Last one in the series, I promise.
I am wonderfully weird, because I actively seek out opportunities to talk to my children about sex, while they are young. Don’t get the wrong impression. I don’t sit them in a row on the sofa, and address them with the aid of a flipchart, or a power point presentation. No. It’s more just a question of, quite literally, the birds and the bees. There’s always some hanky panky going in nature, which you can use to bring the conversation round to where little fledglings come from, and from there, you’re just one tweet away from where human babies come from. (Interesting phrase, come to think of it, “the birds and the bees”, because for all my own sex education, I do know how birds reproduce, but I don’t really have a clue how bees do it.)
We have a book for young children, which I occasionally slip into the bedtime reading pile. On a given evening, I might read The Three Little Pigs, Where do Babies Come From?, and Dazzling Diggers. It used to cross my mind that it might be hard for the kids to distinguish whether the Babies one was fact or fiction, especially if interspersed between the pigs and the diggers, but children are remarkably good at filtering information over time. Perhaps they start off thinking it’s a fairy story, and a rather bizarre one at that, but at least I’ve introduced the subject to them. Now we also have a couple of books suitable for older children, which are more detailed. No doubt the second and third children in the family will read those ones at much younger ages than the oldest has done (I’m a third child myself, I know these things).
The reasons I decided not to wait until the children asked, and then deliver ‘The Talk’, are fairly simple. I didn’t want to miss the boat, and find that some well-meaning but ill-informed friend at school had done the job for me. Or worse, some ill-meaning one. It’s so much easier, as a parent, to pick your own moment. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself cornered, and the moment will pick you. It’ll be the night before the lesson when they’re going to cover it at school, when your child thrusts a grubby letter into your hand saying “Mum, you’re meant to have signed this by last week to say it’s ok for me to be there, but I forgot to give it to you”. Or it’ll be at Sunday lunch with relatives, when your 5 year old pipes up “how did the baby get into Auntie Moira’s tummy?”, and you have to mumble something about “tell you later, now get on with your spaghetti” while Uncle Peter says he’s just getting another beer and disappears to the kitchen.
It’s just easier to talk to younger children. It’s like apologizing. The longer you leave it, the harder you make it for yourself. Younger children are unembarrassed, and don’t say “that’s gross” as often. You don’t have to go into any more detail than you want, because at a young age, they are happy with very little, and often not terribly interested anyway. And here’s something experience has taught me. It’s not a question of having ‘The Talk’. It’s more a question of ‘The Talks’. For a start, you’re never going to cover it all, in the right level of detail, with all the associated thoughts on relationships and responsibilities, on one occasion. So unless you want them to find out most of their information from other sources, you’re going to have to reconcile yourself to more than just ‘The Talk’ in any case. You might as well start early.
Incidentally, if anyone knows where bees come from, then do let me know. Or do you think I should ask my mother?
Showing posts with label wonderfully weird. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wonderfully weird. Show all posts
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Wonderfully Weird Parenting: Part lll
I thought I’d find one or two kindred spirits on the views expressed in my previous three posts, but on the basis of experience to date, I’ll be surprised if I find anyone alongside me on this one. This is, I think, my unique wonderfully weird moment in parenthood.
My three babies were all late. Gloriously late. Frustratingly late for everyone else, but gloriously late for me. Each one was, give or take, two weeks late, born around the 42 week mark. And here’s the weird bit. I LOVED those last two weeks.
I was lucky. At that stage of pregnancy, life can be uncomfortable for many women. If that’s you, then I have to tell you, it’s because your abdominal muscles are too tight. Don’t worry: you’ll reap your rewards in the years to come. Decades to come. Women like me, with abdominal muscles the slackness of a lettuce leaf (and I’m talking lollo rosso, not iceberg), let the baby hang out in front , and our internal organs have their usual space and go about their usual business uncompromised. I never had heartburn, I had a huge appetite, I never had to get up in the night to wee, I slept like a proverbial baby (and I was soon to find out how proverbial that baby was). I felt full of health, and surprisingly energetic. It seemed like a reward for the miserable early weeks of nausea and fatigue. I did have to counter comments such as ‘you are HUGE, oh my goodness, look at the SIZE of your BUMP, are they sure it’s not twins?”, which under other circumstances might have been a little upsetting, but in late pregnancy, a happy hormone is released in huge measure into my body, which turns me into a cow-like creature. I could serenely chew the cud all day long, watching the world go by, and crowds of onlookers could hold placards and chant slogans about the size of my bump, without me really noticing them at all.
During those two weeks, I would roll my eyes appropriately in response to the ubiquitous question “are you still here?”, and accept people’s kindly-offered sympathy. But inside, I would be hugging to myself my delicious little secret: this was the best bit of all. Being pregnant isn’t a picnic, but there is a loveliness to it, and to me, labour would inevitably mean loss as well as gain. I loved those kicks and squirms, the hidden relationship with my baby, the moments spent wondering whether it was a boy or girl, what he or she would look like, how much it could hear of my voice, the traffic, the radio. The complete and perfect ownership of a priceless treasure, which, once out in the world, would never belong solely to me ever again. I think this is why we never settled on a name before our babies were born. Somehow naming them was giving them a public identity. Until birth, they were all just mine.
Another factor in my contentment during those final two weeks, was that I loved my body. I loved my huge, huge bump. I would wallow in the bath, waddle along the street, sink irrecoverably into sofas, rejoicing in my whale-like being, and loving nothing better than to run my hand over the stretched, soft skin of my bump. For all of our lives, as women, we feel so inadequate for not having the perfect body. Along comes pregnancy, and, for me, the realization each time that my body is a marvelous thing, feeding and nurturing another human life, keeping it safe, giving it all it needs. In pregnancy, as never before or since, my body feels to me purposeful, beautiful, sufficient, perfect. I feel so sad for new mothers these days, all so obsessed with losing baby weight, getting their bodies back to how they were. Is no time of a woman’s life safe from the grinding competition and pressure for a toned body?
But back to me. Picture me, if you will, huge and happy, fending off any doctor’s attempt to induce labour, each day wondering “is this the day?” and toying with the date in my mind. Would this be a nice birthday to have, for life? I'd see the changing mat on the chest of drawers, all ready for the tiny bottom and tiny indignant cries. I'd touch the waiting baby clothes, clean, sweet-smelling, and impossibly small. I'd shut my eyes and try to remember that delicious eau de newborn, and know that it didn’t matter at all how impossible that memory is to recreate, because it wouldn’t be, couldn’t be, more than a few days until I had a soft head to bury my nose in for real. I like anticipation. I think I prefer Christmas Eve to Christmas Day.
Perhaps that’s it. The last gasp of pregnancy is the ultimate in anticipation.
I expect it was all my doing. Midwives say that both baby and mother have to be ready, and maybe my babies were in there, head down, champing gummily at the bit, and it was me resisting the trigger of labour. Midwives know that women can do that kind of thing. I told them it was genetic, that my mother’s babies had all been late, but that was something of an exaggeration. She had one 42-weeker out of four; the rest of us were a respectable 2 or 3 days late. All I know is that I have never met anyone else who has actually hoped for a late baby, and I just can’t understand why. Anyone out there?
My three babies were all late. Gloriously late. Frustratingly late for everyone else, but gloriously late for me. Each one was, give or take, two weeks late, born around the 42 week mark. And here’s the weird bit. I LOVED those last two weeks.
I was lucky. At that stage of pregnancy, life can be uncomfortable for many women. If that’s you, then I have to tell you, it’s because your abdominal muscles are too tight. Don’t worry: you’ll reap your rewards in the years to come. Decades to come. Women like me, with abdominal muscles the slackness of a lettuce leaf (and I’m talking lollo rosso, not iceberg), let the baby hang out in front , and our internal organs have their usual space and go about their usual business uncompromised. I never had heartburn, I had a huge appetite, I never had to get up in the night to wee, I slept like a proverbial baby (and I was soon to find out how proverbial that baby was). I felt full of health, and surprisingly energetic. It seemed like a reward for the miserable early weeks of nausea and fatigue. I did have to counter comments such as ‘you are HUGE, oh my goodness, look at the SIZE of your BUMP, are they sure it’s not twins?”, which under other circumstances might have been a little upsetting, but in late pregnancy, a happy hormone is released in huge measure into my body, which turns me into a cow-like creature. I could serenely chew the cud all day long, watching the world go by, and crowds of onlookers could hold placards and chant slogans about the size of my bump, without me really noticing them at all.
During those two weeks, I would roll my eyes appropriately in response to the ubiquitous question “are you still here?”, and accept people’s kindly-offered sympathy. But inside, I would be hugging to myself my delicious little secret: this was the best bit of all. Being pregnant isn’t a picnic, but there is a loveliness to it, and to me, labour would inevitably mean loss as well as gain. I loved those kicks and squirms, the hidden relationship with my baby, the moments spent wondering whether it was a boy or girl, what he or she would look like, how much it could hear of my voice, the traffic, the radio. The complete and perfect ownership of a priceless treasure, which, once out in the world, would never belong solely to me ever again. I think this is why we never settled on a name before our babies were born. Somehow naming them was giving them a public identity. Until birth, they were all just mine.
Another factor in my contentment during those final two weeks, was that I loved my body. I loved my huge, huge bump. I would wallow in the bath, waddle along the street, sink irrecoverably into sofas, rejoicing in my whale-like being, and loving nothing better than to run my hand over the stretched, soft skin of my bump. For all of our lives, as women, we feel so inadequate for not having the perfect body. Along comes pregnancy, and, for me, the realization each time that my body is a marvelous thing, feeding and nurturing another human life, keeping it safe, giving it all it needs. In pregnancy, as never before or since, my body feels to me purposeful, beautiful, sufficient, perfect. I feel so sad for new mothers these days, all so obsessed with losing baby weight, getting their bodies back to how they were. Is no time of a woman’s life safe from the grinding competition and pressure for a toned body?
But back to me. Picture me, if you will, huge and happy, fending off any doctor’s attempt to induce labour, each day wondering “is this the day?” and toying with the date in my mind. Would this be a nice birthday to have, for life? I'd see the changing mat on the chest of drawers, all ready for the tiny bottom and tiny indignant cries. I'd touch the waiting baby clothes, clean, sweet-smelling, and impossibly small. I'd shut my eyes and try to remember that delicious eau de newborn, and know that it didn’t matter at all how impossible that memory is to recreate, because it wouldn’t be, couldn’t be, more than a few days until I had a soft head to bury my nose in for real. I like anticipation. I think I prefer Christmas Eve to Christmas Day.
Perhaps that’s it. The last gasp of pregnancy is the ultimate in anticipation.
I expect it was all my doing. Midwives say that both baby and mother have to be ready, and maybe my babies were in there, head down, champing gummily at the bit, and it was me resisting the trigger of labour. Midwives know that women can do that kind of thing. I told them it was genetic, that my mother’s babies had all been late, but that was something of an exaggeration. She had one 42-weeker out of four; the rest of us were a respectable 2 or 3 days late. All I know is that I have never met anyone else who has actually hoped for a late baby, and I just can’t understand why. Anyone out there?
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Wonderfully Weird Parenting: Part ll
The next way I'm weird is that I didn't really want my children to believe in Father Christmas. I never did, since my older sister had been terrified at the idea of a strange man coming into the house, and so my parents had never had the chance to spin the story. I never felt I missed out. Parents talk fondly of the magic of Christmas, but I always had plenty of that in the sheer excitement of waking up on Christmas morning and kicking at the end of the bed to feel the lumpy stocking there. It hadn't been any less fun for knowing where it had come from. As a family, we enjoyed the whole charade, and played along with the story, while we all knew it wasn't true. It was like a great shared secret.
When our first child reached Christmas-appreciating age, I'd rather planned to go down the same route. Then I discovered that to the great majority of parents, it was hugely important to keep the Father Christmas myth alive for as long as possible. I honestly had had no idea before then, that this was of such consequence. I didn't really want to get my son to believe the story because of my own experience as a child, and because I anticipated a day when he would find out and would then wonder what else I'd been fibbing to him about. I wanted him to be able to trust me 100%, always. It made me uneasy to sell him a fiction as a fact. I also knew of older children deeply upset on finding out they were the last child in their class still to believe.
The assumption at my son's preschool was so strong, that we were all doing the Father Christmas thing to the Nth degree, that it would have been very difficult to opt out. I heard tales of mothers who had let older siblings tell, and how this had ruined Christmas in previous years. I heard of the devious tales that children were told to explain how Father Christmas managed to get gifts to the right place, when a child was spending Christmas away from home. It was a huge conspiracy, carefully guarded, and even if I'd been brave enough to have broken out myself, I had to think through the ramifications of that for my son. For him, it would have been a hard burden to bear to be the only 3 year old at the Christmas party who knew that Father Christmas was in fact one of the dads with a pillow up his front, and to know that he must not tell any of the other children under any circumstance. I certainly wasn’t going to risk letting him be the child who spoiled Christmas for 20 families.
So I went along with the majority, but I confess that I did sow seeds of doubt. I would tell my son "it's amazing how Father Christmas manages to get round all the houses in the world in one night - I wonder how that can be", or "you know that song about how you only get presents from Father Christmas if you've been good? well, the funny thing is, when it comes to it, ALL children get presents after all". Call me subversive, but hey, in this house, the children imbibe doses of irony along with their mother's milk, so even at 3, I was fairly sure that my son was picking up at least some vague sense that when we talked of “Father Christmas", we did so with invisible inverted commas.
The saving grace for me, was a Canadian couple who hosted a St Nicholas’ Day party, early in December the following year. I hadn’t known before then how the Father Christmas legend had developed from an early East European bishop (Saint Nicholas becoming Santa Claus). He gave money and food to the poor, leaving it tactfully in the shoes they left outside their doors, which over time became the presents in the stockings. To me, this gave the perfect half-way house between truth and fiction, with the divide nicely blurred. Now, I talk about how there was a real man, a long long time ago, who was the real Santa Claus. But when they've asked me outright what happens to the stockings by the fireplace, I've started by fudging with "who knows?", and then over time, have come clean and confessed that it is really Mummy and Daddy. But we say "it's fun to pretend it's him", and we do just that. We do the carrot for the reindeer and the mince pie and whisky for Santa, and on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, we act it out just like proper believing families. There’s plenty of mystery and magic, but no room for future disappointment.
But here’s the really intriguing thing. Even when I have debunked the myth, my children have each believed, because they have chosen to. For each of them, there have been 2 or 3 years when they have known that Santa isn’t real, but they’ve believed in him anyway. I don’t know whether it’s peer group pressure, or the desire for fairy tale, but they have taken the lead and acted the story out so hard, that Husband and I have followed along. For you non-weird parents, that may well be an argument to support your approach of keeping the myth alive from the outset. I prefer to interpret it as an argument that it doesn’t really matter which approach you take, so long as everyone has fun.
When our first child reached Christmas-appreciating age, I'd rather planned to go down the same route. Then I discovered that to the great majority of parents, it was hugely important to keep the Father Christmas myth alive for as long as possible. I honestly had had no idea before then, that this was of such consequence. I didn't really want to get my son to believe the story because of my own experience as a child, and because I anticipated a day when he would find out and would then wonder what else I'd been fibbing to him about. I wanted him to be able to trust me 100%, always. It made me uneasy to sell him a fiction as a fact. I also knew of older children deeply upset on finding out they were the last child in their class still to believe.
The assumption at my son's preschool was so strong, that we were all doing the Father Christmas thing to the Nth degree, that it would have been very difficult to opt out. I heard tales of mothers who had let older siblings tell, and how this had ruined Christmas in previous years. I heard of the devious tales that children were told to explain how Father Christmas managed to get gifts to the right place, when a child was spending Christmas away from home. It was a huge conspiracy, carefully guarded, and even if I'd been brave enough to have broken out myself, I had to think through the ramifications of that for my son. For him, it would have been a hard burden to bear to be the only 3 year old at the Christmas party who knew that Father Christmas was in fact one of the dads with a pillow up his front, and to know that he must not tell any of the other children under any circumstance. I certainly wasn’t going to risk letting him be the child who spoiled Christmas for 20 families.
So I went along with the majority, but I confess that I did sow seeds of doubt. I would tell my son "it's amazing how Father Christmas manages to get round all the houses in the world in one night - I wonder how that can be", or "you know that song about how you only get presents from Father Christmas if you've been good? well, the funny thing is, when it comes to it, ALL children get presents after all". Call me subversive, but hey, in this house, the children imbibe doses of irony along with their mother's milk, so even at 3, I was fairly sure that my son was picking up at least some vague sense that when we talked of “Father Christmas", we did so with invisible inverted commas.
The saving grace for me, was a Canadian couple who hosted a St Nicholas’ Day party, early in December the following year. I hadn’t known before then how the Father Christmas legend had developed from an early East European bishop (Saint Nicholas becoming Santa Claus). He gave money and food to the poor, leaving it tactfully in the shoes they left outside their doors, which over time became the presents in the stockings. To me, this gave the perfect half-way house between truth and fiction, with the divide nicely blurred. Now, I talk about how there was a real man, a long long time ago, who was the real Santa Claus. But when they've asked me outright what happens to the stockings by the fireplace, I've started by fudging with "who knows?", and then over time, have come clean and confessed that it is really Mummy and Daddy. But we say "it's fun to pretend it's him", and we do just that. We do the carrot for the reindeer and the mince pie and whisky for Santa, and on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, we act it out just like proper believing families. There’s plenty of mystery and magic, but no room for future disappointment.
But here’s the really intriguing thing. Even when I have debunked the myth, my children have each believed, because they have chosen to. For each of them, there have been 2 or 3 years when they have known that Santa isn’t real, but they’ve believed in him anyway. I don’t know whether it’s peer group pressure, or the desire for fairy tale, but they have taken the lead and acted the story out so hard, that Husband and I have followed along. For you non-weird parents, that may well be an argument to support your approach of keeping the myth alive from the outset. I prefer to interpret it as an argument that it doesn’t really matter which approach you take, so long as everyone has fun.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Wonderfully Weird Parenting: Part l
Well, it was a pony tail holder, so congrats to those of you who got it right or came close. The petals were a bit misleading, I know. Originally 5-yo had said "it's used by girls" and I, in a proper politically-correct non-gender-delimiting way, encouraged her to add in the "mostly". I pointed out that we do have a male friend (adult, not Kindergarten) who wears his hair in a pony tail, although it must be said that I haven't ever seen him wear it in a bright yellow elastic band with decorative petals.
At the wedding service of Mike and Phoebe in Friends , Mike says to Phoebe "I love the way you're so wonderfully weird", which is where I nicked the title of this series of posts from. Now I have muddled my way through all my children's preschool years, I can look back and say that mostly I have toed some kind of majority line, and gone with the prevailing flow. But there have been some things on which I have found myself out on a limb. One of the great things about mummy blogging - parent blogging, I should say - is that it gives me confidence to be a little braver than I might otherwise have been. And certainly braver in talking about it. I have learned that if I want to do something a little differently, chances are that someone else out there agrees with me. I’ve often read posts which have made me say “Ah, so it’s not just me, then”.
So I thought I’d do a little series on the ways in which I have found myself wonderfully weird, as a parent. Feel free to join in my weirdness, or to confess to your own. There’s nothing as cleansing as divulging some personal weirdness amongst friends. You should try it some time, if you haven’t already.
The first way I’m a wonderfully weird parent, is that I hate sleepovers. Who on earth invented the sleepover? You invite my child and a few others to your child’s birthday party. You are going to give them all pizza and have them watch a movie. Fine. Stop there. It’ll be 8.00pm or 9.00pm. I will come and get my child. Everyone will have a lovely time, presents will be opened, photos will be taken, and the birthday will be duly celebrated. But oh no, no, no. You insist on keeping him overnight. This means that he will go to bed at midnight. He will wake up at his usual time, or earlier, perverse though that seems. You will feed him a high-octane sugar breakfast of pancakes or waffles. Then I will collect him, and for the rest of the day, he will be intermittently grumpy, close to tears, unable to amuse himself, and will bicker with his siblings. If I suggest he is tired, he will shout “I’m NOT tired, I keep TELLING you”. The best I can hope for is to wuther through the day, get him to bed relatively early, and hope that normal service is resumed tomorrow. One day, may I just point out, is half the week-end.
So far, I have avoided sleepovers as much as possible. I have never hosted one. If given the option, I have collected the child in the evening. I have even stooped as low as quickly organizing something for the next day, to give myself a feeble mummy excuse about an early morning start. This week-end, since we have had a week of allergies, I sent along a night-time Benadryl tablet, hoping this would somehow encourage an earlier bedtime, or at least a modest lie-in. It didn’t. I have managed to sneak by on minimum sleepovers so far, but with a 5 year old daughter, I fear I am soon to enter the era of major sleepover activity.
What is this ridiculous enthusiasm for sleepovers? At best, if hosted by a family you know well, you have to endure a day on the receiving end of the behavior of an irritable toddler in the body of an older child. At worst (and this hasn’t yet happened to me, but I can imagine the dilemma it poses), if hosted by a family you don’t know well, you spend an anxious evening wondering what on earth possessed you to let your child stay in a strange house, and then you have the endurance trial the following day as well.
Does anyone share my weird hatred of sleepovers? Am I not as weird as I think on this one?
At the wedding service of Mike and Phoebe in Friends , Mike says to Phoebe "I love the way you're so wonderfully weird", which is where I nicked the title of this series of posts from. Now I have muddled my way through all my children's preschool years, I can look back and say that mostly I have toed some kind of majority line, and gone with the prevailing flow. But there have been some things on which I have found myself out on a limb. One of the great things about mummy blogging - parent blogging, I should say - is that it gives me confidence to be a little braver than I might otherwise have been. And certainly braver in talking about it. I have learned that if I want to do something a little differently, chances are that someone else out there agrees with me. I’ve often read posts which have made me say “Ah, so it’s not just me, then”.
So I thought I’d do a little series on the ways in which I have found myself wonderfully weird, as a parent. Feel free to join in my weirdness, or to confess to your own. There’s nothing as cleansing as divulging some personal weirdness amongst friends. You should try it some time, if you haven’t already.
The first way I’m a wonderfully weird parent, is that I hate sleepovers. Who on earth invented the sleepover? You invite my child and a few others to your child’s birthday party. You are going to give them all pizza and have them watch a movie. Fine. Stop there. It’ll be 8.00pm or 9.00pm. I will come and get my child. Everyone will have a lovely time, presents will be opened, photos will be taken, and the birthday will be duly celebrated. But oh no, no, no. You insist on keeping him overnight. This means that he will go to bed at midnight. He will wake up at his usual time, or earlier, perverse though that seems. You will feed him a high-octane sugar breakfast of pancakes or waffles. Then I will collect him, and for the rest of the day, he will be intermittently grumpy, close to tears, unable to amuse himself, and will bicker with his siblings. If I suggest he is tired, he will shout “I’m NOT tired, I keep TELLING you”. The best I can hope for is to wuther through the day, get him to bed relatively early, and hope that normal service is resumed tomorrow. One day, may I just point out, is half the week-end.
So far, I have avoided sleepovers as much as possible. I have never hosted one. If given the option, I have collected the child in the evening. I have even stooped as low as quickly organizing something for the next day, to give myself a feeble mummy excuse about an early morning start. This week-end, since we have had a week of allergies, I sent along a night-time Benadryl tablet, hoping this would somehow encourage an earlier bedtime, or at least a modest lie-in. It didn’t. I have managed to sneak by on minimum sleepovers so far, but with a 5 year old daughter, I fear I am soon to enter the era of major sleepover activity.
What is this ridiculous enthusiasm for sleepovers? At best, if hosted by a family you know well, you have to endure a day on the receiving end of the behavior of an irritable toddler in the body of an older child. At worst (and this hasn’t yet happened to me, but I can imagine the dilemma it poses), if hosted by a family you don’t know well, you spend an anxious evening wondering what on earth possessed you to let your child stay in a strange house, and then you have the endurance trial the following day as well.
Does anyone share my weird hatred of sleepovers? Am I not as weird as I think on this one?
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