Am I the only mum who hates school holidays?

I hate holidays. I have a week of hell where I am forced to find constant entertainment for the girls, who are too young to entertain themselves without causing severe damage to each other or the house.

The idyllic notion I had of me and two children skipping happily across the beach or the park hasn't materialised. People can hear us for miles arguing and shouting around the streets. Me pushing a screaming toddler in the push-chair with a whinging 3 year old trailing behind.

Roll on Monday.

My application for a part-time degree in creative writing

Easter eggs are appearing in the shops again. A gentle reminder that it’s nearly a year since mum died. How poignant to die on Easter Sunday, after the church service on the TV. If she could’ve chosen any time to go, it would have been then. She used to love singing along to the hymns. Perhaps we do have a say, after all.
Mum died. The words still burn into my brain. It’s still unimaginable, even now. She was here and now she’s not. I don’t know how I feel. She wasn’t really here anyway; she was in a world of her own half the time – as people are quick to point out. ‘Well, she was ill for so long, wasn’t she?’ It wouldn’t have been much worse if they’d had added ‘it was for the best.’
She died from Bronchial Pneumonia, not the muscle-weakening disease that over the years had reduced her body to a lifeless lump. Years of inactivity and hiding away at home had turned her brain to mush. She was like a child. Where was my mum when I was pregnant about to become a mother myself? She was gone even then. When other pregnant ladies in my ante-natal class were swapping advice and stories passed down by their mums, my own mum was struggling to remember what I’d just said. The isolation of losing a parent had started a long time before she died. But I didn’t notice until she’d gone and I could finally grieve my loss. How could you mourn someone who was still breathing?
When she died I suddenly felt the 18 year old girl’s pain of needing a mother whose health was deteriorating. My young self appearing like a ghost to show me the pain of becoming an adult, of having a lover break her heart, of going to college and escaping the mess of her home-life. The pain of coming home to find her mother can do a few less things than she could manage before. Feeling selfish as she’d dread the next visit to see what new physical aids had been implemented to help mum around the house.
Over the years it got worse and no one wanted to talk about The Illness. There was nothing to talk about as far as mum and dad were concerned. Mum had it, there no was no cure. That was that. We watched home carers come in to get mum up in the morning. We watched the muscles weaken in her face so it became distorted, her eyelids drooping over her eyes. Mum was disappearing in front of us.
I now look at old photos of mum before her condition took hold and she looks like a stranger. Where did this woman go for all these years? Well, she’s here right now. I can see her in myself. I hear myself sound like her and I can see her in my own daughters. Isn’t it funny how I never noticed it before?