Because I Said So, page 16
The Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny have a lot to answer for, too.
I blame my granny for starting the lies. She swore that if I ate my crusts, my hair would go curly. It remained poker straight, aside from an Eighties flirtation with a perm/mullet combo that made me look like Andy Murray. On a bad hair day. In a wind tunnel.
It’s not just my big fat fibs that have been exposed – welcome to the era of ‘do as I say, not as I do’.
Raising my boys, I emphasised the importance of being motivated and committed. ‘See things through and don’t give up until you succeed,’ I’d witter.
They’ve now watched me start and fail countless new diets and exercise regimes and abandon the ironing in favour of a lie-down with the latest Marian Keyes.
I drill them in the need to focus on homework and ignore distractions. Then the doorbell rings and I take an hour off work to have a chat to my pals.
I teach them about saving and the importance of sensible spending – until my credit card bill cracks a floor tile when it thuds through the letterbox.
I’ve always told them they must never be shallow or materialistic.
Pot. Kettle. Woe.
Yes, Supermum has been unmasked as a fraud.
I can only hope they don’t follow in my footsteps and that they realise the lies and hypocritical lessons were all for their own good.
And if they don’t?
At least I’ll be able to bribe them with a River Island voucher and a Terry’s Chocolate Orange.
Not Guilty
If it were a multiple choice quiz question, it would go something like this: Name the emotion commonly experienced when raising children, that is exacerbated in times of junk food, school holidays and the secret loathing of concerts involving small kids and recorders. Is it:
A. Giddy bliss
B. Deep fulfilment
C. Guilt
Read me my rights, officer.
However, this week, only thirteen per cent of working mothers said they felt guilty about being away from their children, compelling Mumsnet chief exec Justine Roberts to say, ‘Perhaps it’s time to banish the cliché of the guilty working mum once and for all.’
I’m all for jumping on the guilt-free bus, but sadly, I’ve yet to meet another mum who hasn’t felt a twinge of self-reproach at some point in the parenting process.
Mine started early. Oh, the plans I had when I was pregnant. My children would have a diet of organic goodness, they would only watch TV if it was an educational documentary on nuclear physics, and we’d spend every day in a cake-baking, flower-pressing, language-learning, healthy eating bubble of parental perfection.
Cue reality.
I’m lucky enough to have a job that I can do at home, and I’d like to thank Barney the Dinosaur for providing years of emergency childcare. And guilt.
Then there were the many occasions that I contemplated dressing the Low clan in a spy-like disguise when entering fast-food joints (chicken burgers, fresh orange and a fruit bag) to avoid being spotted and judged by the families who never left home without a stash of homemade rice cakes. Guilt.
My children are indeed bilingual. But they only speak English and Glaswegian. Guilt.
On long car journeys we’d start off with jolly songs and upbeat games of I Spy.
I spy with my little eye something beginning with C. Cars. Or T. Trucks. Sometimes B. Bus. After the 345th ‘Are we there yet?’ I’d cave and crack open the portable DVD player and a box set of Bob the Builder. And guilt.
Every year when the school holidays were looming, I’d have visions of giving my sons 100 per cent of my time, recreating the idyllic, action-packed breaks experienced by those perfect families who wear matching jumpers while cycling through the countryside in adverts for holiday camps and probiotic drinks.
Then life would interfere and suddenly the days would become a chaotic balance of fun, games, footie in the garden, and more afternoons whence my large purple friend kept two energetic wee boys amused while I typed up 5,000 words of the next novel.
But, oh, the guilt.
Except… the boys are twelve and thirteen now and they’re two happy, well-balanced individuals who seem to have survived my overstretched parenting fails without turning into delinquents. Or junk-food addicts. And I don’t need a crowbar to get them off the sofa or therapy to wean them off reruns of Storage Wars.
In fact, as I write this, they’re both indulging in their favourite pastimes. My bookworm is lying on the couch with the new Robert Muchamore, and his brother is at a basketball court, where he’s been training for hours.
Apparently, that makes this – according to both of them – ‘a brilliant holiday’.
So, I’m giving up with the grand plans that leave me crushed when they don’t come off. I’m abandoning the dreams of being that family wearing matching jumpers on their bikes. I’m quashing the feeling that I’m somehow short-changing them by juggling work/family/house/movie channel.
Instead, I’m agreeing with Justine – it’s time to banish the negativity and self-doubt.
No more guilt.
Although, it does leave one less option when we’re playing car games.
No more ‘I spy with my little eye, something beginning with G.’
Confessions of a Competitive Mum
Okay, here goes. It’s time to step forward and admit the truth. I’m shrugging off the shame. I’m going to be loud, proud and I may even start a Mexican wave.
My name is Shari Low. And I’m a competitive mum.
This week, the queen of our movement, Judy Murray, spoke up to defend fellow members of our much-scorned and derided gang saying, ‘There’s something about being a competitive mum, especially when the children are male. If I were the dad of sons, I wouldn’t have been noticed.’
She’s right. And as a fellow MASK (Mother of A Sporty Kid), I’m aware of just how easy it is to be pulled into the feverish grip of sporting hyperactivity. Please note that this exertion applies only to spectating and not on-field participation. The last time I took part in a team sport I was sixteen, and half-time consisted of oranges, water, and snogging my boyfriend round the back of the changing rooms.
When I started writing this column, my sons were one and three. In the primary school years I had no competitive edge whatsoever. Which is just as well, as Low the Elder was highly talented in the sporting field of mud-diving while Low the Younger demonstrated a particular aptitude in the little-known challenge of Wotsit Consumption.
At school sports days I’d mock the mothers who’d sulk when their wee Usain Bolt didn’t triumph when carrying an egg on school dinner cutlery. I’d take another bite of a white chocolate Magnum and gently roll my eyes at the mums that showed up in Lycra ready to trounce the opposition in the mother’s race.
In the non-sports arena, I was equally as laid-back. Didn’t get the lead role in the nativity? Don’t worry, darling, the second sheep on the left played a vital role in the early years of Christianity.
As the years passed, my boys joined football teams and I’d duly show up, but to be honest, it was an excuse to hang out for an hour on the touchlines with the fellow MASKs and discuss vital sporting issues. Like the wardrobe choices of high-profile WAGs and David Beckham’s ad campaigns for his new kecks.
Fast forward ten years and it all changed when – drum rolls, trumpets and a toot on a claxon – Low the Elder discovered basketball. When he started I was clueless. As far as I was concerned, an in-depth strategy was ‘catch ball, put in round thing that’s dangling on the wall’.
Then something happened. I had an out-of-body experience. He scored a basket in a crucial game and I was out of my seat, punching the air and yelling, ‘Touch-down!’
I clearly hadn’t grasped the sport-specific terminology.
Maybe it’s admiration for how hard he trains. Perhaps I’ve just discovered a sport I actually love to watch. But ever since then, I’ve been a woman possessed. I cheer. I holler. I once leapt up to celebrate a win and pulled a hamstring. And – please don’t judge me – I possess, oh the shame, a foam finger. Although I will add that it has never been used in a Miley-esque fashion.
And now the unthinkable has happened. My youngest has joined his brother on the b-ball court. See? I’m like, pure down with the lingo now.
However, if Judy’s unapologetic, then so am I. I’m a competitive mother and I don’t care. I’m going to wear my over-excitability like a badge of honour.
And to those laid-back mothers who think I’m ridiculous? Here lies a cautionary tale. Once upon a time, the chilled-out mum of the second sheep on the left discovered that it’s a very swift, unexpected and painful leap from Wotsits to wiggling a foam finger.
School’s Moving On Up
It seems like only yesterday he marched to the school gate for the first time. There were tears. Snot. Wails. But once I got a grip of myself, I waved my five-year-old son off as he sauntered in for his first day of school. I said a silent prayer that he’d make friends. I fervently hoped he wouldn’t be scared. And I seriously wondered if the weight of a backpack that was taller than him would make him topple over like an upturned turtle.
Fast forward seven years, and this week he strode into his primary school leaving dance while trying to ignore the fact that his mother had exactly the same expression she gets when someone dies at the end of Casualty – watery eyes and a petted lip that trembles like an emotionally overwrought guppy fish.
Friends, there’s a new entry in the Little Book of Parental Sighs: That moment when your youngest child leaves primary school and you realise he’s just a few years away from Pot Noodles and living in a bedsit with fourteen student pals.
Sob.
Prior to that tear-jerking, lump-in-throat moment, I’d only considered the plus sides of the situation. No more doing double school runs, now that Low the Younger will be joining his older brother at the big school. No more requirements for me to rustle up 200 woefully inferior fairy cakes for the Christmas party. No more getting up in the morning to those dreaded words, ‘Mum, I need a crocodile/snowman/Scooby Doo costume for school today.’
I’m glad he’s maturing and moving on to exciting stuff. I just hadn’t realised it would come with such an emotional sucker-punch and a deafening snip of yet another apron string being cut.
Speaking from experience, I know what’s ahead of me. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt that says ‘My Kids Love Me – but only if their mates aren’t around’.
If my youngest follows in the size eleven footsteps (yip, size eleven – I’m applying for a lottery grant to keep him in trainers) of his thirteen-year-old brother, the changes will be subtle at first. He’ll no longer give me a kiss when I drop him off in the morning. He’ll see me coming, and immediately go to Defcon One, in case I say or do anything that will cause him embarrassment in front of his chums. And then there’s that physical act that they teach right before assembly on the first day in high school. The adolescent eye roll.
It’s a one-stop gesture, applicable in all instances in which a mother makes gentle reprimands, helpful suggestions, bad jokes, hoovering requests and mutterings involving the words ‘because I said so’.
Right now, my youngest still thinks I know stuff. In approximately six weeks and one day he’ll decide I know nothing at all.
The irony doesn’t escape me. I’ve always encouraged them to be independent. To think for themselves. They’ve been taught to cook, to budget, to keep their rooms on the non-biohazard side of toxic waste.
I’m just not ready for the increase in emotional independence that goes with it.
Look, I’m a mother. Double standards come with the territory.
So, Low the Younger, I’m happy for you, I really am. But you’ll just have to bear with me as I tackle that difficult transition to the next stage of your education.
And in the meantime, just like my primary school graduate, I need to take what I’ve learned over the last few years, and put it in my skill bank in case I need it in the future. If anyone needs help to rustle up a crocodile/snowman/Scooby Doo outfit in an hour and a half, give me a shout.
Uniform Smugdom
Another week, another new entry in my Big Book of Motherly Mishaps.
Every year I get caught up in the back-to-school frenzy that results in a panicked trolley dash round Marks & Spencer five minutes before the shop shuts on the night before the first bell of the new term rings.
Not this year. I was on the case.
In the first week of summer I bought full uniforms for both my boys and had them pressed, hung in the wardrobes and ready to go.
Oh the heart-swelling pride and smugness as I spent the next month planning my acceptance speech for my Mother of the Year award and gazing pitifully on my chums as they fell to their knees, wailing at the prospect of doing the uniform shop at the last minute.
‘Och, I’ve already done it all,’ I volunteered on several occasions, failing to disguise my overwhelming self-satisfaction. ‘Maybe you should try getting organised early next year, too.’
I’m not sure on the exact wording of their replies but they came through gritted teeth and there may have been suggestions that ended with the word ‘off ’.
I didn’t care. Nothing could dent my moment of triumph. Until…
Fast forward to the traumatic moment, only a few days ago, when my thirteen-year-old wandered into the kitchen and uttered a casual, ‘Mum, I just tried on my new school trousers again. They don’t fit me.’
What? Of course they fitted. I’d checked. I’d ironed them. I’d hung them up.
I was mother of the flipping year! He’d obviously tried on his wee brother’s by mistake. Easily done. I sent him back for a second fitting and he appeared wearing a set of trews that looked absolutely fine – if Capri pants ever become standard uniform.
I could see the bones in his ankles. Sorry, had to stop there and take deep breaths until the fraught flashback subsided.
As the hems dangled, looking like flags at half-mast, reality dawned.
He’s grown more than two inches in the summer holidays.
Another horrific thought dropped. ‘Go try on your new school shoes,’ I gasped dramatically, in the voice they use in movies when the mother is sending the hero off to risk his life in order to save civilisation.
He hobbled back through, his facial expression confirming his mutters of ‘too small’.
In four weeks, his feet have gone from a size eleven to a size twelve. At age thirteen.
I wailed, while Flipper Low shrugged, missing the gravity of the situation entirely. I couldn’t take the uniforms back because I’d already removed the tags. Size twelve school shoes are not exactly easy to find, and I now had approximately a day and a half to completely kit him out from head to exceptionally large toes.
And it’s not as if I’ve got anything else on this week.
In an act of stupendous planning, my new novel, Taking Hollywood, comes out in the same week as my boys go back to school.
Every day is spent doing interviews in which I’m supposed to be all ‘Jackie Collins’, wafting around looking glamorous and dropping in dramatic and exciting anecdotes about my fascinating life.
Sigh. Who am I kidding? In reality, even on a good day, I’m a bit more Phil Collins in the glamour stakes. And those dramatic, exciting anecdotes?
Have you heard the one about the frantic mother doing a panicked trolley dash round Marks & Spencer five minutes before the shop shuts on the night before the first day of the new term?
Can You… Stay Forever?
Parents – if the kids are within eyeshot of this page, distract them now. The shock of the fact I’m about to reveal could be too much. Nope, it’s not about Santa. Or the Tooth Fairy. Or a change of wind leaving the face in a permanent scowl.
It’s much more chilling. New research has brought to light a disturbing fact of modern family life – more than half of parents admit that they can’t wait until their offspring leave home.
If I’m being perfectly candid, I can see the obvious advantage. As the mother of twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys, I long for the day when I don’t utter 3,422 repetitions of sentences that start with, ‘Can you…’
‘Can you pick your clothes up off the floor?’
‘Can you put your plates into that mysterious contraption sometimes referred to as a dishwasher?’
‘Can you dig out my hazmat suit so I can wash your PE kit?’
But the other reasons cited in the study had me more confused than my husband in the soft furnishings area of IKEA.
Some parents wanted to turn the kids’ bedroom into a gym. The very thought of that is enough to have me reaching for a cup of tea and a four-finger Kit Kat.
Forty-seven per cent said they wanted to take more romantic holidays as a couple. Well, strike that one. On hols, my kids aren’t encumbrances, they’re chief conspirators (‘You distract Dad while I buy a lilo in the shape of a crocodile’). They also provide a vital divorce-avoidance service for a laid-back husband, and a wife who has the attention span of an over-caffeinated mosquito. My sons are happy to play basketball, swim, wrestle a crocodile-shaped lilo and listen to me murdering The Shoop Shoop Song on the karaoke while my dearly beloved reads in the sun and pretends not to know us.
Another popular reason for shoving the chicks out the nest is that the parental birds want their home to themselves. Hang on till I go bolt the doors. Who would make me laugh? Who would tell me my kitchen dancing is a pure beamer? Who would I bribe to watch superhero flicks that I really should have grown out of by now?
However, my prevailing motivation for tying the apron strings to the kids? The sad truth is that husband and I are not to be trusted on our own.
Before we had children, we were dedicated party people, but thirteen years of responsibility and not getting out much has changed all that. Last weekend we discovered it’s a latent force, waiting to resurface.
