148: Random Notes – random instructions and telling off / temper

It is Saturday morning. We have to leave at 10:45 am to pick up our son from a rugby match and then drive to a festival a couple of hours away. One of our son’s friends has stayed overnight.

I wake up, have a shower, get the boys up, give them breakfast, empty and then load the dishwasher, make coffee for her and me, drop them off at the rugby, pick up lunch on the way back and, for about a half-hour, sit down to watch some sport on TV. It is 10 am.

She has done essentially nothing other than given instructions to our cleaner who has arrived at 9.

Comes out of the shower. ‘Oh, there’s tons to do … can you do it?’ And then, ‘Oh, it’s only 10:15, I’ll do it.’

Then, suddenly, at 10:40, ‘can you empty the bins in the bathroom, take the rubbish out from the kitchen, get his stuff ready for after the rugby ….’

Don’t mind doing any of that but do resent being harangued and instructed at the last minute. Why not some timeliness and organisation?

Then it is Sunday evening. English as a subject is not our son’s strong point but he is trying – as she herself has told me. Now and again I check his homework but he clearly resents it and, actually, I can’t help him with myriad other subjects – so we need to trust him. And, overall, he is doing very well.

She clearly had some beef going and went on at him that I should check his work. I later suggested to her that it was wrong to – suddenly – get on his back when he is doing well overall and appears to be trying in English. We should be objective about it and so, if there are concerns, we should make an appointment with his English teacher and get some facts together. After another diatribe which was mainly ‘noise’, she agreed.

Our son, while speaking to his mum, had copied what he had written and sent it to himself by email – leaving the document he was working on blank. However, all I had to was Paste and I could see what he had written – which was pretty good actually! I think.

Perfectly pleasant week-end spoiled by her temper. I remember my mother being like that – continuously losing her temper and often haranguing. I struggled to shake it off but our son appears to be made of sterner stuff and does not seem to get down. 

Soon – if not already – he will begin to ignore all the noise.