Fogotten Fable

Posted on November 22, 2011 by Catherine Austen

Yet another Friday passed without a fable from me. I had the best intentions. But the full version of Minecraft was released on Friday and my 9-year-old barricaded himself in the office for the weekend.

Ealier this month, that same child came down with a cold that required six – 6!!!!- days sick at home. NOT the feverish sleeping-all-day angelic kind of sick. No. The running around with a dripping nose and a cough so disgusting no one would have him at school kind of sick.

That sickness was followed by my older son’s announcement that he’d dropped a class and would be home at, oh, 1:00 every day for the rest of term. Then my husband decided to work from home for several days.

For a self-employed writer who needs physical and psychological space, this has been a killer month. And it’s not over: there are three PD days this week – 3!!!- Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. (Does anywhere outside the province of Quebec cluster its PD days like this?)

I love my family but can’t they just go away?

The fable I was going to parody was Aesop’s old tale of the wasp and the snake. It goes like this:

A wasp settled down on the head of a snake and began to torment it with stings. The snake tried in vain to rid itself of the wasp, but shaking, flicking, even rolling would not budge the stinging creature. Finally, mad with pain and unable to stop its enemy, the snake slithered in front of an oncoming wagon. And that was the end of the wasp and the snake.

Do I really need to modernize that fable from the writer’s point of view, as “The Deadline and the Annoying Family”? Really? I think not. You get the idea.

Today I am a guest blogger on Tina’s Book Reviews, where I posted about the pros and cons of fictional children. (I leave out the pros and cons of real children.) Check it out.

And no, I don’t really see my adorable family members as waspish. No more than I am snakish, anyway.