The job is a constant grind and can move at a glacial pace – but I’ve never been so happy, writes Aimie Cronin. 

We got given a swan plant. It arrived with a couple of caterpillars on it, disgusting little creatures that were completely helpless and for whom I immediately felt responsible. I didn’t like them at all but I knew what they were becoming and also that they were alive only because of a few spindly leaves, their only source of food in the entire universe that was so utterly fragile and pathetic looking. There was so much drama as those leaves disappeared into the caterpillars’ growing bellies. I watched them and they didn’t seem to be eating and yet the next time I came back several more leaves had gone. More caterpillars would appear and then one day the ratio of leaves to caterpillar became something of alarming concern to my oldest child Remy, five, and frankly, myself.

I am a stay-at-home mum with three kids. This is my day. We wake at around seven o’clock and check the caterpillars. By the end of summer, the plant is completely barren and overrun with them. Remy wonders what they will eat, but I am certainly not about to tell him the severity of the situation. I don’t think he realises starvation is even a thing. I check the ground for dead caterpillars and never see them. Where do they go to die? He wants to know if he could feed them all the things in The Hungry Caterpillar, the pickle, the slice of Swiss cheese, the piece of salami. Google suggests pumpkin as a long shot, god knows why that’s not even mentioned in the book.

It’s about 7.15am and chaos is settling into our day. A caterpillar finds itself inside the clutches of my two year old’s tiny fingers. My nearly-four-year-old has fallen off his bike. Remy comes outside with a handful of Weet-Bix and wants to balance them on the empty arms of the swan plant.

We go inside and have breakfast. My baby has started refusing her high chair and sits on my knee as she spoons cereal into her mouth, dripping milk all down my legs. I know I need to set the boundary, but it’s 7.30 and already I feel tired. She is my last baby. Most nights I go to bed feeling nostalgic that one day she will shun my knee and how much more depressing that will feel than the slap of cold milk on skin. 

There are moments in my day, every day, that hold more beauty than I have ever witnessed. There is also the constant grind, the need to be patient, to connect with the best version of myself, to go to bed listening to podcasts on how to be a better mum, a better wife, a less triggered human. I have never worked so hard and been so happy in my life. 

I like to ring my mum around 8am. I regale her with stories about my night and she listens faithfully to who slept and who jumped into our bed and who said something cute. “Tuddle Mummy!” our three-year-old yells from his bed most nights and I feel the urgency to hold him in my arms, regardless of the hour.  

We get Rocket coffee every day around 10. I park down the driveway so I can leave my babies in the car and run inside to order. It feels stressful, but necessary. Sometimes it’s the only adult contact I have in my working day. Once a man comes into the coffee shop and asks who owns the station wagon up the driveway. My babies are screaming, he says. Perhaps I should go to them? I race out, tears stinging in my eyes. I’m not so concerned about them as I am about the way he looks at me.

Pleeeeease can we go to the $2 shop, they say. Sometimes we stop and they choose ribbons and discounted Christmas tape and awful glitter glue and coloured paper. After lunch, we spread it all over the table and chop things into tiny pieces, then pour inordinate amounts of glue and stick everything back together.

In the afternoon we go for a walk and take the double stroller. My five-year-old pushes his siblings as I hover over him. Around the corner and up the road a bit, we come upon a swan tree. It must have a thousand leaves on it. I tell them the plan. We will go home and put the caterpillars in a container and move them to live on this bountiful tree. This feels wrong to my five-year-old. He wants to watch the caterpillars. He doesn’t want me to get in trouble with the people at this strange house. He holds the container as we drive back. “I wish I could speak caterpillar so I could explain to them what is happening,” he says.

We pile out of the car and decide on the best spot for them. I notice a wasp working its way through the leaves. “Fuck,” I say out loud. We drive away with plans to check on the caterpillars every day but I never want to think of them again. Later at home, I see one crawling across the deck like it’s a last attempt in a long desert. I quietly pick it up on a piece of Duplo and place it on the empty swan plant. This is the work story I tell my husband that night and in the morning when I wake, I go straight to the swan plant and find it empty.