The Rule Book

Someone asked me today whether I ever had any rules for being a Mum. It was in the context of a discussion about how the rules change as your children grow up and also how I feel myself at present - away from the confines of a regular day job - a bit like the rule book has been thrown out of the window. His question made me pause to think and I wonder what rules I did have as a Mum and what rules any of us really follow?

Thinking back the golden rule in those manic initial months - the baptism of fire into motherhood - is of course to grab any rest you can as soon as you have an opportunity to do so. That pearl of wisdom from an older, seen-it-all-before relative "When baby sleeps, you sleep." In practical terms it doesn't work out that way as I remember trying to keep on top of the rest of life when baby slept, but the theory is sound. An image of scraping together something that vaguely resembles lunch from the previous night's dinner and hastily grabbing a moment in the shower, without baby in the bathroom with you, is the sort of thing I did in a dazed stupor at baby's nap time.

I am finding it hard to remember specific rules for managing as a parent, though I guess if you were to ask my children they would probably reel off several. I think we had more of a set of expectations rather than hard and fast rules. We expected our children to listen to others and in turn, we would listen to them. My dear friend and Godmother to both of my children has noted in the past that my eldest always expected to be included in the conversation and saw no distinction between himself and the adults in the room, taking his turn to speak alongside them. My daughter then followed suit from the example set. We expected that our children would sit down for mealtime, particularly if in a public place - no crawling or running around restaurants, no 'helicopter grazing' at home, picking at bits as they fancied rather than joining a mealtime. I guess then that social etiquette was taught by that example.  As for other rules, they would have centred around personal safety and respect for each other. That umbrella covers all of the daily necessities like "Don't touch the hob, wait at the kerb, put your toys back in the box when you've finished playing with them" and a whole host of similar statements. 

What rules do you have for your children? If you're not a parent, what rules do you remember from your own childhood? I wonder if you think they were fair or if with hindsight, you would change them. Keeping up with today's fast-paced life we probably need a fast-paced rule book, one that changes and adapts as issues arise. There's a lot that we needed to think about rules for that didn't exist when we were children. Screen time, internet access, gaming restrictions are just a few that come to mind. I still feel like I am playing catch-up in these areas and actually I have now run out of scope to be setting rules, as both of my children are now adults (well - the youngest is only six months away from being so.) Four adults, one dog, two guinea-pigs and a hamster all living in one space - there may not be rules but there needs to be a respect for each other's space and wishes. It won't be of any surprise to you to learn that it doesn't always work.

Looking back, I am sure that it didn't work for a lot of the time. There are so many parenting manuals available and a plethora of programmes to watch in the style of 'Super Nanny.'  Yet it doesn't really matter how much research you do, I still think that there are no real rules and no elusive magic way to be a parent. In danger of being called a hippy perhaps, I am not advocating having no rules for I firmly believe that children need boundaries and to know what they are. However, I think we all just do the best that we can, sometimes one day at a time, but the best that we can with the skills that we have and we keep our fingers crossed that somewhere along the line, it turns out okay.

When life gives you lemons...

So we’re into the new year now and I’ve started thinking about what may lay ahead and have definitely drawn that line under all that went before last year, to bring me to this place. Many of my recent blogs have explored my feelings about all of that: the job resignation, the need for a complete career break, the necessity of having some head space - I don’t need to evidence it all again here. Needless to say, analysing it all, it would be easy to surmise that life gave me some lemons last year. So what should I do with them?

Lots of quirky phrases are out there to complete the statement ‘when life gives you lemons...’ They are found on t-shirts, memes and more, so go ahead and pick one that suits you best. What statement would I choose? 
Well, I could follow the usual saying and make lemonade. In my experience though, anything fizzy is all very exciting at the beginning but usually gets messy very quickly and I don’t need anything else sticky to clear up in my life! 

Talking of clearing up, there are many good uses for a lemon in regard to their cleaning properties - now I’m thinking of all those household tips where a lemon is your best friend but I don’t think the marigolds look is quite the fashion statement that I’m going for. Even though metaphorically speaking, I am certainly cleaning house - new broom and all that.

I am finding my direction at the moment and also thinking about how to organise myself a new routine, for I do think that life without any routine does quickly lose its appeal and anyway, there are always things that have to be done at some point in the day or week. Necessity is the mother of invention, or so the saying goes. Well the necessity of the dog needing exercise has meant that I am carving out certain times of the day devoted to exercise both for the dog and myself. Secondly, cutting out one wage earner from the family will obviously have implications which we are yet to adjust to. As part of this though, I have found myself re-evaluating how we shop and how and what we cook, which in the long term will bring more home cooking - in turn hopefully developing my confidence in creating meals. Lastly, I have also been considering when I schedule in writing opportunities for myself- so far this year, I have managed to write in some way or another on almost every day, though I now need to find the time and inspiration to begin a real project properly.

This Christmas I received two kitchen gadgets that I am yet to try out: a new mixer and a slow cooker. I feel like a trailer for one of those glossy TV cookery programmes extolling the virtues of home baking and meals designed to complete the image of the happy family seated around the table, sharing anecdotes about their day. Yet, it is something that I aspire to. I have always enjoyed baking and creating cakes for various occasions so I am looking forward to re-visiting this and maybe having the space and time to improve some of the recipes and skills that go along with that. As for the family meals, I have always liked it when we have been able to sit together around a table to eat. I think that is often a fading image in the busy lives that many of us lead these days but I have always found it to be important to pause, share food and time with each other. As the children have got older, our lives have become more disjointed and we’re often eating at different times from each other. We’re certainly rarely eating the same meal, even if sat together for it. Having a new-found vegan regime to cater for as well as other dietary preferences within the family certainly adds to the complexity of dinner time. Saturday evenings are often the best time of the week, as it is then that everyone’s timetables align and all 4 of us sit together for a short while, well some weeks anyway.

Isn’t it funny when you look back at how mealtimes went when the children were young? All those tricks and games you tried to get the kids to try vegetables and stop playing long enough to have some food. Now, as young adults, they would eat the entire contents of the fridge without blinking and one of them wants nothing but vegetables! As for the ‘choo choo train’ or ‘aeroplane coming’ on a fork, no such coaxing is required but has actually been replaced by delivery drivers bringing Just Eat or Uber Eats deliveries that the kids have ordered on their phones without our knowledge! A sign of the times that food, like many other aspects of life now, can be delivered at a click or a swipe and bring almost instant gratification. The tap screen immediacy of modern life leaves little space for real, hands on experiences and is a dangerous path for us all to follow without stopping to stand still, look at our surroundings and get messy once in a while. Roll some dough in your hands, smell the herbs you are crushing and wait for a while to taste the food you have created because just perhaps you might enjoy it more, if you’ve had to work for it?

For me, it is the process of the meal making or the baking that is part of the benefit, as well as saving money or making healthier choices than following a take-away route. I like to lose myself in my thoughts in the kitchen whilst creating meals or bakes and there is also something about providing nourishment for others. Is that a wired-in notion of being a mother? Is it caught up in being a feeder, a provider, part of liking to please others? Perhaps a psychologist would have something to say on that issue? 

So what else is left for my lemon choices? They’re well known health benefits for colds, sore throats and restoring my son’s vocal chords prior to a gig mean that they’re often coupled with honey in our kitchen. I’ve heard the expression ‘just suck it and see’ but I would be cautious about sucking on a lemon - in fact I’ve always been mindful of advice about what you should put in your mouth!

So, all things considered, I’m not going to juggle lemons or slice them for a G & T. For now, I’m going to throw a casserole in my slow cooker and reinvent the cake that my friends and family enjoy - my famed lemon cake. The bigger picture can wait whilst I go ahead with this part, one answer that I can go with... When life gives you lemons, bake cake.

Diva or Door Mat?

At the risk of showing my age and alienating those readers born too late to share in the cultural phenomenon of children's TV in the 70s, I'm reminded of the daily choice of which window to go through: round, arch or square? ⁽¹⁾ Choices back then were simple, like which type of penny sweet to add to your bag in the sweet shop on a Friday on the way home from school, or which outfit to put on a Sindy doll when your friend came round to play - it was always the ballerina.

Still, making simple choices as a child is good practice for the myriad of indecision coming your way as an adult. I often think of myself as standing in a changing room looking at a row of pristine white doors, each with its own neatly numbered shining plaque, considering my options before opening one of them to put on the outfit that hangs within it and pick up the baggage that accompanies it. Don't we all have different roles that we play each day? I have my wife role, kissing my husband 'Good morning' before I stumble around the bathroom trying to make myself presentable for the day ahead. I have my Mum role, which used to involve a lot of multi-tasking to enable my children to get through the pre-school checklist of breakfast, dressing in uniform, bag checking, picking up lunch boxes, reassuring that PE would be fine that day and they just needed to try their best in their spelling test. Lately, my Mum role is more likely to involve a checklist of whether breakfast is going to be eaten before a work shift or calling up the stairs to see how long it really takes to do eye make-up! As children become more independent, my Mum role is more that of a hotel receptionist checking everyone in and out and asking about their dinner reservations. I expect it's a common cry from parents of teenagers and beyond to bemoan the use of the house as a hotel with all services on tap: laundry, meals provided, room service when I've removed the pizza boxes casually thrown on the floor when they had a friend round and ordered out. If I moan too much about the lack of responsibility and demand that chores are completed, am I being a diva?  If I continue clearing up after them and doing those Mum things that were always part of my job description, does that make me a door mat?

Well, clearly the dressing room door to the Mum outfit contains a lot of baggage! What about the other roles that I habitually adopt? I don't know if anyone else has these scenarios going around their head, but my adulting life is managed by me adopting different characters within it. Don't get me wrong, I don't actually have names for each and physical costumes to wear - that would be entering some kind of multiple personality realm - but adult life is only really advanced role play isn't it? What started in the home corner or on board a pirate ship just becomes more refined and subtle as an adult.

I have my 9 to 5 soundtrack in my head as I fire up my computer to check on emails and start my working day. I have the socially adept, a smile for everyone persona when faced with a family / friends gathering. You know the ones where small talk is the order of the day and no-one really actually talks about anything significant and we go back to our lives having moved no further forward as a person. I have my daughter role where I balance being supportive and taking on a semi-parent role reversal scenario with moments of being back to being told what to do, as I was as a child, although this is now in the guise of friendly motherly advice. Then there’s the more recently developed writer’s role. In this I inhabit a somewhat romanticised world in my head where I am both the editor and writer with a deadline, snatching moments of time to write the latest piece or addition to a longer work in progress. Sat in a coffee shop or in a quiet space at home, writing for whichever current project, allows me that feeling of headspace which is fast becoming the goal to strive for within a busy working week.

Now, as I stand in the dressing room with all those doors lined up before me, I see a door that had been mostly left shut for a while. This is the door with outfits behind that allow me to be myself, a woman looking to have an evening out with friends being relaxed and doing silly things just because I can. A woman who likes to dress up in a newly purchased outfit and put on my bright lipstick and paint my nails and have a date night with my husband – whatever that might entail. A woman who doesn’t have to explain to anyone why she might have had a few too many drinks and is now singing rather too loudly on a night out. A self-assured and capable woman with diva aspirations.

The reasons this door has been neglected are complex and perhaps we all go through phases of being the last priority in a long list? In our busy lives with work demands and family commitments, especially when the children are younger and more dependent or there is a family member with health issues, it is so easy to get caught up with the automatic and mundane and find so many reasons not to put yourself first from time to time. I have recently found myself asking if this has meant that I have created an expectation that I will drop everything when asked and rush to help others – particularly where my children are concerned. I think the circumstances of the last year or so have had a cumulative effect where I lost self-confidence and sought solace in seeking out a calm ticking over life by having a default mechanism of agreeing to things, in that sort of ‘anything for a quiet life’ way.

When you’re feeling low and lacking confidence it is somewhat of a paradox that you take on more by not saying no to requests. So yes, there have been times when I’ve been thinking that rather than the sassy diva I would like to portray like a leading lady upon a stage in the spotlight, I’ve been more like the proverbial door mat – down trodden and gathering the dirt and dust from the stamping feet above. The way forward now is to pick myself up off the floor, fling open that last door and strut out with confidence – well, at least every once in a while.

⁽¹⁾             http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/classic/playschool/trivia.shtml

Time for a Chat.

A typical 4 year old, if there is such a thing, has a vocabulary of about 1500 words – impressive in such a short space of time. So you would think that by the teenage years their eloquence would extend beyond “No, uh, M-u-m and what?” All the rich tapestry of the English language laid out before them and it is reduced to a smattering of mumbles, when pushed, and a string of hashtags or a winky face emoji as their thumbs work overtime on their stream of messages in one online chat forum or another. It seems at times that they have entered some secret club that you, as the parent, can only view from the outside. They certainly don’t want to engage in conversation about their daily activities and if you do hear them speaking, it’s often in some new and strange language that I won’t embarrass myself now by attempting to quote any examples from. There’s nothing worse than a Mum trying to be ‘down with the kids’ and I’m sure we all remember the cringing feelings when our parents attempted to be cool in front of our teenage friends, way back when.

Now my kids have entered this teenage and beyond phase, it can be with some regret that I nostalgically look back on their toddler years – the time when they asked questions every single minute of the day – and think why didn’t I appreciate the value of this at the time? Why? That’s what my children asked constantly – why is this or that the way it is? At the time, it is easy to pass off questions with a quick response to close down their line of enquiry or to think if only they could be quiet for just an hour so I can drift off mentally to a place of peace and quiet. But at that point in time, to them you are the font of all knowledge and this doesn’t last for long. How many times more recently have I heard them scoff “Mum, don’t you know what that is?”

Perhaps our household has always been a chatty place. As my two children grew up they were always included in conversation around the dinner table and although encouraged to wait their turn and be polite enough to listen to others, they knew their opinion and contributions would be valued. I recently came across a quote which I find poignantly significant at this time in my life:

“Listen earnestly to anything your children want to tell you, no matter what. If you don’t listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won’t tell you the big stuff when they are big, because to them all of it has always been big stuff.”  (Catherine M Wallace)

Joking aside, I am grateful that my kids – who are mostly grown-up now – do still want to talk to me when they have something on their minds. There has been a patch where this was difficult, where the adolescent hormones combined with diagnosed anxiety and depression in such a way that it felt almost impossible for one of my children to speak to me. Almost 18 months of talk therapy and a whole heap of hard work by the family have helped to address this and I’m feeling that we are now sharing things again. Whether this sharing has been little or big stuff, and some of it has indeed been big stuff, it is worth remembering that the seemingly small step taken to talk about it has been a gigantic leap of faith in making the decision to do so.

And what about me? How am I in conversation? The phrase – “Do you have time for a chat?” conjures up different connotations for me, some negative and others positive. If you’re called into your line manager’s office for a chat, it’s rarely to be about the latest developments on a TV programme or to plan a social event together. Sometimes I will send a message to my husband via text / messenger and receive the reply “Let’s chat about it later.” I know that means that the subject matter is going to be up for lengthy debate later and neither of us are sure what the outcome may be.

Meeting a friend for a chat might go one of many ways. Often it is because one or both of us need the space to unleash all the niggles that have been grinding us down over the last months and say them out loud to someone that we know will listen and not judge. Other times, amongst the niggles, is a bigger, more demanding problem that needs airing and a friend can be the support mechanism for this. Food, drink and chatting with friends can help to make the world a better place, even if only for that moment in time.

A chat about no particular thing is also a great form of therapy – talk about whatever comes into your head first and just go with it. To an outsider, I am sure that’s what a lot of my conversations with friends look like. But the process of this - being with good company, those with shared interests and common experiences - that is a great recipe for a successful chat session. Sometimes you don’t even have to say out loud what is really troubling you – the random other bits of chat act as a cover or code and those who know you well, know to keep that going so that you can process the difficult stuff and everyone in the room knows that’s just what you needed.

And now I come to group chats – you know the ones you can set up on Messenger? I’m quite the technophobe, in fact setting up my writing into a blog was a challenge for me and one for which I had to call upon the support of a tech-savvy friend to complete. Is it a good thing that we have the technology available to be able to hold a multi-way conversation without any need for the physical presence of those people in the room?

Group chats have been great when trying to organise a social event or give details for rehearsals to the whole drama group that I am part of. Sometimes, a couple of members of the group chat divert from the intended point of the original message and if you weren’t online at the time you open the chat to a stream of comments, thumbs up signs and GIFs that you have to scroll through, emphasising just how late you were to this party chat!

It is true that I am guilty of holding several group chats at once and then I really have to be awake and aware of which comments I am sending to who. It would be difficult to explain a flirty message intended for your husband to a group set up with work colleagues about an important meeting in the schedule.

However, I have found myself checking my chats daily and it has been good to be able to access advice from friends when I have needed it or to check where my family members are and whether they are intending on being home for dinner. The benefit over texts being that I can at least see that they have received a message, even if they choose not to respond.

I don’t think electronic chat can replace the real thing though, for all the reasons I’ve explored already. To talk to each other, in person, face-to-face is to be human and individual amongst the daily crowd of automatic responses and faceless encounters. “Do you have time for a chat?” Always, for my family, my friends, I will always make time.

 Have you ever been caught out in a group chat?

What do you think about the social media opportunities for chat and how our children engage with these?