Black Humour

You know, there is alot of black humour in parenting.

I mean, what else can you do but laugh when you are down to your very last change of clean clothes and your new baby pukes all down your back? And you were just about to get in the car to go to the doctors and you are already late and now the baby is screaming and you are wet and dripping and there is no time for a shower, but you really need a new t-shirt at least and there are NO CLEAN CLOTHES!

So you wear your husbands t-shirt to the doctors, no matter that your nipples poke out of it and you try and ignore that your bra is a little damp and that you smell of eau de baby puke.

Or when you stay in bed just a little too long, trusting the toddler to entertain themselves for 5 minutes and then you realise that the silence has gotten deafening and you jump out of bed, only to find that there is olive oil, salt and sugar all over the bench and that your toddler is finger painting in it because you were too lazy to get out of bed when they did and now you have a bigger mess and was 5 minutes really worth it? You think maybe it was.

Maybe.

So you laugh about it, as you run a bath, plop the toddler into the bath and then go about cleaning up the kitchen. While you are still wearing nothing but your knickers.

Then there was that time when your baby needed a feed desparately, but you were driving, so you got your husband to drop into the nearest park so you could breastfeed in the carpark, only your boobs were hideously engorged and when your milk lets down you drown your baby, who pulls off spluttering and choking, while your other boob runs milk in little spurts all down your chest and it was the one day that you didn’t pack spare clothes.

And you realise that the guys in the car next to you can see your naked breast while you are trying to convince the baby to re-latch. There is milk dripping and a nipple swinging about and you think that maybe they were busily getting stoned, but you have just ruined their groove because they now can’t look anywhere but dead ahead without blushing.

OR, you know that time when you thought that your toddler was in their bedroom, only to find that they were actually in the study, drawing on themselves with permanent marker?

And you might feel mortified while it is happening, but you get home and you DO laugh about your little one having a tantrum in the supermarket. Generally to someone who understands. Like the internet.

Black humour.

When I write about things that have frustrated me, or because I am at the end of my tether IN THAT MOMENT, it is generally because someone, somewhere will find the humour in it. Maybe someone else had just dealt with an exploding nappy, or with a toddler who was snuggling you, but just pee’d all down your leg. And the couch. And themselves.

Maybe that is why Mummy and Daddy blogging is soley the domain of parents. Because people without children have a harder time finding the humour in bodily functions and breastmilk gone bad [or as was the case when Amy was a newborn, breastmilk gone everywhere].

Sometimes maybe, when something is outside your experience, you have a hard time seeing that it isn’t complaining, or unhappiness, but black humour. Maybe you need to just relax and flow along and smile if you think it’s funny [that today, it happened to someone else and not you] without assuming that I need help getting over it.

Thankyou.

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I took the weekend off and came back to find 144 146 spam comments. What am I, flavour of the week? (And they are still coming in, to the tune of one a minute or so).

Also? Today, run on sentences are obviously my friends. Don’t pick on me for it.

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Gah, I’ve had to disable comments because of the huge amount of spam on this post. See my ‘contact’ page above if you need to comment here.

xx