I'm No Expert - a Blog on Motherhood and Life in General

Before the children started school in Poland, we decided to take them to Australia for six months to improve their English and spend time with my parents and friends. During that time I was smart and organised enough to send group letters to friends and relatives in Poland, keeping them up-to-date with our trip. Now going back to these letters it is a true pleasure to read long-forgotten details of our special time there, and I have decided to upload a summary to this blog. December – January Our big family voyage does not get off to an easy start. Since my husband spent the week before the trip on business in both Cairo and Algiers, I spent some time on our airport’s arrivals and departures website. This way I noticed that the flight we were taking to Vienna (6:20 pm) had been regularly cancelled or delayed due to the weather. On the day we are leaving everything looks fine until the last minute when, at 6:25, the flight is cancelled and we are sent home with packed ba...

There I was. A wife and mother to two young children, a stay-at-home, working-from-home mother, being eaten up by guilt and utter delight in equal measure. What was I doing here? Should I even be here? This is wrong ! Isn’t it irresponsible? The previous few years had been overflowing with love but also hard work, sacrifice and exhaustion. The never ending strive to be the perfect parent, the rollercoaster ride through chaos and joy, through the mundane and the amazing, through first-time parenting, in which the “I” that I knew, evolved and changed, and momentarily lost herself to this overwhelming new role. Day after day trundled by with colic, cuddles, the “routine” – the kids’ routine – of walks, and bedtime, and blending baby food and reading stories and making playdates, and driving to preschool, and planning family holidays, and trying to keep a freelance career as a translator and editor afloat amidst the kids’ needs and my husband’s demanding job and constant wo...