Can I open by requesting that if anyone spots one of my teenage sons reading this, please remove it from him immediately? If he’s already yelling a furious, ‘I knew it!’ it’s too late.
Hopefully, it’ll be years from now, when I’m in the Home for Decrepit Old Bonkbuster Authors, before my offspring will look back through my columns, spot this page, and realise my motherhood philosophies were a sham.
You see, my name is Shari Low and I’m a founding member of The Association of Parental Hypocrites. My family life is an outrageous collusion of subterfuge and double standards.
Food: I’ve always preached that my children follow the ‘five portions of fruit and veg a day’ rule. I do the same. Although mine are an apple Danish, a banoffee pie, strawberry jam, and a Hawaiian pizza, which counts as two because there’s pineapple and a tomato-based sauce.
Housekeeping: Rooms must be kept tidy. Except my boudoir, which frequently looks like someone’s shot the entire stock of New Look’s plus-size department out of a canon and it’s landed on my floor.
Fitness: Since they were small, I’ve instilled the benefits of exercise. I, on the other chubby hand, consider a bicep curl to be the motion of getting a choccie digestive from the packet to my gob.
Sleep: Eight hours a night is essential – attests the insomniac author who can regularly be found thumping the keyboard at 5 a.m.
Worry: ‘There’s no point in fretting,’ I witter, coming over all Doris Day and crooning ‘Que Sera Sera’, before heading to a dark corner to sweat over my 234th irrational fear of the day.
Education: ‘School years are crucial and what you learn will serve you well in life,’ I preach. The truth? I’ve never had to deploy Pythagoras’ theorem or make the stewed apples we learned to concoct in first-year Home Economics.
Finances: Boys, spend wisely! My bank manager is now holding his sides, laughing hysterically.
Social media: I limit their online activity, condemning this modern phenomenon as trite, while doing a Facebook quiz that informs me my elf name is Cookie the Tinsel Toed Fruit Cake.
Vices: No. Smoking. Ever – demands the woman who spent high school lunchtimes round the back of the sheds with my two nicotine chums, Benson & Hedges.
Relationships: I warn them that they should never, ever enter a relationship with someone who’s clingy… while praying they’ll never leave me.
I also advise them to delay serious romance until they’re older. Meanwhile, at their age, I was already planning a glorious future with the second love of my life. Please note, this was only because the first love of my life, Martin Kemp from Spandau Ballet, hadn’t swept me off to a life of rock star excess. Yes, I knew that much was true.
Ambition: Have a plan. Know what you want in life but be realistic. Incidentally, I’m still fairly sure Mr Kemp will turn up any minute.
This week, my shameful hypocrisy has been brought into sharp focus by Low the Elder’s prelims. My droning insistence that he studies is somewhat ironic, considering that the only time I ever opened a revision book was to cover up the fact that I was reading Jackie Collins’s Hollywood Wives behind it.
So son, if you read this one day, I apologise for the manipulation and I’m sorry if all this work hasn’t paid off.
But if it has?
Please know that you don’t have to thank me. No, really. Your love and happiness are reward enough.
And perhaps the delivery of a banoffee pie to the Home for Decrepit Old Bonkbuster Authors. It’s one of my five a day.