Motherhood – Page 2

Steady selfish

20th March 2018 · Leave a Comment

My parents divorced when I was a child, leaving me fearful of abandonment. This, compounded by my father’s profession – an airline pilot – meant that in my young mind, I worried about plane crashes too. Meanwhile, my brother, who is seven years older than me, navigated the treacherous waters of being teenage with a single mother. Despite my Mum’s best efforts, our home was not always calm. I would climb into her bed some nights, listening to her breathe and she would allow me to sleep there, safe in the knowledge that she was not going anywhere. As I write this, I sense the faint fingerprint remaining from my childhood. Divorce can be misunderstood by those who haven’t experienced it. It’s not that I didn’t understand my Dad had to go, and it’s not even that his leaving impacted us so much in the day to day; after all, pilots are away a lot. But the bedrock on which I relied was no longer sound. It remained, some semblance of its former self, but it was jagged and uneven, and there were gaps where steadfastness used to be. I wonder now if I have fabricated this perception because I have reflected on my own childhood and cross-referenced it with that of my own children? Isn’t that what being middle-aged is all about? Looking back and looking forward; stranded midway.

My children walk on steady bedrock. That is because my husband and I provide it for them, and I particularly, as I don’t ‘work’ for a living, devote myself to ensuring bedrock stability. That sounds as if we lack selfishness. I note in the media the recent preoccupation with ‘self care’ – and how we should all practice it. I wonder: is self care just selfishness, its thinly disguised cousin? I resolve to put myself first more. The happiness of everyone depends on it. But self care can feel like a little-used habit from the past. I remind myself I spent 25 years with just myself, no children to think of, how hard can it be?

I watched a documentary about Joan Didion on Netflix which was fascinating but also tragic, and I was struck by a comment she made about her ill-fated daughter, who died in her late thirties. She said her daughter found her remote. When I watched the cinematic footage of Joan in earlier years, writing prolifically, immersed in her craft, surrounded by other creatives, it’s clear that the life she strove for did not feature bedrock stability. It featured something else entirely; the pursuit of her own needs, her own compulsion to write. And as such it makes me wonder, as most people my age do, what’s it all about? I don’t write for a day or two because I do mother stuff, kid’s stuff, house stuff. The ‘pursuit of my own needs’ comes low down on the the ‘to do’ list.

When my own sixteen year old daughter sleeps in my bed, as she did so for a brief spell recently, it was for comfort, but also to draw strength. There was something in her own life that required bravery and clarity and she took that from me, her mother life-force. I didn’t see this until after it had ceased happening, and all that was left of those nights she slept next to me was the memory. This time round though, I listened to her breathing and recognised the same in-breath and out-breath of her babyhood, the same snuffles, the same sleeping sighs as she made her dream-led twists and turns. So elemental yet also incongruous, as when your child emerges in to young adulthood, you loose that sense of oneness with them. Their scent, their skin, that extension of yourself. She is me. I am her.

It’s curious but it is from these everyday inconsequential human nuances that I notice my writing gets richer. To me at least. It is there that I find words. I put off the pursuit of what I desire and aspire to because what happens in between is every day life. So these moments have to be lived and enjoyed and even, at times, endured, as from them comes the goodness.

SaveSave

The Education of Adults

17th January 2018 · Leave a Comment

It’s a curious thing, being nearly 44 years old. The shenanigans of middle age continue to bring new and exciting dimensions to life. I find myself noting the behaviour of my elders and wondering, as I’ve alluded to before; why the grump? Why the know-it-all? Why the backward-looking attitude? I heard a British social commentator say – in reference to the demographic of Americans who voted for Trump – that they were looking to restore the past. Rather than looking forward, the impetus was to go back, to make it like it was. They rue the day when the future encroached. But, as all humans (and most animals) know, there is no stopping the future, it’s going to come whether we like it or not. I notice too the passing of time – another Christmas, another new year’s eve, another cold and gloomy January. Time tick-tocks, and I see I am straddled between two places; what was and what will be. There may be an esoteric truth to this which can only be understood by the over-40’s. Am I the only one whom until my mid-thirties, had no thoughts on this topic? Sentimentality and nostalgia were not my constant companions then, as they are now.

I also notice the behaviour of the young, my children, their friends, the cohorts of youth, where everything is ahead of them and not behind. My children look back on their younger childhood and regard it fondly. I can isolate each event in memory and recall the effort involved in making it lovely. This activity is grossly exaggerated now I ‘don’t work’. I use that term reluctantly, as I feel like I work every damn minute of the day, until I fall into bed exhausted, but it assists me in making my point. Motherhood can be distilled into a series of efforts, some minuscule and some Herculean, all of them combining, we hope, to make up the whole: to raise a happy child. In amongst it, there are efforts that are misguided or just plain wrong. The times when not enough effort is made, or there’s too much and it overflows in an ugly spill.

I then look to my peers, the beleaguered 40-somethings! I regard my friends with insatiable interest; how are they doing it? Do they feel the same as I do? Is this what we signed up for? Why are we so guarded? Decisions of others are dissected and turned over in my hands, trying to see the angle.

I conclude it’s all a whopping, great big overthink.

Meanwhile, I am lecturing next week at the college where I did my MA. I am returning to spend time with the under-graduates to talk about writing and blogging. I’ve written a blog for eight years this month. Eight years!! Blogging has become almost unrecognisable to itself in that time, so much has changed.

I get asked, pretty much on a daily basis, ‘how’s the book?’ as if it’s a living, breathing thing, like ‘how’s the garden?’ or ‘how’s your mum?’. I pause, and reply that it’s going slowly. For all the momentum of an educational qualification and a publisher’s meeting, the fact remains that work still needs to be done to refine the book. What I produced was a first draft, and what I need it to be is a final draft. There can be fifty iterations between those two points. I notice this statement makes me feel like a fraud. Writers write; they might write every day, but the end result may not change that much. It feels like that now. I persevere. And fret about how hard the perseverance feels. Did I mention that writing, much like motherhood can be distilled into a series of efforts, some minuscule and some Herculean, all of them, we hope, combining to make up the whole: to create a book. The irony of my choice of pursuits is not lost on me.

January always was the pensive month, for all the talk about Blue Monday (to me; a perennial favourite of the 1980’s by New Order), the weather, the post-Christmas slump, the crazy, short-lived bursts of healthy eating and exercise regime, it remains a sullen, after-party sort of month. A time to endure whilst we wait for something better. Roll on the future.

Solstice

21st December 2017 · Leave a Comment

Forgive my addled mind; I blame it on my three-week enforced quarantine, as both of my children have systematically exchanged cold and flu viruses, and I have resembled a Florence Nightingale figure, day and night, ministering to them. Nothing like a sick child to halt proceedings. It happens this time of year as we face the shortest day and the sky darkens in mid afternoon and slides into night by 4pm. I curse it, and wonder how I spent so many years of my life not noticing, not caring about this frankly antisocial, anti-happy, antithesis of summer! We all muddle through in darkness and cold, waiting for respite: ‘it makes me grumpy’ I retort to my children, when they ask if I am alright, (and I clear the next round of soggy, used tissues to a soundtrack of coughing, and wash my hands for the millionth time). Find the joy, find the joy, find the joy!

In a looping, multi-faceted WhatsApp chat between myself and a dear friend, we comment on ‘noticing’, on how we now so aware of everything. The small things and the large. Poverty, crime, the environment, nature, weather, how everyone looks so damn old. We wonder if this is a 40-something trait, something that comes home to roost after our years of self-centredness? Were our twenties the same, or our thirties? I couldn’t tell you one major news story from my thirties; I was knee-deep in nappies, my ‘career’ and my own self-regard. Me, me, me. I consider that career now, which seemed so vital then, and wonder what it would have been like to have held on. Kept my toehold in the corporate cliff-face? Three weeks of sick children would have posed a Herculean challenge and I would be bathed in mother’s guilt by now, struggling. Isn’t this why I gave up? I gave up for many reasons, some of which I can’t even recall now, but wasn’t it to be able to respond to the demands of my family, when they arose? And to write…

Another good friend, who sensed my isolation, made an impromptu visit this week, and we shared glasses of wine. When we met, our children were four and now her son is seventeen and my daughter is sixteen. The preoccupations of the past no longer occupy us, and we have new ones; wild and varied ones that relate to the life of the modern teen and how to parent them. It’s something I’ve written about before in articles here and here. To break it down, it’s along the lines of parties, illegal substances and our abject fear of them somehow infiltrating our teenager’s well-briefed sphere of reality, university places, extracurricular activities, whether they should earn money (and where’s the time amidst studying?), are they OK? Is it all going to be OK? If I contrast this to ten years ago, the preoccupations would have been Phonics, dexterity, reading Jane and John books, learning their spellings, head lice outbreaks and was their friend mean to them at playtime? All said and done, and bed by 7pm.

Oh how things change! And that is what I notice now. Experience is a peculiar thing. The recognition of something similar to something you’ve seen before. What I find interesting is that even things from a year ago seem facile now. As your child accelerates towards adulthood, there are a litany of milestones that make the last milestone seems less significant. Where does it end?

Meanwhile, Netflix has been my best friend as I watched Alias Grace (absolutely spellbinding). And then, with my twelve-year-old son, who is bored with his kid’s TV after days of bedrest, watched ‘Anne with an E’, a revisiting of the classic ‘Anne of Green Gables’. I made chicken soup. I plumped pillows. I escaped to the hairdresser for the afternoon and in an act of rebellion, had my hair cut short and now feel slightly traumatised, but in a good way. I cleaned and sorted and did what the housebound do! I haven’t written a word of the novel for weeks and weeks and this weighs a little heavy. Can I get you a drink? Something to eat? But this is how it goes; the ups and downs. The light and the dark. Happy solstice…

Painting by my favourite, Jessica Cooper, ‘Red Apple’

Generational feminism: a mother’s view of her daughter

16th November 2017 · Leave a Comment

I notice the preoccupations of my daughter and her friends. They’re sixteen. They like the Kardashians and vintage clothes. Outfits that reek of 1990’s throwback, but do so ironically, as if the 1990’s were a long-lost age, not the one their parents have so recently emerged from, blinking into the light, murmuring ‘Wonderwall’. They consider themselves to be equal counterparts to their male friends, yet they regard much of what teenage boys do as alien, to be excused, dumb. I think: still? Boys, it seems, have no filter, no pause button, no method through which to edit their behaviour. Like puppy dogs. Teenage girls meanwhile, are clever, sassy, smart but also vulnerable, insecure and foolish. There’s a quagmire between the sexes, but it’s one they’re happy to wade through. For girls, the focus is on hair and even more on eyebrows; the application of eyebrows being the most important component of the day. Without them, there is a possibility that Instagram photos will be somewhat off; under-dressed. There are acrylic nails and lacy bralettes and beds that don’t get made. Dirty plates and smeary, two-day-old banana milkshakes, and crumpled Maccy D’s wrappers.

I notice the mothers of said teens, in contrast. Forty-something, sometimes fifty-something. Those who had late babies face the teenage reality as they simultaneously contemplate menopause. We like ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and ‘Big Little Lies’ and shop online as if the world depends on it. We wear outfits curated in the hope we don’t look dowdy, curmudgeonly, old. The dichotomous striving between too little and too much: is this too much? I ask my daughter. She replies ‘no’ and I am grateful for her tacit solidarity. We worry and fret and try to bridge the gap between the many prongs of our lives; husbands, in-laws, teens, pre-teens, parents in their 70’s, friends we haven’t seen for a year, but whom we email with fervour. There’s focus on grey roots and how to disguise them, on a slippery slope to becoming platinum blonde, we dye our once-healthy, lustrous hair until it’s straw-like in the onslaught. There are houses and cars and Nutri-bullets and electric toothbrushes. We own stuff. And we clean stuff up. We work and then we fantasise about not working. But mostly we try to decipher the future and observe in our daughters the next generation of women we’re raising; we are the planets and they are satellites entering our orbit. We intuit their behaviour, staving off the next demand, we try to respond appropriately and assuredly. Yet despite years of life experience, we feel as if we are winging it. Every. Damn. Day.

I refuse to see the downside. This is the way it goes. No matter how evolved I thought I was – dammit I was an early adopter of Snapchat; I am down with the kids – there is now weighty evidence that I am an entirely different generation to that of my children. Even though I thought I’d strap that baby girl to my back and carry-the-hell-on with my fabulous life, parenthood did eventually dig its heels in. Now I am a beleaguered veteran; I’ve done some time. I have a sixteen year old! And the road is not even at an end. It stretches ahead over the brow of a hill I haven’t even started to climb.

I remember the summer I graduated like it was last week, I am Generation X. I grew up with John Hughes movies and later, tried to gather the gall to cut my hair like Winona Ryder in ‘Reality Bites’ (I never did). My daughter does not even qualify for Generation Snowflake, but will morph into some as-yet-undefined grouping with worrying social traits, to be reported by the media. I ask her if she is a feminist, which is, on my part, a covert exercise to establish if the doctrines underpinning my own have rubbed off. She looks at me quizzically: is this a trick question? When I was a teenager, circa 1989, I recall feminism in my corner of rural England as synonymous with trouble-making, women who complained, left their husbands, messed up the status quo. Joined CND and camped out in Greenham Common. The status quo was fine and dandy, why change? My daughter regards the status quo but the drum-beat of societal change has been deafening during her life.

Is a feminist innate or is she (or he) made? Can you opt in or out? I feel like my generation opted in. For years, the ground on which feminism stood seemed steady. Sure-fast. It was simply a matter of building it up, adding to it, making it stronger. Now it feels different; a shift in perception. Gender fluidity means all accepted standards can and should be challenged in the name of equality, to enable those who feel marginal to feel less so. I sense threat when writing about this topic, I acknowledge the ease with which I could offend, how I may appear misinformed, blinkered, and note the misjudgments of others who inadvertently stray into the dangerous territory of gender politics. There’s a temptation to remain anodyne. It leads me to question how easily and seriously my daughter might form her views in such a volatile environment. Attitudes previously deemed to be acceptable by society have become the opposite.

I am not sure she knows what all the fuss is about; should women and men have equality? Errr, yea? Dummy. Her generation doesn’t really get the distinction; the glass ceiling is something which, at 16, they haven’t tapped a tentative finger on. Constructs are in place to ensure that, at least in her school experience, she does not perceive disadvantage. Can girls excel at Science and Maths? Of course. Can they play rugby and cricket? If they so wish. On the one hand they are empowered – absolutely so. They don’t consider they are segregated; the world is for the taking. Yet simultaneously, my daughter witnesses modern politics and seems to regard it as not directly relevant to her. Brexit. Trump. A woman Prime Minister in our country. A quiet rage might ignite in the face of injustice, but on the whole, I don’t see her demographic exercise activism. They haven’t worked out what they need to fight for. Yet.

Amongst her contemporaries, there is the perpetual invitation to comment, to ‘like’, to pass judgement, in a way that did not exist in my teenage years. Any attitude I might have fostered had time to grow strength and validity, to form part of an inner dialogue, stress-tested in my mind. Whereas in her connected, social-media enabled age, one false move can lead to a trolling on Twitter or a comment-fest on Instagram. When driving in the car, after the news has aired, I explain the Weinstein allegations to her, what happened and what women had been subjected to in his industry. I explain to her the righteous outcry, the abuse of power, the sexually motivated harassment that existed. I expand on the #Metoo concept; there is solidarity in knowing there are others and there is freedom and strength derived from exposing one’s oppressor.

But where does it all lead? What happens next? Will she be exempt when she takes her first job and someone in a position more senior to her abuses his power? Following decades of this systemic behaviour, do we now face a Brave New World? I consider: do men in 2017 feel brave? Do women? There’s the clear and obvious good that has come from recent events. Emma Thompson spoke eloquently about ‘the crisis in masculinity’ and how we must address that first, and she’s right. Like all newly identified and frightening facets of society, once they are exposed, we reel from the exposure – the rapid and unexpected pulling back of the curtain – but it takes time, humility and intelligence to define how to use that exposure for good. In this instance, it will take a whole generation, years and years of subtle (and not so subtle) change to alter the way a man perceives a woman as she enters the room. This must start with our sons as well as our daughters. It is mothers like myself who have the work to do now.

There will be those who may secretly wish things wouldn’t change. There will be men who overnight have become relics, dinosaurs, defined by their inability to recognise they belong to another era. The world has moved on. How should they behave now and must we acknowledge the fall-out of deriding a generation of men as inappropriate? They are fathers, husbands, brothers, colleagues, friends. As a seismic change takes place underfoot, the tectonic plates of gender are on the move and now a new landscape is discernible, complete with gaping crevasses between what was and what will be. And what of the accused? There’s instant judgement and castigation. Weinstein flashes across our screens. We imagine the manifestation of the sexual predator; the middle-aged, paunchy, powerful man. But it surely must apply to younger men, boys even, who are now navigating these waters? What of the accused teenage boy who thought he had consent but, it turns out, his perception differs to hers? So treacherous is it that my head spins at the prospect of guiding my daughter and my son through it and I, like every generation before me, think back with whimsy to my teenage years when we bought ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ by ‘The Cure’ on 7 inch vinyl and didn’t really question things. I see that era is gone. As it ever was, the older generation – my generation – will define the route forward, but it will be her generation who take the journey.

The beleaguered mothers

13th September 2017 · Leave a Comment

We sit amongst frothy-topped coffees and comment on our ailments. We are the beleaguered mothers. There’s self-deprecation in the morning confessional; we know it’s not the done thing to admit impediment. Yet a string of non-specific, self-diagnosed symptoms emerge: migraines, muscle tension, throat constriction, heartburn, abdominal pain, palpitations, teeth-clenching (my personal favourite). We laugh at ourselves, admonish our frailty and say in unison: ‘it’s the stress!’. That seems to cover it, the catch-all explanation for so many physical manifestations that afflict modern mothers.

It’s not the stress of the new mother; the sleep-deprived, life-curtailed fog that descends after you take the baby home, and lodges for the first year. It’s not the stress of shepherding them through toddlerhood; the fingers in plug sockets, falling down stairs, drinking bleach phase. Nor is it the middle years, where mothers face the reality of not being able to fix everything; no-one to play with at playtime, not being picked for the team, not taking to a sleepover. No, what affects my mother friends is something else. We are now veterans, we have been mothers for many years and are even starting to focus on that empty nest, somewhere discernible but hazy, on the horizon of the distant future. Parenting teenagers offers up a new type of stress. A vapid version of its predecessors; we are on the sideline of our children’s lives, looking in but no longer able to influence, wondering why this all feels so damn weird. Worrying as a job. Professional worriers.

There’s an obscenity to it and that is not lost on me. Here we have a group of women most of whom have not faced real hardship, not real stress, although for each of us there has been a fair share of challenge. No one is exempt from the reach of the conversation that continues, staccato, as we sip too-hot drinks and wonder how long we can steal away together before we really ought to get back to our lives, our commitments, our jobs.

We discuss the need for self-care and tell each other about obscure supplements (Slippery Elm and Ashwagandha), making a mental note to read up on, or acquire said pill. I inwardly fret I’ve shared too much. I suspect we all do. There’s that curious British need to maintain the stiff upper lip. We all say it’s been a great summer and lament the new school term, but secretly love it because it means we can function/work/socialise/be free again. There’s nothing like a group of school mums come September. Those first weeks of term – the freedom! The knowledge that your off-spring are where they are meant to be, learning, and being cared for by other, fully trained adults.

I sit and observe. It is this group of women in whom I am interested. It is these about whom I wrote my novel; the forty-somethings trying to make sense of the mid-life crevasse they find themselves avoiding. The sandwich generation who, once they stop discussing their teenagers, start right in on discussing their older-generation parents. Or the affairs of our peers. Oh the irony! But of course we are also the ‘grateful’ generation. We acknowledge that we have it all. We are the women who were brought up to smash the glass ceiling and many of us gave it a good tap, and still do. It’s just that the stress involved in doing so causes migraines, tense muscles, throat constriction, heartburn, abdominal pain, palpitations and teeth-clenching! Haha!

It seems that what it all boils down to is ability to chill out and not take ourselves all so seriously. We look to each other to see who has mastered this. The ideal reaction is to not react. We agree to work on that, until next time…and enjoy the solidarity of not feeling alone. We are a tribe.

Burger

20th April 2017 · Leave a Comment

I’ve been underground; that is, I’ve been otherwise engaged. School holidays spell distraction for me and as I near the blessed end to each one, I secretly relish the prospect that they’ll go back to school and I get to be alone for a moment. I am sure I write the same sentiment every year after Easter. That slightly guilty, slightly wayward feeling intense parenting provokes, when I am in the company of my children so much I wonder where they stop and I begin. Friends have doled out advice in recent weeks as I’ve hit a spiral of self-doubt; part professional (will I ever finish this damn book?!) and part personal (life feels like awfully hard work right now). I need to take a step back and put in place all the usual measures: yoga, good food, better sleep, walking, planning, trying to calm my worries. Turning the amplifier down.

It never comes naturally to me, but I persist.

The season shifted and the wisteria on my house went from tight, unfurled buds to near bloom in a few days. My son turned twelve. My daughter got to grips with her exam revision and we all breathed a sigh of relief. Can I just say that trying to learn ten subjects intimately when you are just fifteen years old is brutal?! She persists.

My peers and I refer to ourselves as the ‘sandwich’ generation; teenage children and parents who are getting older. We are the burger in the bun of life. Everyone’s peddling and wondering how life got so complicated. I find myself looking at women with young children and for the first time ever, feeling a curious wave of envy. Why? I didn’t even like that stage. I suppose what prompts me is the knowledge that when your children are small, everything is ahead of you. Now, as my daughter approaches her sixteenth year I find myself reaching for the memories of her birth like they have been filed away in a dusty box on top of a high shelf. Lid on.

And the book, well it’s on hold whilst I finish all of the academics now required to graduate. One essay down, one to go (the epic, big boy one). Bear with me, I’ll be back.

Broken sleep

21st March 2017 · Leave a Comment

There’s a sense that time is passing at an uncanny rate. I remind myself: no, this is just what happens in midlife. As a child, time was an impenetrable barrier, nothing sped up an hour. As a teen the same but with some consciousness. As a newly formed adult in my twenties, I was too busy being fabulous to notice. In my thirties I was neck-deep in caring for my babies. Time was something I never had enough of. Not on my own at least. I constantly had these happy campers with me. Years slipped by like pooh sticks under the bridge; fleeting. Bittersweet. Then to my forties, where I am now. Two types of time. When I have it – still a phenomemon that unnerves me, my children might be at school – I am free-wheeling, should-be-doing-something-more-useful but instead I am suspended, truanting. Then not enough time; watching them grow up, wishing to press ‘pause’. I notice that my commentary here refers to them and not me. Everything I think about myself is in relation to them. I commented to a friend yesterday that I spent 26 years on this earth as an individual before I became a mother. Why then won’t it be possible to shift back into that status when my children grow up? We looked at each other perplexed as we know: it doesn’t work that way.

I’m not sleeping well. I have deadlines looming, there’s a change coming. Decisions need to be made. Life – in its funny, imperceptible way has tilted on its axis and now I look forward and see uncertainty where before there was structure and form. My Masters will end this summer and I shall graduate. I will have achieved the objective; a book written, an academic mountain climbed. But then what? I am not sleeping well! It starts off alright but then I wake in the no-mans-land of 3am and am wide awake with ‘to do’ lists. I dreamt I was a ballerina and got the principal role. I then – due to a wardrobe malfunction – arrived late for the performance and the director was not happy. This smacks me as typical! I woke with questions: who was the director? Nameless faceless person I wanted to impress. Why did I not have the right ballet clothes? A tutu does not feature in my life. Why late? Because I was scrambling around trying to find ballet tights; an item of clothing I have not possessed since I was eight years old. During the 3am thought-fest I concluded that I was worried about missing my own show. This feeling of time slipping by and the instinct to pipe up and say: I’m not ready!!

Make of that what you will…

Meanwhile, it might just possibly be the end of winter some time soon and there might just possibly be a day where the sun shines all day and people smile. When daffodils are out, anything seems possible.

The mother’s stare

9th March 2017 · Leave a Comment

For those readers with children, you might be familiar with or recall a time when you stood on a pitch sideline and watched your child take part in some sport or another. This applies too to instrument players or singers; parents nestled in the audience watching a recital or a performance. The idea of mothers in rows fascinates me. After all, it was the mothers who were the starting point for my novel. My son changed schools when he was eight; in his first week as a new boy there was a swimming competition where all children competed. Parents were crammed in, that low-ceiling’ed, echoing bass of the swimming pool building, along with the smell of chlorine. I sat amongst the mothers and looked about the sea of faces and recognised barely one child. These contemporaries of my sons would become his trusted friends. It’s a strange thing when your child is at a school. Their group of peers will become your yardstick for most things over the course of about ten years. Ties to them may stay long after their time at that school has ended and your child has moved on. And the mothers, who you will stand next to daily, will become part of your life in a way you could scarcely imagine when you had a newborn baby.

Now I am seasoned, the school mothers have been a part of my life for over ten years and amongst them I have made some deep and lasting friendships. I have also observed the human condition in all of its intricacy; the plight of divorce, illness, the joy of younger siblings, success and failure, the gaining of jobs and money and the loss of them too. I take my place on the sideline, be it football or rugby or hockey and I stand there conversing. If you were to watch us what a curious sight we’d make. A distinct community of clones for in time, school mums all morph into looking the same, there’s a unspoken uniform. We look out to the pitch, standing in a line and the conversation ebbs and flows as dogs sit patiently, where mud is a regular feature. We rarely make eye contact as we are there to watch the game, so it’s hard to gauge the body language and occasionally we break from form and look to each other, laughing maybe and our kids probably think we haven’t been watching them all along. It always happens right at the time they score a goal or make a break. In some schools this rigamarole is a twice-a-week endeavour; Wednesdays and Saturdays. The working mothers can’t generally make it midweek but occasionally do. The stay at home mothers treat it like a job. This is the mother’s equivalent to the coffee machine in the office. Fascinating and curious and the basis of so much book material I could hardly detail it here!

Maybe because they know this they regard me with suspicion, my friends often joke: ‘you could put this in the book!’ and I wonder if they think that would be a good outcome or a bad one? To recognise oneself in print? It all depends I suspect.

I wonder now what will happen when these days of match and play watching will end? Will there be a void? What has become the underpinning to the mother’s week will start to float away as teenagers say they’d rather their parents didn’t watch or stop playing altogether. And after that, what? They go to university and parents visit for Sunday roasts or to move them in and out of whichever student house? Where will the mother’s stare rest then? Not to mention the time when there’s no real reason to visit – maybe until there are grandchildren? This future of mine spirals ahead in a blur because – a bit like when you have a new born – I can’t even envisage what that will feel like. The parental journey keeps its allure by providing an never-ending series of outcomes that you hadn’t expected. As one of my very clever mother friends said; parents are always in catch-up mode, their children are and will always be at least five steps ahead. Often what is ahead is what simply has not occurred to us yet.

To anthologise

4th March 2017 · Leave a Comment

Saturday morning. Before I wake them, when the house is quiet I sit and type in stutters because the ‘space’ key is sticky on my keyboard. A rogue spill of orange juice from my son? Something makes it stick every other word so I have to track back, add in space, go forward again. Saturday means sport fixtures and squeezed-in dog walks and not nearly as much relaxation as there should be. For me the weekends are busier because everyone is home. Honestly, were weekends ever relaxing after having children?! Not really. My mind casts back to time pre-children when Saturdays meant a day off. There’s no such thing as a ‘day off’ in family life. Once I’d opened my eyes this morning, I scrolled through Pinterest; it comes fourth in my online catch-up, after email, Instagram, the news and Facebook. I imagine all over the world people reaching for their phones as they wake and think ‘how did this happen to the human race?’ But it has and so my phone is my waking friend. On Pinterest – which can always be relied on for a quote to get you though the day – it said ‘Cherish this day with your children for you will never get it again.’ I caused me to stop and think, yes I suppose so. Live each day. But the reality is that this Saturday kinda looks like last Saturday and the one before. Life is punctuated with breaks from the routine but it is the routine that makes the life.

I looked through old photos this week and had that odd feeling where I saw myself ten years ago and thought how different I looked. How little my children were. I know if I were to fast-forward ten years I’d be looking at photos from now and be thinking the same. That’s how it goes with parenthood, it seems you can only imagine your child as they are today where they are the epitome of themselves.

I should’ve been doing more writing this week. Everything is narrowing down to the final of my degrees thesis which has to be submitted in May. A strange feeling; it took me a year to get used to being a student again, these brief months are the enjoyment of that status and then in the near future I see it will all be over. I’ve mixed emotions but the prospect of sitting at a Graduation Ceremony in July makes me happy – assuming I graduate! Hah. To get to that point there’s so much work to do it’s not even funny. The artist I have been working with to conceive a hypothetical book cover has completed his painting and I can next week go and collect it! It’s amazing how from a nub of an idea in my mind, this book has grown into something real, even though it’s not real yet.

My colleagues and I have been preparing our first two chapters for an Anthology that will be published this summer. So at the very least you can see what it’s all about! A literary ‘show and tell’, if you will. I’ll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, every conversation I have with anyone I meet laments the length of this winter and the hardiness of the British resolve to take on any weather thrown at us. I just want the sun. I’ve stood in enough muddy fields to make me distracted and restless. The prospect of bare feet almost unimaginable. Will it ever be warm enough for bare feet?!

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

The Advisory

1st November 2016 · 7 Comments

Everyone is full of advice. I am, we all are. At college we were discussing protocols for working in our tutor group and the question was asked: are you really listening or are you just waiting for your turn to speak? I thought about this; I fear I am a culprit. I am listening, for sure, but I hear myself interrupting people to speak. I wonder if this is a housewife thing? The dog doesn’t talk so I am in silence a fair amount of the time. I want to say something.

Isn’t that what blogging is about? Having something to say?

I formulate a whole raft of theories about raising teenagers. Now that I have one I secretly consider myself expert. I narrowed it down. My most pertinent piece of advice is this: eat dinners with them. That’s it. I would say that has been the single most crucial thing I have done as a parent since I have had a teen in the house.

I used to cook two meals; one for them and one for us later on. I then gradually realised that this sort of segregated eating pattern was odd – not to mention the tedium of cooking two meals, two times loading the dishwasher etc. I read that in a survey of happy and successful women the common denominator they reported was having experienced home-cooked family meals each night when growing up. At the time I read that I was working and had been known to give my kids porridge for dinner with chunks of apple as sprinkles. I thought to myself, it’s time to do better. I have written about this before but honestly I, like many others, didn’t really know how to cook. I could make a meal, sure, but I was not a culinary expert. Having children made me into one. Now people ask for my recipes. Now I hear my daughter’s friends referring to meals I have made. Now I cook for dinner parties like a real grown up. This makes me smile. Look how far I have come.

I cook meals for everyone every night. We have all sorts and sometimes it’s a really eclectic mix of ingredients – a staple in our house is [add name of any vegetable] topped with finely chopped red onions and drizzled with sea salt, olive oil and balsamic vinegar glaze. Can I just say balsamic vinegar glaze has rocked my world?

At these nightly meals we talk – and if conversation is not forthcoming then I ask what was the best thing in their day. They know we sit for at least half an hour and talk, food is served on the table, they help themselves and there are always two or three choices of side dishes. I don’t plate it up for them. This means they linger and we talk and in that time span we get family time. I also get a captive audience in which to talk about the hard stuff. The things that I think are important. Increasingly I come to the conclusion that raising healthy kids (and by this I don’t mean vegetable consumption I mean what’s in their heads) is all about giving them a secure base on which to make decisions. This secure base can only come from reiteration and having boundaries and on making sure that they know they have room to breath but also that the buck stops somewhere. It’s in these daily instalments that I can drip-feed all of the wisdom and sense that we might have accrued and they can make their own (better) choices from it. So there is it. Cook and eat and talk.

Spookily on my other wisdom about raising teens, I received an email from a very nice woman I met on corporate trip I attended with my husband. Turned out she had stumbled across an article I had written for Selfish Mother and contacted me to say: ‘Is that you?’ I said ‘Yes! Oh and I’m writing a book if you like what I write!’ All very cool.

Meanwhile, at the hairdresser today I was advised to go more blonde.

And at yoga I was advised that I was using my extremities to do too much of the work in my postures and I must use my core.

I’m sure that if my dog could speak he would advise me that rolling in fox shit is indeed a good idea and that is why he so regularly does it.

By the way, there is actually some great advice here from my friend Amanda on blogging and business.

And more than anything I advise myself to stop looking at clothes on line and to do something more useful like finish my college work. So that’s what I should do…