MotherSoup

I heard a bit (when the house is full of rampaging school-holiday children, few things survive uninterrupted) of a radio article about the dispute over an American billionaire’s multi-million pound legacy for her dog.

One of the radio interviewees was critical of any such gestures, saying “Dogs aren’t loyal, they just have Stockholm Syndrome”.  This is a reference, not to a pretentious American band but to the phenomenon when those helplessly in the control of others (usually hostages or abductees in the control of their captors) become loyal to their captors.

“There’s sort of a point there,” thinks I, up to my elbows in washing-up water, “although I’m no expert on dogs”. Owners usually choose their dogs, often on brief aquaintance or flimsy reasoning, and the dog’s famous loyalty is just out of circumstance. That’s not really love…

But isn’t it just the same with children? Other than choice of partner, we have no control over which egg/sperm combination makes it all happen. We get the child that appears 9ish months later - and return or exchange is not likely to be an option. Of course, even adoption works with some strict limitations: while finalisation of placements may be delayed for a period, one still does not ‘browse’ through an enormous range of children like clothes on a rail.

I chose my partner, but not my children. Each one of them is not what I would have expected, in so many ways! But I can’t imagine changing them and I love them fiercely just as they are. But unlike your average terrorist I was positively inclined towards them from the start.

And as for them? It will be a good few years before any of mine are old enough to come out with “I didn’t ask to be born”, “You’re not the king of me” and all those other adolescent evergreens.* Nope, they didn’t choose me and Fathersoup and the thought that they might one day find us lacking is not a comfortable one. But to belittle their honest, unconditional love - or anyone’s - because they had no control over their situation is poor-spirited.

What about the billionaire and her rat-on-a-string heir? I haven’t delved deeply into that case, but I’m guessing that with that sort of money, and that sort of family, there’d be challenges to the will whatever she’d done with the money. Some people are never satisfied…

* Though guineapigmum reminds me that it will seem to happen soon enough!

 Blogging this in bed with the laptop in that tiny window of time after the alarm has gone off.

 Two and a half more days of school runs.

How lovely it will be not having to get out of bed to such strict deadlines.

Call me naive, but right now I am seriously looking forward to the end of term.

I clipped the edge of two very different processions today, as I travelled back from Edinburgh towards East Lothian.

First, I gave way to the very end of the annual line of taxis taking needy kids to the seaside. Taxis, minibuses, transits, all with streamers flying and horns tooting and accompanied by the rare sight of police motorcycle outriders with balloons on them.

No balloons on police bikes on the A1, who were at the very front of the fuel protest convoy. I drove eastward as they came up off the bypass and went westward towards the City Centre. I gave them a tootle and a wave out of the window (a brief one at 70mph as the wind could have whipped my hand off!)

Now, there’s plenty of discussion about the pros and cons of the fuel protests, and I do get to screaming point if I ever get stuck behind some cavalcade if I’m in a hurry, but it does my heart good to see people *doing something* about causes that matter to them, whether it’s trips for tots or reducing duty payments.

It can be so easy to grumble about issues and situations, but always finding reasons for not taking action… so I’d getter get off the computer and do something less indolent!

And this post does give me some excuse for using a Father Ted pic…

Here’s a secret: I’m still easily scared by programmes like Doctor Who. That’s one of the reasons why, if I watch it at a weekend, I always make a point to try and catch (or video) the ‘Doctor Who Confidential’ programme which follows on BBC3. That way I get to see all the monsters with their stuffing hanging out, the scary scenes… but with the cameramen and choreographers standing round the edge, and the messily-murdered actors chatting happily about what fun it was to die. Defuses the effect.

I also get to see people like Producer Russell T. Davies and Producer-in-waiting Steven Moffat talking with positivity and enthusiasm about their work. Hearing anybody talk with such passion about their subject is almost always inspiring, and this week both men dwelt on how they imagined that a storyline would be recreated in playgrounds around the country.

Sure enough, I do see kids trotting up to school with bits of Doctor Who monster costumes liberally  - if erratically - applied to their faces and torsos. I have an Offspring who I consider to be too young to cope with Doctor Who - and many of these costumed children are younger than my Offspring. So: am I an over-sensitive mother or do I have an over-sensitive child? Or are some of those other children over-exposed, and their parents shockingly neglectful? None of these, of course, or maybe a little bit of all of them: what pejorative adjectives those all are!

This is an Offspring who has (so far) tended to watch less telly and read more books. Would there be less sensitivity in that offspring if the TV had been on every waking moment since their birth? I’m pretty certain heavy exposure would desensitive anybody… Like me* this Offspring needs reminders that what happens in on-screen dramas isn’t real, or imagination runs away with us both. And we need to remember that the characters in them aren’t real either, because imagination and empathy go hand-in-hand. What is at the core of empathy but imagining what things feel like to somebody else?

If my Offspring would struggle to cope with Doctor Who because of high imagination/empathy levels, what might that say for some of the masked kids at school? I guess they’re well-grounded in the idea that telly isn’t real, but are they going to struggle with real-life empathy as well? If some kids who watch more telly have a well-developed sense of the unreal is there a chance that some - some - will not develop a sense of reality that they can apply to the world and the people outside the goggle-box?

That same Saturday, a few hours before Doctor Who was broadcast, our sunny afternoon in the garden (watching the swallows) was shaken by some astonishingly loud and thumping bass-heavy music pumped out by neighbours in an adjoining street. Loud enough to hear the words of the songs, but too loud to hear yourself think. I find it so hard to understand how anyone can do that (for hours - not just cranking up a favourite track) without a sense of how it may affect others. No empathy.

I suppose the natural conclusion from the collision of these two thought paths is: does lots of television, generally considered to inhibit imaginative processes, also inhibit the crucial, fundamental, early development of empathy?

Well, at least those younger kids I see at school are clearly indulging in buckets of imaginative play - looks like there’s a good chance they’re finding their own ways to learn about the world. And my Offspring? A few minutes of Spongebob Squarepants at a friend’s house still seems to be a bit much for them, but I actually do look forward to the days when we can enjoy some cracking telly together - from behind the sofa, of course…

*yes, maybe it’s been picked up off me.

 ”We need to proactively and unashamedly teach and support parenting skills which will transform the lives of their children.“

Oh, I hope so Don… And not just support, but value and cherish and nurture and celebrate. Our society as a whole doesn’t do this, our government(s) doesn’t/don’t do this. I’d love to feel that our schools were doing this  - are they?  I’d genuinely like to understand how these crucial life lessons can really fit into the curriculum. I can remember my Offspring doing babies as a topic way back in nursery, but even at that stage I was struck by how the opportunity to explore the concept of nurturing was shied away from.

A few years ago, in a newspaper review, Rebecca Abrams gave one of the clearest explanations of the value of secure attachment for children in the first two years of life. Spending most of their time with a primary carer who is genuinely devoted to them can make a fundamental difference to the way that child is wired up to respond to the rest of the world for their whole life, as Don discusses in his posting. But our society has moved away from supporting this process. New mothers are constantly asked about plans to go ‘back to work’ or how long they will be ‘off’ - a drip, drip of subtext that what they are doing with their baby is just marking time. In her seminal book “What Mothers Do: Especially When it Looks Like Nothing” (here’s another Guardian review, and I don’t even read the Guardian!) Naomi Stadlen makes the point that we have no words which actually describe or define the process of ‘mothering’ - we can only describe the tasks that a women does around the edge of caring for her baby - washing, cooking etc - so that a mother has no effective way to explain how her day has been constructively filled just by responding to her baby. And we talk of ‘full-time mother’ and ‘part-time mother’ - an abomination which treats this indescribably fundamental condition like a uniform to be shrugged on and off.

 Making a choice between going out to work and being with their kids is always tough and for many different reasons mothers may choose work and still do a fine job of parenting. But feeling valued shouldn’t have to be one of the criteria which affects their decision. I could join a Women Returning to Work Scheme, which would pay a woman to look after my child so that I could get a paid job looking after women’s children. However, if I ’stay at home’ (another abominable phrase) to nurture my own children I receive no support or recognition from the state. When I first became a mother I felt as if I was disappearing from the world. How can we expect young people anticipate respect, recognition, validation by choosing to devote even a few months of their lives to parenthood?

And we over-value independence, mistaking detachment for strength. New parents can be so afraid of being so depended upon that they must surrender some of their own independence, that they can become obsessed with splitting themselves away from their baby almost from the moment of birth. Natural human needs for detachment are quickly marked out as ‘clinginess’. Our society’s ideas of a ‘good’ baby can define the sort of behaviour that would have an adult labelled as a ‘loner’ - “We are bent on weakening bonds in the name of growth and independence, then spend our adulthoods wondering why we have trouble getting closer to other people.”

Well, the Education System cannot provide state recognition for my role, but it could, as Don describes, enable this generation to have a more positive attitude to well-attached parenting. Don using the word ‘unashamedly’ - maybe in recognition that this work might not be understood by all? I fear that it could be a tough one, because so much of the subject is likely to sit uncomfortably in the modern classroom:

• Acknowledging parenthood as as valid a role as a salaried career
• Normalising nurturing opportunities such as breastfeeding - addressing it at all ages, to both boys and girls and outside of the topic of sex education
• Recognising that dependence has its place, as well as fostering independence where appropriate
• Valuing childcare as a topic for young people: I have no idea how this is or isn’t addressed in the current curriculum, but I remember that my school had a childcare option - universally belittled by teachers as a subject fit only for dull-witted, sexually-loose girls. I would have been moritified to even step through the door of the classroom.

Being a mother to my children is the most important work I have ever done. The discipline, the self-determination, the focus, the initiative, the organisational and multi-tasking skills which I developed while in education and during my career have all been stretched and tested far more in this role than in any other environment.  I’d love to feel that this work will be more accepted and valued in generations to come.