It's unconditional powerlessness

Mol and Liz are now technically very much adults - in the eyes of The Gov or The Law they can do things like vote for the next leaders of our country, change their name by depol, get married, pay for their own dental treatments (first find a dentist), they can shake cocktails for a job, rent a car, go abroad without a parent, they can now basically do anything they want without the assistance of us, the parent.

This is a massive headfuck. How did this happen? I lie in the bath trying not to drop my book in the bubbles and wonder where my power has gone. HR just wrote to me to let me know that my job doesn't exist any more (I had this happen to me 3 times... it might explain why I'm now self-employed), I regret to inform you that your Important Parent Role is no longer valid.

What do you mean you're popping to the supermarket? You can't possibly drive a car and have a bank account and independent financial standing and look unwaveringly at the shop assistant as the bottle of £6-prossecco which is for some party of people who's names I don't recognise gets beeped into your bag. 

Parental Supremacy got cancelled.

But actually, I realise -now that the children are these funky autonomous individuals- that this supremacy in fact never really existed. It was a myth! Us parents needed to think that we had all the power... Because goodness knows life was spiralling in many ways in those mad days of early parenting. Thinking we had control was entirely necessary.

And the clever kids, well, it was all reverse psychology my friend, reverse psychology. They nailed it. Make those old people think they're in charge. Hear that wicked toddler chuckle as they prepare their next line of attack (maybe I'll take a shit in my clean pants 15 minutes after we get on the motorway, actually on second thought I'll throw my entire china plate of food on the floor of this restaurant) to bring their unwitting exhausted parent back in line. All eyes on me please.

I may have been the one who cooked the fishfingers (badly) and I may have been the one who transported Kid-A to place-B and Kid-B to place-C, and it's possible that I might have influenced their wardrobes for a few years and between me and the Husband we decided where to go on holiday for at least a decade... 

But all along those crafty children were stringing us along. They weilded the power. They knew from the very outset our weak spots, the chinks in our defences... With their huge blue eyes, a fat tear ballooning over the long lashes... "mummy, please can I have the..." (insert chocolate icecream, fairy writing paper, another episode of Pepper Pig to delay bed...). Or, the collapse on the floor flailing in utter fury at being asked to finish the cheese on toast / move the 18 teddies blocking the doorway / it's definitely bed time now / no you can't go and find a butterfly in the garden / yes you do have to go to the loo before we get in the car. Either way we would have to respond, and it turns out we were putty in their sticky little fingers.

Those crafty little buggers - they were conducting the parents for years!

Those moments where you expressed (any) emotion rendered us powerless. Crying? We love you. Furious? We love you. Awake at 3.30am? We absolutely love you. Snot all over your face? We love you. Shat yourself in the car and it's gone up your back? ....... Yup. Still love you.

You made us feel (so kind of you) at times that we really did know everything and that we really were the oracles. And occasionally we may have had practical advantages (like making sure you didn't get hit by a bus crossing the road or giving you antibiotics when you had tonsilitis) that kept you safe. And in those moments we felt important. Possibly a bit self-inflated "Yes I took Mol to A&E today as she had a massive asthma attack, I think I probably saved her life"... 

And now as they have their own bank accounts so it turns out we defer to those once-were-toddlers for help and advice ("I can't download this app? How does Vinted actually work? But what actually IS an influencer? What skills do they have to warrent 8.5m followers? What is sriracha?"). And so it continues. Putty.

In conclusion to todays mental meanderings: the problem with unconditional love is that it renders you utterly powerless.

 

 

Do people still read?

 It's been a really, really long time since I last added an entry to this blog. 

And so much has happened in those many years.

The children became old teenagers and started dipping their toes into their 20s. GCSEs A'levels Degrees. First jobs. Driving tests. Renting in London.

Grey hair. Wrinkles. Health 'issues'. A dog. The back yard awash with human turds after multiple floods. Some kind of semblance of a career.

The world muddling along with climate crises after violent regional wars after bit coin after social media horrors after unsettling elections. It goes on.

Quite a lot of death.  

Death to pets. Death to plants. Death to the environment. Death to it raining normally. Death to people we love.  Death to collagen filled skin. Death to the brick phone (although this may well resurrect to halt the onset of a world filled with fake news and tiktok addicts). 

I don't have the same material as I did 10 years ago when two young daughters provided much to mull over and laugh about. And with the death of a parent another step up the Adult Ladder is made with a devastating chasm opening up betwen those halycon days of fishfingers, discussing how puppies are made, and being allowed to sit in the bathroom while a child splashes carefree in the bath. It's a weird homesickness for something that passes so quietly and steadily. I wake up one morning and my daughters are 19 and 22. 

I'm not going to dabble too much in cliches. 

But shit a brick WHERE have those years gone? 

How many bottles of rose-wine and packets of Kettle chips have been dispensed with? 

I overhear friends asking our young What do you want to do when you leave school or uni? What do you want to be when you grow up? And I wince... Because I know that I still don't know myself. My time spent trudging along muddy paths with the dog don't reveal the answer and neither does the bottle of wine and neither does my horoscope (horrorscope). When will that lightening bolt strike and the future reveal itself? It'd be a shame if it literally struck me and I was found on the South Downs Way like a piece of badly cooked gammon, never knowing... always assuming the grass was greener on the hill across the way. Those sheep over there, they're way happier.

In restarting Mothers Ruin I'm going to have a think about this voyage into real life adulthood. It might veer on the existential occasionally. Will definitely involved the dog Kiki (my unjudgemental therapist for the last 10 years). I can't avoid the topic of death. And there may also need to be some fantastical thinking to counter the potential slide into gloominess. 

See you soon.

 

 

 

inside her mind...

I was driving down to Portsmouth to pick up Mol from her 2nd go at netball-after-school-club (she seems to have embraced Team Sport with gusto) (god I hate netball, but mustn't prohibit her total fulfillment of potential by imposing my dislikes upon her... Which reminds me of a loud argument I once had with Husband about how I'd inadvertently told Mol that maths was my weakest subject at school and OH how I'd hated it and sweated and fumbled my way through GCSE ("Is that what you do at university Mum...?" - endless conversations at the moment about what order education comes in, with which exams) and then bloody well failed after all that shit and how I was leaping for joy when I finally got the frickin C grade and could shove my calculater up the teachers self satisfied number-filled-arsehole... And Husband stopped me in my tracks "You WHAT? Oh you should NEVER let them know how much you dislike a subject at school. No no NO! My god woman. It'll ONLY lead to her not liking maths too. You IDIOT! WHAT FUCKING MORON tells their child that they failed at maths? DURRRRRH. (Tongue inserted in bottom-lip to pull stupid-monkey-face.) So now I'm very cautious about what I tell my children. Obviously they both still love numbers because so far it only involves adding up to 100 or telling the teacher that yes, it is a triangle. I enjoy that sort of maths too.)...

Anyway. I got distracted.

So in the car with me was Liz. She sits behind me in her little booster seat and I can just see the top of her eyes, her forhead and her hair... It ruffles in the wind as she sticks her hand out the window.

We chat about who kissed who in the playground and whether Roxy is really (she's one of the dinner ladies) a natural blond or not (Liz suspects not). And once all the big chat from the day is over we fall into companionable silence.

Liz trails her fingers out the window and watches the passing countryside, which looks particularly good today as it's sunny and autumnal. The colours are clear and the air smells just right.

In our silence my thoughts lead back to work, and income and my lack of funding and what happens if Husband should leave me for someone who's actually nice and seems to outwardly show signs of affection, how could I ever find a job that actually pays me money that could feed and house myself and two children, let alone pay for an N-reg car that costs £50 a week to run... I was feeling kind of gloomy as the enormity of my situation came crashing in through the flimsy Peugots' 25 year old windows. Could I survive on my own? Would social services be obliged to take my children away from me and would I have to go and live in a tent on Dartmoor dodging the credit bayliffs?

As the terror of my dependency clouded my head I suddenly came back to reality as I heard Liz say my name (well, she said Mum, because she doesn't call me by my real name, I mean, sometimes I ask her to call me Mrs, or Madam, or to at least curtsey before making eye-contact, but on the whole it's just Mum). She had to say it a few times for me to register that I was in the car, driving, and not in a tent on Dartmoor handwashing my 2nd pair of socks in a stream...

"Mum" says Liz. "MUM".
"Oh, yes! Hello you!"
"MUM! guess what? I think I've got it!"
"What's that Liz?"
"I've finally worked out how to train a dog to skip with a real skipping rope."

Well. Nothing more than dogs skipping to bring me crashing back to real life, eh?