Perfect Parents

You know the sort.

He's baking organic vegetable snacks
while she's teaching the two-year-old
how to count in Catalan.
They organised the right school
moments after conception.
They know everything,
you know nothing.

Their baby has never cried,
never thrown up on the hire car,
it never even really seemed to be a baby at all,
more like a middle-aged Archers' fan
hidden in a macrame shawl.

A glass of white wine the size of Greenland
has been poured, it's late in the evening,
they're coming across the room to share
some of their worldly wisdom,
to pass on the secrets of their special way.
They want to give you the benefit of their expertise.
You don't want to do it like that…

And they just can't resist giving you
that little special bit of advice
picked up from an old French villager.

Just learn how to say non.



Taken from a BBC article, 10 types of irritating advice for parents, 28 June 2013. Submitted by Angi Holden.

And Then Everyone Laughs

Our mothers hate justice.
All their kids complain about justice
and they hate it.

They want to put them in little
Seersucker suits.


Overheard on a train out of Philadelphia, 5th January 2012. Submitted by Wesley Brown.

Soon enough came fearfulness

Once she was born
I was never not afraid:

afraid of swimming pools,
high-tension wires,
lye under the sink,
aspirin in the medicine cabinet…

rattlesnakes, riptides, landslides,
strangers who appeared at the door,
unexplained fevers, elevators without
operators and empty hotel corridors.



A paragraph in Joan Didion's Blue Nights, as quoted in the London Review of Books, 3rd November 2011. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.