reap what you sow

The Engineer learned a valuable lesson recently while bathing young Snooks.

Our boy, sitting up importantly in the bath, held him with a steady gaze and announced “The seacap lurts waiting to take over on Monday.”

The father was, as you can imagine, somewhat perplexed and his confusion was met with repeated and impatient repetitions: “THE SEA CAP LURTS WAITING TO TAKE OVER ON MONDAY.”

The mystery was solved some days later when the boys were watching a film posted on YouTube which had come up during a search they had made on the subject of hovercrafts, Snookie’s then very best favourite form of transport.

Finding we could pull up YouTube on our telly had opened up our viewing to include snips of just about anything you can think of (and many things you can’t) at the push of a button, which had enabled us to show Snooks the Space Shuttle, Daleks, Peter Paul and Mary singing Marvellous Toy and many many more golden moments from our past, which have enriched his present.

So at the peak of his hovercraft frenzy we had all had the pleasure of hours of hovermania available because of other similarly obsessed little boys now old enough to upload their hover footage on line.

However amongst these clips was a short BBC news item about the last voyage of the cross channel hovercraft when, yes you guessed it, the more profitable catamaran took over, apparently on a Monday.

Snooks’ brain had absorbed the news reporter’s script “The Seacat lurks waiting to take over on Monday,” and redelivered it, slightly mangled but with exactly the same intonation, weeks later.

Well this was all rather amusing and harmless enough (with one stark caveat about not leaving You Tube to scroll even on as innocent a search as hovercrafts. Zombies. S'all I’m sayin’) but you never know when and where this total recall trick is going to happen next.

The worst to date came when he and his new best friend with whom he scoots to and from school stopped to watch the workmen building new classrooms and facilities from which the boys will one day hopefully benefit, and Snooks shouted; “’Aven’t you got any work to do, mate?” as the kind foreman came over to greet them.

I of course understood. I could instantly recognise the distinct Richard-Briers-doing-a-working-class-person accent which Snooks had heard a million times on the CD audio book of Benedict Blathwayt’s the Great Big Little Red Train. I knew where Snooks had got it from but I cannot tell you what made him say it at that moment, a moment in which it uncannily had some meaning, which I know he could never have intended. Standing there in his brand new privileged schoolboy sweater addressing the working man as if he owned the land on which he laboured.

Then in similarly apt circumstances he is wont to bellow, “Idiot! Stupid Grandpa car,” at haplessly witless drivers luckily too sealed into their Ford Orions to hear and who would never know that the rudely offensive wordage belongs not to him or even to me, but to the writers of Disney’s fabulous film, Cars and their marvellous creation, its central character Lightning McQueen.

I did eventually have to issue a YouTube warning to the Engineer after his and Snooks’ secret Saturday searches turned up a string on the American sport of drag car racing that has engulfed Snooks’ imagination in a such giant ball of gasoline-and-adrenalin-fuelled fire, which no amount of good children’s literature and healthy walks on the Common seems able to put out.

Snooks and I spent today at home together. We had planned to visit friends in Greenwich but a combination of ill health and bad weather meant a day inside seemed the best for all concerned.

My friend, who I was sad not to see, told me to sit him in front of the telly and rest. I groaned. I can’t do that. It’s not allowed.

“Listen,” she said, “my son’s first full sentence was ‘And that is the last in the present series’ and look how he turned out.” Her son is a 30-something happily married rather rich Oxbridge graduate with at least two properties in capital cities across the globe. He’s nice too.

I settled Snooks in front of repeat episodes of the wonderful Abney and Teal which I noted somewhere around 4pm had not only brightened his mood but had cheered me up considerably too.

As I put him to bed just now, I whispered to him how when I am falling asleep I sometimes think of the best thing that has happened during the day. I suggested maybe he could think about Abney and Teal floating high above the park on their bubble bouncing around near the clouds and floating through the blue, blue sky.

“Or I could think about crashing dragsters,” he whispered back at me, beaming excitedly in the dark.

icarus he ain't

I played a song for Snooks just now before we left for school and we had a little dance in the dining room.

As we walked along the road he sang the line “You’re gonna reach the sky, fly beautiful child” and then exclaimed to me “but persons (sic) can’t fly!” as if Annie Lennox were a bit delusional and needed a few things explaining to her.

It is a brilliant sunny autumn morning. His corn blonde hair is blowing about his face as he scoots along in his little navy duffle coat and his already-too-short school trousers. His cheeks are a bit rosy from the exertion and he is lost in the moment.

I want to say , “Yes you can.” I have found myself here, on the wrong side of sensible parenting, a few times recently. I just don’t want to tell him how the world really is and yet I know, without a doubt, that it is my job to do so.

When he cried into his dinner one evening in the first weeks of school that he never wanted me to go away from him again, I in turn cried down the phone to my oldest friend: “I cannot bear to take him somewhere he just does not want to go and leave him there.”

She, a school-teacher of 20 years’ experience, and Snooks’ godmother, paused for a moment to draw breath.

“I knew I was going to have this trouble with you,” she said. (Longevity and loyalty have earned the right to come out with stuff like that, just about).
“Listen to me. You are going to have to take him to do things he does not want to do over and over again in his life. That is what being a mother is. That is life and you have to show him how to do it.”

My sister, whose credentials include steering her two charges through some of the toughest terrain I have seen, echoed the sentiment.

“Isn’t it about 97 % of what we do – obligation?” she said.

Another friend, the only person I know who has brought Snooks to heel with a simple look and to whom he is quite devoted, told me the same story.

“When I told my mother I did not want to go to school, she said ‘Ok so long as you are happy,’ and so I didn’t go anymore. I was terrified by that.”

Why has it only just occurred to me that being a good mother to Snooks is going to mean showing him the limits of what he can do?

I had hoped to be the person who pointed him in the direction of his dreams, who encouraged his optimism and belief in himself.

Instead I find my script goes more like; “Yes you have to go to school every day for the next 14 years whether you like it or not; no, persons can’t fly and if you have inherited my eyesight you can rule out training as a pilot too.”

The truth is that moments after singing the line, Snooks suddenly turned tearful and said: “But I don’t want to fly.”

Snooks’ aspirations are far more grounded; his greatest wish at the moment is to be grown up enough to own a watch and drive the car.

He also declares that he now loves school. I can see his delight at having overcome the fear and stepped forward.

So I have learned two things: that I can still encourage his optimism while pointing out the realities and that happiness comes from fulfilment rather than doing just as we please.

No need to clip his wings then, but I might just teach him to navigate

all hallowed out

Call me old-fashioned (come on, I know you want to) but are the unhappy souls of the dead roaming the earth searching for peace the stuff of parties, dress-up and sweeties for the under 4s? Really?

Last year I managed to body swerve Hallowe’en, steering Snookie away from the hollow-eyed ghoul masks and chocolate coffins, lest he ask, as he surely would, “what’s that mummy?”

How do other mothers explain it all to their offspring? “Well you see the nice pointy hat you are wearing? You would have been burned alive without a fair trial if you had done that a few years ago.”

I know I know. I am taking it all a bit too seriously. Just a bit o’ fun, you say. If you have read my previous posts (true stories) you will know about my issues with Santa too. Maybe I am just a mean old killjoy.

But when you grew up where I did with Pendle on the doorstep and you have had enough crossings over in the family to warrant a tab with Charon, you tend to have a fairly healthy respect for the dead … not to mention independent women with a penchant for potions and black cats.

I just don’t like it. Explaining spirits to Snooks, good or evil, is not a task I treat lightly, and the transformation of the religious feasts of All Saints and All Souls into a national fancy dress party strikes me as, well, downright disrespectful.

We have had to touch on the subject once or twice to explain the whereabouts of his grandparents, the absence of whom his increasing socialisation has brought to his attention.

In lady, I described his first encounter with my mother - or a picture of her in my locket – an encounter which ended with me explaining that she was now in ‘heaven’, a concept Snooks seemed to grasp with little trouble.

Or so I thought until one morning, many months later, as he and I were passing the local prison, a prominent blot on our landscape as it sits along a regular route we take between our old home and our new one, I thought it was time to explain its purpose.

“Do you know what that is?” I asked him as he gazed over the wall at the vast imposing building. “It is a prison. It is where people go when they have been very naughty.”

He nodded soberly, adding with suitable gravitas, “and mummies go when they get old.”

My mind swirled around trying to find the source of this astonishing assertion. Heaven/prison. An easy rookie mistake.

“No, no darling that’s not it. That is heaven - quite a different place…” I gabbled along trying desperately to stretch the two places as far apart in his understanding as it is possible to be.

I decided bigging up heaven was the way forward, but had to take care not to oversell the place, also home to both his grandfathers, to the point where he wanted to visit.

I thought we were out of the woods until just before he started at the nursery he now attends for three hours every day, where unfortunately, due to its high pedigree, one’s personal heritage is likely to be explored and judged by both children and parents alike.

He and I were sitting at the lunch table discussing love. I was answering his question about whom I loved, and had reached “… my mummy and my daddy” when he helpfully interjected, head tilted just enough to show the appropriate degree of sombre sympathy, “… and they are in prison.”

Snooks’ language has been a source of much comment in his short life – the early age at which he spoke his first word(‘books’), his perfect polite grammar, his appropriate use of the conditional mood which has been one of his great party pieces to date and now his delightful ability to rhyme and joke with words thanks largely to Dr Seuss.

But no amount of coaching seems to be able to prevent this one superb malapropism from causing our social downfall.

Oh well, at least we won’t get invited to any Hallowe’en parties.

new era

I left off with the last post about the time we started to look for a new house, a move which has taken until now, almost two years, to fully accomplish.

Today a letter arrived which finally made legal the work we did on the house when we moved in over a year ago. The letter caused the Engineer to hurrah with relief on the phone.

My hurrah happened earlier today when I dropped Mr Snooks off at the preschool where he started four weeks ago and for the first time I did not have to cajole, con or coerce him into going through the door without me.

It has been a long hard road but I think - dare I say this? - we may have turned a corner.

For the Engineer and I it has been a hassle, a bit stressful, rather tiring, a lot of boring letters and some inconvenience when the builders were here.

But for Snooks, his world has changed overnight, twice.

First came the house move, which he appeared to take in his (two year old) stride until about the time the removal vans left.

Then began the daily and more importantly nightly discussions about the whereabouts of our old home, the neighbours whom Snooks had come to know, the Wedgewood blue walls in his old bedroom and even, god help us, the Green Man.

Not his new big boy bed, nor the lovely bright bedroom with the wide open sky view, nor the garden with space to scoot and play football…not even the novelty stable door in the kitchen were a match for our old cramped place.

By night he was visited by a new terror - the Racing Man – and by day he missed his old friend who no longer lived walking distance away. A few times he reproachfully announced that he was going back to live in his old house.

As the money flooded out, the rain poured in where two Polish builders worked flat out to replace the dingy bathroom and build a dining room with a vista of the 100ft garden for which we had bought the property.

But Snooks was not convinced. The snowman we made together in the garden terrified him peering under my Dad’s hat through the new patio doors from the darkness outside.

Even real fireplace access for Father Christmas, which ticked all my boxes for the M&S style festive family scene, was just another source of angst and had to be barricaded up with a giant Mickey Mouse for safety.

By his third birthday in March, as the bulbs a friend had bought as a house-warming present started to shoot, and his big sister had come to stay in the Racing Man’s room, Snooks started to see some potential in the place and requested his party be held there.

And by summer when the garden filled with roses, scarlet geraniums and lavender; when he was allowed to ‘lawn the lawn’ with Daddy and paint the fence with water; when he could sit at breakfast and observe the squirrels, cats, birds, frog, heron and fox who all visit our garden he announced he liked it here.

And then school started.

When he was born, I said I would stay at home with him for as long as was needed. I wanted him to spend his early years with his mother. I could see no point in buying a fabulous Ferrari and paying someone else to drive it, apart from any benefit he might accrue from the deal.

I did not attend nursery. Nor did anyone I know. My oldest brother did not start school full time until he was six – not because Lancashire in the 1960s was ahead of its time and had adopted the Scandinavian compulsory school age of seven, but because my mother said he was not ready.

When Snooks was six months old, I secured a place for him at a local private nursery as an insurance policy in case I became so unhinged by motherhood (which a friend had described to me as ‘solitary confinement with hard labour’) that I was no longer the best person to care for him. But that day never arrived.

So here we are. At three-and-a-half, he is expected by society to know his please and thank yous, to leave the table only with permission, to wipe his own nose and bum, to tidy up after himself, to play with his peers but not touch them uninvited and to eat, sleep and talk when told to.

And to leave his mum’s arms for the limited attention of three unknown adults and the company of 25 little strangers also wanting that attention, without a fight.

It could make you weep, couldn’t it? And believe me, it has.

the last post

Well friends, the arrival of my 45th birthday on Monday heralds the end of this year in the life of a 21st Century Mum.

The idea was to record the days of my son’s first year so that in future he could look up what I thought and what he did and how it all came about without having to guess, as I have had to do, at the events of these formative days and wonder what caused all the trouble.

I also knew that many of these nuggets about his earliest experiences would be lost in time and so I hoped to provide a treasure trove, which he could plunder and savour long after I am gone.

My lasting memory of my own mother’s death is the overwhelming need to read something she had written. I turned our family home upside down looking for some account of her inner life, but found nothing.

And inevitably, this account has ended up being as much about me as it is about Snooks, a diversion for which I hope he will forgive me when he comes to read it.

So with this one last chance I shall now try to capture him, once and for all, in all his 22-month-old glory.

We have just returned from having lunch together at the local café, a treat afforded by the excuse that there in nothing in the house to eat. This afternoon we make our weekly supermarket run. We need all our strength for that.

Snooks was deliriously tired as his (and my) days start at 5am with a long snookle in bed accompanied by a daily war of wills over whether he can use his free hand to do unthinkable things to my other, apparently available, breast. I will spare you details but think of a clumsy but very eager teenage boy on his first date and you are pretty much in the picture.

However notwithstanding the glazed eyes framed by alarming dark circles he managed to conduct himself with real solid gold charm throughout.

I was proud of this little boy who sat beside me on the wooden bench seat instead of in the high chair provided and said: “Nice to see you mummy,” – apropos of nothing.

His ability to spout phrases which I have never used to him, (and not always cheesy 70s game-show host ones either) continues to astound. Where does he hear these things?

Wolfing the ham from inside his sandwich (always one or the other – carb or protein. He never eats the two together. Is he on the Atkins perhaps?) he perused a book about tractors and farm machinery, announcing the colours of each piece of equipment and its position “at the back”. He also observed aloud the colour and comparative size of the wheels of each one.

He spends a lot of time these days with his head on the floor watching the motion of the wheels of the toy vehicles in his life – trucks, trains, diggers, steamrollers, tractors, cars, scooters, buggies, the vacuum cleaner…

He sees shapes in the world, picking out a rainbow in the arc of a playground climbing frame and last weekend clocking a ‘triangle of birds’ in the sky.

He loves to draw and presented me with a ‘butterfly’ he had created with a lovely series of purple and pink loops. Butterflies are his current Favourite Thing. Last month it was ladybirds.

He loves to give cuddles (please oh please make this last) and can often be found in playgroups lying spread-eagled on top of the largest teddy bear. If necessary he will make do with another small child.

He eats chicken with the gusto of a starving dog but will not touch any fruit. He has fallen in love with chocolate and occasionally stands in the kitchen stamping his size five feet demanding chocolate fingers.

He can count to five easily and with a little help can make it to ten. He reads numbers right to left but recognises all the individual numerals.

When he does eventually start nursery (at the most he will go for three half days in his preschool year to prepare him for school) he may end up, as I did, teaching rather than learning.

In a previous post I promised a second part to ‘Things You Thought You Would Never Do’.

The truth is, all of this, all of these months have been full of the unexpected. Five years ago I would have told you that I would never have children. I assumed that to be the case. Then along came the Engineer, surprising me by being the only man I could ever have married. Then a chat about babies over afternoon tea changed the course of my life in the time it took to order a scone.

But nothing has surprised me more than my enjoyment of motherhood. It’s hard, it is overwhelming, it is exhausting.
It is beyond my wildest dreams.

saved

So it wasn’t Adeste Fideles that did it in the end.

And we did have a few sprinklings of snow here over Christmas, enough to hold little Snooks up to the window and show him the falling flakes while The Snowman magically mirrored the scene on our television screen. I only wish someone had warned me about the ending. I have watched it before, many times, in those days armed with a little niece of some sort, but had somehow forgotten the whole melting thing at the end.

Anyway, it wasn’t that. And it wasn’t Christmas Day Mass where Snooks said he wanted to dance to the (rather good) rendition of Rejoice Greatly O Daughter of Zion.

And it wasn’t when Snooks lay down his sweet head on the floor of the lounge to get a better look at how the wheels of his new train ran along the new track Father Christmas had brought him.

And it wasn’t when my brother and sister both texted to let me know that they too were listening to the King’s College Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at 3pm on Christmas Eve.

And it wasn’t when we were driving back from Somerset on New Year’s Eve and a giant full moon shone down through the car window, both illuminating and entertaining Snooks for the journey.

And it wasn’t when the Engineer, wearing his swanky new shirt and Christmas undies, cooked up the best Christmas Day Dinner I have ever tasted, which was eaten by candlelight to the delicious sound of Nat King Cole, accompanied by our son’s repeated calls for “More chicken!”

Neither was it the glorious harmony of the shared silence in which Snooks and I watched the ducks, geese, swans and coots negotiate the ice floes on the pond in the freezing early morning of New Year’s Day.

Nor was it when, rigged out in full Liverpool FC tracksuit - a gift from a fellow of the northern cities - our future first division striker proudly poured the ‘tea’ using his newly acquired set, including a cup for Clairebear (and a few other unseens clearly present at his tea party).

And even when, on Twelfth Night, we religiously removed all signs of festivity to ward off the bad luck I have always been told would follow if they were allowed to remain into the Epiphany, it still had not really struck home. In fact the thought occurred to me, that day as the country went into a mini ice age:'You would have thought that Joseph could have found a room by now, almost two weeks after the baby was born. Why were the Kings still heading for the stable instead of a nice double with en suite, clean towels and a warm bed for poor old Mary?'

No the moment came at the 11th hour, when all the brightness and magic looked as if it would soon be over and our spirits were flagging a little. It came when I had resigned myself to loving Christmas only as a pagan, for the food, the winter cheer up and the sales. It came, prosaically enough, as I drained the pasta for lunch while the boys (father and son) danced to a song which had been playing in my head for weeks but which I had been unable to find on any of our cheesy and less cheesy Christmas CDs. Even the stash of cassettes I keep under the bed, some dating date back to 1984, had yielded nothing.

As it turned out, it is included in a medley of Christmas songs sung by the big names of the day, which the Engineer had dug out from his vast vinyl collection and, by coincidence, decided to play as a last tribute to the season.

As Whitney’s voice drifted into the kitchen … “He will bring us goodness and light” … it came with Biblical force and lodged somewhere between my heart and my windpipe.

Who knew that the Queen of Schmalz and the star of a spectacular fall from grace, would be the one to get me back into the fold?

Well that’s God for you.

true stories

The other night Snookie needed calming down and I was trying to think of a soothing story to tell him.

He had watched a particularly disturbing episode of In The Night Garden when Mr Pontipine’s moustache had blown off and was being buffeted around the chimneypots by the wind.

I was cooking dinner at the time but heard his voice from down the hallway and immediately noticed the distinctive sound of fear – something rare for Snookie.

Usually if he cries it is in frustration at not being allowed to do or have what he wants at that moment. This is a recurring theme, no doubt for all parents of children this age, and is the usual cause of his distress. I have been given two schools of thought on this – one is to distract him and the other is to validate his feelings. Unfortunately the two schools, as you will notice, are in complete contrast to one another so I bounce rather alarmingly between one and the other hoping that something will eventually stop him howling without causing too much damage to his psyche.

But on this occasion, the sound was different. It started quietly and hesitantly and then built up crescendoing eventually to a full scale ‘Maaaammmmmmyyyy’ as he ran down the hallway and straight into my arms.

The Engineer had been on hand when the moustache scene unfolded and had apparently provided shelter for the first frightening moments but ultimately sanctuary had been sought, and hopefully found, in the arms of mum.

Such was his distress that it took a good few minutes of hair stroking and very tight hugs before he could be persuaded into the high chair for the now overcooked dinner and even then the image of the mysterious moustache flying about the chimney pots was still clearly with him.

So this was how I came to be telling him a story in an attempt to replace the tape with a new soothing one, hopefully erasing the scary picture for good.

Sitting in the semi darkness with the still flushed little boy gazing up at me expectantly I cast around for ideas for a story which was bright and cheerful but sufficiently captivating to ride out the adrenalin rush of the Night Garden drama.

“Well, you know how we have that big tree in the lounge with all the lights and shiny balls on….

“… and you have seen all the lights in the shops and in the streets…

“… well this is called Christmas and it is the time when people get together and sing lovely songs and have some nice food and give each other presents …

“…yes and it is all to celebrate the birth of a Jesus. It is Jesus’ birthday you see, and so we all celebrate for him because he was… he was…”

I found to my amazement I could not say it. In one step I jumped straight out of my life, my schooling, my upbringing, the weekly attendance at Mass, confession, the Easter vigil, transubstantiation – the whole nine yards.

I could not tell my son, who I went to great lengths to have baptised into the Catholic faith so he would not go to Limbo if he died, that Jesus was the Son of God.

‘..a very good man,’ I finished.

By the time he had fallen asleep minutes later, I walked out of his bedroom relieved of my Christianity and consequently my responsibility to pass on all the same rituals and dogma which shaped me.

I am still not sure if this is a Good Thing or not. I will certainly continue to tell him about God and feel I can back up that story with strong evidence and good examples. But despite it being rather awkward, what with the seasonal timing and all, I just don’t think I can sell the Jesus part at this moment.

And it might not stop there.

If the desire to tell my son only true stories has managed to unhinge a lifetime of suspended belief on which my religious faith has until now rather precariously rested, let’s face it, it doesn’t bode well for Santa Claus.

Nevermind. Don’t worry about me. Give me a light sprinkling of snow on Christmas morning and a couple of verses of Adeste Fideles and I’ll be right as rain.