Category Archives: LearnerMother

On hitting back

Family, LearnerMother, , ,

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!

On missing my green-fingered Grandad

Family, LearnerMother, Wales, , ,

One of my clearest and fondest memories from when I was little was visiting my lovely Nana and Grandad. We were lucky enough to see them pretty much every weekend when we were small, and there were lots of things that I loved about spending time with them – even now, thinking of Saturday mornings brings a smile to my face. We’d all pile into the back of my Dad’s van with his tools, perched precariously on a box of spanners and getting an ever numb-er bum, till someone shouted ‘we’re nearly there! we just passed the tall block of flats!’ And sure enough, once we’d seen the tall block of flats, it would be only another five minutes or so before we twisted and turned through the little roads and arrived at 3, Lilac Close, ran through the alley and into the back gate and into the garden, where my grandad would more than likely be getting on with the day’s garden tasks.

I didn’t take much notice of the garden when I was little. I knew that no matter what the time of year and no matter what the weather, there would be something happening; seeds drying in the sun for next year; potatoes to be forked up; raspberries to be picked; daffs to be tied down. And likewise, no matter what the season, most of the food on our plates came from the garden – either freshly picked, or pickled, preserved, or frozen for the winter. But I never really thought about it – it was just the garden.

I wish now that I’d paid a bit more attention! We have this weird raised bed in our tiny front garden, which is certainly ugly, but is also perfect for a vegetable patch. It’s, oh, probably about 5 foot by 8 foot, so not a bad size. Before the kids came along, I grew herbs mostly; but in the last couple of years I have been trying to grow vegetables, in a vain attempt to keep our food bills down. Last year we probably got about 10 useable carrots, three marrows, quite a lot of runner beans and half a parsnip from it – I’m guessing that I could have bought that lot in bloody Harrods and STILL spent less than I spent on seeds to get started! Still, on the plus side we had lots of fun and the kids enjoyed it – and even just getting three or so meals out of it allowed me to feel all smug and good-lifeish.

Undaunted, we have started again this year – remember that hour of sun a couple of weekends ago? Well, we took full advantage and managed to get carrots, parsnips, courgettes, leeks and onions sown into pots, as well as the bed all forked over and ready for the neighbourhood cats to poo in the seedlings when they are grown. I have been promised some runner bean plants and some tomato plants from someone more green fingered than I, and I have some salad seeds all ready for the windowsill. But you know what I really want? I want my Grandad to be here, giving me directions in his Maesteg accent that he never lost, though he lived all his adult life in Hertfordshire. Telling me all the useful stuff that the books don’t, and sharing all the little secrets he knew. The sad thing is, I know if I had shown the slightest, teeniest interest when I was little, he would have loved to teach me all this. And now I want to know all about it, he is, as he would say, ‘pushing up the daisies’, and has been for many years. Well, Grandad, if you’d just push up a few of our veg too, that’d be just lovely! x

Carrots are in!Springtime jobs

On coming out of the tunnel

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I’m sure there are lots of people who won’t be able to relate to the Tunnel, and if you’re one of them, please feel free to be relieved and/or smug that it wasn’t like that for you. Just don’t tell me about it because – you know what – though I’m out the other side, I’m not that far out yet and I CAN STILL FLIP. Yes, over the internet, and right IN YOUR FACE. You have been warned.

It goes a bit like this. You meet the bloke, get pissed for a few years, have some good holidays, buy a house and do it up, get married…oh, this is a bit easy, you think. I’m a bit bored of finishing a cup of tea while it’s still hot, or having a poo on my own, or being able to remember my own name, or of having sex, or being able to put a pair of jeans on without having to fold over the spare flap of stomach and tuck it in. I know, it must be time to Have a Baby. Mwahahahaha go the Tunnel Gods – another one heading our way…..

And so, the Baby arrives. And it is all amazing and wonderful and tearful. Quite tearful actually. The husband did say, at one point, ‘the book says you should have stopped crying by now – it’s been seven days, for fuckssakes’. For which he had Penelope bloody Preach thrown at his head. He didn’t say it again. Actually he did. At about four years. And then he remembered why he hadn’t said it again. Muppet.

At this stage, you don’t realise you’re in the Tunnel – it’s clever like that, see, it sucks you in. You just think ‘oh, I’m tired. I’m a bit down. Must be the hormones. It’ll all be fine when things settle down’. I was lucky enough, first time round, to have a baby that was a good sleeper, but I was still exhausted, useless and – of course – constantly comparing myself to those parents whose kids don’t ever sleep (well, according to them, anyway) and who STILL manage baby yoga and organic everything and stimulating play and ooze Yummy Mumminess from every pore. Interspersed with all this uselessness are of course moments of pure joy, of amazement, of love. But somehow these moments just serve to sharpen the knife edge of anxiety of how unfair it is that this poor defenceless thing has been born to me and doesn’t he deserve someone better and nobody told me it would be like this and I. Can’t. Cope. Oh, is it dark already? How weird, actually it seems to have been dark for a while. Hmm. Maybe it’s something to do with global warming, nobody else is mentioning it so I won’t either….

Of course, the minute you start to get a handle on it all, you’re up the duff again. Wheeeee! Down some more!  Oh! And again! I mean, really, how does this HAPPEN? First time round it was all headstands and ovulation charts and doctors and drugs and every-other-day-or-the-sperm-gets-stale and no booze – for about a hundred years. Second and third time, well, I think he might have looked at me across a crowded junkyard of a playroom. Who knows. Wheeeeeeeeeeee! Down some more! And some more again for good measure! My, we really did break the climate didn’t we if it’s dark ALL THE TIME…how weird that nobody else is talking about it…best just smile and wave…

And so it continues. Guilt and exhaustion and purees and sick and guilt and tantrums and tears and crappy plastic toys that sever your toe if you step on them, and more guilt because the toys are crappy and plastic in the first place, and MORE guilt because your severed toe led to you stamping on the bastard toy, and shouting like a banshee and constant ringing in your ears and panic attacks and guilt and becoming obsessed with sleep and waking up and calculating how many hours before you can slip back into sleep and oblivion, and guilt, always the guilt. And it becomes the new normal, so you forget that life was ever any different. And of course there is happiness too, and laughter, and fun, and love – it’s not all terrible by any means. Just a bit, well, dark still. But we’re kind of used to that now.

At some point though, and so slowly that you don’t even realise it’s happening, things start to feel ever so slightly different. One day you wake up and decide not to wear a hoody and maternity jeans, as you have every day for the past six years. Of course, you’ll probably have to, because you have long since sold all your nice clothes on eBay to pay for more crappy plastic toys, but still, the thought crossed your mind. And one day, the lady in the Co-op DOESN’T tell you that you look tired! Then you start noticing its a bit lighter all around. Phew, maybe we haven’t broken the climate after all. But hang on – global warming shouldn’t affect the light levels, should it? And then the thought is gone, as quickly as it came, But it doesn’t matter, because it was A RATIONAL THOUGHT!  Next thing – you start noticing how haggard and exhausted and generally unfit you are. This sounds like it’s a bad thing. Nope, it’s not. It’s a sign that the light levels are increasing, that you’re finally coming to the end of the Tunnel. And then one day your kids say to you “You used to be so shouty and grumpy all the time. Now you’re fun, sometimes.” At which point it might be wise to remind them that the shouty ogre is NEVER FAR AWAY so when I say go to bed, I mean go to bed NOWWWWWWW before I completely lose the fricking plot…Oh, er, or you could take them in your arms and promise never to be grumpy again. Your call.

It’s not until you are completely out of the tunnel that you realise you were ever in it. So this is a message of hope for those of you still stuck underground somewhere – there is light! Life will return! The darkness isn’t climate change! Of course, the downside of coming out is that you’ll realise that  you’ve been living in something approaching squalor, and your beautifully done up house needs doing up again, due to things like THIS  that seem to have appeared on every wall. In permanent frigging marker. But hey, you’re out of the Tunnel – welcome to the world!

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