Finding my new normal - Part III

One of the things that you become aware of when you become a parent, is how very much your idea of "normal" stems from your childhood.

We think we're going to fathom out how to be parents on an intellectual plane (plane as in level, not as in aeroplane, though I do quite like the idea of working things out while travelling on an intellectual aeroplane). Then we have a baby, and we are taken by surprise by how very much our gut feelings take over, and how much those gut feelings are the instincts that we inherited from our own mothers, fathers and forebears (no, not four bears, forebears). That phrase you hear yourself shouting after your disobedient toddler... where did that come from? You sounded just like your mum! Your Christmas traditions are, well, just the way Christmas IS. Other families' Christmas traditions are other families' Christmas traditions. They're not proper Christmas, somehow. Your own rules for playing childhood games are THE rules (like if you don't say "thank you" when someone hands you a card in 'Happy Families', you have to give the card back). You might agree to play with other rules, but deep down, you know they're not the real rules. (I know of someone... not a million miles away from here... who turned up at university thinking that the person who was losing at the end of each round of croquet, had an extra go, though she had at least worked out that it wasn't necessarily the youngest who got to choose their colour of ball first.)

My parents both love classical music. When I was a child, I thought that children listened to Radio 1, and adults listened to Radio 3. I thought that was the way the world was. I assumed that as you grew up, you developed a taste for classical music, just as you developed a taste for alcohol and olives, and learned to drive a car. I remember going to a friend's house, and hearing the radio, and it was voices. Not music. Voices! People talking. Imagine that. Very odd. I was puzzled. I asked my friend what her mother was listening to, and she said she didn't really know. I probed. What are the people talking about? She didn't know. I went home perplexed. Didn't all grown-ups listen to classical music on the radio? Why would a bone fide grown up be listening to voices on the radio?

I think that the world has loosened up a little. I don't think this feeling of normalcy will be quite the same phenomenon in our children's lives as it was in ours. There isn't the same sense of there being one proper way of doing things. Homes are much more varied. Children mix much more with children of other ethnicities, religions, backgrounds. But even so. It will still be there.

I want my children to question the way Husband and I do things, the beliefs we hold, the attitudes from which we operate. It's part of maturing, it's inevitable, and it's healthy. But I also know that at the ground level of their psyches, certainly for some while yet, they think that our family is the norm, the way things are, the way things rightly are. It's an awesome responsibility. But as I've decided (see my previous post) that there is no normal, then it's probably all ok.
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