Trying hard not to think about it

Over the last few days, with the weak wintry sun casting its welcome dappled light through the half leafy trees, I have had cause to relish many a moment. I have needed them, and sure as sunset, they have come.

Moments with boys scooting off fast ahead. Happy. So precious. Oblivious, excited, free. Desperate to get home.

Moments holding soft little hands. Delightful timeless walking chats about this and that. Lions versus cheetahs. Ants nests. Best friends. What else matters?

Examining the beautiful, developing features of my sons’ faces. Changing every day. Growing up in front of me. It is happening too fast, and yet not fast enough.

This painful process of parenting which we all share. This profound indescribable love, more like longing, so painful in its depth. How on earth do we bear it?

Our elders tell us it goes by so fast. Enjoy them while they are young. I am focussed and savouring and relishing the interspersed joy. Yet all is tinged with an intense mourning which threatens to topple the peace and expose the truth: it cannot be captured. Each moment, each fleeting breathless delight, is blown and wisplike vanishes.

Yet these joyous instants have a restorative power that propels us forward. Cumulatively each moment combines to provide some protection from the taunts of time. We can know that it flies but – for now – can not care.

I will just live and enjoy.

The Science of Sorry

Tonight, whilst playing at the park, Boy 3 hit another boy with a stick and made him cry. Naturally I didn’t witness the offence because I was too busy talking to the victim’s mother, but I did manage to handle it with my typical lack of parenting aplomb. I chastised Boy 3, making him cry, then further intensified his shame by insisting that he apologise to the boy, who by now had been suitably comforted and distracted by his mother and was happily swinging on the swing.

Minutes passed by and Boy 3 refused to apologise, so I ended up saying sorry on his behalf to the profoundly disinterested child and his earnest but slightly bewildered mother. Awkwardly, we changed the subject and moved on.

This all too familiar playground interaction got me thinking about the art of saying sorry. It highlighted for me several important things: one, that I’m clearly negligent in my teaching of appropriate and fundamental social rules of engagement to my children; two, that perhaps knowing when and how to say sorry isn’t necessarily intrinsic to our nature; and three, that I am not good at saying sorry. I also realised that there are good sorries and there are bad sorries.

Clearly, it is entirely expected and appropriate to say sorry when you hurt someone. Even if it was an accident. This is being nice, showing remorse, and demonstrating concern for your fellow being. This is a good sorry. If it is said at the right time, to the right person, it can work positive wonders.

You can also say sorry for things done to others that you didn’t actually do yourself, but for which you nevertheless feel somehow responsible. All good.

Then there are some bad sorries, for which I raise my hand in guilty admission.

I often say sorry to people when they wrong me. I have apologised to people who have stepped on my toe. I apologise for not having something when I was not aware I was supposed to have it. I apologise for being early. For being late. For being on time. I say sorry to resolve arguments when I know I am in the right. I am guilty of a litany of sorries for which, yes, I am sorry.

Forcing a clearly shamed and guilty child to say sorry under duress is probably another bad sorry. I mean, what does it actually achieve? There are schools of parenting thought that would have a mother withstand hours of blistering torment forcing their tortured offspring to apologise. The apocalypse would befall them before they backed down. I don’t happen to subscribe to them. I have seen it happen: mothers in the playground upending picnics and quashing conversation in a stubborn determination to make little Tommy apologise. Poor little Tommy cowers beneath his mother’s stony glare and the nervy awkward shoe shuffles of others before finally relenting and murmuring a defeated “sorry” to his indifferent, if slightly bemused victim. What has Tommy learned? Thou must say sorry or else face a mother’s wrath? Is this good? I’m not so sure.

Tonight I took what in the eyes of Tommy’s mother would be the coward’s way out. I solved Boy 3’s conflict by apologising on his behalf. Boy 3 knew he had done wrong. He was guilty. He was sorry. He just didn’t know how to say it. Probably because I haven’t taught him how. Am I sorry for this?

You bet.

The fun never stops

A-ha. A new parenting challenge. Another curve ball. Thought it got easier after sleeping through, weaning, walking, talking and toilet training?

Think again, sucker.

Try school refusal. Imagine waking up each weekday morning, tentatively, nervously, anticipating the worst. A son, tired from sleep difficulties, angry, anxious, heels digging in.

“I’m not going.”

The dreaded words. Not today. Please.

The first rung on the response ladder: attempted lighthearted brush off. Have some breakfast. You’ll be fine. What classes do you have on today?

“I’m not going.”

Second gear: Come on. You have to go. You know that. School’s great! You learn heaps! Your friend/s will miss you.

“I’m not going.”

By now the ante’s upped. The clock is ticking. The bomb is primed. Bribery is attempted. Force is threatened. The shouts commence.

“I’m not going.”

What do you do? Give in? A day off – so what? He’s tired. Or: physically force him into the car, unwashed and shoeless, shouting, enraged, unforgiving. He will remember this.

Patience. Boundaries. Discipline. Consequences. Consistency. All bow at the mercy of those three tiny words: “I’m not going.”

Toilet training was nothing compared to this.

When you’re not strong

I have never been one to seek help. I never wanted to appear too self absorbed, too melodramatic, too intense. And I didn’t want people to think I was mad, even when I may have felt it a little myself.

Throughout my life, there have been distinct times when some professional guidance or even just friendly advice probably wouldn’t have gone astray, but I have always harbored the feeling that to verbalise one’s problems is to submit to failure. Admit defeat. Once you verbalise a problem, it is out there in the real world for everyone to see and you cannot take it back. Like a big black bubble it escapes into the ether and infects the air: the problem becomes real. You need help. But everybody has problems – why should anyone care about mine? A ridiculous double standard that I only ever applied to myself.

But lately I have had cause to rethink my attitude, and it has been nothing short of revelatory.

The last few weeks I have been tested. I have had my emotions stretched and pulled like a pizza dough. I have cried. I have wailed. I may have even growled. I have felt like a complete failure, at something so profoundly important and integral to my life that my sense of failure stopped me in my tracks. I was off track and floundering.

But then I reached out.

Not within myself, as I normally would, stoically, stubbornly determined to provide my own solution. I did not have the strength. No, this time I leaned. I leaned right out. I leaned on anyone who would listen, and it turns out there were a surprising number of people who did. I looked the feelings of failure and defeat in the eye and I learned that they disappear when you reach out. And people expect it. They come open armed. And they care.

Friends and family are the safety net around the trampoline of life. They are there to be leaned into every now and again when the jumping gets off target. We all have a safety net, and we each form part of someone else’s. I have tried jumping without a net, but now I know better.

CAMHS anyone? Or, the reality of parenthood

I’ve been slightly preoccupied of late with a son who appears to be going through a rather traumatic growth spurt. At least I hope that’s what it is. It’s not the type of childhood growth spurt which affects the arms and legs and causes growing pains at night. This seems to be a brain growth spurt, and it is causing him to behave in outrageously unacceptable and totally – for him – uncharacteristic ways. Swearing like a Tourette’s sufferer and threatening us with knives. That sort of thing.

Ever talked down a knife wielding six year old threatening to kill you? Neither had I. Needless to say, his impulse control has been malfunctioning and it is a very challenging thing to live with, let alone parent.

Some things have taken me by surprise as I have raised three boys into childhood, and along the way I have questioned and doubted my decisions and actions many times. But none of the scenarios I have faced have proven as challenging as this. Two months ago I had a quiet, sensitive, affectionate and obedient son whom I could rely on to be on my side when the chips were down. This week I have an anxious, belligerent, angry, hate filled, foul-mouthed and disconnected child who seems lost in the mire of an out of control mental state.

What to do?

Do I discipline the offensive and aggressive behaviour, or do I hold him in his rage and reassure him that it will be alright? I have tried both with equally negative outcomes. I have dusted off my many “How To” guides to raising sons, but none of them cover what to do when your six year old threatens to kill you. I am piloting a plane with no instructions. I am winging it, desperately hoping that we can ride out this phase and re-emerge on the other side better, nicer, and stronger. It’s a scary portent of a possible adolescence.

It is incredibly hard to feel confident and calm when your beautiful boy is swearing at you, all arms and legs flailing, and seems so filled with anger and frustration and fear you want to shout and cry at the same time. How do you deal with this as a parent? As a mother? As a human being? 

Clearly he needs my help. I think I need help to give him that help.

This is not something they teach in antenatal classes.

Disturbing Trends

I was watching something on iView the other night and something I saw made me feel somewhat… perturbed. 

It was grown men with no pubes.

I asked Señor Sneeze about it and he confirmed that yes, lots of chaps at his cricket club seemed to indulge in the act of fuzz removal, making me suspect that there is a silent, sinister movement afoot which I feel compelled to revolt against for the sake of my sons and any future partners they might have.

I am not a fan of the pube-remove. On women or men. I tried it once many hirsute years ago and was left with a red, raw, stinging monstrosity which would have frightened a baboon. I felt horrible doing it, and when the redness finally subsided the vulnerable, childlike exposure of my nethers just looked… wrong. Thinking about it further, and reading articles on the origins and motivations for the trend, I felt convinced that its provenance lay in the porn industry and a tacky and purely economical requirement for “clean camera shots” or some such. Henceforth I became dogged in my refusal to go bare.

But I know lots of women who are committed removalists, and will quote anything from cleanliness to eroticism as their motivations, neither of which I buy, frankly. Cleanliness? What’s wrong with a shower once in a while, and, ok, perhaps the odd careful trim? As for eroticism, this is perhaps the more problematic of drivers. Are women removing their hair for themselves, or their partners? Do our partners really find the appearance of a shiny pre-pubescent skin patch more erotic than a womanly, luscious forest? If so, why? Could it be because media imagery of naked women, unless you are watching a French film, rarely shows a full curly crop? What does the media have against feminine hirsuteness?

Which brings me to my latest discovery – the male nether-crop. This has probably been around for decades, but having been out of the game for about that long, it has hitherto escaped my notice. Now I am wondering, who told blokes that women like the look of their exposed tackle? When I first met Señor Sneeze at the tender age of 19 – he being 28 and so almost a fully grown male – I rejoiced at the discovery that he had chest hair. I had never had a boyfriend with chest hair before. It made him seem so… manly. That to me was erotic. If I had moved further down to discover a shiny bare patch with a large pseudo-limb flopping underneath I think I would have run screaming. Let’s face it, penises are ludicrous to look at at the best of times. Why remove their useful shelter and expose their preposterous dangle? Keep ’em hid, I say. We are grown-ups, after all, and thus should have hairy bits here and there. Fair enough if you want to trim – nothing wrong with keeping it tidy. After all, nobody likes split ends. And I’m not suggesting we de-evolve completely to our hairy primate origins. But going bare down there? I just don’t get it.

Periods

About a year ago I played a game of netball during which the entire team, but myself in particular, played really badly. After our staggering loss, we stood around clutching our drink bottles and pondered what went wrong. I felt compelled to speak up: “Hey team. Sorry I played so badly tonight. I’ve got a ridiculously heavy period at the moment and I just feel like crap.”

If an atmosphere can be so described, what followed would be an air of “Too Much Information”.

The instant I mentioned the P word, I wished I hadn’t. Where my comment could have been met with empathetic quips about how annoying heavy periods are and how debilitating cramps can be, I was faced instead with an uncomfortable, shifty silence. Odd really, given that I can almost guarantee that each of the women would have, at some point, probably had a period.

Women openly talk about pregnancy. We shamelessly share news that we are “trying to conceive” (aka having lots of sex). We talk about annoying husbands, beauty regimes, weight loss and parenthood. We compare notes on schooling and offspring achievements. We look to each other for advice on career development and personal growth. But up there on the list of the Top 3 Things Women Do Not Usually Discuss With One Another, snuggled in between sexually transmitted infections and miscarriage/stillbirth, is the Big P.

Given that menstruation is the most obvious and profound difference between men and women and is something that dominates our lives for 40 or more years, it never ceases to amaze me how little it is discussed. 

There is an aisle in every supermarket on the planet devoted to the products we rely on to manage our “time of the month”. There are a million euphemisms: Aunt Flo, Cousin Red, crimson wave, rags, have the painters in, ride the cotton pony. But for something which can so profoundly dictate the mental, physical, emotional and reproductive state of a woman, the menstrual cycle is not a topic discussed in the school yard.

Either menstruation for most women is merely a minor inconvenience barely worth a mention, or something is preventing us from discussing it.

For me, my hormonal cycle is like a roller coaster carriage that I ride on, at times waving my hands in joyous delight and at others hanging on for sheer survival. It carries me through this life in a rapid, bumpy fashion which I have had to learn to manage and enjoy. Mine is not a smooth ride. If there are women out there for whom menstruation is a “minor inconvenience” involving a little bit of bleeding once a month and nothing else I would be surprised if they existed, but more power to them if they do. Hormones have seen to it that I spend roughly one week bleeding heavily, one week feeling terrific and one week suffering practically every imaginable symptom of premenstrual syndrome (no mean feat – according to Wikipedia there are over 200). 

Talk to any woman desperate for a baby: a period five days late can be the harbinger of the greatest joy. For a woman not wanting a baby, the greatest agony. The no-woman’s-land between period due date and that positive or negative pregnancy test can be profoundly isolating. Counting days, monitoring moods, avoiding or attempting conception. Menstruation can be a daily minefield. And yet women rarely talk about it. I am yet to hear a woman in the school yard proclaim that she is feeling particularly manic/ paranoid/ pained/ depressed/ bloated/ relieved or pimply because she is on day X of her cycle. I would love to hear it. I would prefer to hear that over the sarcastic, impatient, unsympathetic quips so often heard from men about the women in their lives and their PMT: “She’s got P-M-T“. A statement used in a derogatory way as if to suggest PMT is a cop-out. An excuse. A made-up term. It is so often used to trivialise the very real symptoms around 85% (if Wikipedia is to be believed) of women have suffered at some time. Imagine if women spoke of penile dysfunction in the same way: “He’s got penile dysfunction”. Would men tolerate this lack of compassion? I thoroughly doubt it. And yet periods, PMS, pads, tampons and all the associated accoutrements that accompany a woman’s menstrual cycle are either trivialised, mocked, doubted, or simply ignored and avoided.

It’s time we opened up about periods. They are a fact of life. A profound and fundamental one. All women have them at different times and in different ways, but for basically the same reason. We don’t need to hide our hormones. They are part of the fabric of what makes us women. If your hormones are affecting you in a particular way, it is not an excuse or a cop-out to say so. If a woman told me she was feeling especially paranoid or fragile because her period was imminent, I would rejoice at her sharing. I would let her know that I too feel that way sometimes, and remind her that, for all its intensity, it passes. Just as the cramps dissipate. The pimples and blemishes fade. The bleeding stops. The cycle goes on and we continue our rides, unique and yet bonded as they are. 

They can be a drag, but whether we like it or not we are driven by our menstrual cycles. We ride them. Control them. Are at the mercy of them. 

At least until menopause.

Gesundheit

I live with a Sneezer. If you share the misfortune of living with one you’ll know what I’m talking about.

My Mum is a Sneezer. As kids we used to all hold our breath as she would launch into an attack within earshot of Dad. Without fail it would result in his exasperated utterance “Gor blimey!” as though Mum was deliberately tweaking her nasal hairs just to annoy him. In Dad’s defense her sneezes really are quite something. The sort of cathartic bodily expurgation that has you wondering how her body emerges unscathed. Indeed, the apex of Mum’s sneezing career was apparently having an anaphylactic reaction to Dad’s aftershave.

Fast forward several years of sneezing purgatory and I find myself cohabiting with a chronic, explosive Sneezer. The poor chap had me wondering whether anyone has ever actually died from sneezing when, the other night, he launched into a 30 minute cascade of extreme nasal sternutation which very nearly left him comatose. The onset of the attack seemed to coincide with my arrival home. Upon moving rooms, it was soon discovered that the offending allergen was in fact me. Or at least something on me. Being the cause of someone’s massive allergic reaction is not a nice feeling. You feel all at once guilty and annoyed. Sorry for almost causing you brain damage, but do I have to stop wearing perfume? Do I really need to change my favourite laundry powder? Can’t you just… not sneeze?

I guess, as with my parents, it may all come to a tumultuous sneezing head when something on me will cause Mr Sneezer to go into anaphylactic shock and I will really have to accept that his allergic reaction cannot be helped. Hopefully not. But until then I will have to, like my father, just leave the room uttering an exasperated “Gor blimey!” and perhaps offer some tissues.

On sharing

Maybe I have become tougher and meaner in my old age. Or perhaps things are genuinely getting a bit out of hand out there in the world of parenting. I’m not sure, but frankly, I’ve had enough of sharing.

Kids these days have to share everything. Playgroups, playgrounds, playdates and kindergyms are awash with parents insistent that their children and, moreover, the children interacting with their children, share every toy, every activity, every space they lay their hands on.

Whatever happened to waiting your turn? Respecting the fact that another child was there first and was enjoying their own game? Maybe they don’t want you to join in and that’s ok. I have seen countless scenarios where mothers have shot angry glares as their clumsy toddler is refused entry to an older child’s game. The older child was there first, playing something too sophisticated for the toddler to grasp, and simply didn’t want their game – or space – invaded. This should not be a crime. The toddler’s mother should have respected the older child’s space and re-directed her toddler elsewhere. She should not, as so often happens, expect the older child to automatically and graciously include the toddler and share the game. When this does not happen, she certainly should not, as so often happens, shoot angry glares at the older child’s mother as if to say “Your child is not sharing with my child. Shame on you”.

This happened to me today, and instead of intervening when I saw my son (the “older child” of the piece) getting frustrated at the clumsy toddler, I waited to see if the toddler would get the picture and move away. Thankfully he did, but not before his mother had looked at me sternly, clearly expecting me to step in and insist that my son let the toddler on the play equipment. Well, I’m sorry if I’m being unreasonable, but my son was there first and was having a perfectly lovely time on his own and would have happily moved away and let the toddler play on the equipment if he had just waited his turn. At that point in time, it was his space, and a little bit of respect for that wouldn’t go astray. With two older brothers to contend with every day of his life, a few minutes alone on some play equipment isn’t too much to ask.

I’m not calling for a complete ban on sharing. Just some perspective. Share the box of crayons? You bet. Share the enormous sandpit? Of course. You’ve got half a watermelon there? That’s plenty for all of us. But share the space you have created for yourself under the slide for an imaginary game of baddies versus goodies with any child who feels like joining in? Not necessarily. That’s not being selfish, it’s being self preserving.

Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder

When I was in my late teens I had a relationship with a guy which lasted for about a year and was, for the most part, reasonably fun. But of all our times together, one argument we had still resonates to this day because it summed up for me what is wrong with our society’s concept of beauty.

We were sitting in my car after a night out, when the topic of conversation somehow segued its way onto beauty and the modeling industry. Elle Macpherson – “The Body” – was everywhere at the time and the media’s lascivious obsession with her was a particular bugbear of mine. Any criticisms I had of the idolatry lavished upon Elle and the industry as a whole were often met with accusations of jealousy and spite. I asked my boyfriend earnestly whether he thought I was beautiful. This was not a clumsy attempted prompt for flattery, but an honest question in a fitting conversational context. Giving it some consideration, his reply was no. How could I be, realistically, given that the criteria for true beauty was set by Elle Macpherson? In his rationale, I did not look like Elle Macpherson, ergo I was not beautiful. When I suggested that he was setting the basis of his conclusion on a set of artificially determined criteria he completely missed my point and simply said “You’re just jealous”.

Needless to say, this conclusion did not do wonders for our relationship and it wasn’t long before we broke up. But the admittance to me in the heated angst of that car all those years ago compounded my anger. Anger at how media depictions of women and how we should look have resulted in the creation of a hierarchical definition of what constitutes beauty and “perfection” which in my mind is utterly false. More than false. It is totally irrelevant.

Call me radical, call me deluded, but I don’t believe you can define beauty in absolute terms. I don’t believe there is a set criteria which must be met in order to be deemed worthy of the beautiful tag. I do not believe that the Elles and Giselles and Naomis of this world represent some upper echelon of unattainable physical perfection which we mere mortals can only dream of. I don’t believe there is an unattainable beauty superior to a “real” beauty – the “plus” size 12 models the industry thrusts at us as if to say “It’s ok. We think you can be beautiful too but only if you look like this and of course you’re still not that beautiful”.

This is the hierarchy that I’m talking about. The “perfection” that the designers parade in their seasonal shows with an insulting, elitist air that is lapped up and fed to the masses by the papers and magazines, followed by a shallow, sniveling attempt by the same press to reassure their readership that they can be beautiful too but under a different set of guidelines which are only slightly more broad and still strictly defined. Woe betide the multitude that fall outside these narrow standards: we, the great unwashed, must spend our lives aspiring to fit an artificially created mold by purchasing the necessary products and behaving in necessary ways in a never ending loop which keeps the entire industry afloat. The idea that beauty can be defined and its criteria dictated is the very scaffold upon which the modeling industry and fashion magazines are built.

That we are fed these subjective definitions as objective absolutes and succumb to their influence is a travesty.

Perhaps I’m old fashioned, or a bit unusual, but I believe beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. I despise terms such as “The Body”, “supermodel”, and “perfect beauty” when used to describe women in the popular press. I don’t believe in a universal notion of what constitutes beauty and I think it is evil that the fashion industry and its obsequious press conspire to formulate definitions of something that is objectively indefinable. The subjective cannot be objective:  what is one person’s plain is another person’s pretty and that is just the way it should be. But if this idea caught on an entire industry would cease to exist, and what a shame that would be…