Lessons from life

We’ve been doing some thinking the last few weeks about our social engagements calendar in the new year. For now I think it has forced the conclusion that we need to take a break from Magical Mondays for a while at least. We are on the waiting list for another Home Ed group, closer to home, which has a couple of members we either know now (from MM) or have known from Home Ed groups in the past. It is on a Thursday so we’ll only be able to go every other week as I work every other Thursday but actually I quite like the idea of a fortnightly attendance; weeks seem to go so fast that it feels like Monday comes around at least three times a week and I think we have enough other stuff going on here to keep us going socially.

What has spured this decision on is less a feeling that we’re too busy – I think all four of us thrive on being busy, being with people and dashing about generally; Ady and I have never been ones for sitting home all day and the children get that ‘wet play syndrome’ feel to them if we don’t leave the house at least once in any 24 hour period and start getting all riotous and giving the cat a hunted expression – but a feeling that we are not investing our time in the right pursuits. I think time is a fairly precious commodity, as is money and MM takes most of our Monday along with about a tenner a week in petrol and subs, but more than that I have had low level discomforts with the effect the environment had on Davies. I was going to blog about how the environment we’re in has an effect on us which can in turn lead to us altering our behaviour to be like that more of the time, but realised I’d said something pretty similar to that over on Monster & Teeny a while back so I won’t bother saying it again. But I’ve been pretty shocked at the side of Davies that MM has brought out. I’ve been feeling he’s at yet another leap forward sort of stage, with the gap between him and his regular playmates getting stretched lots again at the moment. He has long been cast in the professional big brother role, spending a lot of time with younger children. I think he does very well at this almost all of the time and has become expert in suggesting games, leading play and generally being ‘in charge’ followed most of the time by adoring and compliant younger children. I’ve always wondered if and when a backlash might come about and I think what he had failed to realise was that in suggesting and leading play he also has a bit of a responsibility to ensure it is working for everyone else. I won’t suggest whether the play is fair or not as being an issue as I don’t really buy into the whole ‘fair’ thing but I have talked to him about ensuring everyone is happy – which I think is slightly different and way more important. An example would be the regular games of Doctor Who he plays with various groups of friends which have always gone along the lines of him saying ‘Let’s play Doctor Who – I’ll be the Doctor, you be Rose, you be Sarah-Jane and you be K9’ and running off in character with the others happily running along behind. Suddenly he’s faced with children who want to have a go at being The Doctor aswell, or are hitting phases which are felling their loving parents let alone a 7 year old boy in managing to deal with their irrationality or fickleness. Coupled with that the fact that he is also a child and prone to bouts of irrationality or fickleness of his own and you have a recipe for occassional tits up all round really. One of the things I have been working to impress on him is developing better listening skills – and as anyone who has ever attended a management training course will know there is a world of difference between the ability to hear and the ability to listen – Davies is getting there with hearing others over his own rather loud persona and working on listening too. The MM environment has been a greenhouse for this with him thrust into a position that seems to be rather running away with him and bringing out behaviour in him that has shocked me, and I think, shocked him too and certainly hasn’t been demonstrated anywhere else.

The whole how to deal with this debate has gone on long and hard here and led to discussions on bullying and situations and relationships generally. Davies most certainly hasn’t been bullied and he hasn’t been bullying anyone else either but I can see that there is a bit of a hotbed situation arising at MM which could potentially go in that direction. My gut instinct and my now long and considered reaction to this is to remove him from the situation. Ady struggled rather with this idea and perhaps if there had been a more specific incident or happening I would not be so quick to just run away without dealing with it but I’ve been pondering more about the idea of the best way to deal with these sorts of situations for the last couple of weeks and surprised myself with my conclusions. There is a widely held belief – when I saw widely held I mean within society, I know my Dad thinks it and actually it is something I have heard said often and indeed has been alluded to on one of the lists I read just recently – that children need to learn that life is a bit crap, that people are sometimes horrid, that you can’t get on with everyone. I know I have heard stories of children in schools who were dreadfully bullied and how they ‘couldn’t let the bullies win’. I have heard stories of bullying in workplaces and how people have suffered for months or even years to hang onto a job in the face of a truly miserable existance.

Way back in my career in retail management I was at a position where I was considered to be very good at my job, talk of rapid promotion and promising career paths were discussed and I was on track to do well. Then my direct manager moved on and a new manager took their place. Within just a couple of months I’d gone from being flavour of the month to underperforming. I’ll never know quite what happened to change that and certainly by the end of what was easily the most miserable period of my life I was underperforming terribly as all of my confidence in my own ability had been eroded away to nil until I was every bit as crap as I was being held up to be. Retrospectively I can see that whether or not it was entirely in the imagination of that new manager or whether there was truth in their claims from the start I was indeed the victim of a workplace bullying incident. My life was made a misery and I would have easily had grounds for tribunals and constructive dismissal claims if I’d wanted to go down that route. But I didn’t. What I did do was size up the situation, consider whether what I’d lose by removing myself from the situation was worth more than the cost to remaining in it and leave. I left without a job to go to because I considered that my own personal happiness, confidence in myself and my ability and indeed the other relationships – like my marriage – were worth far more than a salary, a job title and a fight I would probably never win. I walked almost straight into another job (I had one week off) and very quickly recovered and knew I’d made the right decision on all levels. There are things I would never walk away from without a fight but they are few and far between and only because that equation of the cost of walking away versus the cost of staying balance the other way.

So what’s my point? That I think the idea that teaching children that some things in life are crap and have to be endured isn’t a great one. That they might be better served by teaching them that equation and letting them work out what is most important. That letting the bullies win is actually a load of bollocks and not a good enough reason to stay somewhere that is making you miserable. If a woman was in an abusive relationship and getting beaten up by her partner we wouldn’t dream of advising her not to leave because ‘that’s what he wants, you’d be letting him win’ we’d be there, packing her case for her and getting her the hell out. I’m not saying life isn’t sometimes crap – it is. I’m not saying we should instill the reflex of running away from everything in our children – we shouldn’t. I’m just thinking that maybe we’ve gone too far the other way in making the whole bloody thing one great big endurance test. Surely life is for enjoying not enduring, surely the bits we will remember – the good bits, the ones we enjoyed, should be the ones we spent the most time doing, not the little bits squished in between great chunks of crap. I’m not saying never try anything a bit tough or don’t waste your energy, just decide what it is you *really* want to invest your energy in and then totally throw yourself into that rather than dealing with day to day shit and using up all your reserves on just being. There are things worthy of the fight, big things, ones you are passionate about and then there are the ones which on balance it’s fine to walk away from. For us MM is one of the latter and I don’t think there is any negative message being on passed on by that decision other than we’ve chosen our fights wisely.