One of the key reasons I Home Educate is that most of the time I honestly believe I am the very best person to be around my kids most of the time. I really do think that in the main I am pretty bloody excellent at being Davies and Scarlett’s mother. I know them really well, I adore them, I cheerlead them, big up their good bits, guide them through improving the less good bits, smooth their path and aid their passage. I really do think that the environment we humans thrive in is a supportive, loving one where people around us want us to succeed and do our best and will go all out to help us do so. That is the environment I strive to create around my children.
All that said I know I have my faults. I often said it was Ady who gave me a conscience. Prior to knowing and loving Ady it never occured to me that in the wake of me telling someone exactly what I thought of them and then stropping off I would leave them with pieces to pick up. I never realised my words and actions had an impact after they’d left me and I’d walked away. I used to pride myself on being a bitch, on putting people straight, holding their faults up to a big x ray machine and making them visible to themselves and the world around them. I used to get a buzz out of showing people the error of their ways and then rubbing their noses in it. At job interviews when I was asked what my negative points might be I would always talk about how I didn’t suffer fools gladly, how I could be impatient and intolerant of weakness.
But Ady changed a lot of that. Seeing him crushed by some clever put down or offering him a verbal list of all his shortcomings and then watching him use that very list to beat himself up with made me realise there is nothing to be proud of in making other people feel crap about themselves. It isn’t big or clever to be a bitch. There are consequences to our actions and even if we have walked away from them you have still left a trail behind you. Having children hammered that home even more to me and seeing how they sometimes use that intimacy and closeness to each other to know just where the chink in armour might be and sneak the sword in to cut deep is hard to witness and often has me sitting them down and talking to them about how the way to make yourself feel good isn’t in making others feel bad.
But I still have it in me. I still get really wound up with people and lose my temper. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I have lost my rag in the last ten years or so. These days I am left feeling bad afterwards. I don’t feel proud of having told someone how it is, put them straight and wiped the floor with them. I feel ashamed, guilty and repentant. I regret it and wish I had managed to keep my temper in check. These days I tend to recognise the signs of building rage and try really hard to walk away, to bite my tongue, to get it off my chest somewhere else rather than to someone’s shocked face. I tend to have a slower burn and a higher ignition temperature now and whilst I don’t think I have mellowed much with age I have at least matured and am able to control myself rather better.
Rather ironically Davies does not cope well with my flaring up. Scarlett has enough of me in her to get similarly enraged at slight provocation and will need to temper her temper as she goes through life, or learn to deal with the consequences. Davies has no temper as such and is very much on an even keel. He is far more likely to get upset than angry and despite having had me for a mother with my shouting and stomping he is not immune to it and still gets hurt when I point out his shortcommings to him. I have tried really hard to ensure I put things to him in a constructive and supportive way (not at all easy for me, my default response to acts of stupidity remains ‘are you an IDIOT?!’) but sometimes I don’t have the patience reserves, snap and he gets upset and then I have to do lots of positive stroking and talking it all through with him to restore equilibrium.
Today was that sort of day.
I had a really rubbish nights sleep, I kept jolting awake and thinking ‘oh, I haven’t done *that* yet!’ about all sorts of random things I don’t need to have done yet. I’m guessing this is what insomnia would be like or having a proper genuine thing to worry about. This was clearly cold based delirium brought about by too much ebaying yesterday.
Predictably when we did all have to be up nobody was and I had to wake both children. We were off to an Educational Visit at The Mohair Centre. It was planned for 10am-1230pm so rather than make sandwiches with just out of the breadmaker bread which would then go soggy as it was still warm I decided to not bother and just come home for a slightly later lunch, which would fit in well with a slightly later than usual tea as it was swimming lessons today. Scarlett had a carrot she half munched and Davies chucked a packet of Wotsits in my bag.
The Mohair Centre was way further down the road than I had thought but we arrived on time and greeted many of the same people from last weeks Raystede trip, plus quite a few more. It was a well turned out trip. We started in a classroom where the main messages seemed to be ‘wash your hands after you have touched animals’ and ‘don’t run in the farmyard’. We then all walked round the animals before being split into groups. The woman running it had asked for some adults to volunteer to be in charge of feeding the animals with children to then split into teams to come and feed them. I volunteered to feed the pigs on the basis they are the animals in the choices I found most interesting (pigs, guinea pigs, rabbits or goats) and I sneakily suspected least children would want to feed them. And I was right 🙂 And my children both chose pigs too as I also sneakily suspected they might :). So I stood and watched my two and the very occassional other small child chuck pig nuts at the very old and decrepid sows. We could then look at the other animals (that would be the guinea pigs, rabbits and goats then). I don’t have a lot of time for guinea pigs or rabbits I have to confess. I quite like goats but even they have limited standing and watching appeal.
So I sidled up to the leader and asked her what was happening next. It was about 1130am. She replied that it could be lunchtime now and then she’d come and find us and do some spinning if any of the children were interested. Lunchtime. At 1130am. Lunchtime. In a 2.5 hour session. Lunchtime. With me with no lunch. Ah.
So I retrieved the half munched carrot and the packet of wotsits from the car, along with a very squashed Mars bar mini roll from the bottom of my bag. I debated getting my penknife and taking a slice or two off of one of the pigs, or borrowing Scarletts firesteel and knocking up a quick guinea pig kebab. Davies and Scarlett who would not have been hungry at 1130am had we been at home declared themselves ‘staaaaarving’ in the midst of all the proper parents with lunchboxes and Ali took pity on Davies with some hulahoops (to go with the Wotsits), a kind other mother shared a bagel with Scarlett and I ate the two discarded dried fruit sticks that someone else kindly donated but both my children took a sniff of and refused. They were not actually that nice – I tried to pretend they were pepperami as they looked a bit like very small skinny pepperami but there was no denying they were flattened dried fruit.
The woman came back to us and brought a spinning wheel so the kids all queued up and had a go at that – Davies adding to his wristband collection and having the woman say to him he was doing really well and had he used a spinning wheel before. Then it was home time.
We dropped Ali and Freya off on our way home and when Scarlett pulled me up on why Davies and her had to swim when they were just as ill as me and I wasn’t swimming I agreed they didn’t have to either if they’d rather not and they both voted not to.
When we got home I wanted to nip to the shop for some crisps and both kids came with me. Scarlett had grabbed a pound coin from her purse with the intention of getting some sweets each for her and Davies and we talked about kindereggs and how they are a waste of money for the small amount of chocolate you get. Davies said he’d like some milk and white chocolate and I told them about how on Sunday mornings at my parents restaurant one of us used to go to the local newsagent and get a selection of chocolates, cut them into bite sized pieces and we’d all share a mixed bowl of chocolates as a Sunday morning treat. They loved this idea so I bought a variety of chocolate bars and packets of things like maltesers and smarties and we cut them up and shared them out.
We had lunch, followed by our bowls of chocolate, tea made by them and plenty of CBBC tv. Davies did some geomagging and Scarlett did some drawing. Ady arrived home nice and early and all was well. Until no one listened to me asking them to tidy up, a glass of Lucozade that Davies had asked for and then not drunk got left on the hearth and in a tussle to be the first to light the fire ‘to help Daddy’ it got knocked over. I got cross, pointed out that if I’d been listened to in tidying up it wouldn’t have been there and therefore not gotten spilt and Davies got upset. He then got even more upset when he went to try and get the Ady machine out and knocked over something else in a ‘nothing I do ever goes right and I’m only trying to help, oh woe is me’ manner. So I mopped him up while Ady mopped the lucozade up and then it was time for me to go out to Book Group.
That was good, an interesting book to discuss, I talked about our WW adventure next year, stayed behind to chat to Brenda the boss about the big decisions made about the library announced today, then stood talking to her for another 20 minutes outside in the carpark about us and the WW adventure. My phone rang on the drive home but as it is about a 3 minute drive I ignored it as I was about to arrive home anyway. The front door was answered by a sobbing Davies as he had been worried about me as I was slightly late 🙁
He took ages to calm down and it turned out Ady had told him I’d be home at 830, which I often am from Book Group, but it was actually about 915pm. He’d been in bed getting increasingly worried and calling down to Ady to check whether I was home yet, Ady had not realised he was getting upset and just been calling back up that no, I was not until Davies had finally appeared, utterly distraught and convinced something dreadful had happened to me.
He took quite a bit of calming down and I suspect he is a little delicate from his cold, coupled with me being grumpy and impatient and giving him a hard time for odd little things over the last couple of days has knocked him enough that suddenly being old enough to have valid fears about bad stuff happening, along with the very real evidence that bad stuff does indeed happen to people you love, very sadly exampled by several bouts of bad and sad news this year was enough to have him in bits.
I think I’ve put him back together again for now and I can’t really hope he toughens up as it is his senstivity which makes him Davies who I adore, but I do sometimes fret that me and my impatience is not always the very best combination for a child who takes so much to heart what I might blurt out in the heat of a cross moment.