Parenting
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Monday, September 10th, 2007Harry was invited to a birthday party last week. One where I would have to drop him off (for the first time) because I hadn’t been invited to stay. We discussed it and he said he was ready to be dropped off. We went out and bought a present. He looked forward to seeing his friends again. But when we got there he spotted a couple of slightly older boys as we were walking up the driveway and started crying and saying he wanted to go home.
I’d by lying if I said it wasn’t embarrassing. Every other child there ran in happily and was playing in the garden. I’m already a bit of a social pariah because I took him out of the local school and in my miserable state this felt like the final nail in my social life’s coffin.
We came home. Short of making him feel even more secure at home and keeping his playdates to small groups of friends, I don’t know what else I can do to help him. Or, more accurately, I don’t know if I need to do anything else to help him or whether his confidence will come when he is ready. I know mothering is not an exact science but you’d think God or someone would have given me a bit of a clue.
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Posted in Parenting
Teaching a baby to sleep by himself
Thursday, April 12th, 2007Controlled crying. Two words that strike fear into my already overly-emotional heart.
Last night my fifteen month old’s screams of abandonment and indignation filled the monitor airwaves for nearly an hour leaving me shaken and feeling rotten to the core.
For I have a secret: in order to move Ben out of my bed and into his cot at Christmas time - which was becoming pressing for fear of him falling off the bed before we could get to him when he woke - I couldn’t bring myself to do it properly. So I would lay next to him, sometimes holding his hand, sometimes not as he drifted off. If he woke during the night I simply stretched my arm through the cot bars and he would return blissfully to sleep, often caressing my arm as if there was nothing more perfect on this Earth. This worked fine for several months until recently when bedtime has become playtime and I was lying in bed for fifteen minutes one week, thirty the next waiting for him to finish whatever play he had decided to perform for me each evening.
So last night I steeled myself, put him down, kissed him softly and left the room. Then I came straight back in again, lay him down, stroked his back and left again. Then I came straight back in, lay him down, stroked his back and - well you get the picture. I repeated this for an hour until he fell asleep. He might as well have written a sign and put it at the end of his cot ‘ASLEEP UNDER PROTEST’ the way he was lying, limbs at every angle, the least angelic pose he could muster as his body gave way to sleep.
At naptime today I steeled myself for worse crying as he anticipated the misery to come. It took two minutes of half-arsed crying before he fell into his daily afternoon coma.
This evening he cried as I laid him down and then stopped - clearly too much trouble. As I left the room he started chatting. Chat, chat, chat. He’s not asleep and I’m sure there’ll be some crying in a minute but he’s up there getting himself to sleep and I’m down here doing something else.
I cannot tell you how much I was dreading doing this. His failure to thrive, his eating and his sleeping have been so difficult to deal with - as much in my head as in any practical sense - that I felt there was no way I could have another baby. Absolutely no way I could cope with anything like this again. And that felt devastating.
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Posted in Sleep, Parenting
Sleep deprivation and its fallout
Thursday, November 16th, 2006Nightimes around here are like an affair with the bad boy of the neighbourhood: they seduce you with longing but leave you feeling tricked and used. The dark hours lying awake, crushingly, stupendously tired but forced awake by a crying or hungry baby or by a toddler with nightmares or coldiness, are desperate and there have been too many of them recently.
Ben is halfway through a dairy-free, soya-free diet to see if he is allergic or intolerant to either. So far the only thing it has proved is that I don’t have enough milk to replace the calories he is no longer getting from the (little) food he was eating. We are also awaiting results for tests for malabsorptive disorders like coeliac disease. Depending on the results of those he will face either an endoscopy or a colonoscopy, x-rays and other invasive sorts of things. It is of some consolation that he has no way of knowing in advance what lies ahead.
He remains chirpy. He is cruising. He smiles and chats to strangers. But he is painfully thin, pale and still constipated (the note on the board for tomorrow reads, if Ben no sweetcorn in poop then give suppository - for I ‘track’ and compare progress of sweetcorn and blueberries through the three boys. And I certainly think that’s a skill I will be able to put on my future cv/resume). At home he is irritable, tired, unwilling or unable to eat and generally not so much fun to be around. I say unwilling to eat because it has occured to me that there may be a psychological reason for his not-eating. At first I considered that the noise level in the house might be frightening him so now the dogs are locked out, the boys are bribed to sit and eat with a moderate level of noise but it hasn’t made any difference. I tried him in the highchair, on my lap, milk before, no milk before, soft food, hard food, little bits, larger bits (the one thing he is insistent on is NO SPOON FEEDING, EVER), off my plate, from the boys. Nothing makes any difference. Then this evening, I sat on the floor with the baby, a banana and my dogs, my parents’ dogs and a neat trick of throwing small bits of banana into the dogs waiting, salivating mouths (hey, whatever it takes, right?) and the baby ate pretty much the whole banana. His previous best was two small mouthfuls. This makes me happy but worried. He CAN eat a banana! He wants to eat a banana! He could be putting on weight before my eyes! But then, he’s playing me! There’s some psychological reason for not eating, which he forgot about while distracted by four spaniels dancing in front of his face for lobbed-about bits of banana. And what worries me about that is, if there is a psychological reason for not eating, nine times out of ten it is because of something the parents are doing (I watch Supernanny, I know about these things).
This morning, having had three hours sleep, two and a half hours awake, and one more hour’s sleep (that last hour made me feel even worse on waking, I shouldn’t have bothered) I was withdrawn, feeling sick with tiredness. The baby woke beside me chatting and cooing and doing everything to elicit our regular morning cuddle. When I sat him up with a toy, stonily faced, and avoided looking at him because I felt so angry and tired he looked at me in such confusion. It was only as I saw his face eventually start to crumble that I realised what a bitch I was being, to my ten month old baby!, and I picked him up and let him nuzzle into my neck. If I can be like that deliberately, what else is he picking up from me under the surface, subconsciously? And is his not-eating a manifestation of my irritability at my chronic tiredness or a manifestation of his unhappiness if I shout at the older two (thankfully not often but it does happen)? These are the questions that plague me in those long dark hours when I should be asleep.
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Posted in Sleep, Parenting
Home educating
Thursday, November 9th, 2006On Tuesday I withdrew my son from school.
The day before, I phoned the head of another local school which we had been to see just before the half term break. I had bought the uniform in anticipation of Harry starting on Tuesday morning. The head was busy when I phoned and I was asked to call back. When I called back, the headteacher, who had been warm and welcoming on our visit, was short and sounded, well, annoyed. She effectively told me that my son’s problems were probably of his own making and that changing schools wouldn’t help him. I listened for seven minutes while she went through all the problems that would probably arise from Harry changing schools. When I replied that we had thought of those things but the situation had got bad enough that we wanted to move him she simply said, ‘well if you’re going to move him then I suppose it’s best to get on with it. Call me when you’ve made a decision (we already had). Goodbye.’ and hung up. I put the phone down and sat looking at it stupidly, wondering what the hell had happened. Had the boys’ fighting when we looked around the school (they were bored at the end when I was asking questions) put the headteacher off? I was totally confused.
Then with sickening certainty I knew that she must have phoned Harry’s current headteacher, Mrs L. Apart from the breach in confidentiality, this headteacher had listened to Mrs L’s explanation of what had been going on and then phoned me with her diatribe.
That evening, desperately disappointed and tearful over both schools lack of concern for my son’s welfare, Matthew and I decided that Harry would be home educated. It is unlikely any of our children will set foot in the state system again.
After I told Mrs L of our decision I received a letter from her in which she wrote: ‘over the course of my career I have come across children who cry, scream and hide at the thought of going to school when they would much rather be at home. But they need to learn that school is a safe place to be and that it’s actually fun to be here!’
I thought the exclamation point was a super added touch.
My son thought that school was so safe that he would come home and draw pictures likes this where the big boys are in grey. My son is the one in red on the right, lying on the grass, having been pushed over by the big boys. I would have told Mrs L about Harry’s nightmares when lions were attacking him in the playground except that I don’t expect she would have cared.
The last few weeks have been terrible; upsetting, stressful and filling me with anxiety. I have been tearful and angry on my son’s behalf. I just felt so passive in this whole situation (I like feeling in control although I am not a control freak, I just like to be able to feel in control and then I don’t need to be in control, see?) and I felt unable to protect my boy at a time when he needs protecting most and that the school was making me feel stupid, over-protective and a nuisance. Now we have made the decision to educate him at home I feel empowered. My son’s educational future is in my hands: that’s a scary prospect, but also exciting. I’m sure at times it will be tiring and I will wish he was at school like every other child from the village but I’m looking forward to seeing him learn and grow. He’s incredibly bright and needs challenging. Most likely he will challenge me. But most importantly I will be in control of his education, his wellbeing and his safety. I hope I NEVER again have to drop off at school every day an anxious, tearful, frightened child.
He may want to go back to school at some point and that will be fine by me because that will be his choice. He will have control over his own future, as he should.
The most intriguing aspect of all this has been about my feelings as a mother. For the last couple of years I have very much thought about life at home with small children as something to be endured until the time when they went to school and I got my life back. I was, for the most part, wishing the days away. Since we decided on homeschooling I have felt such a shift in the way I perceive my ‘job’ as a mother. Instead of waiting for the children to start school so I can reclaim my life I am now enjoying living in the present. This is my life, it is here, now. I am looking forward to having Harry at home to teach, to getting on with doing something positive with each day beyond the daily slavery of cooking, cleaning, changing nappies relentlessly. Not just a sense of purpose I suppose, but a subtle realisation that my children’s welfare is more important than anything and that I will happily do whatever it takes to realise that. I am lucky enough to be able not to have to work. They will be grown up and off to university before I am ready. These days are important and fun and I have learnt to appreciate that.
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Posted in Homeschooling and School, Parenting
A little less bad tempered
Monday, October 30th, 2006Tomorrow my boy returns to school. He is in equal parts excited and frightened. I’m not sure if we are doing the right thing sending him back, even though he seems to want to go. I feel we should let him try a few more days there; I will soon know if he needs to be taken out of the school.
My youngest son, now a glorious nine and a half months, has reached a whole bunch of milestones and for that I could weep. He says ‘dog’, he is about to crawl, commando style, any minute and he has pulled himself up to a standing position. His two older brothers were early walkers and Ben has supported his weight by pushing up on his legs since the day he was born. It’s like he has said, ‘stuff this whole sitting crap when I can get up and walk.’ I have found a high calorie milk that he will actually drink, even though it is dairy and aggravates his eczema to the point where he could rip the skin off his neck if I would let him. He returns to the hospital in a couple of days and to a nutritionist shortly. The doctor is seeing him weekly because he now needs high monitoring. He faces a barrage of tests but hopefully these will shed some light on why he won’t/can’t eat.
Meanwhile I’m really struggling to keep a sense of perspective about stuff. That’s the sleep-deprivation. I know I am not doing a great parenting job at the moment. I want to be a better, calmer, happier mother to my adorable children. The baby cries too much and I sometimes resent having to hold him when I have stuff to do just so he won’t cry. He has such a temper on him too and I worry that he has developed that from the noise and irritability that often abounds in our house. Likewise he will happily co-sleep but will throw a strop if I put him in the cot. If I have to get up in the night to deal with the older boys I worry that he could fall off the bed so now I face controlled crying or similar which fills me with dread, or creating a ‘family bed’ which I suppose means a mattress on the floor. My middle son is sweet at school, always smiling, shyly happy but develops a little devil personality when he rejoins his big brother. Eldest son was lovely, responsible and fun to be with when I took him and the baby to town this morning but became silliness personified when he rejoined his his little brother and partner in crime. Perhaps with the older two back at school I will have more time to teach the baby to sleep - maybe along side me every morning between 9.30 and 12.00! - and everything else will settle down.
I’m eating cereal for supper and wondering whether I have the energy to stay up and watch Spooks, the BBC’s fine series about the secret service. With Ben nursing night and day my clothes are hanging off me as my weight drops but I just don’t have the energy to cook (or more truthfully there is no time before my date with Rupert Penry-Jones, MI5 agent and licensed to kill). So cereal and secret lust it is.
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Posted in Parenting
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