Invisible behind the clear glass windscreen she screams and it’s guttural, it’s visceral but totally relatable,
Unseen perhaps because the sunlight hits the screen at just the right angle;
Unseen maybe because she’s over 30 and no one truly sees her anymore;
Unseen probably because she’s not the only one screaming. She’s not the only one alone screaming in her car,
She just feels like she is.
Now before you ask, she is fine,
is of sound thought and the owner of a rational mind,
She beared the brunt of just your bog standard tantrum this morning;
she wasn’t yet dressed,
She unloaded and loaded the washing machine, hung herself out to dry as admittedly she’s long past her best,
She’s your port of call in a storm, a bright beacon when you’re lost in the dark,
When needed, she’s your number one,
But. She lost a little chunk of herself when she became a Mum.
A choice was made and the path laid clear,
She went into this decision with wide open eyes,
Imagine her shock and imagine her surprise that when asked if she’s okay, she pours out lies,
Who set the bar so high? I always thought I was quite tall,
Glossy magazines, painted fake smiles? Yeah, actually, I’m really rather small.
Diminished, dishevelled and disappearing into herself,
No longer desirable; too young to gather dust upon that high shelf.
And seated in her car her thoughts close in and whisper…
When suddenly it hits her…
She’s alone. Alone! Finally alone.
Her thoughts are not of school runs, panicked emails, best laid plans but they’re her own,
What to do? What to do? It’s every mum’s dream when wide eyed and staring out comes that scream,
‘I wasn’t my best today; I should have tried harder, I allowed it to get to me – another chink in my armour,
A martyr to motherhood? I’ve let down my team,
Lost patience and a PE kit – I’m every mediocre parent’s dream’,
Left alone too long and your thoughts can turn sour;
guilt hits harder if your ‘me time’ runs over an hour.
Admit it now, it’s called defeat.
It’s okay to throw in the towel as
there’s always your car. It will sit and hum gently while you scream and howl because it understands that sometimes you don’t always want to ‘talk’;
sometimes you don’t need a shoulder to cry on;
sometimes you don’t want your problems shared or halved
or even solved.
Sometimes you just want to scream.
Like a car, we just want to get from A to B and perhaps it takes a scream to allow us to see
that today we couldn’t please everybody; today we let ourselves down; today perfection was far from our grasp,
Like it always is.
But at least we tried.
The Teaching Mum 