Friday 27 June 2014

Days Gone By

I have just spent the best part of this afternoon making a pie.  First getting all the ingredients together cooking, seasoning and then making the sauce for the pie.  Then I set about making the pastry, rolling it out fitting and pressing, rolling then cutting and trimming it to fit the pie dish.  Then putting it all together and cooking it.

This got me thinking about days gone by.  In the past, like my mother, mums would stay at home bring up the children and cook for the family.  This, in those days, consisted of making everything from scratch.  When I was young there were no ready make meals and everything has a recipe or a passed down technique from mother to daughter.

I know now how long this takes and being a stay at home mum was a very full time job.  Not saying it isn't now but no wonderfully organised mum would have time to go to work and make pies, wash out toweling nappies by hand, sew dresses and keep the house clean with brooms and solid polish.

The modern woman is expected to go out to work, putting their children into care with strangers, keep their house clean and cook.  I for one, would have loved to have had the privilege of being a stay at home mum.  This was something I always wanted to be but my 'wonderful' husband said when I gave birth to my first child that there was no way he was going to be going out to work all day just to keep me sitting at home with the baby.  This meant my dear mum and dad took over the care of my children and I went back to work.

I remember rushing home in my lunch hour to make a flan ready for evening. Trying to live up to the standard my dear mum had and to try to do the things stay at home mums did.  This didn't last long as it was just to hard trying to juggle everything at once.

By going back to work I missed my children's first step, first word and all the fun experiences you get when you have children, something you can never get back if you miss.

The world seems to have gone a bit crazy, with all the publicity encouraging woman to work and fine child care.  In my opinion there is plenty of time to work after the children are at school and the roll of a mum is to be there for their babies.

I know if I had my time back I would not have gone back to work and ignored the rantings of my husband being jealous of me having a bit of time off work.

There are a lot of people who would disagree with me but I feel the balance of life has been tilted in the wrong direction and the warm safe family unit has been eroded.

In an ideal world we would be getting back to making things, instead of eating all this processed packaged foods which you are not quite sure what is in it.  The treasured arts of sewing, cooking and housework would still be being passed down from generation to generation.

So back to my home made pie which is about ready to eat and being the stay at home mum I finally am!!

Love from the Funny Farm x

Wednesday 4 June 2014

The Mother-In-Law

I always thought I was very fortunate not to have a Mother-In-Law.  My ex husband's mother left the family when he was a small boy, never to be seen again.  I had a friend who's mother-in-law was an interfering lady, who made my friend feel like she wasn't bringing her children up correctly and always outdid the present giving.  Luckily for her the mother-in-law is not an ex so not giving her so much trouble.

I remember my fathers mother, my grandma, and her hatred of my mum.  She resented my Dad marrying my mum and remarked that he was marrying beneath him and thought he could have done better. She also said that it was far too early for him to be leaving home.  This was because she was upset about losing the housekeeping money he gave her.  Funny thing was he used to visit her regularly and still gave her money on the quiet.  My Mum would have been so upset if she had found out as they struggled a lot when they were first married.  She would also have been more upset if she knew her mother-in-law spent the money betting!

The few visits from the in-laws always went badly.  There were always fights over how to hang up my father's washing.  My mother would peg up his shirts and his mother would take them down and peg them up a different way, tutting and saying she didn't know how he survived married to someone who didn't know how to peg things up properly.

Then there was the refusal to eat the food my mother cooked, saying that is was overdone, underdone, tough, inedible and leaving it all on the plate.  Hurtful to say the least, especially when my mother has spent her last penny to buy the best.

One a few occasions, she would stand up and gather her long suffering husband (my Grandpa) and say Ted we are going home, can't spent another minute here! Leaving uneaten dinners and a bad atmosphere.

I remember the day my mother was informed by a family member that her mother-in-law had died. She jumped, skipped and ran down the stairs singing 'This is my lovely day'  only to slip and fall down the last few steps cracking her coccyx and being in pain for weeks! In her words the pain was worth the celebrations hahaha.

I have heard many other stories of the mother-in-law from hell plus many wonderful mother-in-laws.  I aim to be a lovely mother-in-law and hopefully will be loved.  I still stand by my original statement that I am glad I didn't have one and the hassle that sometimes comes along with having one.  So celebrate the Mother-In-Laws around the world good or bad, just don't break anything doing it!