My Fellow Inebriates,

My mum was doing storytime with the kids tonight and ducked out to fill up their water cups. When she came back, they were in bed together eldest reading to youngest, all by themselves.

This is a breakthrough for my mother, who likes to conserve her parenting energy. With a literate six-year-old so much is possible…Miss P can read her own stories, choose her own videos on YouTube, determine her own cold medicine dosages, find wine bottles for yours truly—the list goes on and on.

Not that my mother dislikes reading. She loves reading (just not out loud, or kids’ books, or when she could be on Facebook).

She didn’t say she was sad they were becoming independent. But I think she was a little. And perhaps a little regretful about not having read quite enough to the kids.

I urged her to have a drink—to celebrate P’s reading, and to dampen that still distant but fast-approaching feeling of not being needed.

She said of course she felt needed. “Who the hell is going to do your bloody typing, LB?”