Was it Friday the 13th?

Some days are naturally glorious: smooth, bright and filled with love. Other days are opposite: bumpy, dark and hateful. Yesterday was one of those days and poor Boy missed his organised home school lessons.

Friday is Math day. Step father takes Boy for the morning and they work through a couple of pages of a text, plus, this amazing step father designs learning connected to real life events that capture Boy’s interest. Yesterday they intended to do sub sets, drawn in the sand at the beach and illustrated with shells, sticks and beads. Then the phone rang…..

My ex husband (my two oldest children’s father) was diagnosed with Prostate and Spine cancer. It was a shock to me and the kids needed my support. Despite our differences of opinions over the years and totally different philosophies on life, I do get on okay with my ex husband. He has stayed with us a number of times and whenever he is visiting the kids, we always catch up. He is neither a bad person nor a person that I would wish any harm to come to him. The kids are devastated and I feel helpless and just plain shocked.

I spent some time talking with him on the telephone and have offered our support in what ever form he needs it. I cried, I laughed and I shared…and I went to bed very sad.

Just after my daughter rang to tell me the bad news about her Dad, pathology rang to ask me to come and get my ex-foster daughter (although she is now out of care, she still lives with us). She has been sick for weeks and went back for some follow up tests. While there, she became very ill and could not drive home. My darling partner went to pick her up because I had my hands full with supporting my oldest son.

Partner had to spend the entire morning at the Doctors with our foster daughter because she really was too ill to move. She was put on a saline drip and told that if we weren’t available to help her then she would be hospitalized. We await the results of her tests to find out what is going on.

Another call: A student of mine died. A mature aged student (45), she had been battling cancer for some time. I spoke with her at Christmas and she said that the tumors had shrunk and she was heading toward being cancer free. I believed her. She had exploratory surgery yesterday and did not come out of the anesthetic.

A friend popped in on the off chance I was available. She burst into tears and told me about how depressed and confused she was. I spent some time with her and made a couple of therapeutic suggestions for her to follow up. As a friend I cannot play therapist, it is unethical. Instead, my friendship manifests as care and wanting to ensure she gets the most appropriate treatment and assistance in her hours of great need. At this time, her need is huge and I would never not help someone. One of my favorite sayings, and life philosophy, comes from Mary McKillop: Never see a need without doing something about it.

And finally, at 8.30pm after I had consumed two glasses of wine, I had a call from a young family friend. He was either as high as a kite or had consumed waaaaaayyyy too much alcohol. He wanted me to drop everything and go and pick him up. He was after a bed for the night and early morning transportation back to an outer Cairns beach. I said “NO WAY!!!!!!!”

Boy had a vicarious lesson in supporting other people in their hour of need and practical experience of how some days, life transpires against the best laid plans of home schooling mothers and step fathers. Happy to be getting out of Math, we instead all sat, overwhelmed, around the table and kneaded our own therapy. Using that marvelous clay, Sculpey, we began producing more frogs and Platypode (plural of Platypus) as wedding favors for our Rainforest Wedding on March 31. That’s them pictured.

How good our beds were last night…and Boy is still sleeping at 9am Saturday morning. Today is a perfect day, the rain has stopped and the sun is shining. I am grateful that I can see and appreciate such a glorious day but my heart is heavy for my children, my ex husband and my friends. Life is short, precious and a gift. Math can be caught up any old day of the week.