Mia Wasikowska as Jane Eyre in a very governessy dress.

We went to the cafeteria.  Ah, a lovely evening of not cooking!

Then a small creature a couple of booths behind us shrieked, “I don’t want to share my chicken with you!”

I collapsed into giggles.

“Where IS that coming from?” my husband asked.

“Look!  The mom’s in pink pajamas!”

“Those aren’t pajamas.”

“Yes, they are.  If I were a mom I’d wear pink pajamas, too.  I’d be wearing slippers.”

I hoped she was wearing slippers, but they were only Ugghs.

If you’re childless, you prefer families with small children to hang out at McDonald’s, though the parents are dying to get out of McDonald’s.

It’s not that I’m unsympathetic–I am sympathetic–but is it permissible to admit that children are boring? After a period as a teenage nanny long ago I decided I would never have children.  I  couldn’t get anything done, and by the time the child–and he was a very nice child–was asleep, I was asleep, too.

Anne Bronte dealt with the problem by tying the children to table legs so she could write.  Yes, she lost her job.

I spent my nanny time making papier-mache puppets and reenacting Wuthering Heights, my favorite book, much to the delight of the child, who wanted to be Heathcliff, since I claimed he never washed.  We also had picnics on the windowsill with his family of toy hedgehogs. I  didn’t quite realize that you didn’t have to go all out like this every minute, and I never had enough time to read.  After a year and a half I quit to go to the university.

Perhaps as an adult parent I would have had more energy, if less creativity.

Very few of my friends had children until their late thirties or early forties, and our friendships sometimes languished for years because they were so distracted… unless they had nannies or babysitters.

Our siblings looked daggers at us when we said we read books.  They didn’t read books:  they had children.  So why could we read books?  (Does that even make sense?)

One of my friends solved her need-to-read problem by begging her husband to look after the child on vacations.  “You really need it, don’t you?”  he said incredulously.  She spent 14 days reading in the hotel instead of sightseeing or doing recreational things.

I know how she felt.  It was a wonderful solution.

As my sympathetic mother once said, and she regarded me as a born teacher (was not!), “Kat, you get so tired.”

I do get tired.

I was a very tired teacher.   Like most of my friends, I sought an alternative profession after a few years teaching.  There was a mass exodus of those of us qualified to teach Latin.

I would have been a very tired mother.

And that’s why it made me laugh to see a mother in pink pajamas.

I wasn’t exactly laughing at her.   Well, I was…