A mother's day confession

I think it's time to come clean. It's been 17 years. I hope we can be forgiven.

On Mother's Day 17 years ago the children, with husband's help, cooked me toad-in-the-hole for lunch. (For those of you not familiar with this dish, it's sausages cooked in a pudding batter. ) I remember it clearly because it was the tiniest bit heavy and I struggled to eat it - although the real reason I was struggling to eat was that, the previous week, Husband had been diagnosed with cancer.

The children were all small then. Daughter, the oldest, would have been just 11. After lunch Husband suggested that we go and find some frog spawn for our pond. One of the children, Elder Son probably, said that there was frog spawn in their school pond. (His class teacher at the time was also teacher with responsibility for nature studies.) 'Come on then,' said Husband, 'we'll get some from there.'

We made our way up to the school grounds, which, of course at a weekend, were locked. Not to be deterred Husband squeezed through a gap in the fence, made his way to the pond, took out some frog spawn and returned the way he had gone. In our defence let me say that we - Husband and I - were both still in a state of shock at the news of Husband's illness. Little things - like breaking and entering - didn't seem to matter much in the grand scale of things. We took the spawn home and rehomed them successfully in our pond.

And then we didn't think any more about it having other issues on our minds.

That summer the time came for the regular parents' evening. I went along to meet the teachers while Husband stayed home with the children. Now our children were all well-behaved and quite bright; there was never a lot that needed to be said at parents' evening, so I assume it must have been to fill the silence that Elder Son's teacher mentioned that the school pond didn't have any frogs that year. 'Someone must have come in and taken all the frog spawn,' she explained in a most disapproving voice.

Now I'm sure Husband wouldn't have taken it all; he'd have been very careful about something like that. Maybe someone else had the same idea as us and wasn't so particular. Or something ...

I said the only thing I could in the circumstances, 'We have some frogs if you'd like some of our spawn next year.'

xx