My lovely Husband and I have been together for 23 years, married for almost 20 years, but sadly we were not able to have children of our own. Isn’t life funny how things can turn out though. Almost 15 years ago I took a job as a Personal Assistant to a very decent man who ran several companies, and I also became his wife’s assistant along the way. They are a lovely family with 3 daughters, at the time I took the job the girls were very young, 8, 6 and 3 years old. Over the years I became very involved with the girls, I would do school runs, take them to after school activities etc… Although their parents are very wealthy, they didn’t spoil the children, which has made for very lovely young ladies all these years later.
I have such wonderful memories, I was lucky enough to go to their French villa many summers to look after the girls for a week, we had such lovely times. I made up lots of fun activities, from table tennis competitions to water polo and we even made a short movie, well a funny little 5 minute clip, such a funny story…… I found one of those pool floats that looks like a noodle, it was broken, the outside was a peach colour and the inside was reddish, I made the girls laugh when I said it looked like an arm in half, so we came up with the idea of making a scene, similar to the movie Jaws, the youngest girl got in the pool and pretended to wrestle the inflatable crocodile, then stuck the broken noodle into the arm of her t-shirt and waved it around screaming! well I don’t know how we made the clip for laughing, I was crying. One of the older sisters did a bit of clever editing, put music to it and titles and loaded it on You Tube, that was at least 12 years ago and I still smile when I think of the fun we had making it!.
I used to be up first in the morning, so I would go down to the bakery for fresh bread and croissants, I would also buy the girls a beautiful little cake each, because every evening after dinner we would settle down in front of the TV and wade our way through whichever box set they wanted, I seem to remember one year we did the entire X-Men movie series, one each night!
Some evenings we would go into the town, a typical pretty french place with cobbled streets and market stalls, I would buy them Italian ice creams as we wandered about, looking in the pretty shops etc…
So you see, I couldn’t have children of my own, but fate put me in the path of these wonderful people, who so very generously let me take part in their children’s lives, now those children are all grown up but I still see them very often and they call me their second Mum, how lucky am I !