Bugger.

Well, my resolution to post at least weekly fell by the wayside pretty quickly, but it's not every week that your mother dies.  It's funny, I really didn't think I'd want to write about this on the blog, but it feels quite liberating to put it down in print, although now that I have it's difficult to know what else to write.  Maybe being able to tell the ether all about mum, and how much I'll miss her is something that will come later.  For now it's like being in a very surreal dream punctuated with crippling physical pain when reality bites, and hysterical laughter when my daughter - the most wonderful thing in my life EVER - punches the air shouting "rock 'n' roll" before giving me a choking cuddle and snotty kiss on the lips.  Right at the time when I thought I'd be plunged back into the black fog of the depression that has tracked my footsteps for about 20 years, I feel so blessed and thankful, and strangely peaceful.  Like I've grown up and have to take responsibility for myself.  I just wish she was still here, so much. 

White Lies and Whoppers

So I thought maybe the best place to start was to explain how the title of my blog came about and to invite others to share their own tales of parental dishonesty!

One of my family's running jokes (which are, by definition, crashingly boring to anyone outside the four of us) is that any soup is called "ordinary soup", for the benefit of my brother who as a child pretty much refused to eat anything else.  As you have probably guessed, "ordinary soup" happened to be whatever soup my mother set down in front of him, but if it was "ordinary soup" it was eaten. Anything else was dismissed out of hand...and onto the floor.

Other little gems which I took as gospel, as only a child can, were that if I had a bath every day my fingernails would grow to be long and beautiful, and that the hugely overweight girl around the corner became so from eating cheese in precisely the same manner as I had taken to doing when I came in from school.

My daughter is too young at the moment to be subjected to any such blatent fibbing on my part, and I'm sure there are others out there whose mum's and dad's "truths" trounce my own mother's efforts, so please do share.  I may pick up some tips...

Here goes!!

Isn't it always the way: you spend forever procrastinating about doing something and then when you actually kick the family out of the house, avoid the wine bottle and get around to doing it, it is SO EASY!  I'm sure there will be a host of little niggles and technophobically motivated errors along the way, and so if there is anyone actually following this anytime, then my apologies in advance.

Right, I'm off to try and make this page look a little less like a hastily set-up blogspot template....

Ta ta for now xx