Meg Rosoff

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Battle Hymn of the Lemur Mother

You gotta love those tiger mothers. Slaving night and day to make sure their children debut at Carnegie Hall before their twelfth birthday. Admirable, obviously, but they do make life hard for themselves. Lemur mothers, on the other hand, lead quiet peaceful lives, uninterrupted by tantrums about violin practice, exam revision, or panic that a child who does not go to Oxford or Cambridge will somehow enter an inferior circle of society.

Infant lemurs are stashed in a hidden location while the mother lemur gets on with lounging, reading books and drinking gin and tonic. If inappropriate television, Facebook or Topshop vouchers are required to pacify the infant lemur, this is not rejected as a strategy.

Lemur mothers do occasionally scream uncontrollably about the state of their offspring's bedroom or the fact that nobody around here ever does the laundry but me, but this is not a common event.  And even the mighty lemur mother is, after all, only human.

Lemur mothers frequently make use of their long, powerful back legs, catapulting themselves into the air and landing in an upright posture on a nearby tree. Meanwhile, if the lemur child wants to learn the violin, it can damn well practice on its own.

Lemur. Tiger.

You choose.