Introduction Foreword Writing Together Coping Within The System Coping On My Own Coping With Teenagers Coping With Relationships Live Performance

Suzi Oddball

Mum and Wife

Every day we clean we wash we cook
When all we would rather do
Is curl up and read a book
We go to the shops and carry home food in big bags
We strain our backs and work out our guts
We are called her indoors or silly old nags
And when our children get older
They turn to us bolder
And say, "Are you okay Mum?"
And pat us on the head
They even show us how to tidy
And tell us how to cook
And when they get really fed up with us
They say
"Mum, why don't you curl up with a book?"

 

Twists and Turns

There is a peculiarity to life, one moment everything is flowing
Harmony and peace
The next moment the wind has taken off with the garden umbrella in a freak gust
A water bill for two grand flies through the letterbox
Due to leaks and gushes
And your daughter wants you to be her teenage buddy
Because her friends do not want to know
And all you want to do is sleep
As you did not slumber properly for days, maybe weeks

Okay now all those problems are sorted
I phone up the water board and negotiate what was affordable monthly
paying for years!
The house has to go without the garden umbrella
It's gone forever
Whoever has it I trust it keeps you dry?
One day I hope a gust of wind blows it back to us I was fond of that green umbrella
Maybe it was because it was green
As to my daughter I'm still her teenage buddy

 

'Thank you for this opportunity which enabled us to perform in the Pavilion. I hope we can do it again sometime and also get more workshops. The day after the performance I got a huge tax bill and I would have been so depressed and squashed but doing the performance made me stronger and able to phone up the tax office to confront this problem and try to solve it instead of leaving it and becoming depressed.'