"We are the most messed up Mother's Group ever created."

You thought your Mother’s Group was bad, wait until you hear our stories.

There I was, standing awkwardly at a birthday party my five-year-old daughter Caterina was invited to at her friend’s house. There’s not a lot you can do with five-year-olds at a party at home except play games, jump on the trampoline and eat party food, all of which we did.

Sick of standing on my own sipping lemonade out of a paper fairy princess cup, I walked up to another mother and started talking.

Within minutes we were sharing stories about the day we almost killed our kids. Soon, every mother at the party had joined in.

It was the most disturbing and most comforting conversation I’ve ever had with a group of other mothers.

Here’s how it all began:

Most of our kids were jumping on the trampoline and we started talking about trampolines in general when one of the mums told a story about how a year earlier, her daughter had been jumping on an old fashioned trampoline without any netting and had flown off it and slammed head first into a fence. She’d lost consciousness and turned blue.

She and her husband – forgetting first aid advice to keep children still and immobile after such an injury – scooped her up, put her in the car and raced her to hospital. She came to in the car and went on to make a full recovery.

Her story prompted another mother to tell her story, then another, then another.

I piped up with a story about the time I dropped Philip on his head. We’d been watching the kid’s movie Gnomeo and Juliet when the theme song started playing over the closing credits. I took turns dancing around the lounge room with each of the kids and during Philip’s turn, he somehow turned his six-year-old body upside down and I lost my grip. He landed on his head and I heard an enormous crack. I was convinced I had paralysed him.

I called for my husband to stay with him and I called for an ambulance. In the meantime my husband – forgetting the first aid advice to keep children still and immobile after such an injury – carried him to bed. The ambulance came, strapped him into a stretcher and I spent a horrible night trying to explain to emergency room staff that no, I hadn’t deliberately hit my son or placed him in a headlock. It had been a complete accident.

He was fine. No paralysis had occurred.

Then another mother talked about the time her son had climbed on her back and they were laughing and carrying on. She went to move him from her back to the bed and for some reason he let go at that exact moment and she ended up body slamming him into the bed frame. He lost consciousness. She remembered her first aid and waited for an ambulance.

All of our children had somehow managed to survive our terrible parenting skills.

We were laughing in the end. We weren’t sure over what. I suppose we felt comforted by the fact that we weren’t so bad after all and that many parents had made the same mistakes we had.

We concluded that as long as our children were happy, healthy and alive, we weren’t doing so badly after all.

What has been your scariest experience as a parent so far? What did you learn from it?

Want more? Try:

“Don’t judge me, but… I love bragging about my kids.”

A warning to all parents, this is not safe for your children.

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When you become a parent, you don't leave your brain in the delivery suite. That's why mothers with kids of all ages come to themotherish.com; because they're still interested in news about entertainment, health, current affairs and food along with an inspiring and useful stream of parenting advice and support.

Most importantly, they come because they want to hear personal stories of parenting directly from other mothers, without fear of judgement.

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