Family Affairs and other matters

Tis the season of “Parent/Teacher Consultations”. Do teachers hate these sessions as much as I think they do? It must be really awful having to listen to parents bore you stupid about their little protegees. Or maybe it’s not like that and that is why I am not a teacher. Frankly, the news that children might not start school until the age of six filled me with total horror and I thought two things:

a) Thank god my kids missed that.
b) What are the government going to do about childcare facilities for working parents?

Anyway, what a difference a year has made…. his teacher didn’t say that we needed family counselling to help him learn strategies for anger management. Or that he has no concentration. Or that he can’t read. Or that he can’t write. Or that he has no idea what he is doing in maths (sorry, numeracy).

It was all good. Happy, well liked, focused, interested, bla bla. It was like he was talking about a different child.

In fact, now I come to think about it; given the teacher didn’t recognise me and had never met his dad, he may have indeed been talking about a different child.

It is odd having to sit at things like that with my ex-husband and talk to the teacher about our child. He talked to us as if we both still lived in the same house and I kept glancing over and thinking, how strange that we were married for so long….sometimes it seems like yesterday, other times I can’t even remember what it was like.

An interesting thing happens when you don’t know somebody anymore – their smell is no longer a comfort. Suddenly they smell different. Unfamiliar. He was wearing the aftershave he’s always worn and I found it difficult to breathe. Smell is such a basic instinct – probably one of the most important senses when looking for a suitable mate. If you don’t like the smell of somebody’s breath when you meet them then forget it (unless you can give them the benefit of the doubt owing to smelly curry the night before).

So. I must remember that if the gag reflex comes into play in future, it will probably be a non-starter.