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I have been taken hostage

I have been taken hostage and there is absolutely nothing that you can do to help me. 

It has been one thousand two hundred and seventy one days and sixty seconds and I fear for my sanity and my life. 

Money won't free me. 

I need to stick this out for another couple of years before I will escape.  Only time served will free me.  Come to think of it, it is more like prison! 

I have of course been added to class and sport WhatsApp groups by people that meant well at the start.  Bearing in mind that my kids are in a decent (and rather expensive) private school, the level of questioning never ceases to amaze me and I mostly find myself sitting on my hands to not respond to the daily stream of questions. 

Each child has a homework book, and the new mom's in Grade 1 are the worst.  it is not as if any child will fail Grade 1 if we get the maths wrong on the first day of school.   The school sends out a weekly newsletter with a detailed summary of exactly what will be happening in the week ahead.  Again, these kids are in primary school, they are not sitting for final exams at Harvard.  

I have toyed with the idea of adding my au pair to these groups, but I fear that she will resign soon after the first batch of questions arrive, there are certain things that a mother needs to do herself. 

As someone that often travels to London, it infuriates me when the stream of stupid questions start arriving as I leave my office and free Wi-Fi to take the train, because then I am paying to read these silly messages.  Most often my own kids have the answers, and if not for the sensitive nature of some of the topics mistakenly could touch, I would just add Liam to the class WhatsApp group.  
Liam, when are you writing your science test?  
On Tuesday Mom, and we are writing about pages 78 to 93  
See, as a working mother my kids were taught from a young age to pay attention.  As the kids of a working mother, they know that they need to come home with most of the answers. 

They memorised our phone numbers as soon as they could talk, no GPS tracking phone watches for our kids.  Liam was always the leftover kid at aftercare and Gerhard phoned me one day and asked me if I knew a Yolande, as she just called and asked if Liam could go home with her.  Liam must have been around five at the time, and he longingly stared at the mom's picking up their kids at 3pm every day, so one day he asked if he could go home with his friend Reuben.  This friendship is still something to see. 

Well, the WhatsApp groups, it is not only the mom's.  We have rugby groups where the dad's also play their parts.  One dad keeps on posting weird messages like I am wiping my ass on this and then deletes these messages.  Again, words fail me and I wait for the day we have a Margaret van Wyk situation on our hands.  Again, for reasons quite obvious one cannot add ones au pair or eldest kid to a WhatsApp group.  

So we soldier on in the hope that the kids will soon go to Varsity where they will hopefully no longer rely on their mothers to resolve their issues via WhatsApp.  



 




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