I ♥ Me - Week 3

This week's question by the lovely Notes is:

What Mummy/Parenting behaviours ignores your me, making you want to laugh, scream or cry?

You know what it's like, I'm sure - as a surly teenager pretty much everything your parents do is "Unfair" - the things they make you do, or don't let you do, are done purely out of spite. Their sole purpose and aim in life is to make your life a misery, right?

As you grow older, maybe you mellow somewhat - come to realise that they had some good intentions behind what you considered to be their totally unreasonable expectations. However, there are still some things that you vow you will "never do when you have your own children". After a while, maybe you are lucky enough to become a parent yourself. You tell yourself you won't stress about what they do or don't eat... you won't get overprotective and react like a frightened mother hen when they step near the precipice.... you won't...oh... wait...

Because that's the thing about parenting - a certain amount of it is learned behaviours. Maybe you did decide to become a strict disciplinarian in rebellion against your parents' hippy, laissez-faire attitudes... maybe you buy televisions for every room in the house because your parents did not let you watch ITV as a child...or maybe you just have a strange aversion to wax crayons. However, deep down, I bet you still sing the lullabys your mother sang you, insist your child wears a vest if it falls below 18 degrees C, or holiday in caravans - because it's what you learnt as a child.

Occasionally it makes me scream at myself in frustration when I hear myself uttering the phrases - "hold my hand, this is a busy road", "are you going to finish that", or "do I have to say everything three times?!", and I think "I sound just like my mother".

Then I laugh, and think "Yeah, I probably do...and it's not actually that bad..."

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Now run along and click on the badge at the top and pop over to her blog to see what everyone else has linked up!

In Which I Admit I Am A Cowardly Custard

My mother has always been considered...how can I put this politely...somewhat overcautious when it comes to health and safety by my father, my brother and myself. She was always the one that would freak out if we tried to climb a wall, or go too close to the edge of a high building (her own vertigo didn't help). I have always been very conscious of the fact that I should try and avoid being too cautious with my own children.

Turns out it's not actually that easy.

Maybe it's conditioning, maybe it's some kind of deep maternal instinct, but I have started to see the worst in all possible situations. Most of the time I can keep these fears under control. The only time I can't is when it comes to road safety. We have had a very close shave with each of our children - occasions that left me literally shaking and sobbing with the thought of what could have happened, had luck not been on our side. We live on quite a busy road, in quite an urban area, so trips to and from pretty much anywhere involve negotiating road safety. I am slowly starting to trust DD1, who at 5 and a half at least knows not to run out into the road, and allow her a little more freedom. I still insist on her holding my hand most of the time when we cross, however. I do still insist on DD2 (2 years younger than her sister) holding my hand whenever we are walking by a road.

I bumped into an acquaintance the other day, who also has two daughters, the eldest of is not quite yet 3. We walked through the park, with said eldest daughter on a little self-propelled car, while my friend pushed her youngest in a pushchair. At the edge of the park there are some large, wrough-iron gates, which lead straight onto a road. This road is not particularly busy, but there is a wall on the corner that makes it difficult to see any oncoming traffic. The gates were open, and the little girl (let's call her I) was merrily pushing her way towards them, showing no sign of stopping. Her mother did not bat an eyelid when she proceeded through the gates into the road. It was only when we saw the lorry approaching that she shouted out to her daughter that she should have been more careful and looked where she was going. Thankfully, the lorry was driving slowly and stopped, however, I could not help thinking that things could have been different.

I was obviously somewhat surprised at the mother's calm reaction, given my own fears. I don't want to judge her - the example is merely an illustration of the point that children and road safety probably don't mix very well. I am just as guilty of what others might consider horrible lapses of judgement. However, I am curious as to what everyone else's experiences are on this.

Do you let your children cross the road by themselves? At what ages did you start, and how did you make sure they knew about road safety?

Rebel With a Cause?

Deer Baby's latest post "'Snot Fair" about how she perceived her parents treated her and her sister differently, mentions her act of rebellion at age 13, when she decided to pierce her own ears.

This reminded me that my own earrings were also the act of my greatest teenage rebellion at the age of 16.

My mother has never had her ears pierced, and from a young age she made clear her disapproval. Whether this had anything to do with the fact that her mother used to wear great, heavy gold hoops I don't really know (strangely I have inherited said hoops, but do try not to wear them too often as I can't do so without thinking of my grandmother's stretched and drooping earlobes).

Of course, all my friends wore earrings, so a certain amount of peer pressure used to prompt me to regularly ask for pierced ears when birthdays or Christmas came around, but without success. With hindsight I do wonder whether it was all a cunning plan by my mother to focus my act of rebellion on something that was relatively harmless. I must make a note to try this parenting strategy on my children sometime. Either way, it seemed to work. I was a studious teenager, academic and one of the geeky crowd. I didn't hang out with the cool kids who drank and smoked.

I almost couldn't believe it myself when my friend F took me to the jewellers in the big city - I'll never forget that weird staple gun and the little packet of sterile swabs I was given.

The look on my mother's face when I came home and showed her, was a mixture of disapproval, disbelief... and I thought I could also detect the hint of a smile. She had been a bit of a wild child when younger. She would never have admitted it, but I think somehow she was secretly pleased...

Blonde, brunette, redhead - is it all the same?

DD1 is a little mini-me, DD2 is like a female version of hubby - they couldn't look more different.

I'm naturally a sort of dark, honey blonde, currently sporting lighter highlights. My husband had jet black hair when I met him, and is now a sort of George Clooney grey. My mother is a redhead (getting paler of course now). DD2 has been taking a lot of notice of hair colour suddenly, so this has somehow become important. She often goes around pointing out what colour someone's hair is. For example, she points out that mummy's and her sister's hair is blonde.

Suddenly last week, however, she decided that she also wanted to be blonde. I had to explain that her hair was dark, like daddy's. "no", she said "daddy's hair is grey". Ok, fair point. She then thought hard. "My hair is a little bit blonde, underneath".

I'm surprised that she feels so strongly about this. However, it did get me thinking about what hair colour says about me. In some ways, I do not really have a huge amount of choice - lighter is all I can realistically go without it looking too strange on me. I have therefore only ever been varying shades of blond. I can be no other way without changing my appearance drastically and it looking strange.

I do sometimes wonder if being blonde is a help or a hindrance. At work, I certainly stand out, which can be positive. On the other hand, I have also experienced surprise that I am at my relative level of seniority, as I suppose in some ways I look younger than my years.

Is hair colour important, or just another element of your appearance? Has changing your hair colour made others react to you differently?

Help! My Daughter is a Girl!

I was a bit of a tomboy as a child - I played with boys a lot, I loved playing with cars and climbing trees. I wore trousers, always looked a bit scruffy and never wore pink.

When DD1 was born, I was very conscious of not wanting to conform to gender stereotypes. Whilst I loved dressing her in cute little outfits, I tried my best to ensure that they were all the colours of the rainbow. In the end she was a very sicky baby and she got through so many changes of clothes that I think her first six months were spent more or less permanently in sleepsuits. As she got older, I would dress her in trousers as these were far more practical - especially for nursery. I also continued in my quest for "anything but pink", and was proud when she told me her favourite colour was orange.

DD2 came along a couple of years later, and it slowly became inevitable that a certain female bias crept into the house. Other people bought dolls, fairy dresses and pink frilly things. I kept to my sensible trouser rule, though. Lately, however, this has been a real struggle. To some extent, DD2 has always been the easy-going one. For a long time I thought I had missed the terrible twos completely - however, it just turns out she is a bit of a late developer on the tantrum front, and just as she is approaching her third birthday, she has developed some very clear ideas about what she does and does not like.

What she does like: wearing a skirt. So much so that every morning instead of a "good morning", she waltzes into the bedroom and pronounces: "I want to wear a skirt today". As we do not actually possess many skirts in her size, this causes a few problems, to say the least.
The equation goes something like;
DD1 wearing mainly trousers + DD2 being the unfortunate recipient of mainly hand-me-downs = Temper tantrums in the mornings.

The only compromise she will accept is by promising the PINK trousers... which begs the question, how did it come to this?!

Mothers and Daughters - part 1

I love my mother.

You know if I open with a line like that, there is bound to be a "but" following somewhere.

Since I left home at the age of 18, and until just under a year ago, my mother and I had been separated by a 10-hour car journey/2 hour flight/several "low" countries. This seemed to work fairly well for both of us. We saw each other relatively regularly, for a week or so at a time. Then my husband and I had children. My parents were fantastic - they came over and really helped out in those first few horrible sleep-deprived months, but I always knew it was for a limited period each time.

A couple of years down the line, my father retired, and they decided it was time to leave "the continent" and return to Blighty. This had always been the intention, but I suppose the arrival of grandchildren cemented the plan. My father is a Barnsley lad, and we had spent our periods in the UK in Cheshire, but they decided to move "darn Sarf" to be near the grandchildren. Since last May, we therefore now find ourselves within 10 minutes' drive of each other, and it has taken some time to adjust.

My mother and I resemble each other physically, but have always been complete opposites in terms of character. I am more like my father - reserved, introverted, fairly untidy. She is outgoing, bubbly and an OBSESSIVE cleaner. (My dad swears she wasn't like that when he met her, although my grandmother was apparently the same - is it hereditary? If yes, it only manifests itself in later life.)

Earlier this week, I came home from work to find that my parents had been round - they've got a key and have been popping by a fair amount as they are collecting some wood from our garden. I knew this by the fact that my kitchen had been tidied up. So far, so freaky. The thing that really made me fly into a rage, however, was that mum had taken my washing out of the machine, and replaced it with a completely different load. The machine had been on a timer, due to finish when I got back from work. She had taken one look at it, realised the laundry inside was dry, and the machine was "flashing strangely" and assumed something was wrong. Suffice to say, I completely flew off the handle at her (it had not been a good day at work), and managed to reduce her to tears.

I understand that I may come across as completely irrational - she was, after all, only trying to help. To say I felt guilty about going berserk is an understatement. However, I think I might finally have got the point across to her that I am no longer 6 years old (add another 30 to that), and that I am quite happy to wallow in my own chaos. The only question now is - how long is it going to last?...