What I had in mind

It finally stopped raining the other day and I thought up this weird way to torture myself and the kids. I packed up their bikes into the car and Cormac and I met Lauca at school in the afternoon with a surprise bike riding afternoon. But for some reason that surprise went down like a lead balloon and she immediately started crying. I don’t know why, parenting is like that, unpredictable. It was so muddy getting from the carpark at school to the bike path that we had to abandon our shoes. So, we were all splattered in mud and our feet caked in the stuff and we were climbing fences and throwing bikes over to the other side and it was getting quite hot and sticky and the kids were grizzling at full force and I suddenly thought “wouldn’t it have been easier just to stay at home and stab myself in the face with a fork?”

But the magic of going out for a walk (or a ride) is that somehow you start to enjoy it in spite of yourself and by the time we were half-way the kids were relaxed and happy and I could breathe again and I was all “see, see, kids this is what I had in mind”. And we stopped to see the creek swollen with rushing water and then I nodded to a drug dealer, because doesn’t matter what your line of work is, sometimes you just like to get out of the office and enjoy the change in weather. He was there without a customer in sight, but his backpack, his can of Mother, his cigarette and his mobile phone pinned to his ear and the sunshine sparkling around him and we continued on our way with Cormac imitating the hell out of him. And then we ran into a labourer, sweaty and dirty in his fluorescent shirt so I wasn’t shy about my muddy feet. He was cheerful in that Friday afternoon kind of way, with his bottle of beer in a paper bag and a weekend in front of him and we grinned madly to each other and exchanged pleasantries about the sunshine and I just thought, released, we’ve all been released from our cages.