Feeling like a non-mother – just for a while

I don’t know if non-mother is a word, but it’s the most succinct way I could think of describing it.

On Wednesday night I left JJ with my nephew and went out with three girlfriends to go to the Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Beforehand we ate out at a restaurant. A proper one with attentive waiters and cloth napkins and yummy red wine. It’s such a rare treat these days to go out to a restaurant. If I go out to dinner with JJ it’s usually somewhere that serves fish and chips like a pub or a cafe and it’s somewhere that isn’t too fancy.

We saw Tina C with her show I’m a Little Bit Country, I’m a Little Bit Aboriginal. I didn’t have much idea of what to expect apart from some country and western music which I’m not really into but she sounded entertaining. Toward the beginning of the show she said she’d love to hug everyone in the – fairly large – audience but couldn’t possibly. Therefore she’d hug one person and that person would have to hug five more and so on until the whole audience was done. We were sitting towards the back and my theory was that people wouldn’t get that far but they did.

I’m not really into doing things like this and I don’t know why as it’s quite harmless. I got one or two hugs from a couple of blokes but didn’t run around dispensing my hugs. I thought it was a bit of a time waster but we decided afterwards that it was a good ice breaker (a bit like being in some sort of workshop) and it was confronting which was what the whole show was about really.

She didn’t sing as much as I thought she might but she was very funny and on the ball in regards to our politics and the Aboriginal stolen generation. Her guest, Auriel Andrews, used to be on the Reg Lindsay show which I remember from when I was a kid and had completely forgotten about until she mentioned it.

My only real gripe was the room was really stuffy and it was hard to get comfortable. I noticed a few audience members fanning themselves so it wasn’t just me.

Then yesterday, instead of going into the office as per normal, I went to Melbourne with work. Just for one day. I had to do some motherly duties like organise JJ to be dropped off at school and then picked up just incase my plane was late, but for the rest of the day I felt non-motherish because I was out of my routine and doing something a bit different.

Mind you, when I got home I was completely tired and uninspired so I scraped together some food to eat. My nephew was supposed to cook (he cooks once a week) but said he wasn’t feeling too good. He still managed to eat some leftover soup and use the internet for a couple of hours. Hmmmm.

It’s definitely back to being a mum now. My house is a pigsty from severe non-attentiveness during my very short non-mother phase.