to telling whether you were raised by a single mum is to
use your own memory. Did you live in a house with just your mum?
Yeah? There's your answer. It doesn't make for a humorous yet
touching blog post though, so I thought I'd try and stretch this one
out a bit.
My parents split up when I was eleven and my dad moved to a sad little bachelor flat about fifteen minutes away, so my mum became a bit of a single mum. Then, when I was fifteen, my dad went and died, which put up a bit of a barrier to the whole parenting thing, so my mum became a total single mum. During this time we've lived in three different houses and have gone from having a bit of money, to no money, to even less money and then back to a bit of money again, but we've had a WHOLE LOT OF FUN.
Not really, but it's mostly been fine. Here are the things that I've learned as a result of being raised by my brilliant mum.
-Spiders will die if you leave them under a Tupperware box for long enough.
It's a cliché, but it's true; we're a household of three girls and we all hate spiders. We used to have a cat who ate them, but now we don't and we have to improvise. Thanks to my mum, I can get rid of a spider using almost anything and without having to go anywhere near it.
-LOL at yourself.
You know at school when you're asked to bring in one of your dad's old shirts because you're going to do something that has the potential to be a bit messy, like use a pritt-stick or felt-tip pens? Well, we would always have to take our Grandad's shirts, because yeah, no dad. I love my Grandad; he's kind and generous and hilariously over-protective, but sartorially minded he ain't and as a result I really did look like I was wearing a 76 year old man's shirts.
Nowadays, this would be a look that I could totally rock, but at the time it was mortifying; everyone made a comment and it was impossible to look cute in front of my crush.
I appreciate that life gets shittier than this, but it was moments like these that allowed me to hone and perfect my greatest defence mechanism; humour. I'm now completely comfortable looking awful and stupid, as long as I get to make the first joke.
-Every diet, ever.
My mum has a great bod, but I can't remember a time in my life when she hasn't, at least, been 'cutting down'. Red and green days, points, juices, cayenne pepper, the 'hospital diet' (whatever the fuck that was. I remember my mum taking about 40 minutes to print it off.) and cabbage soup; my mum has been through them all.
I can only assume that had a man been around, there would have been someone to eye-roll all of this away, but there wasn't and as a result I can now tell you, without any doubt, the amount of weigh watchers points in a Mr Kipling apple pie.
-Watching Top Gear and Soccer AM is not how it has to be.
We had no big, growly man guarding our TV remote and consequently I have never had to sit through a full episode of Top Gear. Excluding watching England's 1998 World Cup matches at school, I have still never watched an entire football match.
When my friends at school were moaning about having to sit through 'the match' the night before or their dad's perving on this week's Soccerette, I could nochalantly drop into conversation that my mum, sister and I had watched a documentary about men who had previously been married coming out as gay, making me seem all cool and cosmopolitan.
-You CAN go out like that.
In the December of 2008, when there was snow on the ground, I attended a college party wearing a pair of tiny white shorts that I now wouldn't be able to get over my head, let alone my arse. I had fake tanned my legs to within an inch of the equator and I was ready to party.
Was I told “You're not going out in that”? No, because there was no dad there, thinking about hormone-filled boys trying to brush their hand against the exposed bum cheek (yeah, they were that short) of his precious first-born child. I only had a mum, who remembered what it was like to be seventeen and desperate for boys to fancy you.
And, thanks to my mum, I had a great time at parties, spending the whole night worried that boys would want to do stuff, that girls would call me a slag for looking like I wanted to do stuff and boys would call me frigid for being too scared to do stuff.
I never wore those shorts again, so well played mum, well bloody played.
- You can miss out on stuff and it will be fine.
Whether it was the year nine skiing trip, the year eleven cruise or a cinema trip that fell too close to the end of the month, there was lots of stuff that my sister and I missed out on. We knew that we couldn't afford it and we didn't want to upset our mum by asking. At the time, it felt rubbish and like we were missing out on THE MOST EXCITING EXPERIENCES EVER, but I soon learned that we weren't. Everyone got blisters on the ski trip, all of the girls fell out on the cruise (also, who the fuck wants to go on a cruise before the age of 63, anyway?) and I could watch Hitch when it came out on Sky Movies three months later.
You get over FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) pretty quickly, and now, if I get in from work late on a Friday and all I want to do is re-watch Wedneday night's TOWIE because I fell asleep halfway through, rather than doll myself up in fifteen minutes and jump back on a train to go on a night out, then I will and and I'm fine with it.
-Periods are not a big deal.
With three women in one house, the topic of periods comes up regularly. Or irregularly. There's no man there to sport a grimace whilst mentally going to his happy place. There was no 'ick' factor about periods in our house,;no one looking horrified when they came down in a morning to find you clutching a hot water bottle to your abdomen. All aspects of the menstrual cycle become appropriate dinner-table conversation topics, thus ensuring that you definitely won't be the girl that faints during the year nine period talk. In fact, the whole thing seems quite tame and you look at the nurse all “Yeah? Is that all you got?”
Our house is basically that scene in Harry Potter, where they break into the bank and everything they touch keeps multiplying, only with tampons.
My mum has obviously taught me other stuff, like how to make great Yorkshire puddings and how to hold your shit together whilst everything is crumbling and you're probably going to lose your house, but I think the aforementioned are pretty much the 'take home' points.
My parents split up when I was eleven and my dad moved to a sad little bachelor flat about fifteen minutes away, so my mum became a bit of a single mum. Then, when I was fifteen, my dad went and died, which put up a bit of a barrier to the whole parenting thing, so my mum became a total single mum. During this time we've lived in three different houses and have gone from having a bit of money, to no money, to even less money and then back to a bit of money again, but we've had a WHOLE LOT OF FUN.
Not really, but it's mostly been fine. Here are the things that I've learned as a result of being raised by my brilliant mum.
-Spiders will die if you leave them under a Tupperware box for long enough.
It's a cliché, but it's true; we're a household of three girls and we all hate spiders. We used to have a cat who ate them, but now we don't and we have to improvise. Thanks to my mum, I can get rid of a spider using almost anything and without having to go anywhere near it.
-LOL at yourself.
You know at school when you're asked to bring in one of your dad's old shirts because you're going to do something that has the potential to be a bit messy, like use a pritt-stick or felt-tip pens? Well, we would always have to take our Grandad's shirts, because yeah, no dad. I love my Grandad; he's kind and generous and hilariously over-protective, but sartorially minded he ain't and as a result I really did look like I was wearing a 76 year old man's shirts.
Nowadays, this would be a look that I could totally rock, but at the time it was mortifying; everyone made a comment and it was impossible to look cute in front of my crush.
I appreciate that life gets shittier than this, but it was moments like these that allowed me to hone and perfect my greatest defence mechanism; humour. I'm now completely comfortable looking awful and stupid, as long as I get to make the first joke.
-Every diet, ever.
My mum has a great bod, but I can't remember a time in my life when she hasn't, at least, been 'cutting down'. Red and green days, points, juices, cayenne pepper, the 'hospital diet' (whatever the fuck that was. I remember my mum taking about 40 minutes to print it off.) and cabbage soup; my mum has been through them all.
I can only assume that had a man been around, there would have been someone to eye-roll all of this away, but there wasn't and as a result I can now tell you, without any doubt, the amount of weigh watchers points in a Mr Kipling apple pie.
-Watching Top Gear and Soccer AM is not how it has to be.
We had no big, growly man guarding our TV remote and consequently I have never had to sit through a full episode of Top Gear. Excluding watching England's 1998 World Cup matches at school, I have still never watched an entire football match.
When my friends at school were moaning about having to sit through 'the match' the night before or their dad's perving on this week's Soccerette, I could nochalantly drop into conversation that my mum, sister and I had watched a documentary about men who had previously been married coming out as gay, making me seem all cool and cosmopolitan.
-You CAN go out like that.
In the December of 2008, when there was snow on the ground, I attended a college party wearing a pair of tiny white shorts that I now wouldn't be able to get over my head, let alone my arse. I had fake tanned my legs to within an inch of the equator and I was ready to party.
Was I told “You're not going out in that”? No, because there was no dad there, thinking about hormone-filled boys trying to brush their hand against the exposed bum cheek (yeah, they were that short) of his precious first-born child. I only had a mum, who remembered what it was like to be seventeen and desperate for boys to fancy you.
And, thanks to my mum, I had a great time at parties, spending the whole night worried that boys would want to do stuff, that girls would call me a slag for looking like I wanted to do stuff and boys would call me frigid for being too scared to do stuff.
I never wore those shorts again, so well played mum, well bloody played.
- You can miss out on stuff and it will be fine.
Whether it was the year nine skiing trip, the year eleven cruise or a cinema trip that fell too close to the end of the month, there was lots of stuff that my sister and I missed out on. We knew that we couldn't afford it and we didn't want to upset our mum by asking. At the time, it felt rubbish and like we were missing out on THE MOST EXCITING EXPERIENCES EVER, but I soon learned that we weren't. Everyone got blisters on the ski trip, all of the girls fell out on the cruise (also, who the fuck wants to go on a cruise before the age of 63, anyway?) and I could watch Hitch when it came out on Sky Movies three months later.
You get over FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) pretty quickly, and now, if I get in from work late on a Friday and all I want to do is re-watch Wedneday night's TOWIE because I fell asleep halfway through, rather than doll myself up in fifteen minutes and jump back on a train to go on a night out, then I will and and I'm fine with it.
-Periods are not a big deal.
With three women in one house, the topic of periods comes up regularly. Or irregularly. There's no man there to sport a grimace whilst mentally going to his happy place. There was no 'ick' factor about periods in our house,;no one looking horrified when they came down in a morning to find you clutching a hot water bottle to your abdomen. All aspects of the menstrual cycle become appropriate dinner-table conversation topics, thus ensuring that you definitely won't be the girl that faints during the year nine period talk. In fact, the whole thing seems quite tame and you look at the nurse all “Yeah? Is that all you got?”
Our house is basically that scene in Harry Potter, where they break into the bank and everything they touch keeps multiplying, only with tampons.
My mum has obviously taught me other stuff, like how to make great Yorkshire puddings and how to hold your shit together whilst everything is crumbling and you're probably going to lose your house, but I think the aforementioned are pretty much the 'take home' points.
Love
to ya mothers.
Good job you done. vashikaran love spell
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