How I most recently failed our daughter

Dudelet, little elf’s brother, is eight and clever. Clever as in very clever, very academic but not at the extreme end of the scale. He learns easily (perhaps a bit too easily), has developed a ridiculous vocabulary for his age (I treasure the memory of his grandfather’s face when dudelet, at two and a half, gravely explained “…and this is a meditation stool”) and is one of the small group in his class who are sat together and given extra homework to “stretch them.” He’s also a bit moody, hyperactive, spends too much time on iPods, computers and GameCubes if given the change, and wakes up at 5am daily to read Michelle Paver. I can’t remember a time when he hasn’t clearly and cleanly distinguished between fantasy and make-believe. Most younger children walk a liminal line between the two if, at times, a slightly knowing one. For dudelet, his toys have always been toys from the moment he found words to express the concept (when he was nearly three). Imaginative play has always been story telling with a layer of ironic distance rather than projection. I sometimes feel he’s missed out.

Little elf, in contrast, rapidly acquired imaginary friends – in fact a whole imaginary family. She went through a phase of putting her babies everywhere and heaven help you if you sat on them. This was tricky because her babies were tiny and invisible. Her bedroom is full of monsters and fairies. Her toys talk and need their hair washed. Sometimes, they speak for her or she speaks for them (and therefore, for herself). Dudelet taught himself to tell the time and use a computer. Little elf has zero sense of time and seemingly no interest in acquiring one. She loves pink, dresses, ballet – a long list of normative little girl things.

Recently, we went to a parents evening. Little elf’s teachers and the classroom assistant sat behind the desk and beamed at her. Then dudelet took her off to play so we could have a conversation. We were in for a shock. Little elf was a bit disruptive. She didn’t want to play with others when she was supposed to. She’d only join in activities in her good time. She was cheeky. She threw things. She’d hide or pretend to be invisible.

Supermum and I looked at each other, baffled. We hadn’t expected this. Our four year throws the occasional (okay, regular) major strop but she’s usually…Well, there’s the drawing on the wall, the room demolition, the eating tantrums, kicking her brother, cheekiness…But she’s so funny…How could anyone…?

“Don’t get me wrong,” the teacher said. “we do love her. But she can be a proper little madam if she doesn’t get her own way.”

“But…” we chorused, trying to explain that we just didn’t recognise the portrait of a charming, manipulative little harridan that had just been painted for us.

The teacher scanned us both. She knows little elf’s brother who’s also got something of a reputation as a character at his school.

“She really is very clever, you know,” she said.

I confess, I think we both said “What?”

“Really smart – she’s a very intelligent little girl. She’s knows just what she’s doing.”

After which, the teacher went on to outline a strategy for managing her behaviour which has so far worked reasonably well. Meanwhile, we went away reeling. Little elf is clever. Why had we never noticed?

It isn’t that we don’t think she’s clever so much as dudelet has so thoroughly occupied the ‘clever’ slot in the family. Little elf had taken up the ‘charming, mischievous, cute” slot (and the speech issue probably doesn’t help).

How could I have let her down like that? How could I have allowed this to happen? And how typical! The ‘clever’ boy, the ‘charming’ girl! I’m so thoroughly ashamed of myself.

So I’m trying to monitor my behaviour, to look for ways in which I’m failing to actively empower her intellectually and (contrariwise) to be attentive to how I’m pushing dudelet into an altogether different stereotype. The other thing, of course, is to be aware that all stereotypes aside, they may well be expressing perfectly valid sides of their characters and identities to date. Who’s to say? It’s an ongoing project, parenting, and we can’t deny that she’s already equaling her older brother in sheer emotional intelligence. And, lastly, it could be argued that the fault isn’t that I’ve noticed she’s clever but that I put too high a default value on conventional evidences of intelligence. Little elf spins astonishing stories of giants and pirates and princesses and monsters who are invariably cut into little pieces. Dudelet likes to do sums, draw comics and invent sushi processing machines.

That’s enough navel-gazing – you get the picture. But, I’m still stunned by our failure to at least question the stereotypes we were setting up. Sigh.

Must try harder.

Eight is a difficult age

There are times when I really don’t want to be in the same building as my eight year old. I’m sure I’m not the only parent who thinks this. Two nights ago, I walked into the bathroom following twenty minutes of intense prevarication on dudelet’s part and asked him if he’d cleaned his teeth.

“You’ve already asked me that!” he whined.

I know, I wanted to say, and I’m asking again because you ignored me. And because you’ll ignore me this time and then again until you finally get the reaction you’re looking for: an explosion of frustrated rage on my part generating dramatic tears and an even larger explosion on your part culminating in your slamming the bathroom door on me and screaming every time I try to engage you or attract your attention. The previous night I’d been foolish enough to tell him that I’d actually been waiting for half an hour and had triggered slammed doors and inarticulate howls of rage and sorrow every time I’d come near him until he finally fell asleep, still furious.

This time, I didn’t say anything. Ten minutes later, he cleaned his teeth. But I felt like I was walking on eggshells.

You can probably tell that we’ve got a bit of a cycle happening here – we ask him to do something, he doesn’t do it, we wait a reasonable amount of time and ask again and he explodes in fury. It’s unpleasant, it happens on a daily basis and we still don’t really know what to do about it. Eggshells, many of them broken, all over the house.

We know it’s related to a number of issues:

• Self-esteem

• Tiredness

• School

• Growing up

Growing up is the easiest one to accommodate. We know hormones and testosterone are raging throughout his (still) little body. He’s an increasingly independent being who struggles with that independence and the responsibilities. There are changes going on with his body and it’s both interesting and frightening for him. The good news is that he at least talks to us about him and the those conversations (that’s a whole other post) are going well. The bad news is that it contributes to the thunder and lightning of the other issues.

Tiredness is a big problem. Dudelet is an early riser. Four thirty isn’t unknown. At eight, he knows to keep the noise down and to find something quiet to entertain himself with and we’re lucky that he’s a good reader. But if he wakes up before five during a light sleep phase he just won’t try and go back to sleep again. There are simply too many distractions and short of stripping every book out of his room and putting a lock on his door (NOT under consideration for even a single moment!) there isn’t a lot we can do about it.

But this means that by six or seven o’clock, after a long day at school, he’s often cranky, grumpy and carrying huge bags under his eyes. He’s generally asleep before eight thirty but we’re pretty sure he isn’t getting all the sleep he needs.

School is another challenge. His tiredness is starting to impinge on his behaviour in the classroom (his teacher reports that he sometimes ‘loses it’ over the tiniest of things) and getting him to engage in out of school activities is a constant battle. He seems to be well socialise and popular but he’s clever and still hasn’t learned how to manage how he uses that cleverness. In other ways, he’s immature for his age – he cries more readily than other children. He’s physically timid (this frustrates supermum, who can be a bit of a Hemulen, a great deal) and avoids teamsports or physically activities like the proverbial plague. I suspect (and feel rather guilty about it) that he gets a lot of this from me. In other ways, he’s ahead of most of his peers ( a full stage above in areas like maths and reading).

Looking at books and commentaries leads us to believe that self-esteem, or lack of it, at the core of dudelet’s tantrums and difficulties in coping with everyday elements of family life. On some occasions he’s come right out and said it – “I’m no good at anything” “You don’t love me” “You think I’m rubbish” – and it breaks my heart.

It also makes me feel terribly guilty, as if my own feelings of inadequacy and failure have somehow infected him like an airborne virus

So what are we doing?

Nothing very spectacular. We’re biting our lip, we’re avoiding getting drawn into confrontations (which always end appallingly badly), we’re praising when possible and avoiding being negative. We’e already doing most of the things one finds on typical parenting checklists (except, of course, when we forget ourselves – we get tired too). I can’t help feeling that a lot of these tensions would dissipate if he could only learn to go back to sleep. But that’s not something we can impose – he has to learn to do it himself.

Anyone else find themselves trapped in this sort of a cycle? How did you manage to break out of it?

Southport Seafront, clichéd decay, weird paddle boats

The fact is, Southport isn’t anywhere near as bad as I remembered. Every toilet in every chain restaurant seems papered over in posters warning about meow-meow and suggesting one ‘asks Frank’ but the expected gangs of feral tweens wandering the seaside wastelands seem to keep themselves voluntarily confined to a large skatepark. Tottenham and Hackney could learn a thing or two there.

We’ve been here for three days, visiting my elderly relatives and taking a ride round ‘my old haunts’, as a obscure track by The Dream Syndicate might put it. There’s a decaying Victorian park sandwiched between an immense Travel Lodge and an even larger Best Western that offers a pleasantly melancholy tour of Southport’s former grandeur.

I had my iPhone so I took a picture of a decaying and pleasantly melancholy park gazebo (or meow-meow house).

In the distance, there’s the deserted coils of the giant rollercoaster in Pleasureland. I’ve no idea if it opens in winter. Probably not. It looks like the council decided to put a lot of money into it at some point and sort of…stopped. But not before they built a heritage centre. I walked around it (it was closed) and couldn’t really work out what it was for. It was surrounded by truncated lampost pillars, like a Greek ruin.

There’s a circular chamber at the back. Perhaps its the airconditioning for a vast underground system of tunnels and bombshelters. Perhaps not.

Dudelet and I took a walk while we waited for the arcades to open. There are rituals associated with seaside towns which must be observed at all costs and the exchange of money for noise, coloured lights and unreliable hits of serotonin is one of them. Dudelet, though he didn’t know it at the time, was about to win a jackpot amount of tickets* and acquire a memory which will remain with him for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, we passed a building with a sign proclaiming it to be the Smallest Pub In Britain.

Next to the Smallest Pub In Britain was an equally small sternwheel paddle steamer. I have no idea how they acquired it.

Back in the park, we found a deserted miniature railway station. It was a forlorn sight.

Elsewhere, the Most Gothic Hotel In Southport stood waiting R-PAT’s wedding party.

Then I discovered Hipstamatic and turned everything into the 1960s.

And here’s a picture of my family. They’re the cold looking little group trudging wearily towards Fun.

Later this week, I’ll do the happy post about the joyous, uplifting things. But today is all about the cliché and the decay. I suppose I’m listening to too many Cure reissues.

*If you don’t already know, it’s far too complicated to explain.

Date night

“I’ve booked a baby sitter for the night of your birthday. What would you like to do?”

I suppose the fact that my initial reaction to this was disbelief, followed by pre-emptive disappointment, mild dread and common-or-garden fear suggests that we’re out of practice at hanging out with each other outside of the well-formed rituals of post-dinner Scrabble or Buffy and Angel DVDs. It has, in fact, been about a year since we last tried “going out” as a couple when I dragged supermum off to see the Hold Steady. It wasn’t a successful night. Crowded, deafeningly loud and I spent of most of the evening worrying about whether supermum was enjoying herself. She wasn’t.

“Please,” she said, “No more gigs. Unless I get to sit down.”

We’ve fallen out of practice because of the baby-sitting problem. Even if I’m at home, little elf, who’s nearly four, goes completely doollally if supermum leaves the house in the evening. Leaving her with a stranger has been out of the question. We’ve tried exchanging baby sitting with friends but once they’ve done it for us, it’s literally very difficult to return the favour. “It’s okay, my mother’s doing it.” Or their sister. Or Aunt. We’ve tried begging (“No! Please! Use us! We need to get you back in our debt!”) but to no avail.

We do go out. Just not with each other. Supermum has evening life drawing and yoga classes she attends religiously, week-in, week-out. I also do a yoga class I manage most weeks. She periodically heads off on ‘mums’ nights out’ and she’s off doing a drawing class this afternoon. I’ll go and see bands (Wolves In The Throne Room next week!), sometimes even with other people. But I think we’ve both come to view time spent in a structured ‘date’ environment with each other with a certain amount of trepidation.

But now she’s found a babysitter who little elf (apparently) won’t attack on sight and we’re supposed to go out. We’ve talked about re-establishing a social life with each other and other people as a couple for ages but I suppose I’d kind of got used to the idea that we probably wouldn’t have to deal with this sort of thing for a while to come.

And I really don’t know what to do. Supermum isn’t working any more and she actually met me for lunch the other day. We spent most of it walking around whilst she vetoed every every cafe, restaurant or sandwich shop* within half a mile of my workplace (in Bloomsbury – that’s a lot of catering to dismiss) and we finished up mostly talking about how we didn’t really like the food we’d finally ended up with. Then we talked about vasectomies.

So, somehow, we’ve got to work out how to spend two hours ‘conversing’. It’s seems really silly, considering that we normally talk a lot, to splash out all this time and effort to put ourselves in an artificial situation where talking is actually more difficult. But there you go. It’s my birthday and we’re going to have ‘fun’. As a ‘couple’.

I want to go out together. We love each other, dammit! But just I’m too tired to get through the emotional labour involved in ‘fun’ at the moment.

* Supermum would put this very differently, viz “You only picked out places that you should have known I wouldn’t like.”**

** It’s possible she’d also put that differently too.

Three things I tell dudelet each night

Warning: Contains parenting. And sentiment. And a teeny bit of very un-Dad Who Writes-like slush.

Something which supermum and I noticed a while back (and continue to struggle with) is how a bad day with dudelet (nearly seven years old at this point) can overshadow all his many wonderful qualities, actions and general all-round fabulousness.

So, much to my surprise, I introduced a little positive thinking practice into our bedtime routine. The last thing we do before “lights out”* is for me to tell him three things he did during the day that I loved. I’ve set myself a few parameters

• No reference to anything bad that’s gone on, like particularly naughty behaviour
• No comparison with his little sister
• No use of something I’ve heard from supermum – they all have to be from actual, real, concrete interactions I’ve had with him.

On work days, this can be tricky. But I manage it. If I forget, he reminds me. Ands recently, he’s started asking me to add three things that I’ve done during the day that I think where pretty good or worthwhile (I’m paraphrasing). So I suppose he’s now reforming me a little.

Is it working? Who knows? I suspect all parenting techniques are essentially homoeopathic, if you see what I mean.

But at least we both remind each other that every day, he’s given several new reasons to love and value him so it’s probably doing some good somewhere.

*It’s actually “Lights turned down a bit” as dudelet often reads himself to sleep