Matric exam stress - hers or mine?

Thirteen years of hard slog and here we are - my daughter recently kickstarted her matric exams with her all time favourite, English (I say this with huge tongue-in-cheek and a heavy dollop of sarcasm). For despite my complete fascination and absolute love affair with the language, for some or other reason the apple has not fallen remotely close to this tree.  So much so that her grades through the years have skated dangerously close to 'meets the minimum requirements'. Eish!

Who do you think spent almost all of Sunday night, the eve of the dreaded English First Paper, doing toilet duty of note - yep, you guessed it: moi, me, mne, ekke. Not to mention walking the wooden boards in my passage to a well buffed gleam during the hours of her actually writing the exam on Monday morning. The beauty of it all is that madam steps into the exam hall without so much as even breaking a sweat.  Calm, I tell you and with such confidence, leaving me with her usual, "stop stressing mother - this one's in the bag."

When I picked Princess Pieface up 2 hours later I was the worse for wear - seriously, my hair (which as many of you will know is a wild mass of out of control frizz at the best of times) was standing on end and a sure indicator of my frazzled state of mind. And what greeted me was, "see, I told you not to stress. Yor, that was such an easy paper. I wrote and wrote but ran out of time..."

Will someone please pass that damn Prozac?!