The un-shareable side of family life

Parents are often much maligned for over-sharing their family life on social media.

 

Some share the highlights - the foreign holiday with glowing tan lines, little darlings playing tea-parties with teddies, the autumn walk through the park. Some go for the warts and all - little Johnny coated in poster paint after an over-enthusiastic bout of finger-painting.

 

I’m guilty of sharing both such type of photo, (although not so many of the foreign holiday anymore, thanks, Recession) but last week was not photogenic, not one for Facebook.

 

Last week we all caught colds.

 

My nose streamed and then turned bright red. I got a cold sore so enormous the three-year-old was frightened of it and pleaded with me to take it off my face.

 

The teenager coughed like an 80-year-old smoker. The toddler developed the purple bags of an insomniac under her eyes.

 

Our sitting room was strewn with the confetti of used tissues, the children moaned and groaned beneath layers of duvet and we ran out of Calpol and Lemsip. Things can’t get much worse I thought.

 

Then my head started to itch. I noticed the toddler itching, the teenager itching. Nits. We’d caught nits. It had gotten worse.

 

The man was sent to the chemist on a nit-poison-buying mission and returned with the latest in nit murdering technology. Turns out that the deadly toxins my mum used to douse me and my siblings with has been replaced by a hideously oily natural substance. So oily it’s almost impossible to remove. So oily our hair defied all shampoos and remained lank and greasy for days.

 

Cold sores. Red noses. Dark circles under eyes. Greasy hair. We were the least attractive, most unappealing family in Ireland last week.

 

Did I get out my camera to record this historic day? Did I share this photo with friends and family in the hopes of a flurry of attention?

 

No. No, I did not.

 

Something things are best left un-shared.

 

Daisy Wilson is a freelance writer who lives and works in West Cork. Mum to an almost-teenager and a toddler who is striding through the terrible twos with a glint in her eye, life is noisy, fun and covered in fingerprint marks.