Mariëtte gets confrontational question from girl next door: ‘Why don’t I learn to say no?’

This is a hasty column, on a hasty day in a hasty week. After all, haste is the word to summarize our lives, which is striking in a time when you can’t get around much and have fewer obligations than usual. Yet it feels like I am constantly being chased from all sides. For example, I’ve been working on this column for three days. In one and a half minute snippets, two if I’m lucky.

Of course we have out-of-school care and babysitters, but there is still often something outside the schedule, which I have to do when the children are home. When I’m trying to figure out how undisturbed is a utopia, I quickly come up with mundane things like overturned cups, the bell that rings a hundred times a day and the phrase ‘I’m hungryrrrr’ that, how much do I eat? also available, sounds every few minutes. Don’t get me wrong, that’s not a complaint, I’m just sometimes still surprised how often I run and fly and how you get a gift almost unnoticed with parenthood. At least, me.

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Rush

Last week we were in the car. I am desperate from the stress, Nora happily in the backseat and next to me our girl next door. In three minutes I tried to bridge the distance between our house and the small farm where the girls have riding lessons. We were late because the teacher had been late, I accidentally promised Casper that he wouldn’t have to go horseback riding and he stamped to remind me, so we still had to go by our house and there was a tractor in front of us.

“Are you always in a hurry?” my neighbor asked. Well, I thought, throw in a confrontational question. “Actually, yes,” I said. It made me a little sad myself. Why always make my schedule so jam-packed? Why don’t I learn to say no?

say no

“Are you coming, mom?” asked Nora, who is not yet able to ride independently. Although I had wanted to have a half hour of hastily answering emails, I suddenly felt like walking next to a pony. To see my child enjoy. “Of course honey,” I said, and it was delicious. And those e-mails, it turned out that they can wait.

This column is in Kek Mama 07-2021.

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