Skip to main content

Skills you need as a mother



I don’t know about you and what happens in your house, but in my house we all have different skills sets.  Gerhard is responsible for holidays, booking, paying and actually getting us there.  I pack, clothes for flying holidays, clothes and food and medical supplies for self-drive holidays.  I buy groceries and direct Sekai what to cook when, Gerhard does a mean braai and he makes delicious curry and pasta.  I tend to do most of the shopping in the house, Gerhard has to buy cars.  You catch my drift.

For my sins I seem to be responsible for IT…please note that I do not possess any specific IT skills.  For some reason I just seem less afraid of embracing technology.  As a working mother I don’t have a lot of free time.  Weekends are for shopping (groceries and clothes for the kids mostly).  This past weekend was spent setting up Liam’s Xbox.  The poor kid saved up forever to buy a new Xbox.  Gerhard had to work on Saturday, so the kids and I set off to buy the said Xbox.  We then had to set the thing up. 

Let me tell you this is a far cry from the Nintendo game consoles of my youth where you plugged a cable into the TV, another one into a power outlet and off you go.  Your only concern was when the game, a massive cartridge bigger than an old fashioned tape did not make proper contact with your console and you sort of had to wiggle it a bit!

An Xbox is like a complicated computer.  There were multiple parts to be assembled from the box.  Then the thing needs to be connected to the internet, in our case snail speed internet brought to us courtesy of Telkom.  Let me tell you at a point I felt so sorry for poor Liam sitting there waiting that I ended up connecting the Xbox to my mobile phone.  It took hours!  Liam eventually went to bed without playing a single game on his new Xbox.  Liam and I sat in front of that TV because I had all the passwords in my head, yet Liam is the only one that understands the complicated controller that the Xbox comes with.  So a team effort if I were to be completely fair.

We got there in the end, but I felt like I needed one of Gerhard’s shorter flying holidays and a stiff drink afterwards.  I still have no idea how to play Fortnite, a strange shooter like game where you do a little dance called the Floss after emerging victorious!  I do think every decade of parenting brings its own challenges, but tech and locking down kid accounts and Fortnite is definitely something our own parents did not have to worry about.

So the list of skills that the modern mother needs gets longer and longer every week. Speech writer, taxi driver, nurse, psychologist, shopper, teacher, pet sitter, IT guru, financial advisor, giver of hugs, keeper of secrets,  finder of things, employer of staff to look after kids, chucker of cricket balls in nets when dad’s must work.  To all the mothers, I see you!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Raising Luka

A miracle happened in the past week and a half.   Luka went from being an utter little shit to a rather cute little girl.   We are still reeling with shock, waking up every morning waiting for an earth shattering blood curling tantrum, and then she calmly walks into our room, gets in bed with us, cuddles a bit and drinks her tea and off she goes.   We are literally dumbfounded by the turnaround in our little girl, and we are too scared to even speak about this, let alone tell strangers on a blog about this.   Luka is just different.   Not a single teacher ever described our Luka without using words like ‘feisty’, ‘strong willed’, ‘determined’.   Good when you are Margaret Thatcher or Helen Zille dealing with issues like unemployment and corruption, bad when you are a two year old girl with a mom and dad short of patience. What changed? I think two things happened, Luka started speaking much better and clearer than before, so we are better able to understand her wishes (comman

Tinsel and all that glitters

And so the 1 st of December happened and we put up a tree.  A very simple version of a story that is just a tad longer… As in the past, I decided not to put up a tree at home as we leave for our annual beach holiday soon in any event.  Well after seeing trees, baubles, glitter and what not on Facebook, I felt extremely guilty for denying my kids the pleasure of Christmas for two whole weeks whilst my virtual friends’ kids were all rolling in the tinsel.  So I decided to put up the tree after all, how lazy can one person be.  Out came the box and the tree and the lights and horror of horrors, we are missing a leg.  So Luka and I went to the mall last night and got a new tree, a bigger tree and more sparkly things than we need.  If it says Christmas, and if it even has a hint of glitter, we have it, we even have fairy lights running up our balustrade, we have baubles and glitter and advent calendars, I really went to town on this one.  It is just that Christmas takes on a s

Walk in wardrobes and butterflies

Can one person be so excited about a prospect? We have been living in the same house for a couple of years.  After moving back from Australia I had only a handful of shoes.  OK, I tell a lie, 30 odd pairs that I held in my hands and after carefully weighing up, deemed worthy of sending across the waters at the cost of an average lung in the Ukraine.  I had some basic clothes, same story, stuff that I could fit into a couple of suitcases.  The cupboard space in the master bedroom seemed more than ample to house my (ever) growing wardrobe, a top here, and a pair of shoes there.  The couriers from the online shops here in SA mostly know me by name.  My super power is the ability to know exactly what something from an online store would look like on me, what I can pair it with, whether it would fit, a rare skill, I admit, but this took years of returns to the online stores, collected by my same courier friends.  I have a list in my head of brands where I need to buy the sh