Article: Sam Wilson from women24
Image: Tammy Gardner

The summer school holidays are six weeks long. Easter is ten days, winter holidays are four weeks and then there is another ten-day break somewhere in spring. So that's like, around 13 weeks right?

The average annual corporate leave is three weeks long. Is it just me, or is someone out there with a cosmic timetable screwing with working mothers?

But even stay-at-home mothers, those who haven't been frantically pretzelling their children's holiday time into play dates and obscure sport clinics, giggle guiltily all the way home after that first school lift of the year.

Much as we love our children, the prospect of having a quiet home – without doe-eyed little people meaningfully coming to you with boogie boards or Monopoly or a book called something like Lula the Discontented Cow – is beyond exciting.

Freedom! Me-time! The chance to... worry about how school is going. Sigh. Because that's what we all really do that first day back, isn't it?

I know I do. I personally hated school with a passion, and it is terribly, terribly hard not to transpose those fears onto my sons.

"Now, try not to be too unhappy today," I told my sons comfortingly as I dropped them off at the school gate. "Mommy will be thinking of you both all day. Everyone has to go to school, so we must just make the best of it. Be brave, my beloveds."

I am not at all sure who I was comforting as both my sons were using this quiet moment of mother time to wave frantically at their friends through the school gate, whilst mouthing "I am coming now!". Humpf. Could it be that they were as nonplussed by the hours of Monopoly as I was?

Then there is the way your children's personalities come into play when they venture out into the big, bad world. At home, my six and eight-year old sons are practically a single entity – a rolling, ever-moving ball of energy called Joe'nBen (as in "Joe'nBen, get down from that trellis this instant!" or "Joe'nBen, do that again and I swear Mommy's going to strip!"). Divide them up into two classes, and they devolve into Joey the Eager and Benjy the Cool.

I know this because when I picked them up from school on that first day, I got the following responses to the question: "And how was your day?"

"It was FANTASTIC," beamed six-year-old Joey. "I made a comic book called Treeman, and then we made a fort under the jungle gym, where you needed a password to come in and then we had music and then..."

"And you, Ben?" I asked my sweaty four-year-old, as he nonchalantly chucked his Batman backpack into the car.

"Fine," he deadpanned back at me. "My teacher didn't give me any trouble."

Indeed. And why does that make me so very afraid?

Sam Wilson is the Editor-in-Chief of Women24.com. Her sons have both inherited her ability to speak seventy words a minute. Her husband spends more and more time with headphones on.

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