What does Flour taste Like

It was an early morning a few years ago. I had quickly jumped into the shower. As I turned it off I had three excited children burst in ‘We made SNOW ANGELS MUMMY’

Pardon?

Horrified, I saw each of my children covered, I mean, right down to the flour-encrusted snot dripping from my youngest’s nose …. COVERED in flour.

Impossible to clean, 15 pounds of flour. Dumped onto my kitchen floor.

It didn’t stay on the kitchen floor.

That would have been too easy.

It Flew up onto the ceiling fan and whirled around to the tops of cupboards. It coated the walls in a fine dust. In their excitement the children had run down the carpeted stairs with flour dusted feet to grab their toys and bring them upstairs to play in the ‘snow’. They had tracked the flour into their bedrooms to grab extra toys to play with. From the kitchen to the bedrooms to the basement there was flour EVERYWHERE.

When my youngest wiped his snotty nose with the back of his hand and then put that hand into his hair it created a snot paper mache mess in his hair that I had to CHIP out for DAYS later.

Let’s pause for a second here. I want you to Really visualize this. Snot and flour paste in the hair that I had to CHIP out.

For DAYS.

The painful thing about flour is that you cannot vacuum it, you cannot wash it … you need to sweep a THOUSAND times. Slowly dust everything (children, fans and walls included), the dust then flies into the air and settles on the floor so then you sweep, then you dust, then you sweep …. you get the picture.

As this was all happening, in a moment of despair, I called my mom. A voice of reason and comfort in a chaotic moment.

Everywhere I looked there was FLOUR. A sea of whitewashed walls and floors.

I wasn’t mad. I saw the humour, I really did. But in that moment, the moment where I had taken a short hot shower to wake myself up from yet another sleepless night only to wake up in a world coated in white powder, I felt exhausted, tired and drained.

I called up my girlfriend and offered to host her and her children in my flour-covered house.

As I sat there, coffee in hand. My girlfriend didn’t try to do anything.

She didn’t give me a pep talk, she didn’t try to make things seem less crazy or chaotic.

She didn’t try to get me to talk about what I was feeling or what my plan of action was.

What I remember is her coming into my house, pouring a coffee and sitting down by my side.

She Sat By My Side.

In Silence.

I can recall that one moment perfectly.

In the middle of the craziness, don’t we all need that one person in our lives that can just come. To sit by our side. So you know who is in your corner, so you know you aren’t alone.

In the world of parenting finding that person, finding that community of people who can just listen to you is so important. Life is crazy – it’s literally messy and flour covered – we all need a person to walk beside us.

So: What does 15 pounds of flour taste like?

It tasted like Baileys in our coffees :)!