Love

My mother is a practical woman, and not one for philosophising on the nature of relationships. I suspect to her generation, and to her 56 year married self ,they just are. We’ve never had a mother daughter talk where she tells me about love or marriage or any of those sorts of things, but even so, she has somehow communicated to me that true love is expressed when two people strip a vomit covered bed and howling, vomit covered child in the middle of the night. So I suppose this post is a love story.
In the last 3 weeks, my partner has removed a the rotting corpse of a large rat from the roof cavity, changed a washer in the hot tap of the bath surrounded by weeping, nude children who had just been herded into the bathroom and then shouted at not to get in the bath under any circumstances (proving the perverse theory that they only want to do what you don’t want them too, as usually they cry about not wanting to get into the bath) and run an electric eel through the drains. Perhaps you are stupid, and don’t know what an electric eel is or what it does, like me last Wednesday, or actually , like me, now. I do know it’s a thing that you run through your drains, and that filthy things come out of the drains, and my job is stay inside the house, watching the news. If you need more detail than that, ask Logan.
I also for some reason can’t set a mousetrap, or manage a mouse corpse the next day. ( I know a rodent related theme is emerging. I know I should be pretending we don’t live amongst an infestation. But in things related to Love, one tells the truth.) I can’t feel automatically on getting into the car that the tyre pressure is wrong in the back left, nor do I entirely know what to do with this information. I know nothing about gyprock, I have never even turned on the lawn trimmer, I have never been up on our roof. These are the fertile soils in which love grows, in which it blooms.
Last week the kids had recurring ,vomiting gastro. I did 24 loads of washing in 4 days. They threw up in every room of the house. They vomited in their own beds, and in ours. One night as we trudged up and down the hallway with buckets and mops and clean towels ( no sheets left, obviously) I thought of my mother and the story she used to tell me, a tone of great warmth and affection in her voice, of how my brother once woke up and vomited everywhere in the middle of the night and how she and Dad had order returned and him back to sleep in a clean bed in under 15 minutes. Logan and I have been together for nearly nine years now, and although we never did get around to getting married, I feel our vows were renewed that night. It was a beautiful thing. Apart from the litres and litres of vomit.