OPINION
The World According to Kate The Power of Pussy Cat Ears!
As a mother, you juggle many responsibilities and daily activities on which people depend—food shopping, clothes washing, picking up kids and dropping them off. In short, you are the general manager of your family’s universe. So, when I found myself needing time out to finish an assignment, I discovered that ‘time out’ meant ‘5 minutes’. Constant interruptions of what would usually not raise much of an issue suddenly summon rage as my husband and daughter are left wondering what went wrong.
I guess it is human nature to assume that sitting reading a book or just staring into space is not doing anything majorly important. The world of academic study changes this paradigm. You realise that outside appearances don’t always reveal what is going on inside. Perhaps, it is also the nature of university students to assume that people ‘get it’. We are University Students. That means we need to do a lot of study if we want to succeed. However, it doesn’t take too long
16
into studying to realise that some people don’t quite get the concentration and pressure involved in passing university, let alone achieving higher results. My first approach to this challenge was to do what most mums would do (I guess), namely try to cram everything into the day and stress themselves out of their tree in doing so. After too many weeks of being crabby, I decided I needed another way. I decided that time was the issue. I did not have enough time. So, I started getting up at 3am to have a few hours of peace to concentrate and study before my family woke up. This worked wonders, until seven days of five hours sleep a night had me resembling a crazed Frankenstein. I was starting to wonder how I was going to fit it all in. Nothing seemed to work. Until one day… The room of primary school students was bustling around, and as I looked for my daughter, I noticed one little kid sitting to the side with a hat on. I naturally assumed he was in the ‘naughty’ corner and asked my daughter what he had done wrong.
February 2021
She looked at me quite puzzled and explained that the hat meant that he was concentrating, and we could not disturb him! LIGHT BULB! The moment we got home, my daughter and I looked for the most prominent and easy thing I could wear when I did not want to be disturbed. A headband with cat’s ears on them was the golden find! Now, as a simple solution to my need to be left alone, I pop on the cat’s ears. It is like flipping the lock on a toilet cubicle – everyone knows that it means Do Not Disturb! What is your secret method for getting some quiet time?
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