Category Archives: Family

On the fear

Family, LearnerMother

The Fear.

For me, this is one of the things I struggle with most in my efforts to parent in a half decent fashion. I’ve always had slight neurotic tendencies, but managed to keep them in check when all I had to worry about was looking after myself. Now I am responsible for three amazing kids, each one far more than I deserve, the fear is there all the time, lurking and ever-ready to pounce. They get on their bikes – I immediately see life-changing head injuries. They run and jump and dance on the walk to school – I immediately see a mistimed skip, a tumble over the kerb, and I don’t even want to know what happens next. They build dens on top of the bunk bed and I am convinced that one of them will topple off and end up with a broken bone. Tomorrow, the eldest is off to a pool party – his first one – and I am desperately trying not to visualise all the million things that could go wrong from drowning (he can swim) to running along like the excited kid he should be, and cracking his head on the poolside. It’s not limited to possible accidents; if I wake in the night, I HAVE to go and check each one is breathing. And if they are not breathing assertively enough, I have been known to wake them. Just to check. Apparently this is quite normal for parents of a NEW baby – but my babies are 7, 5 and 3.

The Fear is not only in my head, but there’s a sort of physicality to it. I can see these events in glorious technicolour; I can feel them as if they were happening, for real, right now. It’s horrible, and it’s exhausting. My rational mind knows that it’s irrational, or at least highly exaggerated. But my rational mind spends a lot of time being sat on by my irrational one, so it’s not a great deal of help. It’s much worse when I am tired and stressed; though the panicking never really goes away, I can manage it much better if am feeling on top of things in my day to day life.

I try and hide this from the kids. I want them to grow up resilient, with a sense of adventure, with a can-do attitude, with a healthy and rational attitude to risk. I don’t want them to miss out on things because I am constantly catastrophising every situation we come across. I *think* I do ok at keeping it to myself – but I don’t really know what they are picking up from me. The husband balances me out in this respect – he has his demons, but the Fear isn’t one of them, luckily.

Am I the only one? Does it ever go away? Or do you just get used to it??

On trying not to multitask

Family, LearnerMother, , , , ,

I have been making a conscious effort to be more ‘present’ with the kids recently, and to multitask a little less.

It bothers me that I have become really good at carrying on a conversation about the school day, at the same time as sending an email, checking the work twitter account, deleting spam from the shop facebook page, juggling money between accounts to avoid overdraft and checking what the weather will be like tomorrow. Admittedly all these things need to be done at some point, but probably not right now. My problem is that I’m very much a right now sort of person, and I do genuinely find it really difficult not to do something if I know it needs to be done. And smartphones – brilliant as they are – only make this tendency worse in me. So I’ve changed a few things – I’ve put my email on fetch rather than push; I’ve turned off @notifications beeps for the twitter accounts I am responsible for; I’ve taught the husband twitter too so he can deal with the shop account; but most of all I have tried to change this mental inability to switch off from work/shop life when I am at home.

Tonight, for instance. Tonight I was going to bang out a couple of emails while the youngest was watching the Night Garden, but I decided – no, I was going to leave the emails and watch it with him. So I put my phone to one side, out of temptation’s reach, and cuddled up with him on the sofa. Then suddenly up he jumps and runs to the other side of the room to bring me my phone.

‘No sweetheart, I don’t need my phone right now, I’m having some special time watching the Night Garden with you’.

I watch his little face, waiting for the beam of happiness that would surely come from having my undivided attention.

And I am indeed rewarded with a beam, a massive grin from ear to ear. A lovely warm feeling washes over me. Yes, I should definitely do this more often. Look how happy he is, just from having even a small amount of one to one Mummy time.

‘Really?’ he says, ‘Don’t you want to do Mummy’s work on Mummy’s phone?’

‘No, Mummy doesn’t need her phone now – Mummy can do her work later’.

An even bigger grin. Oh, how I am mentally polishing my mothering halo. And then, slowly, reality dawns as his grin gets bigger again…

‘Oh, good. That means I can play Angry Birds!’

angry-birds

On hitting back

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For no particular reason, yesterday was a crap day. Whiny tired kids, whiny tired me, the husband at work all weekend – you know the kind of thing. So pretty much as soon as I could decently put them to bed, I did, and then followed them with a beer and the laptop for a cheering-up dose of Outnumbered, the BBC comedy about a 2-parent, 3-kid family, which never fails to make me feel a bit better about life.

Here’s a clip from the episode I watched last night…

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It’s not one of the funniest bits by any means, but I wanted to share it because it reminds me of one of the ongoing dilemmas we face as parents – what do you tell your children about hitting other kids? It used to be really clear in my mind –  DON’T. And while they are small, that’s fairly easy to maintain. Don’t push other kids around, and if someone does it to you, don’t hit back, just tell a grownup.

It’s not so clear cut for me now. I’m still parroting the ‘don’t hit anyone, ever’, line but particularly with the eldest, should I be encouraging him to stand up for himself more? He’s nearly eight and though I don’t want him to be aggressive to other kids, I do want him to be able to look after himself – and of course as they get older, grassing people up becomes less a route to solving a problem and more to becoming seen as a weakling. It’s not a problem at school, thankfully – where there have been issues between some of the boys the staff seem to be very good at nipping them in the bud. But holiday playscheme is another matter – he is often picked on by one of the older boys there, and there has also been some shoving around. The staff are pretty good but it is never going to be the same controlled environment that it is in school.

Summer holidays are nearly 3 months away but he’s getting anxious about 4 weeks at playscheme already, and I’m getting anxious for him, and about what I should be telling him to do if the picking on gets more physical? He knows not to hit first, but should I be relaxing the line about not hitting back? And what if he does, and it escalates and someone gets really hurt? What are the rest of you telling your kids? I would love to hear about it!