My Medical Certificate

To Whom It May Concern:

I have examined Lonie Polony who is
suffering from

A psychosomatic disorder

And will be unfit for work from 26 March 2007 to indefinitely

Signed Dr. Lionel Nopoy

Please bear with me while I post another return-to-work rant – or else just go away, twiddle your thumbs/have a cold shower/enter a chubby bunny contest and come back another day when there may be a post more to your liking.

Over the last week or two I’ve begun to feel weird aches, pains and heartburn afflicting my poor polony body. I’ve blamed everything from too much lactose to bug-filled reservoir dregs (insert Mr. Brown joke here), and even did a wee on a stick to rule out an unscheduled firing of my uterine oven. However, I’ve had to conclude that in the (hopefully) unlikely event of kidney stones or one of those horrible giant tumours that makes it into the Guinness Book of World Records, I am indeed, like Miss Hoover, suffering from a psychosomatic disorder. (Whether that means I’m crazy or not is highly contentious – popular opinion has it that my tenuous link with sanity snapped when a speck-cleaning gone awry caused my own eyeball to wrinkle.)

You see, I’m becoming rather anxious about once more donning the yoke of a humble minion to His Manofsteelness and all that entails for my children, our family life and my accustomed sleep-in-and-day-long-pyjamas. Even though over the last couple of weeks I was supposed to ease myself back into the early mornings, the showers in the cold and dark, the application of make-up and wearing of presentable office clothes, and the readying of one helpless and one unaware-of-urgency child to leave the house before eight o’clock, this morning was the first in a loooooong time that I’ve managed to haul my indolent carcass out of bed by then.

And with less than a week to go, I’m experiencing a rush of guilt which is not nearly so pleasant as, say, a rush of melted chocolate, because I haven’t been the baking-and-craft-and-enduring-childhood-memory-creating mum I somewhere got the idea all other at-home mothers are, to my children while I had the chance. So now I’m going to go and assuage that gnawing sensation in my tummy with home-made glue and cut-up cereal boxes, and hope that cleaning up the inevitable house-wide mess will take my mind off that fact that I’m utterly unprepared for going back to work.

Monday 26 March is going to be a scandalously obscene, XXX-rated shock.