A new life
A pink straw hat
too long hung
behind the bedroom door
contemplates a new life.
Its owner lying
on the bed, ungainly
as a hippo, writhes...
checking times before
the next wave arrives.
Forgotten now, it seems,
months of commands
exhortations, demands
delivered by a draconian
midwife - who tells tales
of new mothers fussing
You'd think they
were being murdered
she complains.
Strange:
that this third party
is here...yet...
not come through
the bedroom door.
Odd:
how the midwife
soon to to re-wed a long
discarded husband
reaches
for the pink straw hat.
“My patience, resolutions and beliefs are tested to the limits – sometimes daily.”*
Right at this moment one of my challenges is the constant, tuneless whistling from my elder son. When my boys were babies it was getting them to sleep or trying to figure out why they were crying. On any given day now, it might be squabbling, fighting, teasing, screaming, shouting or rudeness. Who’d be a parent? We might well question ourselves after the event, but we can’t very well put them back! Just how we find those inner resources, how we constantly demand more of ourselves, how we keep marching up that hill with a smile on our face and gladness in our heart at the sight of our ‘babies’ is one of life’s mysteries.
* © from Being Mummy by Anne‑marie Taplin published April 2007