BY MIA FREEDMAN
“I would rather earn money than be with my kids on their birthday” says UK social commentator Katie Hopkins. “Why is this is so hard to understand? Work today. Enjoy tomorrow more.”
Let’s park Katie and that controversial statement for a moment and ask a simpler question: Is it ever OK to miss your kid’s birthday? OK or not, sometimes it’s unavoidable.
This one time, I missed my son’s birthday. It wasn’t like I forgot it – although if you ask me the birthdays of each of my kids, I have to pause for a moment to get all the numbers right. I’ve never been good with dates.
No, I missed it because I had to work. As he is the youngest of my three children, I’d already clocked quite a few kid birthdays: 23 of them to be exact. They do tend to blur a bit, to be honest.
But I won’t pretend I wasn’t anguished by the thought of not being there when he woke up. In our house, like most I imagine, the formal part of birthday festivities occur in the morning as soon as the birthday person wakes up. We all pile into our bedroom and sing and unwrap presents and there’s always one from the dog or at least a card.
A few years ago, however, when my baby was turning two, I wasn’t there. Instead, I was climbing on board the Prime Ministerial jet waiting to interview Julia Gillard and frantically looking for a pen.
It was during the 2010 election campaign and I’d been waiting to hear from the PM’s office when she’d be available for an interview. When the call finally came and they told me I’d have to fly down to Melbourne to interview her on a plane back to Sydney, I tried to negotiate a different date. Overhearing the conversation, someone on the MM team turned to me after I hung up the phone and said, “did you really ask the Prime Minister to move her schedule to accommodate you?”
Top Comments
It is her freedom for her to think this way, but it is wrong for the reporter to promote it. If you want to make so much money as to have to miss your kid's birthday celebration, then why bother to have kids in the first place. After all you are a woman whose most important function in the world is to give birth to and look after your kids! What a stupid world we are living in now!
why is her responsibility to raise the child every waking moment she has I assume the kid has a father and isnt the second coming of christ ffs
Children as mere accessories for photo shoots!