The little things – Why we should appreciate our parents
Yesterday I had one of those major landmark parenting moments. It wasn’t a birth, the start of school or a graduation. It wasn’t one you’d take pictures of and boast about on Facebook.
But it was a landmark. The kind of thing I think every parent has to go through.
Yesterday I had to stand in the supermarket aisle and shout at my wayward children who had just nearly rammed the trolley into an innocent bystander. The kind of shouting where everyone looks at you, embarrassed for you. Shameful.
The whole trip was ill fated. The kids were tired and bored. I was tired and bored. We had loads to buy and, thanks to a recent reorganisation, I spent a lot of time wandering around passive-aggressively muttering things like ‘stupid bloody supermarket, cheese is dairy, why the hell isn’t it in the dairy aisle? Would that make too much bloody sense?!’
After numerous warnings, one full on shouting fit and subsequent extravagant efforts to show the world what a great parent I was by making the rest of the trip one fun game, we finally left.
‘Never again. Back to online shopping!’ I mumbled as we reached the car.
But as we drove off, I got to thinking. When I was 4 my mum was a single mum of 3 children under the age of 9. She worked, didn’t drive and there was no such thing as online shopping (even now she wouldn’t dare use it after she once accidentally completed a whole online shop only to realise she’d only actually managed to order one block of cheese…!) How the hell did she do it every week? I don’t remember tantrums in the aisles or moaning on the walk home, but we must have gone to the shops because we definitely always had food!
Thinking it through made me realise that it isn’t the big things we do as parents that matter, it’s the little everyday things – just muddling through, making sure the kids are okay and keeping things ticking over.
I always thought my mum was amazing, but I never appreciated how hard she must have worked just to raise us. All the little things I have no recollection of which must have been so difficult – like dragging 3 kids round the supermarket! I’m just embarrassed it’s taken me so long to realise.
So the next time my own monsters whinge about wanting chocolate cheerios (no chocolate at breakfast is the one battle I’m still winning!) I’ll try to remember that in 30 years time they’ll hopefully be faced with their own screamingg little brat and will finally be grateful for what I’m doing.
Thanks mum – and sorry I didn’t say it sooner.
Why is being a mum so lonely?
‘What are you up to today then?’ ‘I thought I might go to baby massage at the Children’s Centre, then I might make a start on the ironing this afternoon’ ‘Well, that sounds fun. Quite a busy day!’ So would go the morning conversations between myself and my husband during my first maternity leave. After the final ‘busy’ comment, I would generally stare at him with a contempt I would struggle to muster up for any offence these days. Busy? Seriously? The patronising assumption that an hour of waving your baby’s limbs around followed by discussing signs of teething with a group of women I barely knew hardly counted as ‘busy’ or ‘fun’ in my eyes.
I loved being a mum, but in those early months I struggled with maternity leave in a way I never expected. It was boring, the days stretched out and, above all, it was lonely.
This week Action for Children published a report stating that a quarter of parents feel lonely, isolated and ‘cut off’. They claim this level of loneliness is shocking, but I’m not shocked.
Prior to giving birth my days had been genuinely busy. Working as a secondary teacher, I barely get a moment to myself. At times it drives me crazy, but I’m never isolated and in 7 years I don’t think I’ve ever clock watched. I can honestly say I love working.
Yet when my son was born, I made this choice to give it all up for a year and revel in the domesticity of motherhood. While I’m glad I did, there were definitely times when I found it more frustrating than fulfilling. I’m far from the only person to ever feel this way, and it certainly isn’t a modern phenomenon. In 1963 Betty Friedan published the hugely influential book ‘The Feminine Mystique’, credited this book with kick starting the second wave of feminism. In it, she exposed the unhappiness felt by many supposedly well off women, blessed with a comfortable home and a healthy family, who simply couldn’t find fulfilment through domesticity alone.
If such struggles were felt by mothers who had grown up in a society expecting such a life, I wonder if this loneliness and disaffection isn’t felt all the more keenly by women of our generation who have grown up to expect so much more? These days many mothers have spent years educating themselves, working and often carving out successful careers. To go from a respected colleague to a stay at home mum is never going to be easy. It’s not just the lack of work colleagues, but everything that goes along with it: the structure, the intellectual stimulation, the post work socialising, the sense of purpose and achievement, and having something to talk about other than snot, vomit and poo! Viewed in this light, the loneliness felt by many new mothers is anything but shocking.
However, far from a sentence of loneliness, parenthood can also be the doorway to a whole new community. I lived for years in London never meeting a neighbour, but now know so many they even offer to babysit so we can go out! These days I can go shopping and run into friends in a way which I never thought possible in a busy metropolis: I was happy to believe the ‘everyone in London is grumpy and will never talk to you’ stereotype. After weeding through the boring baby chat, I’ve even made a couple of good ‘mum-friends’ who I hope will remain part of my life for many years to come.
Plus, for those of us who really can’t cope, at least the work of people like Friedan means we do have the choice to return to work when we just can’t take any more baby yoga!
Having said all that, my due date is a week away and I’m about to start this whole stay at home thing again. Could someone maybe pop round in a few weeks and make sure I haven’t gone completely mad??
Sorry for being pregnant: an open letter to my little boy
Dear little man,
At this moment, you are tucked up in bed. You are almost certainly not asleep. Partly because you’re a stubborn little so-and-so, partly because when I left you had grabbed yourself yet another book to read (which both infuriates me and makes me a little proud!), and partly because it’s nearly an hour before your normal bedtime. Sorry about that. I made the stupid decision to skip naptime today. You were probably fine, but I was not. That’s what being 38 weeks pregnant does to you.
I guess you’ve had to put up with a lot of this sort of thing since I got pregnant. I try my hardest to continue being a fun, lively, energetic mum, but I know I’m failing. When I was at work, I put so much of my energy into trying to stay professional during the day, by the time I got home I tended to crash on the sofa in a heap of emotional exhaustion. You got fed and cleaned, but for a few weeks that was about it. Now I’m no longer at work, we can go back to having fun. Except I’m huge now, and that hardly makes for the world’s greatest playmate. We have fun days out, but they’re regularly punctuated by ‘Sorry darling, mummy can’t really run at the moment’, and ‘Sorry sweetheart, mummy can’t fit down the slide anymore’. Try as I might, I can’t stop pregnancy getting in the way.
It’s marginally easier when we’re at home, but my heart broke a little last week when you said you’d rather do jigsaws with Daddy because ‘Mummy can’t sit on the floor anymore’.
I’ve recognised my limits and asked other relatives to take you out for the fun-filled days I can no longer manage. I should welcome you back from these days fully rested and refreshed, ready to play with all the vigour you deserve. But all too often I’m overcome by my nesting urge, trying to make everything in the house as perfect as I can before our lovely family existence is interrupted by a new recruit. By the time you come home I’m more physically exhausted and useless than I was before you left.
Thankfully, you’ve made it easy. You’ve moaned only once: that ‘the baby has been in your tummy for aaaaages!’ Your only frustration is your impatience to meet them.
You have accepted becoming the ‘big boy’ of the house with a grace and excitement I could only have wished for. Of course, this is largely because we bribed you with a brand new dinosaur themed bedroom, but thanks for being so easily manipulated!
Little do you realise how much this baby will turn your world upside down. Not only will it have nicked your old room and toys and books, it will get in the way of all your favourite games; destroying every train set you build up and banishing your marble run to the top shelf, to be used only when baby is asleep and well out of the way. No, you have no idea. You are actually excited, and have even decided that we should name the baby ‘Lovely’.
Therein lies the problem. If, in years to come, you ever look back and find yourself resentful of the playtime you lost with mummy when she was too big to run around or too busy feeding the baby to play Froggy Frenzy, remember: it’s your fault. If you hadn’t been so amazing in the first place, we probably wouldn’t have wanted to have another.
All my love,
Mummy x
How I overcame my cynicism about The Royal Baby (almost)
I am living my very own Groundhog Day, but instead of a day it’s the never ending repetition of a single conversation. It goes like this.
Stranger: Aww. He’s lovely. How old is he?
Me: Just turned one.
Stranger: Aww. What’s his name?
Me: George
Stranger: Ooh, like the prince! Hello Prince George [laughs]
Me: Hmm [plastering on a fake smile until the stranger gets bored and walks away or starts talking about the royal baby]
I’ve already had this conversation four times this the week. It’s the one I’ve been dreading ever since they announced the name of the royal baby. Actually, since the birth of the royal baby. Actually, since the announcement of the pregnancy, when a whole range of royal-baby-name-experts (is that really a thing?) crawled out of the woodwork and started pontificating about possible names. It seems that when you’re a royal it isn’t the job of your parents to choose your name; it is the job of pompous, snorting, overbearing aristocrats on Radio 4, and they chose George months ago.
We chose George several months before that.
In many ways, it doesn’t matter. It’s not exactly an unusual name. Our George was born a full year earlier so people shouldn’t think he’s been named after the prince (though from the conversations I’ve had, it’s as if people do). It’s not likely that we’ll be socialising with the royals and have awkward but amusing incidents where the two get confused. Ha ha ha!
That’s the thing. We have absolutely nothing to do with the royal baby, but now somehow seem inextricably linked. Before, people would engage in a discussion about my son, but now as soon as they learn his name they’re talking about some other child, a child none of us know and none of us will ever meet!
It’s symptomatic of the strange fascination with ‘The Royal Baby’ which has always baffled me. There are approximately 370,000 babies born in the world every day. The vast majority of those I will never meet and don’t give a second thought. I’m not being mean, it’s just a fact. I will almost certainly never meet Prince George, he will have no impact on our lives as we will have no impact on his, so why would I care?
I thought this was a pretty sensible and logical approach but soon found myself being labelled a cynic, a misery and even cold-hearted.
I wouldn’t call myself a Republican – in reality I just don’t care that much – but I did find myself becoming increasingly cynical as the media coverage of ‘The Royal Birth’ became so preposterous it was practically parodying itself: the ridiculously intrusive and pre-emptive announcement that she’d gone into labour led to endless speculation about every detail of the poor child’s life before it had even taken its first breath in the world and press camping outside the doors of the hospital like a group of deranged stalkers hoping that a stray piece of placenta soaked tissue might accidentally float out of the window so that they could splash it across the front page and analyse it in disgusting, intrusive detail, giving them the world’s greatest exclusive. All it needed was for Chris Morris to pop up in the press throng and it could have been an episode of Brass Eye
Then there was the horrendous commercialisation of the whole thing. Companies launched themselves on to the royal bandwagon, capitalising on the birth of an innocent, oblivious child to sell more toys, clothes, shoes, socks, mugs, dribble bibs, cakes, washing powder, toilet roll, sink and plughole unblocker – well, you get the idea. George at ASDA especially must have been over the moon!
Label me cold-hearted if you want, but I was happy to turn off the TV and computer and wait until the whole thing blew over.
The only problem is, when I finally came out from hibernation, I discovered a side that wasn’t so bad after all. Seeing a photograph of Kate, William and George for the first time my initial thought was still ‘For God’s sake, isn’t there any other news?’, but another part of me (I guess the mum part of me) thought ‘Aww, they do look happy’. I guess that’s the thing about being a parent, while you can recognise the increasing amount of nonsense in the world, you also know the most simple pleasure in the world: looking at and loving your child. Seeing them look at their George made me look at my George and for a brief second, I could find something in common with a family so far removed from my own life.
And on the plus side, we’re never going to struggle to buy gifts with the name George on them.
The Eternal Suffering of the Spotless House
If cleanliness really is next to Godliness, my family are stuck permanently in purgatory.
While we are a long way from the horrors of student days – when my husband tells me a girl was once sent screaming from his flat after noticing a distinct rustling in the pile of takeaway boxes which had become a permanent fixture next to their kitchen bin – I’m hardly a domestic goddess. If you were to turn up at my house uninvited, or even invited, you’re far more likely to be greeted by a mound of un-ironed shirts and half-read newspapers than a freshly brewed pot of tea and a slice of homemade cake.
I am not a domesticated person. I eat cake, I don’t bake it. I buy clothes, I don’t iron them. I can cope with cooking up and – more importantly – eating a family meal, but don’t expect me to wash up as well. That’s just ridiculous.
I hate housework; I hate it.
Housework is a necessary but mind-numbingly boring evil. A task approached with begrudging acceptance and minimal satisfaction on completion.
Sadly, housework when you have a baby moves from an occasional inconvenience to an eternal occupation: cleaning and sterilising bottles; washing dirty clothes; picking up half-eaten food from the floor; scrubbing baby sick off the sofa; picking up half-eaten food off the floor; washing more dirty clothes; drenching every surface with anti-bacterial spray when someone who visited turns out to have a stomach bug; picking more half-eaten food off the floor; putting away toys; hanging out washing; ironing; picking up yet more half-eaten food off the floor then sweeping and mopping it before collapsing, exhausted and miserable in front of ‘Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners, ‘The Great British Bake Off’, ‘Great British Sewing Bee’ or some other prime time reality show designed to highlight how crap you are as a homemaker compared to these inane, grinning buffoons, who periodically fawn over a particularly well-constructed cross-stitch or sobb over a rogue macaroon which isn’t quite the same shape and size as the rest. Oh for God’s sake, grow up and get a real life!
I hate housework and homemaking; I hate it!
King Sisyphus angered the gods through his trickery and deceit, and so was condemned to spend eternity pushing a boulder up a hill, only to see it fall straight back down and have to start again. In the first few years of our courtship, I lied continuously and pretended to be interested in my husband’s crappy football team. Perhaps that deceit is why I seem to have been sentenced to a lifetime of mopping the kitchen floor, only to slip on a sludgy piece of brown banana ten minutes after I finish and start all over again.
I really hate housework; I HATE IT!
Throughout my pregnancy, there was a constant stream of doomsayers, desperate to tell me how shit my life would be once I became a mum. Gems such as “Ooh, enjoy sleep while you can. You won’t get much once the baby arrives!” or young single people gloating “We won’t see you down the pub again soon” or women who already have a brood of children taking pleasure in telling me, in detail, all the ways in which my body would fall apart and begin to resemble that of an ogre after the ‘joys of childbirth’. But no one told me that I’d be perpetually chained to the kitchen sink and essentially have to superglue marigolds to my hands just to get through the day.
My biggest concern when going off on maternity leave was that I’d be bored away from work. “Oh you won’t have time to be bored” chimed the doomsayers. Well, they were half right. I don’t have time, but forgive me if I don’t find dusting that stimulating.
I hate housework; I REALLY HATE IT!
Like most people, as a child I went through numerous phases of wanting to be all sorts of things: a lawyer, an actress, an astronomer, a singer, a fashion journalist – once in middle school I even did an art project about wanting to be a dentist! I didn’t really know what I wanted to be, but I always wanted to work and, to quote the great feminist thinker Beyonce, I wanted to be an ‘independent woman’.
I have always worked, ever since I got a part time job at the age of 15. For most of the time my husband and I have been together, I have been the greater earner (not by much, but still!). The idea of being at home and being reliant on someone else, of having to go cap in hand to ask for cash to go shopping whilst on maternity leave was galling. It’s something I’ve never gotten used to. Many people would say I’m doing a valuable job by staying at home to raise our son, and I’m sure that’s true. But when raising him on some days consists of going to some cutesy named playgroup to sing nursery rhymes, then round to a friend’s for lunch and a coffee, I do feel a bit guilty. So I feel it’s only fair that I take on the lion’s share of the housework. The problem being, just in case you’ve missed it, I HATE HOUSEWORK. I HATE IT!
So, in two weeks, I’m heading back to work. Full time. I thought this was the norm but chatting at the local children’s centre tells me this often isn’t so. Everyone else is sorting out flexible working arrangements, cutting down their hours or giving up altogether. It’ll definitely be hard to leave the little one, but, oh to engage my brain again! To talk about something other than nappies and weaning. But most of all, to escape the housework: the wiping, the mopping, the sweeping. What’s that you say? It’ll still be there to do when I get home? No it won’t. I’m getting a cleaner! Yes, sod the expense – I’ll dye my hair at home and we’ll eat more beans on toast. Sod the middle class guilt – I’ll get over it when I see how shiny the sink is. Sod what other people think – it’s money well spent if I can pick the baby up from the childminder and head down to the park rather than picking up the duster and heading to the living room furniture.
So take that Sisyphus. If only you’d thought to hire help and sneak off back to work, perhaps eternity wouldn’t have seemed so torturous.
Who’s in charge: the kids, the parents or the advertisers?
Sometimes, I’m a bad mum.
Sometimes, when I’m really tired and just can’t face singing any more songs about farmyard animals or cleaning the kitchen floor for the fifth time today, I sit my son in a washing basket with a few toys, make myself a coffee and watch TV. Aaah TV, the monster in our living rooms: ruining our children’s eyesight with increasingly large screens; destroying our collective imaginations with mind-numbingly stupid programmes; and turning the next generation into a mass of unthinking consumer robots. I love it!
In a letter to the Telegraph last week, the organisation ‘Leave Our Kids Alone’ pleaded with the government to introduce greater restrictions on advertising aimed at young aged children, warning that we are in danger of turning out “young consumers rather than young citizens”. They claim that advertisers target children specifically so that they use “pester power” to get their parents to buy them things.
Well, duh!
Of course advertisers target children. They are impressionable, they like what they’re told to like and they’re desperate to fit in. They haven’t yet got the strength to see the difference between what they want and what is good for them. Just like when they turn their noses up at a nutritious dinner of chicken and broccoli pasta and instead decide they want to eat nothing but custard creams. But you don’t smile and hold out the biscuit tin (and if you do, call Supernanny now!) because you know it’s not good for them.
Just as we, the parents, are in charge of making sure they don’t overdose on sugar before they reach their third birthday, it is our responsibility to stand up to the little brats and say no when they throw a tantrum and demand the latest little Bratz doll (a terrifying anti-feminist nightmare of a toy which I can only assume has been inspired by a toy-maker’s personal love of drag queens). Sure they might scream and cry and throw all their other toys out of the pram, but we’re strong enough to cope with that.
Oh wait, no, apparently we’re not. Because, wherever you go, you see screaming children getting exactly what they want, and then demanding more as a result. And it’s our fault. We’re the ones turning them into “little-consumers”, because from the moment they’re born we teach them that people show love by buying you things.
After reading the letter in the Telegraph, I got to thinking about the things children “pester” us to buy. I headed off to the toy store to do some research, intending to write about how ridiculous children’s toys are, how extortionate the price tags and how stupid parents are to give in.
As I wandered around, I marvelled at the idea that any parent would even consider spending £35 on this nightmare-inducing giant bee…
I winced at the thought of a well-meaning relative spending £33 on a ‘Sophie la Giraffe’ gift case, which essentially contained a blanket and a squeaky dog toy presented a fancy cardboard box (and yes, I am a hypocrite because we do have a ‘Sophie’ and it is well used, but I still maintain that it really belongs in a pet shop)…
And I recoiled when I noticed how much my son seemed to like these hideous, googly-eyed monsters, which I wouldn’t dare take home for fear of spilling water on them or accidentally leaving the biscuit packet out after midnight…
I walked around the store characteristically sceptical, sneering at the ridiculous way in which we desperately try to prove our love by turning the simplest of pleasures into a consumerist activity.
Instead of happily talking through the old family album with your kids, record a message on Tomy’s ‘Forget Me Not Photo Album’ and you’ll save yourself the trouble of ever having to talk to your children about their Nan again.
Rather than expend the hugely difficult effort of breathing on a small plastic stick costing 50p to create bubbles, you could invest in the “Bubbleator”, currently on sale at only £25 for 2!
Yes, I sneered at this nonsense, and then berated myself for falling for it all. For as I walked around the store, my son challenged my scepticism by loving all the things I hated. He actually cried when I took away the evil gremlin toy. Cried! But then he stopped crying ten seconds later when I waved something else in his face, then cried when I took that away. This pattern repeated itself as we mooched around the store for over an hour, clearly proving that he didn’t really love these toys, he just got excited by anything new.
Yet it took all my mental and emotional strength to walk out of that store without spending any money.
At the moment, my son loves nothing more than to hit a spoon on the tray of his highchair. Literally hours of entertainment. It’s prompted at least 3 people to say, “Ooh, shall I get him a drum kit for his birthday?” to which I respond, “Why?” He doesn’t need a drum kit. He’s made his own, which will never get boring like the toys in the shop did, because as soon as it does, I can just give him a different spoon or tray. The possibilities are endless! Why waste your money on buying him something which he can imagine and create himself?
Still, I know that on his next birthday we’ll be bombarded by drum kits, electronic gismos and all sorts of other lovely but inevitably short-lived presents. Because that’s what you do. Even when the children are too young to ‘pester’ us for what they want, the consumer culture is so ingrained in adults we can’t help but go out and buy loads of stuff for them anyway.
So maybe ‘Leave Our Kids Alone’ is right. Maybe we should be fighting harder against the insidious influence of the advertising industry. Maybe we should be exercising more control over what our kids are exposed to. And maybe, occasionally, we should just leave our kids alone – preferably with a wooden spoon, a biscuit tin lid and sitting in a washing basket…
Sceptical Mum 