For all those with a partner who works at the weekend

There are plenty of us, although down at the local park on a sunny Saturday morning it might not feel like it’s the case. I see Dads everywhere, giving their wives a lie-in whilst they take the kids out to run off some steam, enjoying precious family time denied them by a busy week at work.
But for those of us who are the primary carer of the children and have a spouse who works one or maybe both days of the weekend, it can be tough. Particularly when the kids are small. My husband works on a Saturday and has done since our daughter was a toddler. I am very fortunate to have my parents living close by and when my son was a baby this help was absolutely essential.
I recall a conversation I had with a fellow mum, who had brought up her three children when her husband, a former colleague of myself and my other half, had worked saturdays. She recounted how difficult the children could be on that day, instinctively knowing you were without backup and cut adrift from the usual structures provided by the working and school week. Their house was often in turmoil – toys and mess everywhere – when her husband finally returned in the evening, exhausted himself.
Having spent so long in the economic recession we have learnt to accept the hardships of our working lives, grateful for employment and emphasising the positives in our jobs over the negatives. But if there was anything I could change about our lives it would be this aspect. Not so much for my benefit anymore but for my husband’s. Weekends are the time when Dads get to interact with their family at a more leisurely rate. With 12 hours lost, the homework and chores tend to dominate instead.
As the children get older, it gets easier. No longer does that Saturday seem to stretch out endlessly ahead of you from the moment when you’re first woken up by a lively offspring at the crack of dawn. There are still issues, however. When both of the children are invited to a party or play date you are immediately unsure of how to get them to the right place at the right time single handed. I call upon my parents for help, but I do wonder how others cope.
The reason that I was prompted to write about the subject on this Saturday morning, is that I was reminded of one of the positive legacies of my solo starts to the weekend. Ever since my daughter was tiny, we have always embarked on some kind of creative project to begin the day. This tradition appears to have embedded itself into the culture of our Saturday, long after the requirement to fill an interminable day has dissipated.
Whether it is completing a Lego set or painting a picture, Saturday a.m. is the time we do it. The habit has been firmly instilled. I think this is a lovely tradition but entirely unintentional!
During every weekend now, I do spare a thought for other families in the same boat. Without a doubt it’s hard, but a necessity and one out of which some unexpectedly pleasant habits can grow.

The Joy of Unwrapping.

They say that each new generation is different. I’m certain it’s true. But I still expect my children to be just like me. In many respects they are; from the avid reading and telly watching to the mild suspicion of group sports. There are, however, certain new interests and preoccupations my offspring have latched onto that I can’t quite connect with. The attraction of observing other people unwrap parcels is one of them.
My son gets enormous pleasure from watching these little films uploaded to YouTube of Dads and their children unwrapping Lego. What’s the fascination? I’ve got no idea.
I can understand the pleasure derived from unwrapping or unboxing your own birthday or Christmas presents. In fact, this very weekend, I indulged in one of my favourite of all little pastimes – receiving and opening the package which contains the paperback version of my new book. In the writing and publishing world, nothing quite beats it.
But watching someone else demolishing a pile of pressies, I just don’t understand. So I asked my youngest why he enjoys it so much. He told me it’s because he wants to see what’s inside (yes, I asked for that) and to discover if it will turn out to be a set he already has or something new that he may want in the future. Occasionally, they go on to construct the set and he can compare their building methods with his own.
Okay, so I’m starting to appreciate the purpose of the exercise. The opening of the package builds the suspense, like turning over the early pages of a novel, skimming through the publisher’s info and acknowledgments. The anticipation is being established for the main event, when we begin Chapter 1 itself.
This type of activity is also indicative of the visual nature of young people’s lives these days. The digital world is an aesthetic one; where arresting images and fast-moving videos accompany almost every word that’s written. I would stop short at suggesting it is voyeuristic, because I suspect this view is old fashioned. I find it a bit weird and unsettling because it is new to me. But then so is Skype and Facetime.
There are crucial aspects of young people’s lives that are very different from the way ours were. Although getting a chance to watch people just like us around the world doing the exact same things that we do is perhaps not such a bad thing. It shows that there is so much more that unites humanity than divides us – a very important belief to cling on to at this particularly unstable period of time for many parts of the planet.
So I’m keeping an open mind. There is certainly stuff that my son should not be watching through the world wide web, but the innocent and simple joys of unwrapping a parcel, surely a universal human pleasure, probably isn’t one of them.

What they really had for breakfast and other little horrors our children love to reveal…

  
An article in The Telegraph today reminded me of an embarrassing incident that occurred a couple of weeks ago. The piece was a frighteningly accurate account of the chaotic reality of most people’s early morning routine. It put me in mind of when my mother-in-law visited on a Sunday afternoon recently, innocently enquiringly of my daughter what she’d had for breakfast, to which my first born happily replied, ‘dry roasted peanuts’.

There followed a full five minutes of me trying to explain that this hadn’t been breakfast at all but an ill-judged and totally unsanctioned mid morning snack. It sounded weak, although it was pretty much the truth. Our son is a great one for eating in the morning and will have whatever we care to serve him. Shona, on the other hand, doesn’t have an enormous appetite before 11am. Despite being offered a selection of breakfast options that a five star restaurant would be proud of, she often refuses them all, waiting for a couple of hours before feeling the desire for sustenance of any kind. By which time she might graze the cupboards largely unnoticed.

So I began to consider all those awkward situations where our children, in their eternal innocence, reveal our worst habits and cock-ups to the world. Naturally censorious as the pre teens tend to be; hang-overs and lie-ins appear to rate very highly in the long list of crimes that our offspring feel the need to tell their teachers and friends about, usually first thing on a Monday morning.

Swearing, passing wind or topping up a glass of wine are also on that list, along with large underwear and the existence of/methods employed for the removal of, any kind of body hair. Nobody fully warns you about this hazard when you embark upon parenthood.

No aspect of your life will pass without comment or judgement once the little darlings first become capable of speech. Most of the time, we will find this honesty refreshing and adorable. But just occasionally, when our youngest decides to announce to all present that they’ve not brushed their teeth for a week, or eaten a piece of fruit since June, we gaze at our shoes, wishing the ground would swallow us up, desperate to explain that this is Timmy’s idea of a joke but knowing  that there’s really no point.

Now it’s been said, no one is ever going to believe it’s not true…

Has our understanding of courage been highjacked?

When on a trip to London yesterday, my husband and son took a tour up the Orbit tower, in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. I’m not a great one for heights so my daughter and I ducked into a nearby cafe to await their return. After settling at our table with the drinks, my daughter began indulging in some soul searching. Apparently, they’d had an assembly the week before about ‘courage’. She lamented how she should really have possessed the courage to climb the tower and clearly felt it a personal failure to have ‘wimped out’.

This got me thinking. I immediately told Shona that courage didn’t mean quite the same thing to me as it did to the teacher leading the assembly. She agreed, suggesting  that abseiling off a building might constitute courage to one person and stupidity to another. It has certainly  become fashionable in recent years to encourage youngsters to take part in high adrenaline activities, viewing them as ‘character building’. Indeed, my daughter will be going on her year six residential trip in May, which is an adventure holiday including a ‘leap of faith’ on the final day.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great. The kids will love it, just as I enjoyed riding roller coasters and diving from high boards when I was a teenager. But where I become uneasy, is in the redefining of thrill seeking, adrenaline pumping acts as synonymous with courage. Fearlessness is only one aspect of the OED definition of being courageous. It is also about having fortitude, being brave and gallant, even heroic. To me, a courageous act is to stand up for what you believe in even if all those around you disagree. To stick up for someone who is being bullied at the risk of a backlash against yourself is courageous. To make the trip to a war zone in order to provide medical care or assistance to those caught up in the violence  is courageous.

When I hear about those individuals who seek greater and greater artificial thrills by walking tightropes between tall buildings or climbing rock faces without support ropes, I always wonder how those who live with real difficulties view this strange occupation; those who trek for hundreds of miles and embark upon dangerous sea voyages to escape torture and persecution with their young families must marvel at why people would actually seek the stress that those dreadful  situations bring.

The answer, I suspect, is that ordinary life bores some people . They’ve sought out every available activity to stimulate the endorphins and have become addicted to the buzz. This isn’t what courage means to me and I wish we would stop telling our children that it’s what they should aspire to. Courage is the ability to recognise the true value in what we have before us right now. It might take more courage to stand still and face our responsibilities than to rush off in search of the next big thing.

So, I had no intention of forcing my daughter to go to the top of that tower – to face and overcome her fear. Because we all have a different interpretation of being brave. For some people, travelling any distance away from their home requires a courage that others may not fully  appreciate. Who am I to judge what another individual’s capacity for stoicism might be. I’d rather my daughter stood up for her friends when it mattered most and was a person who put their head above the parapet at work to point out an injustice. Because that is what true courage means to me and it is possible to achieve it on either  a small or a large scale.

Want to encourage the creative urge in your kids? Embrace your own.

When I was about three years old and my sister five, our dad, a bank manager who commuted to his London office each day, decided to re-decorate our suburban, three bedroomed semi-detached house in Essex.
In the process of this fairly mundane and entirely unremarkable task, he decided, almost inexplicably, to create a colourful painted mural up the stairs.

At the time, I thought this creation was wonderful, and something that everyone’s dad did. It perhaps took me until I had my own children to realise that it really wasn’t.
I’ve been decorating the upstairs bathroom myself this past week and although I have created murals in my children’s bedrooms at various points, I’m just not brave enough to do it elsewhere in the house. But I wholeheartedly wish I was.

Nothing appeals to children more than the feeling that their world of imagination and fun can spill over into the serious, sterile universe of the grown-ups. I can still remember that picture snaking up the twisting staircase, with perfect clarity. There were green hills, blue skies and white fluffy clouds. I’ve no idea if it was any good in an artistic sense (sorry Dad) but to my younger self this really didn’t matter. It was magical.

My sister is now a rather wonderful artist herself and I write novels. We have both embraced the idea that it’s perfectly acceptable to explore your imagination and follow it to wherever it wants to go.

Does this tendency have anything to do with that mural my father painted for us over 35 years ago? Well, I can’t prove it, but I definitely think it might have. In which case, maybe I should really consider making a similar gesture to my own children.
Because how can we expect our offspring to show their creative side if we are never prepared to reveal ours?

#Parenting and work. Why we still haven’t got the balance right.

Both my children are now back at school after a nasty bug that meant they were at home for pretty much two whole weeks between them. I work from home so this wasn’t a problem, but it certainly got me thinking. For two full-time working parents this sort of situation is nothing short of a nightmare. But in this modern, digital world, surely we must be able to come up with a decent solution to the dilemmas which face working parents?
Providing flexible working hours and allowing men to take time off to raise children as well as women has gone some way to addressing the issue. However, the impact of the recession since 2008, which has resulted in widespread insecurity about jobs, and the stagnation of pay has meant that many families are reluctant to take advantage of these offers. The bread-winner’s career remains sacrosanct. That’s certainly the way it is in our house and the reason I gave up my part-time teaching job. My husband’s career requires him putting in very long hours during term-time and it became increasingly clear that I would need to be the one who took full responsibility for the childcare. This meant adopting a less rigid approach to work.
What I have discovered, as a result of this shift in my working patterns, is that I’m far more efficient now. My children being off school ill didn’t really put a dent in my schedule. In fact, it meant I was stuck at my desk with nothing else to do but get on with my job. So how might this observation translate into the wider job market?
Firstly, I think we need to debunk the myth that the number of hours you are seen at your desk or in the workplace equals how valuable an employee you are. Women need to rush out of the door bang on five, to pick up the kids from childcare or school. It doesn’t mean that they aren’t putting in another few hours back home later.
In certain professions, working from home just isn’t possible. Teaching and medicine immediately spring to mind. There needs to be one-to-one contact with students and patients. But having said this, the world of education is gradually changing. In a few years from now, it will be possible for students to follow an entire school or university curriculum remotely, needing a tutor’s feedback only through e-mail or Skype. Pre-recorded tutorials and seminars could be produced for a global market. This type of future would clearly benefit those in the poorest parts of the world and enable the primary carers who have an educational background to achieve proper, flexible working.
This example is just one of the many potential possibilities, but I strongly believe that as a society we aren’t giving enough thought to the issue, largely because we all manage to muddle through, just about. Some new and innovative thinking is required in this area. We aren’t utilizing our female workforce effectively by not taking this issue seriously. With a recent boom in the birth rate in Britain, it’s an issue which certainly isn’t going to go away any time soon.