parents

In which I ponder…teenagers

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(I have loads of drafted unpublished posts and I found this the other day. I imagine I didn’t post it because it might have caused offence to said teenage offspring. They are both out of their teens now, and this still rings true, so here it is).

teen_whisperer

 

Unless you have teenage children, you really have no idea how stupid, emotionally unstable and embarrassing you are.

In the glory days when they are young, you are perfect. You’re the best Mum – the prettiest, the cleverest, the kindest. You can do no wrong. Children have fights in the playground over who has the best mum or dad.

Then, overnight – and without warning – you become persona non grata. It starts with the rapidly dropped hand in sight of the school gate and the cheek turned away as you lean down for your goodbye kiss, and is followed up quickly by eye-rolling and a reluctance to be seen in public with you. Then before you know it you are – apparently – a fully fledged psycho.

I’m happy to say that these stages of teenager-dom are close to being over in my household. In fact, one of my children is no longer actually a teenager, and has moved out to his own place. But I do still have one hormonally charged resident sharing my home, and although I’m fortunate that for about 98% of the time she is absolutely the light of my life, during the other 2% she comes close to driving me to the sort of psychosis she thinks I exhibit anyway.

I read somewhere once that teenagers are particularly sensitive to changes in the volume of voices. I hope I did anyway, as every time I am even slightly irritated I am accused of shouting when I’m pretty sure I am not. The problem is though that then we get into a cycle. Because originally I was mildly irritated about something like – oh I don’t know – the sink being full of washing up when I got home from work. But then I’m irritated about the fact that what we seem to be debating now is not whether it is reasonable to fill the kitchen sink with your redundant plates and mugs – often along with uneaten food – but whether or not the amount I am ‘sooooo upset’ about it is commensurate with the crime, which apparently hadn’t been anticipated*. And if I’m not careful, I can then find myself shouting things like – ‘if you want to see me soooooo upset I can do that if you like’, and I end up looking like the teenager while she sighs and does the washing up.

So the other great thing about being the parent of a teenager is not only that you can be stupid, embarrassing and emotionally labile, but you can be a complete loser as well.

This dynamic is made more difficult by being a single parent. If you’re still happily ensconced in wedded bliss with the other parent of your teenager – or maybe even if you’re still ensconced but not necessarily happily – you should have at least one other adult in the house to support you during these interactions. How I’ve longed for someone to say ‘don’t speak to your mother like that’. Also what your teenagers don’t realise is that when they say we are being unreasonable, horrible, or difficult, we are often wondering if we are or not. Am I an awful parent? Am I? There is no one to debrief with, no one to back you up, or to discuss where you might be going wrong, or could take another approach, and it makes it all that little bit harder.

I have been extremely lucky that my own teenagers have been largely lovely**. We’ve even reached a stage where sincere apologies and reparations are made after there has been an incident. But as a parent, I’ve learnt that you also have to be prepared to apologise when you’ve overstepped the mark, and that admitting that sometimes you’re not sure, or you find it hard seems to build trust and understanding. It’s ok not to be the expert, to be fallible, imperfect. And to be honest – whilst they are struggling with never being a teenager before and all that brings, we are also struggling with never having been a parent to a teenager either, so we’re going to make mistakes. When you do this, of course, it does mean that you’ve gone full circle from superhero to real actual person, but it also seems to open up the door to a new type of relationship – a more adult and authentic one. And you teach your children that it’s ok to make mistakes so long as we learn from them – the first stage of which is admitting them.

Of all the phases of parenthood, these teenage years are the ones with the highest anxiety. You must let go, you must allow them to start to assert their independence, go their own way, take some risks. Even though every fibre of your body is saying ‘stay home with me, where it’s safe!’. I have successfully traversed the nail biting experience of knowing your child is in another country alone, of first forays to nightclubs, of driving with their friends down the coast for the weekend. Every parent of a teenager will know the horror of the unanswered call, the text message with no response and of waking up in the early hours of the morning and discovering their teenager is not yet back from their night out in the city.

I’m no expert, but I’ve tended to allow a higher level of independence than many parents, often out of necessity rather than choice. As a single working parent, I couldn’t drive my children everywhere, and we live in a major city. They’ve been navigating the public transport system near and far for years, and learnt to drive right in the city centre (literally terrifying for everyone concerned). My son was at school in the UK, flying back and forth on his own. Both children have made the long trip to and from the UK alone – the first times only just in their teens. I like to think that these experiences have contributed to making them the independent, brave, adventurous young adults they are today.

However, on the rare occasion, I’ve put my foot down with regard to what I’ve felt was an unreasonable request. And when the inevitable onslaught of begging, and accusations of unfairness and being horrid etc etc has begun, I’ve asked them this. Do you think I am saying no to this because I’m a dreadful person who just wants to ruin your life (as suggested) or….could it be something else? Then I’ve made them tell me why. And of course, it’s because I love them and I want them to be safe. Even very bolshy teenagers seem to find it hard to remain quite so indignant in the face of this. And if they carry on being rude or difficult, unplug the internet and take the modem to work with you. If nothing else it will make them come out their rooms.

I would say though that it’s also my experience that teenagers often ask to do outrageous things in the hope that you will say no, in order to absolve them of the embarrassment of declining to do so, even though it would be achingly cool or would ingratiate them with someone cool if they did. I’ve been happy to be the fall guy and have everyone think I’m a bitch – to the extent that we even had a code which would tell me in a text message that I should say no, prior to the call asking me. I won’t tell you what that code was so as not to embarrass my kids, but you should think about setting one up with yours.

So if you’re currently parenting teenagers, good luck! But remember – like all those other stages, even when it feels like it’s lasting forever, it will be over before you know it. And then adulthood beckons – so enjoy them while you can.

*even though I have repeatedly, since the beginning of time, been expressing irritation at said dishes in the sink…

**well I would say that wouldn’t I? But it’s true.

 

In which I ponder…being loved and being remembered

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me and mum

It may seem harsh, but my mother is universally acknowledged as being a rather difficult person.

Until I had children of my own and had matured enough to at least try to see the world through her eyes, as far as I was concerned that was it – she was tricky and sometimes volatile and at times we clashed terribly. For my own part, I’m probably universally acknowledged as being a rather sensitive person, so I would often feel hurt or angered by her behaviour and so it went on. At times I wondered if she even liked me, let alone loved me.

Then – partially as a result of study – I started to wonder about my mum. When I had children, I realised that there was no doubt that she had felt and probably still felt the intense love for myself and my siblings as I did for my own children. And seeing how gently, how delicately she treated my babies reminded me of a mother I’d largely forgotten in the red mists of the teenage years and then the struggle to establish myself – to differentiate myself – away from my family.

Mum was anxious and I realised that often when I felt she was being controlling or difficult or unnecessarily obtuse, she was actually just trying to control her environment so that she could feel safe. The things that made her anxious were irrational, but I knew that this was the nature of anxiety. And I knew all this because I recognised it in myself – either as a result of inheritance or learning or both.

My mum had an anxious mother too. Of course her mother was anxious – she was bringing up a child in London during the dark years of the Blitz and her husband was away being a soldier with all the other husbands. So my mum’s first 6 years were spent largely without a father, scurrying to an air raid shelter every night and often during the day as well. If she was in anyway predisposed towards an anxious personality, this cannot have helped, and her position as an only child meant that – according to psychology – that all the anxiety in her family system had only one place to go. To her.

Over the years, she got older, and I got older and I started to feel that I understood her better. Either she was getting less difficult or I was getting less reactive and we clashed less. I began to realise that her little digs at the way I ran my house, was bringing up my children or cooking dinner were less criticisms than rather clumsy attempts to help me and – as a person who was not given to shows of affection – a way of showing me that she loved me.

Now my mum has Alzheimers and doesn’t know who I am.

It’s not just me – our whole family is generally a mystery. And as she’s lost her memory of the nearly 50 years I’ve been alive or the 67 years she’s been married to my dad, she continues to reveal parts of herself that I either previously ignored or overlooked.

For example, I always felt she was not close to her parents and that this had always been the case. She rarely had anything positive to say about them. But now I know that she loved them, and saw them as her support system, as we all do. I know this because she re-experiences the shock of their loss every day. I’ve realised the gentleness of the way she was with my children was not a quirk in relation to my babies but part of who she is – possibly hidden by her anxiety. She laughs easily, and makes jokes with me. She loves my dog and even let him on her bed when she stayed with me, although we were not even allowed human friends in our bedrooms when we were children. She loves cake. More than virtually any other food.

How could I have missed all this? How lucky am I to have found this out before it is too late?

And – even though when I ask her who I am, she doesn’t know, and is either surprised to discover she has a daughter or adamant that she doesn’t have children – I’ve never felt more loved by her or loved her more. If I call out ‘Mum’ – she answers. If I ask her if she loves me, she answers without thought – ‘yes’. She treats me with love, along with my children. Her voice (most of the time) carries love. Although she refers to my long suffering dad as ‘my new man’ or ‘that man’, and is confused and surprised when we tell her that that man is Colin, her husband of 67 years – when she is unsure she asks us where Colin is.

So it occurs to me – love is more than memory. When your brain can no longer articulate your relationships with, and your love for, the most important people in your life, your heart knows. Your body knows. Somewhere deep inside, somewhere beyond words, you know who you are and who you love and who loves you.

And given a choice, I’d rather feel and give love, than be remembered.

In which I ponder…decades

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pico-iyer-quote-home

Last weekend – the 1st April – marked 10 years since we left the UK for a new adventure in the sun. If it wasn’t for the fact that the children have doubled in size and gone from primary school kids to adults I’d have trouble believing it, but in other respects our previous life seems like a very distant memory.

As a family of four, although we were sad to be leaving our family and friends, we were certain we would not be returning home. We wanted to make a new life, start again, challenge ourselves – and anyone who knows me well knows that this sort of thing excites me. So even though I knew leaving everything that was familiar to me was a risk – for many reasons – I was still keen to do it. It would be easy to mistake me for one of those people who believes that if you change everything externally – your home, your job, your country – then internal things will change too. Like your relationship. However, I wasn’t stupid enough to think this might be the case, and I figured that if I ended up divorced then Australia was as good a place to do it as anywhere.

After all, everything seems better when the sun is shining, doesn’t it?

In the event, just when I thought that miraculously distance, some good weather and beautiful beaches had done it’s job, everything fell apart in spectacular fashion, and it turned out that the sun didn’t make a whole load of difference.

At first I wanted to go home. I was desperate to go home. I was lonely, and frightened and heartbroken. But the idea of returning home – packing up and making such a momentous decision on my own – was overwhelming. I’d never made a decision of that magnitude on my own. And I knew that taking the children to other side of the world, where they would rarely see their father was not in their best interests. Inexplicably, even though at times I hated his guts and would happily have stuck a fork in him, somehow I couldn’t bring myself to do that to him.

The longer we didn’t go home for, the harder it got. The children cemented their friendships and got to critical moments in their schooling. I started a career which I enjoyed and in which I was successful. Eventually, I too started making new friends and developing a life removed from and separate to my old life. We bought a dog.

But the pull to return never went away. I didn’t sell the house in the New Forest. And every time I visited I became convinced that going back would be – conversely – the way forwards. My family* want us to. And we miss them so much. My friends want us to. And we miss them so much. When I’m there I think that’s what I want too – it would be so easy to be there, in my house, with my best friends round the corner and my family not too far away. It’s confusing. It’s all so familiar.

So why haven’t I done it?

Well…this weekend I decided that we should celebrate these 10 years in Sydney. We came for a new life and we certainly got that. We came for a better life, and in many respects my life is indeed better. We came for a challenge – and we got that in bucket loads. I’m finally at a place where I feel proud of what I’ve achieved. Things didn’t turn out how I expected, but I’ve raised independent, resilient, smart, awesome young adults. I’ve established a career in a new country. I’ve made a new home and new friends. And I’m a new person – stronger, more confident, more independent**. I have become myself.

It’s been a hard lesson and a long road, but I’ve learnt how to be me…

The children and I spent our decade anniversary evening surrounded by friends in the most iconic of Sydney spots, in the shadow of the Opera House. I had so much fun and I felt blessed to have such wonderful people in my life. I realized that I am not lonely. My life is full. I have my moments – of course – but life is good.

And I think I have to recognize that the reason I haven’t gone back is because I don’t want to.

Because I’m already home.

 

 

 

 

*except my dad. And I suspect that’s because he wants to live here himself

**with better shoes and hair

In which I ponder…being liberated

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travel-solo-jpg-pagespeed-ce-xf4df4ftzw

This won’t come as much of a surprise to my married and partnered friends – but there are some very liberating aspects to being single.

The one that generally springs to mind is that I – in theory – could have sex with anyone*.

Obviously in practice this is neither as true nor as desirable as you’d think. Both George Clooney and David Beckham are sadly unavailable, for example. But also sex is not the thing that most single women miss most in the absence of a relationship. For example, I am more frequently vexed that there is no one to help with the garden and deal with the admin tasks relating to the car then I am about the absence of a willing and naked man in my bed – although if George Clooney turned up unexpectedly I probably wouldn’t get him to phone the RTA** to sort out my green slip.

All that being said though, I am, for example, in the enviable position of being able to buy whatever I want (so long as I have the money for it). Now I realize that for many people this is also true when in a relationship, but shopping for things other than food – and sometimes even for food – was often a bone of contention in my marriage, and over time I resorted to a variety of forms of subterfuge to disguise any shopping trips. I don’t think we were very unusual in this regard, and to be fair on my ex husband, I probably had more shoes than I needed. Or than anyone needed really. But who hasn’t swapped the fancy designer bag of clothes lovingly wrapped in tissue paper for a plain old carrier before they got home or said ‘what – this old thing? I’ve had it for ages!’. Or is that just me…

I can also just get a dog if I want one (a decision I regret regularly, even though I love the daft dog. Where’s a husband when you need one?!). I can move house whenever I want – and believe me, I have. I can have as many cushions as I like on my bed and no one complains. I have all of the wardrobe space to myself, and dinner no longer has to consist of meat, potatoes and two veg. If I want the light on to read, there is no one there to complain about it.

All awesome, I think you’ll agree.

But I’m learning that in fact, something which filled me with fear and dread in the early years of singledom is turning out to be one of the best rather than the worst things about being alone.

For the first few years after my ex husband and I separated, I didn’t go on any holidays, other than to visit family and friends in the UK. How could I go on holiday alone?? This is something that should be done with a family, or at the very least, a partner. Besides, I’d been on holiday alone once and it had been a disaster – years ago I’d taken myself off to Spain to ‘think’ after finding out about one of my husband’s affairs and I am here to tell you that ‘thinking’ is pretty much the worst thing you could do for yourself in this situation. I spent most of that week either crying alone or crying to my friends (at enormous expense) on my mobile phone. Crying in Spain alone is not preferable to crying at home with some friends who might distract you every now and again from your navel gazing. Crying alone in Spain means you have nothing else to do other than torture yourself about what ifs and might have beens and oh my gods…

Understandably I was not keen to repeat this experience. So I didn’t go away. I thought I would wait until I had a partner again.At the time it seemed like a good plan – after all, how hard could it be to meet someone? Soon I would be all loved up again like a normal person, and I’d have my holiday partner for life.

Five years on, I knew I was going to significantly reevaluate my plan. I still didn’t have a partner. And I still wasn’t going on holidays apart from with family or the kids. I could see that the children were not going to be wanting to go on holiday with me for much longer, so what was my plan? What if this is it – I’m on my own forever? Is my plan never to go on holiday? No weekends away? Am I never going to go to all those places I want to see – Sardinia, Corsica, Mykonos, Bora Bora, Vietnam and all the rest – because I don’t have a special someone to go with?

And I realised that if this was the plan, it sucked big time. And I also realised that the only person who would actually be preventing me from doing all these things was me.

So here I am, on one of many weekends away alone I’ve been on in the last year, and it’s fine. More than fine. It’s great. I can do what I want. Make my own plans and change them at will. Get up early or late. Eat three square meals a day or eat nothing.Spend ages staring at the same painting at a gallery or scoot through barely looking because I’ve already determined that I’m not keen on anything in it. The possibilities are endless and I feel not just liberated but finally as if I am fully in charge of my life.

And I haven’t cried once.

*although for some people that was the case actually when ‘happily’ married – and that, my friends, is why I am no longer married…

** the fact that it was only when I proof read this piece that I realised I had put NRMA here instead of RTA should give you some indication of how badly I need this help…

In which I ponder…mothering

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tired-mom2

Years ago, when I had two children under two, from time to time someone would observe my sleep deprived visage, my poor body wrecked by two difficult births and my often hysterical demeanour, and tell me that I had to enjoy it, because it would be over before I knew it, and my two beautiful babies would be gone and grown.

Frankly, if I could have, I would have happily bludgeoned some of those well-meaning people to within an inch of their lives with my double pushchair, but generally I would smile through the pain, agree and return to my life, which consisted mainly of child related activities and sobbing quietly in corners when I thought no one was looking.

I was terribly disappointed with myself. I loved my two children – of course – but at the same time I couldn’t help feeling that I had somehow ruined my perfectly good life by having them.

On reflection, I had to admit that there was really nothing in my life, prior to actually producing children, that would have suggested that I would be either good at being a mother, or indeed enjoy it. I watched some of my friends in envy as they took to it all like ducks to water, baking cakes, making jam and spending hours playing mindless games with a two year old, and appearing to be actively enjoying it all.

I, on the other hand, wanted to poke my own eyes out after 10 minutes of toddler play, and felt like a massive failure.

None of this stopped me from loving the bones of them, or from doing the things that I knew were good for them and for their development. I would have – still would – lay down my life for them. I just wanted to like it more. I had expected to like it – I had thought that even though baking and jam making and building a tower and knocking it down over and over and over and over again had never interested me before, that the act of pushing a child out my nether regions would perform some sort of hormonal miracle and I’d find all that stuff fun.

It didn’t. And I didn’t.

I felt like my life, and my self concept was disappearing – being subsumed to the needs of others. And now, looking back with the benefit of maturity and experience, I realize that essentially that is what mothering is. What seems like a sacrifice at the time is in fact a brilliant quid pro quo arrangement, where you give up your life and in return you get a lifetime of parenthood which actually knocks pre parenthood into a cocked hat and then stamps on it.

Thankfully, as they got older, I got better at it, it got more interesting and as a result it got easier. And now just at the moment when I could honestly, without a hint of irony, say that being a mother has actually been the best, the most important, the most fulfilling and the most challenging experience of my life, and that my children have brought me more joy, more laughter, and more love than I ever thought possible, I find myself the mother of two adults aged 18 and 20 who are contemplating flying the nest completely.

So, stand down your double buggies ladies and listen to me. Cherish every moment. Know that your best is good enough. Because it turns out they were right.

It is over before you know it…

 

 

 

In which I ponder…flying the nest

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Flying the Nest.jpg

 

My son’s entry into the world was not what I had planned for.

Rather than the relaxed, relatively drug free delivery I had been planning, where he would be born accompanied by music and soft lighting, he was dragged into the harsh clinical light of a hospital room surrounded by doctors and nurses, with his chord wrapped twice around his neck and his heart intermittently stopping. Just below his right eye, he still bears a scar from this very first experience of the world.*

Not long afterwards they took him away from my bedside, moved me into a single room so that other mother’s would not be upset by my crying and told us to be prepared for him to die in the next 24 hours. They took Instamatic photos of him so that we would at least have something to remember him by and told us that he had a very serious heart disorder.

When, after a thankfully relatively brief sojourn in neonatal intensive care, they allowed us to bring our son home – with the proviso that if he turned blue we would call an ambulance immediately – I slept fitfully, like a coiled spring, the slightest sound from his crib beside my bed causing me to wake up in a panic. Only I could keep him safe and keep him alive. Or so I felt.

That same boy, some 19 years later, is now about to start studying at Sydney University, news that he received at a hostel in the Czech Republic, as he is currently travelling around Europe, on his own. His heart still doesn’t work properly but seems to have been much less of a problem than was predicted. Fingers crossed.

There is a part of me that thinks – I did it! I got him through life successfully, and now he is flying the nest. Well done me. Well done him. One more to go, and then the world’s my oyster.

But the reality is that I’m terrified.

I had always assumed that this stage of my life would look quite different. I expected to be financially secure, able to fully reap the benefits of having had my children relatively young, and enjoy my late forties and fifties by combining work with the ability to see a bit of the world without the expense and responsibility of young children. I can see other friends reaching this point too. It always felt like this life development was kind of a pay off for a job well done parenting, and the quid pro quo for the sadness that parents naturally feel when the intensive part of their job is over. It would probably be a good distraction too.

In practice though, my financial situation is the least secure it’s been since I was in my early twenties. Having once thought my Ikea days were over, I now find that if I survey my home, I struggle to identify anything much that wasn’t purchased there. Like many other divorced women of a certain age, I am contemplating working until I am 70 in order to service a large mortgage on a small property in a suburb the people I used to know have never heard of, and will probably never visit. I’m not expecting there to be much in the way of spare money for exploring the world, or much time, given that I’ll be working.

And more than that – who will I spend my time with? Children flying the nest might have provided an opportunity to reconnect with your partner and then enjoy adventures together that you couldn’t afford before you had children. But now it is just going to mean an actual empty home.

I’ve thought about all this way too much lately. I think most of it is just fear because my future looks very much more uncertain than I would have expected at this point in my life. But at the same time, I’m conscious of how lucky I am to have ever been in the position where I thought my life would be different to this. I know how privileged I am to have the life I have anyway. And so whilst I feel afraid, I also feel reproachful – which is then rapidly followed by guilt for not being more grateful.

I suppose the trick is to try to stay in the present and appreciate each moment as it happens – without too much reference to what was, or might have been.

And I suppose the lesson is that – if I allow myself to look back for a moment to George’s birth – things rarely go to plan, but they can still turn out beautifully in the end.

So I’ll keep holding out for that happy ending – whatever that is.

*If you think that’s bad, you should see my scars…

In which I ponder…love, family and distance

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love-around-the-world

When we are young, we imagine we are invincible and, unless forced by circumstance, we rarely consider our mortality. In middle adulthood (I think this is where I’m at now, although some – including myself – might want to discuss whether I’m actually an adult, but I’m certainly in the middle of something), those of us who are lucky enough to have them around, kid ourselves that our parents are immortal.

I’ve not always had the greatest of relationships with my parents, in particular my mother. But the passing of time, and in particular the experience of parenthood has taught me to be more tolerant and more grateful for what I have. All parents are just doing the best they can at the time, with the tools they’ve got.

I love my own children with a passion and a depth I did not know was possible until I had them. And I can remember then having an epiphany about my parents – realising that they must feel like this about me too.

Moving to the other side of the world means that visits are infrequent, although I have been fortunate to have seen my family at least once a year during the 8 years I have been in Australia. The time passing between visits, though, means that those incremental signs of change and ageing that can go unnoticed when you see someone regularly are visited upon you starkly every time you meet.

For my dad, this has meant his hair has gotten whiter, and he’s become a little grumpier. His wit is still as sharp as ever and he is still in demand for his professional knowledge on boards and the like, and for his local activism and advocacy. Adventurous too – he just got back from Machu Picchu. We will gloss over the unfortunate incident involving alcohol related but apparently elegant (according to him anyway) pirouetting on the local station platform. Suffice to say, dad is not much different to how he’s ever been but during the time passing between two visits 18 months apart, my Mum seemed to get smaller, a bit frail and rather muddled.

However, it is one thing facing the mortality of one’s parents, which is in the natural order of things. It is quite another watching your brother and the rest of your family deal with a terminal diagnosis for his beautiful 11 year old son when you feel you are too far away.

I’ve learnt through the experience of emigrating that love, family and friendships recognise no borders, particularly in these days of technology and easy (ish!) travel. In many ways I feel as connected as I was when I was only round the corner or a few hours drive away. Social media allows us to continue to have a window into the lives of people thousands of miles away on a minute to minute basis, and Skype and texting and other applications mean that chatting is frequent. But there are some ways of expressing love that do not translate well across hemispheres. The loving touch, the hug, a much needed cuddle. Picking up a prescription and dropping it round, helping out with the shopping, turning up with an unexpected bottle of wine…how do I love thee? Let me count the ways…

I can’t help wondering if I am on the right side of the world. I love Australia and I have made a life here, but when the inevitable happens, will I feel I loved Australia so much it was worth sacrificing time with the people I love – and who love me? Will my annual visits provide enough memories to sustain me when they are gone? Am I doing enough to support my family?

I’m not sure that I know the answer to these questions but I do know that I am not the first, and will not be the last, to consider them. They are the dilemma, the pain and sorrow of immigrants all over the world. I suppose I just have to hope that I have enough time to decide.

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My nephew has been diagnosed with Battens Disease and you can read about his brave struggle here.