Teenage Holiday

It’s like midday, it’s teenage o’clock

OMG tripping, am I wicked or wot?

Washing up, still piled high in the sink,

What do you mean, didn’t I stop and think?

The dishwasher’s full, duh, you know it’s clean

Empty it? What on earth do you mean?

Pasta? You’re joking? To start the day, just mad!

I’ll have cereal first so it won’t be so bad

Yeah I’ll come shopping, you can buy me some gear

Just wait a minute, I’m not finished here

I need a shower, do Facebook, and gel up my hair

Get dressed in some rad clothes so people don’t stare

Text mates to tell them what I’m going to do

Search under several piles to find a missing shoe

Oh God does the bruv have to come as well

Shopping with him is my idea of hell

Whaddya mean? It’s what you say and I’ve got no choice?

I’m practically a man, and I have a voice

I can make a stand, I know what to do

Yeah I know you’re busy – can’t you see I am too?!

Ok, I can see you’re angry, I’m sorry, I’ll come

Just give me ten minutes and… 

I love you mum!

Working from Home

Yes, it’s been a while… So to those regular readers who wondered if I had fallen out of the blogosphere and landed on my head, rendering me in an unconscious blogging coma for 3 months, I am back.  And to those new readers who have wandered into my little puddle of the blogosphere, welcome!

As it happens, there was nothing dramatic about my departure, it just seemed to spiral, and every time I envisaged sitting down and updating my blog, life just happened, and then a bit like the impending gloom of writing ones Thank You cards, or To Do list, or tackling the pile of ironing that remonstrates with you in angry fabric conditioned punches as you open the cupboard – it was simply easier to delay doing it to another day.

As many of the blog followers know, I have for the 16 years in which babies have been in my life, worked from home.  This has a lot of benefits when you are a mum of young kids.  You can dictate your own hours, your boss doesn’t frown if you turn up to work in a shabby faded dressing gown smelling suspiciously of nappies, you can attend those interminable baby hand-clapping gym-bouncing rhyme-singing mornings that all young mummies feel that they ought to, until they realise that they are doing more of the above than their babies who are soundly asleep in their buggies. 

And it means that despite the teething sleep deprived hours , the worry of childhood diseases, the endless unsought advice on said diseases, the tantrums in the supermarket, the eviction from the house of biting, fighting, scratching mums (and their toddlers), you can wearily hobble in to a client meeting, baby sick unnoticed on your shoulder, and sit down for a conversation that is only slightly elevated from the ‘Me want’ stage…

But as the kids get older and start developing personalities of their own, this working from home lark can get trickier.  Again, it has its advantages – I can simply inform my boss in a slightly schizophrenic way that I am taking the afternoon off to watch my son play a football match. And if one of the kids is sick, I can keep an eye on them whilst on a phone call to a client.  But when it hits holiday time, this can be a little bit of a problem.

The older two respect my wishes to be left alone on the days that I have set out to work.  They can cook themselves basic meals without setting light to the kitchen.  They are perfectly capable of loading the dishwasher and making their beds.  They can tidy up after themselves.  They can do all of these things… Whether they do, as teenagers, is a different matter.  Their hours are not mine.  I learned long ago not to wait for them all to emerge for breakfast. During the holidays this can stretch from 7.00am to 11.30am.  But by the same token I have learned that expecting them to make a lunch (yes, the timing is a little tricky) means that the fridge is constantly raided throughout the day, and this simply won’t do.  And so I set a lunch time. In between phone calls and document writing.

 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not having a moan, just simply stating it as it is. I absolutely wouldn't have it any other way. I get to see my kids whenever I want and wherever I want, and to carry on doing a job that I love. I get to have my cake and eat it. 

But that doesn't detract from the fact that working from home with kids can get a little tricky.  For a start, working mums in offices who need someone to maybe have their kids for a few hours, forget that you too, work.  Sometimes having an extra child around as a kiddie distraction does actually work for me too.  Sometimes it doesn’t.  It can be a little tricky if you are on the phone and someone rings the bell and the dog hurls himself in an enthusiastic ball of fury at the door.  It can be a bit off putting when you are copy editing a technical document online, and your child comes in to tell you he has nits or that he has forgotten that he has extra sports training 20 miles away starting in ten minutes.  

I had a conversation with Little Man this morning who was sitting companionably beside me as I worked.  He was doing some homework for a test. 

‘Imagine,’ I said, to establish the boundaries, ‘That I am sitting in an office like all the other working mummies.  You need to think about what you need to ask me.’

He looked at me.  ‘But you are sitting beside me’.

‘Yes, I know, but imagine that you aren’t.’

There was a little silence as he turned back to his book, and I to my computer.

Suddenly he began to make a really annoying loud noise.

‘Ring Ring, Ring Ring.’

‘What are you doing?’

He continued the noise.

‘Stop It!’ I said sharply.

He stopped and looked at me admonishingly. ‘Answer the phone then!’

I rolled my eyes and put my hand to my ear.

‘Hello?’ I enquired wearily.

‘Hello Mummy!  What time’s lunch?’ said my son cheerfully.

I’m going to have a stern word with my boss about working conditions…

Kids Dented Egos and a Nice Cup of Tea

Having been brought up in a family of girls, when I had my first boy 15 years ago, I looked in bewilderment at this small manchild who peed in an arc every time I tried to put a nappy on him and a mum in the ward next to mine said to me, ‘Boys are a gift – they are tough on the outside but very, very soft on the inside.  They need more nurturing and care than you would think.’  Mind you she may have been a little biased as she had just given birth to her third child, a girl, who was born with a full set of milk teeth and I left hospital as she was shrieking at the midwife that there was ‘No  f***g way’ that she was going to breastfeed…

3 boys later and her initial words could not be more true.  Throughout the years from the first stumbling toddler steps and Upsy Daisy moments, to the first little sports day races, to the first sprints on full on athletics stadia, my boys have matured into little men – all tough and muscly on the outside, but very soft on the inside.  And part of that growing up process is dealing with fear, and dealing with failure.  And part of dealing with those, is how you deal with it as a parent.

Whether it is losing at a sporting venture, or your child not getting the academic qualifications that you had hoped for, or your teenager has suffered heartbreak for the first time, it is how you react that determines how your child copes with his very real (even if hidden behind a façade of Don’t Care)sense of failure. And it doesn’t come easy.  And there is no way of knowing if you have got it right or wrong, until it is said, and then it can’t be unsaid.  Does the ‘Upsy Daisy, Get Up Now’ approach from a little toddler tumble, ascribe to the utter desolation of being the one to lose a penalty kick?  Does the ‘I love you because You are Special’ sentiment actually work when all the child wants to do is fit in with his peers?  And does the ‘Just ignore Them if they are being Mean, they’re only Jealous’ statement apply when your child is deliberately being targeted?  When is it time to step in, and when is it time to stand back?

As adults, it seems fairly simple – we have developed our own coping mechanisms, and either vent to our good friends and family over a nice cuppa, set out to prove our detractors wrong, or hole up for a while, licking our wounds until we have come up with a strategy.  It is up to our kids to discover their way of dealing with it, and it is up to us to support them with it.

In my case, last week was a week of very mixed emotions.  Little Man, at 9 years old being the only boy in his dance class, and the only male dancer in his school class, had come back from his weekend of all male dance with the Royal Academy of Dance full of pride in what he had achieved and the fact that he had felt part of a ‘gang’.  His school encouraged him to show off his certificate and talk about what he had done in an assembly.  On leaving the room, some alpha females called him Weird.  In a rugby match later when he was delighted to be moved up from the C’s to the B’s, some of the boys were querying why.  But he said nothing to me as I waved at him from the sidelines, and he threw himself into it with gusto and tackled well, going off with honour and a bloody knee.  It was at the match tea, when someone pushed him out of the queue, that his bottom lip started to quiver, and then the tears began to fall.  The male Games teachers, looking hopelessly out of their league, brought him to me.  Initially I tried the Upsy Daisy method.  Didn’t work.  Then I tried the ‘Just ignore Them if they’re being Mean, they’re only Jealous’ approach.  More tears, because of course all he wanted to do was to belong.  So, as it was nearly the end of the day, I took him home, and we had a cuddle on the sofa, and he had a good cry about maybe he should give up dancing but he didn’t want to, and I held back a few tears.  And then we had a cup of tea.  And then we were laughing. And when he was in bed I replied to his teacher’s concerned email.  And the next day he came back beaming because everyone had been nice to him.

And then yesterday Eldest Son (14) played in the semi  finals of a National Schools rugby tournament in which over 500 schools had taken part.  It was held at Allianz Park, home of the Saracens, and the boys were enormously proud to walk out on to the 3G pitch in front of a roaring crowd.  Eldest Son is the fastest in his team, and is used to sprinting past everyone on the pitch and so plays on the wing.  Unfortunately, the opposition’s fastest man was playing against him.  It became a contest of speed.  Eldest Son lost the battle, and limped off the pitch with two bloody knees and a dented ego.  His team were simply outclassed.  The boys bowed their heads in defeat, utterly miserable and dejected.  The watching dads clapped their sons on the backs and tried the Upsy Daisy method.  Some boys had tears streaming down their faces.  The mums tried the ‘ We love you because you are special, you did really well to get this far’.  The boys carried on walking.  They went back by coach, vented to their friends, and by the time they arrived and we were waiting with carefully blank faces, they were laughing.  They had sorted it out amongst themselves.  They had dealt with it in an adult way.

 

This morning the carpenter came in to start on the skirting boards.  Passionate about rugby, he had been watching his only son of 17 play in a match at the weekend. He asked how Eldest Son’s match had gone and I told him.  ‘We lost ours too,’ he said gloomily, and we both stared into the mid distance.  I gathered myself. 

‘Cuppa?’ I asked brightly. 

And he nodded, smiling ruefully.

On the Social

As a writer, marketer, and certainly as a mum, I have a peculiar fascination for social media.  This is a bit of a love-hate relationship.  For years I would look at the Facebook phenomenon and puzzle why everyone would be so interested in the lives of people they barely knew, and in some cases actively disliked.  I saw my personal friends fall in and out with respective virtual friends, some became depressed at the apparent golden lives of others, and some deliberately maintained a role as a voyeur – looking and judging without commenting.  As a slightly addictive and very quick-to-pen personality, I deliberately kept out of the social media loop for a long time, knowing that to commit word to type would mean that I had left an indelible print that may come back to haunt me for many years.

However, there comes a time when actually, as a parent, it is best that you know the danger that your kids face, rather than warn them ineffectually and hope that they don’t fall into the abyss created by social media.  This started when Eldest Son turned 13, and could now legally have a Facebook account like his friends had had for years.  Like many parents, I felt that there was only a certain amount of control that I could continue to have over my kids lives, and what better place to start than with social media – allowing him to have that freedom of voice, yet setting up administrative parameters and rules to be obeyed for his own safety, and ultimately legacy.

And so we joined Facebook together. And while I was at it I joined Twitter (@ruthym007) and had a brief flirtation with Pinterest, YouTube and Instagram.  During the course of my writing and work, I have looked at many social media sites, blogging sites, chat sites, community sites and interactive web sites and have found that there are enormous social e-groups out there – all willing to give you the benefit of their advice, whether or not you want it.  It becomes an all inclusive, all pervasive entity that sucks you in, whether you or not you want it.  And so you become silently embroiled in the anger of the mum from Fleet who has just been splashed by a 4x4 on the school run, and others join in with that fury and cite their own stories of puddle rage, and then the conversation turns to general ranting against all people who drive 4x4’s, and then the 4x4 drivers of the group start protesting that they are not all bad, and so on.  It can take hours of your life, or just seconds, your choice.

And this is what, essentially, the divide in social media is about.  It is a tool for communication that was not available to people of my age when we were growing up.  The most that we committed to on paper was the odd (in my case some very odd) letters, both personal and official and flirtation through an office fax.  Photos were three dimensional and kept in albums (or in my case plastic bags in the loft). Now emails can be forwarded to another circle at the press of a button, and anything on social media can be captured and resent to any corner of the world.  None of us can escape it – even if you are not on social media, a picture of you, no matter how old, can be flashed around the world in seconds.  And it’s the same with those old letters and flirtatious office faxes.  So what is the answer?  Well, the likelihood is that you will never know about it, unless someone mentions it, and for years I found myself amazed that everyone knew what I had been doing at the weekend courtesy of friends on social media.  At that point perhaps only 50% of my personal friends were on it, and we laughed at those who obsessively clicked and tapped their status updates wherever we went.  But that percentage has shifted, and two weeks ago I was out with a group of 8 mums, and only one was not on Facebook.

Sadly, I see more and more people of all ages sitting opposite or beside each other tapping away at their phones.  The art of communication it appears is electronic.  From a personal point of view I now make an enormous effort to leave my phone in my handbag and no longer place it on the table in a restaurant.  It is actually more difficult for me than it seems, but if someone has taken the time to meet me for a meal, it is the least that I can do.  And I don’t have that kind of relationship with virtual friends.

On the other hand, I saw the power of Twitter only last night. We have been party to enormous amounts of flooding around our area due to an unprecedented amount of continual rain.  A horse was trapped on a patch of land the size of a dining table. @Natasha_Herald tweeted <If you have a horse trailer please tweet>  It was retweeted 92 times, shared to Facebook  and several offers of help were produced in 20 minutes.  A newly built community that worked at electric speed.

Of course, in the meantime, Eldest Son simply uses Facebook as another communication tool, rather like his mobile or his Xbox.  When he came back from school last Friday with an extra pair of school shoes (I kid you not) and I was ranting and raving about having to phone or email around the list of parents, he simply put up a message on FB and within two minutes came downstairs to announce that they were Harry’s and he would give them to him on Monday. I was left twittering ineffectually.

Watching Benefits Street last night on television, about a street in which there is a preponderance of unemployed people living on the poverty line in social housing, I was struck by the sense of traditional community that they displayed, albeit in a rudimentary way.  But then again, how does that differ from the many social groups on-line? Joined together in a common cause, whether it is the dole, dancing, disease or dogs?  Perhaps rather than fighting the rise of social media, we should embrace it for what it is in all of its contradictions, superficial, helpful, distracting, empowering, depressing, meaningful, pointless – and above all malleable. Communities on social media do not replace the ones that we build in real life, but they can build you up when you are down with a simple <Like>, they can find you anything you want, they can advise, they can lecture.

And unlike Real Life, there is always an off button.

Out of the Mouths of Babes

If you have children of 5 years or over, and are a car driver, then you will (if you haven’t already) one day discover a strange phenomenon known only by London cabbies or Limousine chauffeurs – that of the Invisible Ear.  That is, from the moment that your progeny starts to bring friends home for tea, or in the spirit of good mumminess you offer to give a wayward child a lift, or it’s your turn to do the football run, or indeed (as has once happened to me) a strange child simply clambers into the back of the car and demands to be taken to my house (I didn’t), as the driver, you suddenly become invisible.  Gone then are the two most important things that your children will say to you every day 1) what they ate for lunch  2) what are they having for dinner? 

Instead, their friend brings out of your child more information than you have ever done, and what amazing information that is – unless of course you make the stupid mistake of joining in, in which case if it’s the teenager involved, he merely looks at you wishing that you would instantly explode, if it’s the preteenager, he rolls his eyes and says that you’re really sad, and if it’s the 9 year old he and his friend become instant mutes and giggle on the back seat pretending to shoot you with their fingers…

But if you stay quiet and carry on driving, they carry on talking.  I now know why in my twenties, even thirties, all right… maybe a little into my forties, I would get into taxis with my mates after a night out, and at the end of the journey the driver would be laughing.   It is because, once those car doors close, there is a false sense of privacy, a feeling of shutting out the rest of the world, a space in which to release all that information that is rushing around your head, be it muzzy with alcohol, dizzy with teenage hormones or sparking with prepubescent neurons.

A friend of mine F, whose turn it was to do the netball run, set off in the car to pick up her daughters friend.  F rolled up to the house at 8.30 am in her duvet coat and wooly scarf, beanie shoved on her slightly hungover head, feet trussed up in wellies, teenage daughter in a strop.  The other mother A opened the door impossibly coiffeured and impeccably dressed in a crisp white t shirt and blue jeans, with casually low slung converse boots and not a scrap of make up.  Inwardly F marveled at how great A looked for her age, A was, after all, an older mum, as she bundled the girls into the car.  As she drove off, her daughter turned to her friend with a sigh and said ‘Your mum is soooo cool, she wears fab boots. And she looks sooo cool – I really love her hair, and she’s so pretty.’  F studiously carried on driving although her ears were reddening.  The other girl stopped BBMing on her phone and turned to her daughter, ‘You wouldn’t have said that a couple of weeks ago – she had a chemical peel and bits of her face were dropping off all over the place and she looked like an angry baby.’

Because of the car, I can now proudly talk as an expert on the merits of Xbox versus Playstation, can tell you why the England Cricket team are hopeless, what the best school dinner is, whose single is really the best in the Top 40 regardless of statistics, and who is the fittest girl in Year 4 (and why the girl with an ipad mini and an iphone doesn’t rank).  Other mums who have ferried my kids to places have told me what I wear in bed (or not), which of my children received a bona fide Valentines card (or three) and didn’t tell me, who we entertained for dinner at the weekend, and what I am getting for my birthday…

It does not, however transcend the Teachers Ear Syndrome, which thanks to several friends of mine, have kept us entertained on many a night out.  I asked one friend how her new posting was working out.  She said that a five year old Irish boy with the face of an angel had told her that his mummy thought she was much better than the ‘focking halfwit’ of a teacher that he had had before.  She was torn between correcting his language and defending her predecessor…

Perhaps though, it is best to enjoy the Invisible Ear phenomenon for what it is – a sign that your kids are growing up, learning to express themselves no matter what their age or style, and testing out their ideas and opinions in a contained (and motorized) vehicle. 

Just sit back, and enjoy the ride…