The truly incredible thing about being a parent is that you're constantly learning and experiencing new things with your child. Just when you think you've got it sussed, something surprises you.
This morning we experienced one of us clinging for dear life to the school gate shouting "YOU CAN'T MAKE ME GO!" (it was him, in case you were wondering) and we learned just how embarrassing a 4-year-old child can actually be when he really puts his mind to it. The surprise element was that this child, who up to now has taken life in his stride without a moment's self-doubt, has worried himself into a tantrum over his first full day at school.
The last two weeks have been half-days, but from today my son's school career starts in earnest. He's wound himself up about there being 'millions' of people there because it's the first time there will be a full class ("You do know that Jimmy Krankie* will be going today, don't you Mummy? He's trouble. He's a troublemaker. Honestly. He was trouble at playschool. So I shouldn't have to go if he's going, should I?") and he's very concerned that I might do something exciting in his absence ("You won't go and buy any bread without me, will
you?") But I still wasn't prepared to have to physically propel him towards the school gates as he furiously shouted "Get OFF me! I'm not your child!" at the top of his voice, and then prise his determined little fingers off the gate post while the other parents (whose children were, of course, standing quietly holding hands with their guardians as if butter wouldn't melt) gave me sympathetic "we've all been there" smiles, ignored us both completely, or failed to hide an irritating "thank God it's not mine" expression of smugness.
Driving home with a heavy heart, I cried from the guilt of leaving my baby unhappy, after he'd clung to me and begged me not to go, and from tiredness after being awake most of the night worrying because I knew he was.
At the same time, I suspect he was playing happily with his fellow prisoners of education in his bright, friendly classroom and sparing not a moment's thought for home.
Such is the lot of a mother.
* Names have been changed to protect the troublemakers. Or at least their mothers.
Monday, 21 September 2009
Tuesday, 15 September 2009
A New Phase of Evil
The toddler I used to write about started school last week. It's a truism that time flies at a speed that almost blurs your vision when you have a young child, and his pre-school years have been no exception. Suddenly my baby is an eloquent, ferociously bright schoolboy, and as his mother for me the first few days of starting school were a bittersweet blend of fierce pride and excitement mingled with nostalgia and a feeling of loss for what is now past.
For him, there was just excitement: new uniform, new classroom, new friends, new adventures. He started his school career in typically independent style, and on the second day I found him on the pavement waiting for me when I arrived to pick him up. He'd walked out unnoticed as soon as they'd opened the doors to allow parents in to collect their children, deciding he'd save me the walk to the classroom from the school gate. One visit to his class teacher and a phone call to the head later, eliciting much horror and mortification from all concerned, and a flea would have trouble exiting the school without permission. That's just my way of making a point; any sign of actual fleas will prompt another call to Mr Headmaster.
The first week was just morning attendance, and after school on the third day I treated my boy to a session at a local playbarn. There he met one of his new school friends. They played happily together until my son's lunch arrived when he grumpily left his playmate whooping down slides and clambering up foam bricks to eat it.
"Have I eaten enough?" he asked, approximately every 4 seconds. I told him he had to eat his lunch and then he could return to his friend.
Presently, the friend mooched by to assess the situation. He looked at my son's plate.
"I had that too," he observed.
"Did you have to eat it all?" asked my son, crossly.
"No. I left some of it because I was full."
My son glared at me, then turned to his companion.
"SHE says I've got to eat all mine," he grumbled, then added with venom, "She's evil".
His new friend gasped. "IS she?" he asked, breathlessly. He stared at me in fascination, as if trying to decide whether having an evil mother was interesting enough to override the obvious downsides.
My son continued to grumble. His friend, still keeping a beady eye on me in case I suddenly burst into flame and poked him with a trident, remarked that he'd enjoyed a dessert of delicious chocolate cake.
"Even though you didn't eat your lunch?" I asked, becoming my own mother. "I thought you were full."
"Well I was full of my LUNCH. But I left room for the chocolate cake," he replied with a 4-year-old's sturdy logic.
"Can I have some chocolate cake?" asked my son, predictably.
"If you eat 3 more mouthfuls of your lunch," I replied, almost automatically.
His school friend gazed at me with a look of slight disappointment in his eyes.
"Oh," he said to my son, dejectedly. "She's not that evil after all."
For him, there was just excitement: new uniform, new classroom, new friends, new adventures. He started his school career in typically independent style, and on the second day I found him on the pavement waiting for me when I arrived to pick him up. He'd walked out unnoticed as soon as they'd opened the doors to allow parents in to collect their children, deciding he'd save me the walk to the classroom from the school gate. One visit to his class teacher and a phone call to the head later, eliciting much horror and mortification from all concerned, and a flea would have trouble exiting the school without permission. That's just my way of making a point; any sign of actual fleas will prompt another call to Mr Headmaster.
The first week was just morning attendance, and after school on the third day I treated my boy to a session at a local playbarn. There he met one of his new school friends. They played happily together until my son's lunch arrived when he grumpily left his playmate whooping down slides and clambering up foam bricks to eat it.
"Have I eaten enough?" he asked, approximately every 4 seconds. I told him he had to eat his lunch and then he could return to his friend.
Presently, the friend mooched by to assess the situation. He looked at my son's plate.
"I had that too," he observed.
"Did you have to eat it all?" asked my son, crossly.
"No. I left some of it because I was full."
My son glared at me, then turned to his companion.
"SHE says I've got to eat all mine," he grumbled, then added with venom, "She's evil".
His new friend gasped. "IS she?" he asked, breathlessly. He stared at me in fascination, as if trying to decide whether having an evil mother was interesting enough to override the obvious downsides.
My son continued to grumble. His friend, still keeping a beady eye on me in case I suddenly burst into flame and poked him with a trident, remarked that he'd enjoyed a dessert of delicious chocolate cake.
"Even though you didn't eat your lunch?" I asked, becoming my own mother. "I thought you were full."
"Well I was full of my LUNCH. But I left room for the chocolate cake," he replied with a 4-year-old's sturdy logic.
"Can I have some chocolate cake?" asked my son, predictably.
"If you eat 3 more mouthfuls of your lunch," I replied, almost automatically.
His school friend gazed at me with a look of slight disappointment in his eyes.
"Oh," he said to my son, dejectedly. "She's not that evil after all."
Thursday, 20 November 2008
Blast from the Past
A few weeks ago, I bumped into the love of my life. It happened just off the square of the town in which we used to live, at the monthly Farmer's Market. Given his life-long fondness of a good meal, it was always likely that it would be at a food-based event that I eventually ran into him. (My sister has since seen him at a wine tasting evening and in the queue at the local farm shop in the space of a fortnight).
I was with my mother and my son when I spotted the love of my life standing in the street chatting to his father about twenty yards away. He was with the love of his life (presumably) and their two children. Well, he was with a woman and two children, so I joined up the dots.
My mother hadn't noticed him, so I had hoped for a painless and quick scenario where I blithely walked straight past un-noticed, but regrettably my mother noticed a pretty dress in a shop window just as we drew level with the spot where he was laughing with his family, and said "Oh, just wait there a second, I won't be a moment!" and ducked into the shop before I could hiss an expletive to prevent her. Like the graceless klutz I am, instead of just continuing to walk and waiting for her further up the street, I stood frozen to the spot in mortification praying that he wouldn't notice me. Of course, I needn't have worried. He did notice me, and I could tell that he had by the way he very carefully looked straight through me and by the very deliberate air with which he didn't look in my direction again.
It is almost ten years since he took me to Paris for my birthday and we moved into our new home together a week later. We'd met at sixth form college, but parted later when we went to different universities. After our respective graduations we'd both returned to the area and he'd written to me. It was all rather romantic really - of course a proper letter, on proper writing paper that arrives through the post, is in itself much more romantic than it would be these days. If it was happening now, I suppose he'd just look me up on Facebook and ask for my number so he could text me. We were friends for a while, both of us making a fuss about how very mature we were by being able to put our past relationship behind us and strike up a friendship now we were older. I studiously ignored the fact that I’d loved him the whole time and still did. He’d qualified as a lawyer by then, and took his great pride in his professionalism. It wasn't until I called at his office on his birthday to surprise him with a posh birthday cake (as you do for your casual friends, of course) and actually surprised myself instead when, delighted, he’d hugged me within full view of his secretary and as I breathed him in the unbidden thought "Got you!" popped into my head that I admitted I was kidding myself.
I was right of course, and not long afterwards, to our surprise and to the shock of precisely no-one else, our relationship was well and truly back on. Eighteen months or so after we’d resumed contact, he started pushing for us to buy a house together and I was over the moon. We bought a flat and I excitedly moved in with the man I assumed would one day be my husband and the father of my children.
It is commonly said that making assumptions is dangerous, and I can't say I disproved the theory. A year later, out of the blue as far as I was concerned, he left. He announced his departure on Christmas Eve. I stood in our living room with the church bells pealing to signal the dawn of Christmas Day in the distance as he told me. I fled like a wounded animal to my parents' house in the middle of the night, and when I returned the next morning to talk to him, he was gone. He’d taken his Christmas presents with him, which was a bad sign and also, I felt, a gesture slightly lacking in finesse. I wandered around that flat like a lost soul in the days that followed, waiting to wake up from the nightmare I'd found myself in, desperate to find myself back in my life as I knew it. Eventually I plucked up the courage to go to his father's house to try to persuade him to come home. He promised to come to our flat to talk to me, which he did, and it was when he told me that having thought long and hard about what being with me added to his life, and realised the answer was 'nothing' that I realised he was truly lost to me. I could have answered the same question about what he added to my life without hesitation: him. In fact, I had rather thought that was the point. Evidently, he had expected something more than just 'me' - some kind of dowry perhaps? A possibility that I might win the lottery within the first year of cohabitation? A few camels? Who knows.
The professionalism (and the letter writing) I had previously admired bit me on the backside when I began to receive solicitors' letters from him concerning the division of our home and its contents. My greatest ally had suddenly, and incomprehensibly, become my adversary. And after the formalities were finally all over, on the few occasions I bumped into him in the following months, he completely ignored my existence as if I was a total stranger. I'd like to think it was a coping mechanism rather than cruelty, but I’ll never know. For this reason, however, I wasn't surprised at the practised indifference that day in the street.
As I stood there almost a decade later, it seemed like no time at all since he'd gone, and yet a lifetime. His wife (or as good as) was pretty, blonde, smiley and chatty, and for a surreal moment the scene before me put me in mind of a play with someone else playing my part. Of course the truth is that I had once been temporarily playing her part. I was the understudy; the warm-up act. I was Jennifer to her Angelina, to give myself a flattering counterpart (and to flatter him to a quite ridiculous extent). I surreptitiously studied her without jealousy but with fascination. Why her, but not me? What was the magic ingredient that she had, and that I had lacked?
But the thing that really fascinated me about the whole encounter was that as I stood there, no-one other than he and I even knew we were acquainted. Saturday morning life hurried by. His wife chatted away, oblivious to the fact that the nervous-looking woman standing by the dress shop window who kept bending down to fiddle needlessly with the buttons on her small son's coat once had a joint bank account with her husband. She certainly didn’t recognise me, or perhaps even know of my existence in her husband’s past at all. No passers-by would have ever guessed that these two strangers once shared the same address. And yet the day that this man left me, literally my whole life had changed. I had been catapulted from the steady path I had been sure my life was following and flung unceremoniously onto a completely different trajectory on someone else’s decision, and no amount of protestation or refusal from me could prevent it. Nothing was the same as it would have been had it not happened. A few months later, when I had reached the point where I had to swim or drown, I had picked myself up, gritted my teeth, and foolishly embarked on a new relationship with someone to whom I was completely unsuited. That relationship had limped on unhappily for much, much too long, mainly because I had something to prove, and had eventually ended when I became pregnant. As I stood in the street, I looked down at my golden-haired child and reflected on the ironies of life; if the man standing a few yards away – the man I had chosen as my partner in life, and with whom I had wanted to have children - hadn't smashed my heart to pieces, then the only other person who has ever claimed my heart and soul even more completely would never have existed. One had to be forfeit for the other to be possible. There could never have been both. I marvelled at the concept of all this bubbling beneath the surface of a small town street on an ordinary Saturday morning. How many more silent personal dramas were playing out at the same time? At any time? It was so understated. So subtle. We're so used to life being portrayed in soaps and TV dramas, dirty linen on display, everything out in the open, but the real dramas in our lives are muted and un-noticed.
There had been questions about his departure that I had never had answered. What did I do to deserve that treatment? Why did you seek me out and take it that far just to break my heart? Why couldn’t you have just left well alone? Why did you behave so abominably? I had felt cheated, deprived, betrayed, wronged. In a nutshell; why, why, WHY did you leave? Of course, I will never know the answers. Perhaps he never knew them either. I laughed to myself as I imagined the same scene in a soap. My character would ask outright, as loudly as possible, and in front of the greatest assembled number of family, friends and general acquaintances possible, “Wot’s she got that I ain’t?” What would his answer be, as his horrified wife looked on?
“Well, she never describes my job as “making money off the backs of other people’s misery” or refers to me as “an ambulance chaser”. She doesn’t swear at the police when they phone up in the middle of the night for the duty solicitor. She understands that my life is in tatters when Stoke City lose. She comprehends how my important it is for me to play football games on the computer. She doesn’t smoke, or moan, or refuse to speak in the mornings until she’s had two cups of tea. She doesn’t drink too much at The Firm’s Christmas parties and spill Baileys down the expensive designer dress that I bought her and then wipe it off with my tie, or fall over in the ladies’ toilets whilst trying to smoke a sneaky cigarette and think I won’t notice. She doesn’t scoff at the amount of hair gel I use, or complain about the style of pants I wear. She doesn’t pinch my books before I’ve finished reading them and refuse to give them back until she’s finished herself, and she didn’t laugh herself silly for a week when I got a speeding ticket and point out the irony of it to everyone in her acquaintance, evidencing the fact that I am the world’s slowest, worst and most cautious driver as the source of her mirth.”
As my mother rolled out of the dress shop without an inkling of the drama that had been silently and invisibly unfolding and we walked away, I glanced back one more time and smiled to myself. The true answer was blindingly obvious, of course. She was just a better cook.
I was with my mother and my son when I spotted the love of my life standing in the street chatting to his father about twenty yards away. He was with the love of his life (presumably) and their two children. Well, he was with a woman and two children, so I joined up the dots.
My mother hadn't noticed him, so I had hoped for a painless and quick scenario where I blithely walked straight past un-noticed, but regrettably my mother noticed a pretty dress in a shop window just as we drew level with the spot where he was laughing with his family, and said "Oh, just wait there a second, I won't be a moment!" and ducked into the shop before I could hiss an expletive to prevent her. Like the graceless klutz I am, instead of just continuing to walk and waiting for her further up the street, I stood frozen to the spot in mortification praying that he wouldn't notice me. Of course, I needn't have worried. He did notice me, and I could tell that he had by the way he very carefully looked straight through me and by the very deliberate air with which he didn't look in my direction again.
It is almost ten years since he took me to Paris for my birthday and we moved into our new home together a week later. We'd met at sixth form college, but parted later when we went to different universities. After our respective graduations we'd both returned to the area and he'd written to me. It was all rather romantic really - of course a proper letter, on proper writing paper that arrives through the post, is in itself much more romantic than it would be these days. If it was happening now, I suppose he'd just look me up on Facebook and ask for my number so he could text me. We were friends for a while, both of us making a fuss about how very mature we were by being able to put our past relationship behind us and strike up a friendship now we were older. I studiously ignored the fact that I’d loved him the whole time and still did. He’d qualified as a lawyer by then, and took his great pride in his professionalism. It wasn't until I called at his office on his birthday to surprise him with a posh birthday cake (as you do for your casual friends, of course) and actually surprised myself instead when, delighted, he’d hugged me within full view of his secretary and as I breathed him in the unbidden thought "Got you!" popped into my head that I admitted I was kidding myself.
I was right of course, and not long afterwards, to our surprise and to the shock of precisely no-one else, our relationship was well and truly back on. Eighteen months or so after we’d resumed contact, he started pushing for us to buy a house together and I was over the moon. We bought a flat and I excitedly moved in with the man I assumed would one day be my husband and the father of my children.
It is commonly said that making assumptions is dangerous, and I can't say I disproved the theory. A year later, out of the blue as far as I was concerned, he left. He announced his departure on Christmas Eve. I stood in our living room with the church bells pealing to signal the dawn of Christmas Day in the distance as he told me. I fled like a wounded animal to my parents' house in the middle of the night, and when I returned the next morning to talk to him, he was gone. He’d taken his Christmas presents with him, which was a bad sign and also, I felt, a gesture slightly lacking in finesse. I wandered around that flat like a lost soul in the days that followed, waiting to wake up from the nightmare I'd found myself in, desperate to find myself back in my life as I knew it. Eventually I plucked up the courage to go to his father's house to try to persuade him to come home. He promised to come to our flat to talk to me, which he did, and it was when he told me that having thought long and hard about what being with me added to his life, and realised the answer was 'nothing' that I realised he was truly lost to me. I could have answered the same question about what he added to my life without hesitation: him. In fact, I had rather thought that was the point. Evidently, he had expected something more than just 'me' - some kind of dowry perhaps? A possibility that I might win the lottery within the first year of cohabitation? A few camels? Who knows.
The professionalism (and the letter writing) I had previously admired bit me on the backside when I began to receive solicitors' letters from him concerning the division of our home and its contents. My greatest ally had suddenly, and incomprehensibly, become my adversary. And after the formalities were finally all over, on the few occasions I bumped into him in the following months, he completely ignored my existence as if I was a total stranger. I'd like to think it was a coping mechanism rather than cruelty, but I’ll never know. For this reason, however, I wasn't surprised at the practised indifference that day in the street.
As I stood there almost a decade later, it seemed like no time at all since he'd gone, and yet a lifetime. His wife (or as good as) was pretty, blonde, smiley and chatty, and for a surreal moment the scene before me put me in mind of a play with someone else playing my part. Of course the truth is that I had once been temporarily playing her part. I was the understudy; the warm-up act. I was Jennifer to her Angelina, to give myself a flattering counterpart (and to flatter him to a quite ridiculous extent). I surreptitiously studied her without jealousy but with fascination. Why her, but not me? What was the magic ingredient that she had, and that I had lacked?
But the thing that really fascinated me about the whole encounter was that as I stood there, no-one other than he and I even knew we were acquainted. Saturday morning life hurried by. His wife chatted away, oblivious to the fact that the nervous-looking woman standing by the dress shop window who kept bending down to fiddle needlessly with the buttons on her small son's coat once had a joint bank account with her husband. She certainly didn’t recognise me, or perhaps even know of my existence in her husband’s past at all. No passers-by would have ever guessed that these two strangers once shared the same address. And yet the day that this man left me, literally my whole life had changed. I had been catapulted from the steady path I had been sure my life was following and flung unceremoniously onto a completely different trajectory on someone else’s decision, and no amount of protestation or refusal from me could prevent it. Nothing was the same as it would have been had it not happened. A few months later, when I had reached the point where I had to swim or drown, I had picked myself up, gritted my teeth, and foolishly embarked on a new relationship with someone to whom I was completely unsuited. That relationship had limped on unhappily for much, much too long, mainly because I had something to prove, and had eventually ended when I became pregnant. As I stood in the street, I looked down at my golden-haired child and reflected on the ironies of life; if the man standing a few yards away – the man I had chosen as my partner in life, and with whom I had wanted to have children - hadn't smashed my heart to pieces, then the only other person who has ever claimed my heart and soul even more completely would never have existed. One had to be forfeit for the other to be possible. There could never have been both. I marvelled at the concept of all this bubbling beneath the surface of a small town street on an ordinary Saturday morning. How many more silent personal dramas were playing out at the same time? At any time? It was so understated. So subtle. We're so used to life being portrayed in soaps and TV dramas, dirty linen on display, everything out in the open, but the real dramas in our lives are muted and un-noticed.
There had been questions about his departure that I had never had answered. What did I do to deserve that treatment? Why did you seek me out and take it that far just to break my heart? Why couldn’t you have just left well alone? Why did you behave so abominably? I had felt cheated, deprived, betrayed, wronged. In a nutshell; why, why, WHY did you leave? Of course, I will never know the answers. Perhaps he never knew them either. I laughed to myself as I imagined the same scene in a soap. My character would ask outright, as loudly as possible, and in front of the greatest assembled number of family, friends and general acquaintances possible, “Wot’s she got that I ain’t?” What would his answer be, as his horrified wife looked on?
“Well, she never describes my job as “making money off the backs of other people’s misery” or refers to me as “an ambulance chaser”. She doesn’t swear at the police when they phone up in the middle of the night for the duty solicitor. She understands that my life is in tatters when Stoke City lose. She comprehends how my important it is for me to play football games on the computer. She doesn’t smoke, or moan, or refuse to speak in the mornings until she’s had two cups of tea. She doesn’t drink too much at The Firm’s Christmas parties and spill Baileys down the expensive designer dress that I bought her and then wipe it off with my tie, or fall over in the ladies’ toilets whilst trying to smoke a sneaky cigarette and think I won’t notice. She doesn’t scoff at the amount of hair gel I use, or complain about the style of pants I wear. She doesn’t pinch my books before I’ve finished reading them and refuse to give them back until she’s finished herself, and she didn’t laugh herself silly for a week when I got a speeding ticket and point out the irony of it to everyone in her acquaintance, evidencing the fact that I am the world’s slowest, worst and most cautious driver as the source of her mirth.”
As my mother rolled out of the dress shop without an inkling of the drama that had been silently and invisibly unfolding and we walked away, I glanced back one more time and smiled to myself. The true answer was blindingly obvious, of course. She was just a better cook.
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