I 
have an all-consuming fear of ice and it means I can’t do things with my kids. I know that might sound really silly, but hear me out. About – oh maybe it was three months ago now? – my daughter, Abby, went to the birthday party of a friend of hers. Since it was really hot and the family didn’t have a pool or anything like that, they decided to look at party venues and found out that one of the better ice skating rinks in Melbourne also hosted kids birthdays. So they took their little girl and all her friends ice skating for a day. This is wonderful in itself, a truly inspired idea for a party, and I wouldn’t have had any problem with it all except that Abby came home jabbering about how much fun the day had been and how much she’d love to do it again. And I simply can’t take her.
For the first week or so I thought she’d just drop the idea, but she persisted, asking patiently once a day whether I’d be able to take her to the ice skating rink this weekend. After it became clear she wasn’t just going to drop the subject, I persuaded my husband to take a day off golf and take her for a lesson. A single lesson was all it took to get her completely obsessed, fooling my naive husband into signing her up for weekly lessons so one of us would be forced to take her each and every week. While I don’t want to delve too deeply, or indeed at all, into the reasons behind it, but I do know that there’s no way I can ice skate in Melbourne. Or even go anywhere near an ice skating rink. I feel like, if I do, I’ll have a panic attack. But at the same time I don’t want to deprive my daughter of doing something she loves. What do I do?