Posts Tagged ‘children’
Monday, February 15th, 2010
A very long time ago I was embarrassed by a child I once looked after. She was four at the time and I was nineteen and we were playing hairdressers in her room … as one does … when she told me that her daddy was in love with me but he couldn’t marry me because he was married to her mum. Guess who was standing behind me? There was a lot of awkward eye shifting and foot shuffling and mutterings before her dad walked away and the incident was never mentioned again.
My child never embarrassed me … until recently. It was my husband’s birthday party and the house was full of people – mostly the short variety. Adults and children were playing in every room of the house. It was a good day.
There are items in the house that have been forgotten about since having a child … items that I often wish weren’t forgotten but circumstances prevail and … well, these things just get forgotten. But not by the child. He had seen something that, when it came to playing cops and robbers, he knew would be a great asset to the game. He walked proudly into the room swinging the pink fur-coated handcuffs. It could have been worse … but not much, I doubt. I might have even blushed and, for once, I couldn’t blame it on champagne.
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Tags: adults, children, handcuffs, sex, toys
Posted in best reads, bhalababy | 3 Comments »
Friday, November 27th, 2009
I call my child noo-noo, shnoek-poep, Mr Moozle … basically whatever comes out of my mouth. And it puzzles me as it not only makes me sounds slightly ‘challenged’ but it brings out maternal feelings that I never knew existed.
I asked around and I am happy to declare that it is all perfectly normal – these weird terms of endearment are simply a testament to the love we feel for these little distractions that throw our hearts into turmoil.
My dad used to call me cockroach or cockalock – not exactly heart-warming but, said with great tenderness, surely just a bit of the same. Sadly, I can’t think of any words my mother ever used …
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Tags: children, endearment, words, words of endearment
Posted in bhalababy | 2 Comments »
Thursday, November 26th, 2009
Our pool of friends has suffered its first casualty. It’s because of the children. I am sad and relieved all at the same time. Sad because I knew them at the beginning, I was at their awesome wedding and I love them. Relieved because they are the first!
What do people do when their children get in the way? Because they DO get in the way!
I work with children whose parents throw them away when they get in the way … they are dispensable. But what if you’re not a prostitute or a drug addict or you don’t live in dire poverty? An educated and affluent person throws away their partner instead. We feel the burdens of life too strongly to suck it up and live through the pain. We are weak. We haven’t suffered enough to realise that ‘this too will pass’. Or maybe we are just a bunch of cynics and life is too short to get bogged down by small miseries.
I can’t say the thought doesn’t cross my mind – I can’t throw my child away, so why not just get rid of my husband? I suppose the few years you get to grow your children into adults pass so quickly and then they leave you eventually … they never took that vow to stay with you forever – so maybe it’s the relationship with the person who just might stick around once the children have left that should be preserved.
I’ve lived through unbearable but perhaps this is even beyond that; I just cannot say. I don’t support the argument of staying together for the sake of the children but splitting up because of them is just plain tragic.
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Tags: burdens, casualty, children, separation
Posted in bhalababy | No Comments »
Friday, November 13th, 2009
This made me think about a friend of mine who, on discovering she was pregnant, went to every clinic in town to hunt down one that would give her the abortion pill. But on finding one, decided there must be a reason it had been so difficult to find it in the first place that she couldn’t go through with it after all. She now has this bright and bubbly child who comes with her fair share of trials and troubles but who fills the house with light and joy. It’s hard to imagine there would ever be regret … and I don’t even ask because it is so unimportant now.
Becoming a mother was the biggest shock of my life and learning to love the child I claimed had ruined my life was a tough journey indeed with many a tortuous mountain peak. I now find that the love I have developed for him over the years has grown like a tumour around my heart and to get rid of that love would mean ripping my entire heart out of my chest.
So, although I feel guilty and wonder if he’ll ever forgive me for not wanting him to start with, there is no cell in my body that would want it any other way. Sure there are times when I hate my role and wish I could be untethered again … but, this child: he is meant to be here for reasons I am, as yet, incapable of explaining.
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Tags: abortion, children, choices, gift, parenting
Posted in bhalababy | No Comments »
Monday, November 9th, 2009
We fret so much about doing the right thing all the time … at the right time and in the right way. We’re terrified we’ll do something wrong and damage our children so much that they’ll end up hating us. But, you know what, when our children get to 13 or 14 (often even sooner), they are going to hate us anyway. It’s inevitable … like hormones.
Which makes me wonder if perhaps the best thing to do is bring them up in a way that will preserve our own sanity rather than theirs … and that way we will be better equipped to deal with the inevitable.
You may get lucky and have a child that doesn’t ever hate you. And what a bonus for that sanity of yours.
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Tags: children, parenting, sanity, teenagers
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Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
Having just had that experience of crossing over into the life of my parallel dweller, visiting friends in London and Paris, I have also experienced staying with two friends who have chosen to have two children. Although my trip was primarily to run the Paris 20km, a distance I am fast becoming a veteran in, I have recently been making tourette-like declarations of intent to run a full 42km marathon before I am 40.
I’m running out of time.
Watching my friends with their children and gauging the extra workload of adding that extra person to the household, I got to wondering if the decision to go from one child to two children is perhaps something like going from a half marathon to a full marathon: it doesn’t necessarily require you to up the pace … often you can plod along a little slower … but the stamina required is oh so much more.
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Tags: challenges, children, one or two, running
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Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
It must have a certain amount of something to do with vanity when you hear your own words come out of your child’s mouth and think how wonderful he is for saying such clever things.
This is until your sweet curly-haired and blue-eyed four-year-old instructs you to tell the cranky neighbour to just f*** off. I’d love to blame those hippy parents of his school friends for not bringing up their children properly … I’d love to but I can’t really, can I …
All I could do was tell him what a rude word it was and that it would be best if he didn’t use it in public. Now he just whispers the word in my ear when he thinks the situation we are in may warrant its use.
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Tags: children, foul language, manners, parenting, swearing, up bringing
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Monday, September 28th, 2009
I’m six. I am sitting in the dentist’s chair and I am that child again who hid in the waiting room, jaws firmly clenching shut, face numb. The dentist has already given me five injections and has only one left to administer before he can extract the tooth … but nothing was getting me back into that chair. My mother called in friends of mine, friends of my older siblings, adults, and even bribed with all my favourite sweets and desserts. But she eventually sighed deeply and dragged me home. That was the beginning of my bad encounters with dentists and I still have a phobia.
… or maybe I am just stubborn. I look at my child and shudder at the thought that he might turn out like me and put me through this kind of hell. And then I realise that perhaps he already is. Could I have made him like that in the short time I have had with him, or is it feasible that I had nothing to do with it apart from the genetic perspective?
Most relevant right now, it seems, is the obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). I have had it since I can remember. I never knew what it was but I remember seeing it come up in all my aptitude tests and I trusted my parents to discuss with me anything that I might need more information on so as to better manage who I am. They never did. I see the same characteristics so clearly in my son and I blame myself for his being like that anyway because, whether it was nature or nurture, he is like that because of me.
One can never tell what really is nature or nurture because you can’t experiment with both simultaneously.
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Tags: children, parenting
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Monday, September 7th, 2009
A new friend is a friend out of our connection over the lack of any real need to have children. I am known to her boyfriend as the evil one as he is determined to have kids (to the point of dumping her if it doesn’t happen). I suppose it is unfair of me to try and dissuade her as there are things that can be done to pre-empt any of the crap that enters your relationship when having a baby. There are practical tricks and tactics that can be deployed.
For example:
discussing expectations of parenthood;
defining a budget for things such as a night nurse;
planning logistics around routine and responsibilities;
looking at the potential need to move in order to accommodate a child;
balancing work and social commitments and sacrifices;
counselling sessions before even trying to fall pregnant.
You can’t have it all. We want it all – I suppose that is normal … what makes us human. But having something always comes at the cost of giving up something else. And perhaps that should be fine. Having a baby costs. We can’t expect to keep everything of what we were before having a baby … and have the baby too.
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Tags: babies, children, choice, marriage, relationships
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Monday, August 3rd, 2009
I know now why all those ex friends and acquaintances kept encouraging me to do the child thing … they just wanted to be able to be my friend again. I used to find it shallow that they couldn’t be friends because I hadn’t given birth … like they were part of some secret club and I didn’t know the password. But I have found myself guilty of a similar thing lately – I have been befriending people I haven’t seen in years because they have since had a child. Once you have had the identity crisis that having a baby brings, it is just so much less intimidating being around people who just may be on the same wavelength as you are.
I find myself trying to play it safe, play down the parent thing, when out with childless couples. I feel boring talking about my child and wonder why it is any less boring than a friend talking about their job … but that’s how it is; it’s my new reality.
The biggest problem … and this is quite huge … is when you don’t like your friends’ children or your friends don’t like yours! There’s also that thing when people become their children. I’m guilty of it … as is every parent I know … you have to get through the invisible shield that holds all the child-related angst and bullterrier-like protectiveness before you can get to and engage with the real me.
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Tags: babies, children, friends, parenting
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Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
This post started out with the intention to be about the MTN Science Centre – it’s chaos, things are broken a lot of the time … and it involves going to a mall! But it’s fantabulous fun for an incredibly active child.
It could even be about sending my child to a friend and each time having to retrain him back to normality on his return due to his exposure to extraordinary behavioural quirks.
But it’s about something far more pertinent to me right now.
A friend of mine more than implied that I pander to my child. I don’t take criticism (constructive or otherwise) at all lightly as I tend to analyse everything that is said. I was firstly shocked that she said it at all and then I was shocked that I of all people actually pander to my child. The horror of it! I started feeling like a total fraud.
I took it away and thought about it … a lot! And what I came out with is that I don’t pander to him at all. In fact, it’s shocking how little I let him get away with and how he has actually been on the verge of rebelling … at the tender age of 10 years pre-teen. ‘Defiant’, is what his teacher calls it.
I should have known better, having studied developmental psychology … and using it more on my dog than on my child. When someone is constantly abused by someone else, they will eventually reach a point when they have to let some of it go … and it invariably ends up being dumped onto the people they care about most. Something like kicking Pavlov’s dog. It’s sometimes hurtful, it can often be shrugged off … but then there are those rare occurrences when you can use someone else’s rubbish to clean up your own home.
Two days of a little more pandering and his defiance is already on the wane. We’re all dysfunctional; we just have to learn to share it around a little.
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Tags: children, conditioning, critism, defiant, dysfuntional, friends, fun
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Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
I have two children … one is a cuddly 3-year-old boy and the other is a 50kg Ridgeback. I feel like a teenager when I want a bit of privacy with my husband because we have to sneak around if we want so much as a private hug. If Nic sees us, he reaches up and demands a group hug and if Jama, sees us he just pushes between our legs and stands there wagging his tail.
A friend of mine asked my advice about training a new puppy and I told her to use her skills she has learned being a mother. I take that back as I obviously did something seriously wrong at puppy school.
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Tags: children, husband, privacy, Ridgeback
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Monday, May 18th, 2009
You have got to be kidding! It’s Monday … that in itself is reason enough to be moody … and my limits have been tested already … and it’s not only 9 a.m. Just when I though I was over the morning’s hurdles, I arrived at my child’s school to find a party invitation to a Boot Camp. I have spent the better part of three years ensuring that my child does not fall into any stereotyping traps and … so far so good. And now this. You can’t be serious! In normal circumstances I would just turf the invite and he would have been none the wiser, but this is his favourite school friend and we’d have a real war on our hands if he couldn’t go.
I believe in the nature argument, I really do, but surely parents can see that they are sticking their children in boxes. Girls ARE good at sports. Boys DO cry. In this metrosexual age, what are we doing to ensure our children grow up to be well balanced? Children are not shut down to anything – they are capable of everything. I just wish we could get past gender.
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Tags: Bootcamp, children, gender issues, metrosexual, stereotyping, traps
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Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
I didn’t think it was for real … kids say some odd stuff but they don’t really say this kind of thing. Or do they?
We took our child to play with the son of my husband’s old school friend (someone he played with from around this age), and their lunchtime conversation was entirely about who’s dad was not only bigger … but cooler! It seems the competition had to do with who had the best tools … something I think the mums might have been more qualified to argue. :D
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Tags: children, comparison, dad
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Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
I have a friend who believes in this concept – amazingly, just the one. There are those who get really uptight if you so much as reprimand their kids for such indiscretions as smacking, kicking or even biting your own precious offspring. And then there are those who believe that bringing up baby all on your own is a lark and if not for the input from all around, your child would not be quite as balanced as one would wish. Perhaps all the breeding for more and more kids has a lot to do with parents trying to create their own mini-village … who knows. I certainly don’t have a clue what it’s all about and I could spend this lifetime and the next trying to figure it out.
Like any crisis that happens en mass, people tend not to individualise in order to better contain it. This seems to be what happens with parenthood – it happens to everyone who has a child so parents are grouped together into one collective and a rule of generalisation is applied to everyone in the collective. But, behind the scenes, there are people screaming in pain at the stress of it. Broken marriages, non-existent sex lives, grey hair and emotionally screwed up children.
It is not easier being part of the collective … ‘the collective’ is not the same as ‘the village’.
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Tags: children, collective, family, friends, new parent, parenting, village life
Posted in best reads, bhalababy | No Comments »
