When your child isn’t playing nice.
Posted
June 30, 2009 at
8:43 pm by
Trish
This morning we had parent/teacher interviews with both the girls’ teachers. I wont reveal the details of the discussions obviously but I will say that there is an issue with one of our children that is of some concern and we will be monitoring things closely, as will her teacher.
One of our kids is not playing nicely with some of her fellow students. She is doing well academically, but there are some shenanigans going on during the recess and lunch breaks that need to be addressed quickly.
My younger brother struggled to get along with some of his peers, and his troubles were exacerbated by a general lack of interest in school and a sometimes difficult relationship with his teachers (who were not at all curious about why he might not like school so they just stuck him in the corner and told him to be quiet… thank goodness modern education allows for different learning styles in students… but I digress).
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Letting Go.
Posted
May 19, 2009 at
1:43 am by
Trish
There’s simply no getting around it. I’m about to break my mother’s heart. I have continued to live in the same town I was born in, the same town where my parents still live. I got married here, had my own babies here, and I have stayed here for work and for friendships and for family. But at the age of almost-38, I feel as though it is time to fly the coop. Leave the nest. Make like a tree and leaf. Shoot through like a Bondi tram.
My mother has a reasonably active social life but I think even she would agree that she spends a lot of time focussed on being a grandmother. With six grandchildren, it’s hard not to be. My sister, brother and I have all benefited from Mum’s help and advice and emergency babysitting service at some time or another, and so our lives have all become quite tightly intertwined. I don’t know if it’s fair to say that Mum has forsaken other activities that some other people her age have taken up in their retirement years, but she probably would be quite a different person if she hadn’t had her brood of grandchildren to fuss over.
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The dreaded dentist visit
Posted
March 17, 2009 at
12:48 am by
Trish
When I was in grade school we had a Community Dentist and Health Clinic attached to the school, and once a year each and every child was marched through the doors of the Clinic, in groups of four or five, to have their teeth checked. I can remember little things about those visits, including the butterflies hanging from the ceiling, their wings made from cellophane and their bodies from the little cotton logs that were inevitably stuffed into your mouth as you lay back in the big chair. The sun streamed in through a large window, I remember the room was very bright, and I remember the few other kids sitting along the wall to one side, waiting their turn. I remember the kids who had just been, arriving back at the classroom and announcing who was next, and feeling relieved when my name wasn’t called.
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Long Hot Summer
Posted
January 28, 2009 at
6:47 pm by
Trish
As I sit and type this at 10.30am, it’s nearing thirty degrees. When an Australian says “thirty degrees” they mean “celcius” or “bloody hot for so early in the day.” Our school year begins in February and ends right before Christmas, giving families about six weeks of summer holidays at the beach where we can all work on our melanomas. Mine are coming along quite nicely, thanks.
As a teenager, I read enough of my next door neighbour’s Sweet Valley High books to learn that American kids often spent their summer vacations away at Camp. ‘Camp’ sounded like a magical place, filled with awesome activities like ‘hiking’ and ‘gridiron’ and pre-pubescent boys with long hair and bell-bottomed jeans. And that ‘Camp’ lasted weeks and weeks at a time, so long in fact that you actually came to miss your parents. Wow.
School starts on February 2nd and I can confidently tell you that my children have spent these past few weeks of summer not missing me so much as wishing I was not around. I have taken a break from the corporate ladder just long enough to become a problem to my children. They are sick to death of me. I’m everywhere - driving them to the Mall, taking them to the pool, chaperoning them on camping trips to the beach and organising for their friends to come over and play for hours on end. I just wont leave them alone. Every time they come into the kitchen, I’m already there, preparing cold drinks or cutting up watermelon. They go into the lounge to chill out, and I’m arranging a new selection of DVDs I’ve just rented for them at the local video library. They go out in the backyard to muck around with the garden hose and sprinklers, and I’m hanging their wet swimsuits and beach towels on the line. I’m everywhere! I’m totally in the way! I’m not giving them a moment of peace!
The kids are going to be really, really glad when they can go back to school and they can get out of my face. And next Christmas holidays, I’ll be expecting both of them to beg me to send them to Camp, or its Australian equivalent, so they can enjoy some parent-free time for once.
Battles, big and small.
Posted
November 5, 2008 at
9:49 pm by
Trish
Readers of my own blog are well aware of my rabid interest in the US Election, and on this site I have been taking part in a discussion forum that has got tempers flared and patriotism ignited. It’s pretty intense. As an Australian, living in Australia and therefore about as unable to vote in the US Election as a person can be, it is perplexing for some Americans to have me weighing in with my opinions. One person on the discussion forum suggested I take my opinions and shove them in my tucker-bag (I’m paraphrasing).
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Package deal.
Posted
November 1, 2008 at
6:12 am by
Trish
My parents married young and started their family right away. By the time they were 30, they were the proud parents of four adorable children (the second child was particularly cute). At that time they had a group of friends, all married couples who had decided to wait until after they had turned 30 to start their families. I can remember going to their houses for parties and marveling at how tidy they were (no toys) and at how nice their furniture was (double income, no kids = leather sofas). And I can remember feeling extremely self-conscious as we arrived at their house, all of us kids with our hair brushed neatly and in our Sunday best. Jokes were made about how many of us there were. They called us The Tribe and made silly jibes about my father’s virility. And then we were shuffled into a room at the back of the house where a television had been set up for our entertainment. At the time I was embarrassed about being so many.
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The hand that rocks the cradle, the hand that makes the dinner…
Posted
August 21, 2008 at
8:39 pm by
Trish
A few months ago I read a book called ‘The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl’ by Shauna Reid. She is an Australian woman, a couple of years younger than me, now living in Scotland. She wrote the book (and the blog it started out as) to chronicle her weight loss ‘adventure’ and it was a hilarious, touching story. She began her diet when she was tipping the scales at 351lbs and now weighs literally half that at 175.5lbs. I don’t read a lot of diet books so I can’t say whether or not this is not your average diet book, but I suspect it isn’t your average diet book. There’s a lot more to Shauna’s life than her battle with her weight, and all that extra stuff makes for some hilarious passages in her book. I could go on but I don’t want to sound too much like her pimp.
One of the things she talks about is her relationship with food as a young child, and the role her parents played in her weight gain. I’ve watched enough episodes of Oprah and Dr Phil to know that ‘eating issues’ are often established in childhood, and I have family members and school friends who can trace their weight problems back to their parents’ insistence that they finish everything on their plate before they could leave the table.
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Deign to complain
Posted
August 17, 2008 at
8:32 pm by
Trish
There are few things more pathetic (and I mean that in the ‘causing and provoking pity’ sense of the word, not the ‘miserably or contemptibly inadequate’ sense - thanks, dictionary.com) than the site of my ten year old girl, tucked up on the sofa for the second day in a row, completely at the mercy of this dreaded winter ‘flu.
Here in Australia, and in freezing-cold Canberra to be exact, there are some nasty winter bugs going around, and the girls in this family have all succumbed, one by one. My eight year old had it a fortnight ago, last week was my turn, and now it’s Madeleine’s. This poor kid’s annual winter bout of the ‘flu usually involves a trip to the ER in the middle of the night for a dose of something to open her airways. She has a tendency to develop croup when she catches a cold, and I’ve seen her lips turn blue enough times now that we now know to take her in the minute she starts sounding even remotely seal-like. We took her last night at about 8.30pm, and fourteen hours later she’s happily ensconced on the sofa with her iPod, the remote control, her Nintendo, the electronic thermometer and a banana smoothie, breathing easier. She never complains, she just looks at me with bloodshot, teary eyes and pulls Buster the Bear in a bit tighter. Which is all a parent really needs to hear, really. More chocolate, darling? OK. Here, have a whole block.
Compare this act of incredible bravery with my own experience a few days ago. I was actually weeping. I would like to tell you that my aches and pains were FAR WORSE than Madeleine’s struggle to breathe but I’m pretty sure that argument wouldn’t fly. But I really, really felt terrible. Everything ached, nothing fixed it, and nobody was giving me chocolate. And did I complain? You BET I did. I complained to my husband at every opportunity, begged him to make the nasty aches go away, implored him to do something, anything, to make my life less miserable. Yes, it was extremely undignified.
Why do we complain? Does it actually make us feel better, somehow, to be explaining to somebody else just how rotten we feel? Do we do it for the sympathy, for the chance for a cuddle or some flowers or just some acknowledgment that what we’re going through really is awful? Is complaining just another way of seeking validation? Maybe it is. But that doesn’t explain why some people complain and others don’t. Don’t we all need validation for the way we are feeling?
I’m a shameless complainer. OK, maybe not completely shameless. Sure, I feel a bit ridiculous afterwards, especially if the person I’m complaining to calls me on it and points out how pathetic - in the miserably or contemptibly inadequate sense - it is to see a grown woman weeping about a little upper respiratory infection. A dear friend of mine has just been through several harrowing sessions of chemotherapy and the only time I’ve heard her complain was when she was getting frustrated with the turban covering her bald head, because it kept slipping sideways. I’ve heard about chemo, I’ve seen people in the movies go through it - it looks like sheer bloody hell, but I never once heard a peep of a ‘why me??’ from my friend. Why doesn’t she ask for sympathy? Doesn’t she need somebody to tell her ‘you poor bugger, I’m so sorry, that must be awful, you’re very brave’?
Maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she has made peace with the fact that this is just something she has to go through, something that will eventually make her stronger and wiser. Maybe when you’ve got something that awful happening to you, it just seems like a complete waste of energy to be undignified and ask someone else to agree with you that it’s awful. Yes, that must be it. And that would explain, I suppose, why I wept at my aching body… in the great scheme of things, a mild upper respiratory infection really isn’t that bad. In fact, it’s pretty contemptibly inadequate. I wasn’t weeping because it hurt so much, I was weeping because of the futility of having a cold that had knocked me completely on my arse without teaching me anything profound about myself other than the certainty of my own pathetic-ness.
I think I’ll just stick to my job as chief medicine-distributor and chocolate-provider and try to remember to take some echinacea next winter so I can avoid getting sick and miserable in the first place.
Self defence in the age of cyber bullying
Posted
July 19, 2008 at
11:43 pm by
Trish
A couple of years ago we signed the girls up for karate lessons. Friends of ours had enrolled their son in Tae Kwon Do classes specifically so he would be able to defend himself against a physical threat which they believed would more than likely present itself at some point in his life. I remember thinking that he’d have to be very unlucky to get attacked, and that they were perhaps being a little paranoid. And yet you hear these stories of young men getting themselves into fights by walking past the wrong nightclub at the wrong time and getting in the way of the wrong guy coming out of the club, and you can understand why they might want their son to be able to fend off that kind of attention. Still, he’s only a kid, surely that was years away?
We signed our two girls up for karate because we would like them to be able to defend themselves against an attack, but mostly because we wanted them to have the confidence that comes from knowing you could defend yourself. I don’t know if it’s an urban myth, but there was a young girl, about 11 years old, who was grabbed from behind by a man who then tried to get her into the back of his car. It happened in broad daylight at the local shopping centre. The girl had been practicing Tae Kwon Do since she was about five years old. Apparently, that’s long enough to learn how to escape a man’s clutches, spin around, and kick him square in the face and render him unconscious. Apparently he started to come round as the police were handcuffing him.
Great story.
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Fear-mongering.
Posted
June 15, 2008 at
3:59 am by
Trish
I hardly watch the news on television anymore. I don’t like the tabloid-spin most news networks are putting on their stories, and I don’t like being surprised by stories about children who have been abducted or women who have been violated or any of those other happenings that I can’t forget about for days afterwards. I prefer to just read the headlines and make a decision about whether or not I need to know all the horrid details. I also don’t like being fed this notion that I need to be afraid that any of this bad stuff is going to happen to my family, and that I should be super-vigilant any time I leave the safety of my fortified house. And that I should have a fortified house. And know karate. In some countries, I might be encouraged to carry a gun, to protect myself from the madness that I see on the news every night.
I don’t like being scared and worried. And as a parent you give birth to worry. The list of things you can add to your list of things to worry about doubles when you have kids. What am I saying? Doubles? How about increases by a factor of a zillion. I try very hard not to think about the things that can happen to them but I have an active imagination and I’m usually pretty quick to jump to the worst possible conclusion. I’m 37 in a couple of weeks and my head is covered in grey hair. You can’t tell unless you look at the roots, but it’s there. Very, very grey. Grey like Bill O’Reilly’s hair. OK, grey like Anderson Cooper’s.
The problem is that the kids, my two otherwise perfectly innocent little girls, occasionally do things that give me reason to worry. And although they may see their little adventures as just that - an adventure - I see it as the story on the evening news, complete with graphic images and adjectives in bright scary-red capitals. I don’t want to be one of those parents who wont let their kids out of their sight, but I also don’t want to be one of those parents who wish they had been more vigilant. Where or how do we draw the line? (more…)
The Bad Seeds
Posted
May 23, 2008 at
3:52 am by
Trish
There are three boys in my ten year old daughter’s year who are known as Those Boys Who Get Into Trouble All The Time. There’s one in my seven year old’s class. Every school has them. For a few years when he was young, my brother was one of Those Boys. I can remember my parents’ anguish at having to go down the road to school to see the Principal, yet again, because of some mischief my brother had gotten himself into. But I didn’t really appreciate how difficult it must have been for them until today.
I was standing in the playground this afternoon, chatting with a couple of other mothers as we swapped kids for afternoon play-dates, when I was struck in the back of the head with something sharp and hard. The force was enough to knock my teeth together and send my sunglasses right off my face and onto the ground. I clutched the back of my head and spun around to see what it was and where it had come from. One of the other mothers picked up a small rock as three boys turned away from me with their hands in their pockets and their eyes cast upwards. Wasn’t us.
I looked down at my hand, fully expecting to see blood, but there was none. My head was aching immediately and now, about an hour later and despite a couple of pills, I’ve got a dull ache behind my left eye. So, not a serious injury, but it was all I could do to hold myself together as I turned to look at these boys and try to figure out why on earth they might have decided throwing rocks was a good idea.
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The search for inner peace. And quiet.
Posted
May 1, 2008 at
6:03 am by
Trish
I would like to be able to tell you that I am one of those perpetually peaceful people who seem to radiate a slightly smug contentedness from deep within their soul. I would like to be able to tell you that I write in a gratitude diary every day, right after my 6am Yogalates session and bowl of organic muesli. I would like to be able to tell you that I am able to handle anything my children throw at me – figuratively speaking – because I am inherently calm and happy and balanced. I would like to be able to tell you I’m like that because I would like to be like that but the thing is, I’m not. Maybe in a parallel universe, but not this one. I’m just not good at relaxing. During the birth of my second daughter, I tried very hard to breathe deeply through the contractions, to focus my energies inward and breathe the pain out. My husband later told me that I sounded like a horse.
In this universe, I’m just your average, garden-variety ineffective parent whose favourite method for calming down involves a large glass of shiraz and an even larger block of chocolate, and whose body would simply snap in half if made to do the downward dog.
When my mother was a stay-at-home-mother of four she went to yoga classes once a week – we used to say she was going to Yoghurt Classes – and she once told me that yoga saved her sanity in those days. So one day I went to a yoga class for new mothers and stretched for about 50 minutes before being told to lie down and listen to the lovely music and breathe deeply and just as I felt the tension melt away and the thoughts leave my troubled mind and just as I reached that state of blissful contentment… I fell asleep. I might have snored. Well, at least I didn’t neigh.
I really love the idea of meditation, but although I have tried I just can’t do it without the snoring. So, like all good mothers, I am living the life of a calm and contented human being vicariously through my children. My kids are learning to meditate. In our house, every day ends with reading from a book called The Wishing Star: Meditations for Children by Marneta Viegas. There’s a good reason why this is a good thing.
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Sunday morning soap-box
Posted
April 12, 2008 at
9:13 pm by
Trish
My younger daughter, Ella, is seven years old. A few weeks ago she spent the night at a friend’s house and stayed up late and ate junk food and did all that stuff that usually happens at a sleep-over that makes you sigh and shake your head and tuck her into bed a little earlier the next night. But she also got to watch a movie that was rated suitable for mature audiences, and I have to tell you that’s the bit that worried me the most.
The mother of the friend is a good friend of mine, which complicates things a little. I like that we are all friends, and that our daughters play happily together in the backyard while we gossip on the back porch (sometimes, shhh, we have a glass of wine). On the one hand, we’re good enough friends that I could tell her that I don’t want Ella watching M-rated movies and she’ll be fine with that. But on the other, I don’t want her thinking that I’m questioning her judgment and that this somehow means I’m questioning everything about her. I know how much I worry when someone gives me some slightly negative feedback - I immediately start making a mental list of the zillion other things they must hate about me too.
Perhaps I would not have worried so much about the movie if Ella hadn’t had a nightmare. She told me that she was having a bad dream about the movie she saw, and we (her Dad and I) told her not to be silly, it wasn’t a scary movie, you’re just making excuses to stay up late. In the end she was so over-tired and overwrought that we banished her from the room she shares with her sister and made her sleep in the spare room. But just to reassure ourselves, we checked parentsinmind.com to see what the classification police had to say about the movie. Oh, dear. References to humans having sex with animals. A man kicks a young woman’s head off. A man whips himself on the back and we see bloody slashes.
Yes, we punished her for having a nightmare after she watched an M-rated movie. That has to count as one of our least proud, most imperfect, parenting moments.
In the end I decided not to say anything to my friend about it - what’s done is done - but if Ella is invited to stay over again I’m going to put on my Serious Concerned Mother face and just ask that she limit the viewing choices to the bottom shelf - the one with all the Disney cartoons.
The movie classifications are there for a reason, telling us very clearly that some smart people in a government office somewhere have given the whole matter a great deal of thought and no, this film shouldn’t be seen by seven year olds. Why question it? Why take the chance that our kids might find references to humans having sex with animals a little upsetting instead of hilariously funny?
Remember when? Nah, me neither.
Posted
March 27, 2008 at
8:13 pm by
Trish
I have had 36 birthdays but I can’t remember more than a few of the gifts my parents gave to me each year to celebrate the milestone. Perhaps if you’d asked me to remember these things BEFORE I had children I may have been able to reel them all off. But as every mother knows, with parenthood comes amnesia.
They gave me a alarm clock radio when I was about 12. I woke up as they were sneaking it into my bedroom sometime around midnight, and I remember having to pretend to be asleep, and to keep my excitement quietly to myself after they’d left. I really, really wanted a alarm clock radio that year, and when I finally fell asleep it was with a big grin on my face.
I remember my 18th - that was the year Dad bought me my first Swiss Army Knife. The year after I got a Gortex Jacket, you know, for going hiking. Dad is very outdoorsey. After that, Mum took over the gift purchasing responsibilities. For my 21st I received a gorgeous gold locket. And for my 30th, they gave me a Wedgewood vase, and in the card Mum wrote something along the lines of “you’re old enough to have one of these now.” So naturally I’m wondering what I’ll get for my 40th. I just know I’ll be old enough for Tiffany.
Other than that, I have no memories at all of the gifts I received. Isn’t that terrible? I suppose at the time all my parents hoped for was that I would be happy with their choice (and grateful!). I don’t know if they asked themselves, when they picked out my eighth birthday present, whether or not I’d remember that particular gift for the rest of my life. Needless to say I didn’t. But I’m sure it was lovely, and I’m sure I would have said thank you.
Madeleine turns ten tomorrow. It’s the first of those milestones that I remember wondering about in the days after she was born. Wow, imagine what she’ll be like in a year? In ten years? When she’s off to college? Ten years. Crikey.
Just in case she forgets what she got for this birthday, we’ve got the present opening caught on video camera. And there’ll be an extra reminder from this year, a little birthday souvenir - we bought her a ticket to tomorrow night’s Harry Connick Jnr concert, and I got hold of a tour poster, and then I bought her a nice pen, and when we cash in the backstage passes his Manager bestowed upon us, she’ll (hopefully) get an autograph and maybe a “Happy 10th Birthday Madeleine, love Harry xxx.” And yes, since you’re asking, she is a fan in her own right. I put him on her iPod, but she’s the one that put him into her Favourites playlist.
So this should be a birthday to remember. But if she ever forgets, I’ll happily remind her, because I’m planning to enjoy this concert at least as much as she is and I’ll remember every single detail. I’ll wait until she’s a little bit older, though, before I tell her how cute Harry’s butt is when you see it up close.
Parents’ Worst Nightmare #453: What if your child is a World Class Athlete?
Posted
March 11, 2008 at
8:26 am by
Trish
When we got married I don’t remember any discussion about a pre-nup. Maybe Australian lawyers were yet to discover that such a thing existed. We may have had some system where the bride and groom agreed beforehand on who would get to keep the family heirloom convict ball and chain but other than that we just said “I do” and got on with things, albeit with our fingers crossed. So you might think I’m joking when I say there’s a clause in our pre-nup that says if any of our kids inherit my husband’s athletic prowess then he’s the one who gets to drive them to early morning training.
My husband was a slightly hyper-active five year old and during the summer of 1977 his mother decided to enroll him in swimming lessons in an effort to get him to burn off some of that energy. There was a coach on the pool deck who noticed PJ had a good strong kick and suggested to his mother that he might have some natural talent. By the time he was eight years old he was competing in local races. I met him at high school in year eight (junior year) but already knew him as that guy who won all the events at the school swimming carnival by half a length. Of the pool. I’m not just bragging, he was really good. At the pinnacle of his career he was ranked in the top ten in our country for three different events, was all set to compete in the Olympic Trials, and was considering an offer of a swimming scholarship to a college in North America. OK I’m bragging, but it’s all true. The story doesn’t have a happy ending, unfortunately. He developed tendonitis in his shoulder and at the age of 18 he had to give it all away. If only…
His father was a champion sprinter in his heyday in England, his mother an accomplished horse-rider, so there’s something in the genes on his side of the family that make them good at sports. We have been watching both our daughters closely to see if they’re going to be champion sprinters or Olympic swimmers but up until a couple of years ago neither seemed all that excited about either. Which is fine, of course. I was a very content but fairly ordinary netball player and cross-country runner when I was at school. I was a mediocre saxophonist and a lousy bagpiper. But that’s another story.
At the end of Ella’s first year of school we started to notice that she had quite extraordinary muscle definition for a child of six. Her arms looked like they had been sculpted and her back muscles positively rippled as she struggled with getting her school uniform on over her head in the morning. We couldn’t figure out how she had developed such a physique until one day I watched her on the jungle-gym in the playground at school. She was swinging from one end of the frame to the other, pausing every so often in a chin-up to let the other kids past. Then she would jump off and run across to the fireman’s pole and scale it in half a second flat. And suddenly I realised - this kid is actually a monkey. You know how some parents will say “Jimmy, go get your violin and play a little Chopin for the nice visitors”? Well, we’d say “Hey, Ella, show everyone your biceps!” and she would roll up her sleeves and do an Arnold Schwarzenegger.
One year later and we signed both the kids up for the local swim club, a very informal Friday night/Sunday morning commitment that included one session of training and one session of just-for-fun racing. The junior kids’ coach greeted Ella with a hearty “Well hello there, Muscles!” and that’s when I knew she definitely was a bit of a freak. She leapt into the water and proceeded to splash around and to her best impression of a Japanese tourist caught in a rip at Bondi Beach. It was enthusiastic, but it wasn’t pretty. She might have had the physique but she lacked the coordination.
This summer we enrolled the girls again at swim club. Madeleine took to it with characteristic determination and has developed a lovely freestyle technique. She can certainly swim further than me. Ella reluctantly joined the little kids’ group. If you asked her she’d probably tell you that the only reason she’s doing swimming at all is because the parents cook pancakes for the kids after the Sunday morning lesson. But this year something seems to have switched on in her head. A couple of Sundays ago I took a break from flipping pancakes to watch her in the pool.
The kid has a hell of a kick. She absolutely powers through the water, and I have to walk at a reasonable pace as I follow her alongside on the pool deck. I’m not just bragging. OK, yes I am. But there’s no denying that Ella is the one who has inherited the necessary genetic makeup to possibly excel at swimming and so PJ and I have been discussing the logistics of getting her to training at 5am, six mornings a week.
PJ’s mother took him to training every morning for ten years. She got up, drove him to the pool, came home and went back to sleep for a while, then went back to the pool to pick him up, then came home and got herself ready for work. Can you imagine? It was dark when they left, and during winter at least it was still dark when they got back. It’s quite a commitment, being the parent of an elite athlete. Getting the kids to school every morning is hard enough without factoring in training sessions that start well before the crack of dawn. Add to this the fact that we are about to realise our dream of moving out of the city and onto a rural acreage - forty minutes from the nearest swimming club - and we’re wondering if we, let alone she, has what it takes to be a serious swimmer.
She is only seven years old. I’m getting ahead of myself. She might not want to do it. She might be happy just swingin’ from the jungle gym. But what if she discovers a natural talent for something like this, something that requires a lot of hard work? I’m all for encouraging my kids to try their hand at anything. At the moment they do karate and horse-riding, and swimming will give way to winter sports (netball for Madeleine, soccer for Ella) and I’ll keep driving them to their classes as long as they’re happy to go (which they are, in case you were wondering that I might be one of those scary Stage Mother types). But if Ella takes to swimming the way her Dad did, or Madeleine develops on obsession for dressage and show-jumping like her grandmother, do I have the energy and time and commitment to keep up?
I hope so. I think so. Yeah, of course I do. I might need to start getting into training myself though. And by ‘training’ I mean setting the alarm for 4am and practicing operating my espresso machine whilst my eyes are still firmly shut.
Ineffective, now with added Imperfection!
Posted
March 5, 2008 at
10:13 pm by
Trish
Back in 2003 I optimistically signed up for Parent Effectiveness Training. My first born daughter had been one of those ‘good babies’ that you sometimes hear about, the kind that grow into adorable two year olds and sweet little three year olds, with barely a tantrum to speak of. I was riding the wave of smug parenthood when my second daughter came along and introduced me to the fine art of the Supermarket Special. It was right there, in the cereal aisle, watching my daughter throw her little body to the ground in dramatic, dying-swan fashion, that I realised I had been kidding myself. I actually didn’t have a clue what I was doing after all. My attempts to calm her down, to entice her back into the pram, to gather her up in my loving arms and show her that I loved her in spite of the violence of her tantrum, were all in vain. I stood and watched her writhing about on the floor and wondered if I could be any less effective.
So when a friend told me about Parent Effectiveness Training, I eagerly enrolled. The course promised techniques and methods to tame the most ferocious toddler-beast. At the very first class I met a dozen other bewildered, haggard, ineffective parents, all keen to regain the upper hand. Our instructor was a sweet and softly-spoken woman who didn’t seem to possess the vocal range required for yelling at children. I wondered what magical powers she possessed that made it possible for her to maintain decorum in her house full of toddlers without needing to raise her voice. The Ineffective Parents in the room leaned forward to listen to her wise counsel. She spoke about patience, about negotiation, of discussing alternatives but not compromising on boundaries. She said it worked wonderfully well in her house, and she was sure we could all learn from her experiences. We looked at her incredulously and wondered if she even had children.
Some parents might find the PET model works well for their families and I am not here to argue the merits of one theory over another. But what I will say is that there are few places more validating and supportive than a Community Centre room full of parents at the end of their collective rope. When our softly-spoken instructor invited comments from the floor, well, you might as well have tried to hold back the tide. Everyone had a story about their own special brand of ineffectiveness, and everyone was grateful for the opportunity to tell it like it was. We all attempted to out-do one another with stories of how spectacularly we had failed in our efforts to be Effective Parents. We shared our stories and offered up pure unadulterated empathy. We were there to learn how to be effective, but the most valuable lesson we learned was that we were not alone in our ineffectiveness, and that there was always some poor bastard who had it worse.
And so it is with great joy and gratitude that I join the ranks of the Imperfect Parent. I know that I am among friends here, and that my stories will elicit nods of recognition, virtual hugs of understanding and perhaps the occasional softly-spoken disapproval. Australians are known for their laid-back approach to life, their she’ll-be-right attitude and their penchant for questioning authority and taking well-intentioned advice with a large grain of salt. As a parent this attitude has possibly landed me in a nappy-bucket (diaper pail!) full of hot water on several occasions but it has also given me a sense of humour that frankly I couldn’t have survived without. Thank you for joining me on this journey, thank you for overlooking the extra vowel in humor and the ’s’ in realized, and thank you to the editors of The Imperfect Parent for allowing me to embrace my ineffectiveness and my imperfections. It’s going to be therapeutic.
