Wife is always a negotiable role, you are allowed to leave, maybe that's part of the perception of the 'work' involved.
Mother (mostly) not-negotiable, in for the long run, pretty hard to divorce the kids, even when you wanna.
I tried wife, but found my wild nature stifled by the undercurrents of the paradigm...maybe the label 'wife' caused me to stay somewhere when I should have been somewhere else, becoming a better mother.

I work in retail, in a really busy health food store. Answering the phone is 'lucky dip of horrors' Such as: "What is the name of the butcher over the road, do you have their number?" "When is the next bus?" "Are raspberries higher glycaemic index than boysenberries?" Crustomers, bless em.. are generally in some or other type of daze. All time cringing memory, is the quivering man waiting for help in our crowded dispensary area, asking me in front of half a dozen strangers if he could get some help because when he was young his sister held him down and raped him.. Instant crowd dispersal! And the very big, scary, space invading type with open necked shirt and medallion, cornering me and asking for assistance as he gets extremely hot and sweaty when making love. Eeeew.

But no one has mentioned straps or canes...dare I open that can of worms?

Attention Technical Writers: Sometimes you're just too brainy for your boots and leave even the brainy but 'undereducated' amongst us sobbing with incomprehension (did not achieve). I remember well the car-repair manuals which saved my bacon on many occasions, replacing gearboxes and differentials in random driveways with only the help of a Holden 67-70 manual and a patient friend. These were written with the non-academic in mind, for the end-user whether that was a qualified mechanic or someone like me on endless cross-country meanders. These days, I can't even programme the vcr and if I am struggling on the computer, I ask the 10 year old for help. I certainly can't rely on a manual written by someone for whom the technology is so basic, they don't believe any of it requires explanation. No offence intended !

I will retain my flimsy semblance of anonimity, and wish you well my old friend...I enjoy your stories.

Hi Steven, mr half-ounce I presume.

South Auckland (early 80's) Aorere College....Wagging. Usually in groups...bored groups. Bright, lazy, disruptive type, got away with lots because of natural intelligence. The teachers who I remember with respect to this day were the ones who treated me as an individual and noticed my unconventionality as an asset, not a liability to their authority. Generally, if they respected me, I respected them back

The testing policy is indicative of the undervaluing of 'other' skills, often which are not learnt until later life...you will count numbers of visionaries, outcasts, creatives, activists etc (as well as numb-skulls, and there's a place for everyone) in the statistics coming out of the tests, and in truancy figures.

Tim thank you. As a parent of an unconventional 10 year old in state schooling, I despair of some of the shit she has to learn.. Homework is a disaster for our life together, I love to come home from work and school and do OUR life together, not spend an hour doing fractions and making pointless posters. Still it was a great pleasure sending her off with a banana shaped presentation discussing the political and ecological implications of the west's appetite for bananas. Only homework fun ALL YEAR. It pains me to observe the traits I perceive as being my daughter's strengths (sense of fairness, unique creativity, quirky and quick humour etc) be the things that 'teacher' despises and seems to be on a mission to destroy. She reads, she writes, she does maths in top group..leave her be! One of her self-motivated projects this year, a bound book titled "I Hate My Teacher" and containing hilarious drawings of various tortures. I know, I know, send her to the psychiatrist, but this is not a violent or antisocial person, but a young member of society already feeling the sting of the expectation of conformity. She'll breeze through the testing, but if there aren't enough teachers of Tim's passion on the horizon, my next enormous debt to the government will be truancy fines.

The town is washed out, beaching an enormous whale in the process. When ravenous survivors carve up the whale, a yellow mini is disgorged from it's guts. Zombie sheep feast on entrails and devour the remaining survivors...