The weekend of guilt
It turned out I didn’t go over to Tim’s place after all. No real reason, but I figured I’d seen Jock and Tim make idiots of themselves plenty of times before so I wasn’t missing out on much. Hanging out at home was pretty usual for me these days, so Mum didn’t pick anything up on her maternal radar as she usually would have when there was drama in the air. Anyway, I reckon she liked having me kicking around the house.
Mum looked pretty happy with herself after our quality time in the veggie patch. She always loved a project, especially anything to do with the house. That was her thing, the house. Well, if I was really honest, it wasn’t just her thing, it was her and Dad’s thing. You couldn’t separate the three of them. It was like the house was another member of the family.
They bought this place the same year I was born, and it definitely needed a lot of love. It was a dump! But that’s what they wanted. They were into DIY way before it was on telly every night of the week. They wouldn’t go anywhere near IKEA or Freedom, though, like normal people did. Oh no, the Armstrong family had to get up at the crack of dawn every weekend and go to garage sales, junkyards, smelly old nana stores and freaky run-down warehouses. They would spend hundreds of hours happily trawling through crap, dirty crap, and get really excited when they found something that no one in their right mind would even touch. Then they’d spend what was left of the weekend and every weekend after that getting whatever piece of junk they’d found back to how it was originally. It seemed like a huge waste of time to me. So I’d point out that we were in the twenty-first century in case they’d missed it and they’d both smile as if I was the idiot and keep sandpapering the latest 1850s table they’d scored from somebody’s skip.
Stuff was different now, though, weekends were different. There was no junk in the backyard, and no Armstrong projects. Except for the veggie patch.
Which was how Mum spent most of Sunday morning, staring at the veggie patch over her pot of tea. Then she flicked through the weekend papers. That was weird. Before, she’d never allow them through the front door. She’d carry on that they were a journalistic disgrace and full of trash. Dad reckoned that was exactly the reason why you should buy them. They would sit at opposite ends of the kitchen table and throw smart-arse comments back and forth at one another that I had to dodge every time I went to the fridge. Now Mum’d actually go and buy the papers, sit down at the table in the same position and mutter as she flicked through them. I told her she sounded like a madwoman and she told me to get used to it because it was going to get worse with age.
Sunday nights always make you feel sick in the gut. It’s that time when you remember all the crap for school that you haven’t done over the weekend and are too tired to do now, which means you know you’re going to get in trouble for it tomorrow. Or in my case, the fact that I had had all weekend to tell Mum everything before it hit the fan, but I hadn’t.
But that’s how the you can decide whether you tell your parents thing works. The whole time it sits in your belly reminding you that there’s something you have to do. Then you go and catch up with the boys, kick the soccer ball around, hang out in your room messing with chords on the guitar, and you forget. But then you hear your mum singing in the kitchen, happy after working in the garden all day, or you watch her settle back with a glass of wine and a chick flick and that’s when it hits. It comes up from your gut and sits in your mouth like you want to vomit it all out. Then you see that she’s dressed in her home trackies she’d never be caught dead in anywhere else, lying on the couch laughing at the telly, and you know you can’t. You just can’t. So you walk back to your room and decide that, like most things lately, it’s better to swallow and pretend that it’s gone away.