Parenting
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Thursday, October 5th, 2006In all the times I have struggled with parenting, struggled with post-partum depression, struggled to maintain a grip on my sanity amidst one or two or three crying, bad tempered or badly behaved children I have held onto the thought that I alone am responsible for my children’s welfare and happiness and mostly I do a pretty good job. Sometimes this thought has been a burden but mostly I have been grateful to know that these are good times, times when I am able to ensure my children are happy, looked after, protected and prepared for the world ahead of them. ‘Life doesn’t get easier, it just gets different,’ mothers of teenagers would say. I took their words to heart and appreciated the moments when my children were young.
Almost every day for the past four weeks my eldest son, a brave and sweet four year old, has come home with a skinned knee or elbow, a bruise on the head, a bloodied lip - or like today, all three - as a result of being pushed over. Last week he was pushed over by a friend who was first hitting him on the face and then chased him as he ran away and pushed him over. Yesterday he was pushed over by another friend right in front of me as they filed out of school (as I went to pick him up the boy didn’t even say sorry, just made some excuse about Harry tripping over). Today he was pushed over by bigger boys in the playground.
When I picked him up from school today I asked him if he had been picking his lip (a slightly undesirable habit of his) as it was all bloody and broken and he turned at me with a worried expression and said no he hadn’t. This evening I could see it was bruised and it was only when I asked him again he told me what had happened. As he lay down to sleep he said, ‘mummy I can’t lie on this side because my head is hurting’ and when I looked he had a big bruise on his head from the fall.
Until now I have felt angry with the other children who push my boy over, wondering what the hell is wrong with them. Playground antics are one thing, but this is more than that. I’m sure my son is no angel but I could not imagine him deliberately pushing someone over. But if he did, I know he would certainly say sorry if he saw that he had hurt them. I have felt like taking their parents to task but have held my tongue thinking that this would pass. But today I just felt like crying, crying for him because he has been quietly tearful in the mornings when I leave him and now I know why, crying for me because I can’t protect him.
I had already spoken to the teacher and asked her to look out for Harry but this doesn’t seem to have had any effect. I can’t be there to protect him and at four he is too young to be able to protect himself. I expected some jockeying for position among the boys in his year. Boys are an unknown to me and my husband assured me that physical stuff is all part of the boys’ world. But even he is surprised and saddened by this.
This evening my little boy’s eyes filled with tears and he asked if he could go back to preschool where he wouldn’t get hurt anymore. I looked at his bruised, bloodied face and I felt my heart breaking.
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Posted in Homeschooling and School, Parenting
Chickenpox
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006My eldest son started school and my middle son returned to preschool just four weeks ago. For the first two weeks they attended until lunchtime which gave me a couple of hours to sprint into town, buy a few items off a very long shopping list that had been growing over the summer because there was no way I was shopping with three small children in tow unless it was a life or death situation, stop in Starbucks (only to feed the baby in rather more pleasant surroundings than the grotty cubicle in Mothercare) and then drive home praying that there would be no delays to make me look like the worst mother in the world by being late. After exhausting the shopping capabilities of both myself and the town, I then spent the last couple of weeks trying to clear the backlog of cleaning and paperwork that had threatened to take over the house.
As everything settled into a routine I began to look forward to having some time this week to do a bit of work when the baby deigned to nap, to encourage him to eat when he was awake and to see some friends that aren’t exactly what I would call super child friendly (but who might at least coo politely at my incredibly beautiful baby). I looked forward to being able to read a bit, even read a lot, and perhaps even write the odd blog post or two because anything would improve my posting rate these days.
Then my mischievous three year old, William, got chickenpox.
Now he is sitting, itchy and feverish, on the sofa demanding something, anything, to eat that won’t irritate the blisters in his mouth. He has been up hourly through the nights not wanting anything except to see that he is still able to summon me to his bedside. He has been lording it to school in the long-abandoned double stroller, causing me to have a near hernia pushing him and the baby up the steep hill walking home. And I get to go through it all again in two weeks, this time in stereo!
The UK, for reasons I can’t quite fathom, chooses not to offer a chickenpox vaccine and chickenpox is still considered a childhood rite of passage. It spreads like wildfire but we encourage it further by hastily organising pox parties to spread it (we’ve had one today). We (almost) celebrate our children getting ill, knowing that they will have lifelong immunity to the disease, grateful that they will not risk being exposed to it as adults, or worse, when pregnant when the risks are very much greater.
There are few real diseases that our children are not vaccinated against anymore. Side effects of chickenpox can be serious but are rare. With usual middle class angst I’ve been on the lookout for pneumonia and encephalitis along with the bothersome itching but William seems to be surviving it mostly unscathed, except a very large boil-like infected spot invading his leg which will require antibiotics tomorrow. My medicine board will collapse under the weight of another medicine joining the household timetable.
So a few spots disrupting my longed-for free time is pretty insignificant. But, you know, the blogging, the reading. When?
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Posted in Parenting
Failure to thrive
Wednesday, September 27th, 2006My youngest son had a rough start to life in a brightly-lit operating theatre on a gloomy night in January. Now a bouncing, smiley eight months old, he has nonetheless had a number of minor health problems which have combined to make him feel pretty miserable and irritable. A urine infection several months ago meant long-term antibiotics and tests to check that his kidneys function as they should. Eczema and food allergies have severely restricted what he can eat, be bathed in, have his clothes laundered in, even whose skin he can touch. Chronic constipation - and I’m talking really chronic - has meant that he has been on suppositories for the last two months and dosed up with lactulose ’softener’. He has not reached the ‘being able to sit unaided’ milestone. Despite a good start to weaning he now eats about two teaspoons of food a day in total.
To say I have been unhappy with his progress would be an understatement. At his seven month review with the doctor I expressed, not for the first time, how concerned I was and asked for Ben to be referred to a specialist but because he is already under the care of a urology paediatrician at the hospital he was not referred for other investigation. A ‘wait and see’ approach was considered to be the best course of action. But he continued to not eat, showing no appetite, and he continued to fail to put on weight.
After feeling like I was a neurotic first time mother for worrying about this - after all I’m a third-time mother, I’m an expert now right? - he was weighed again today and officially diagnosed as ‘failing to thrive’.
The paediatrician will be calling me tomorrow about the next steps to take to get Ben back on track. But I still feel like he is slipping through the net and I’m scared, really scared, for his long term outlook.
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Posted in Failure To Thrive, Parenting
What Supernanny would do about the child that spits
Tuesday, September 12th, 2006For the first few days both boys cried when I dropped them off at school and pre-school respectively. But it didn’t last long and I had five mornings last week to myself. Three of those I spent shopping. I took the baby and wandered around the shops feeling like a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders, stopping for coffee in Starbucks while I fed the baby and read a magazine, enjoying the admiring glances at my incredibly handsome baby as he made cooing raspberry-type noises. The children came home tired but seeming to have enjoyed their busy mornings and we had lunch and vegged our way through the afternoons with me piling them into an early bed for them to sleep (mostly) soundly until the morning.
Sadly it hasn’t lasted. Today my eldest’s teacher pulled me aside and said that she didn’t think Harry was ‘ready’ to do the full days which start next week as he seemed too tired. He’s always tired. I’ve had him tested for diabetes and since it was negative I have put his tiredness down to other factors: it’s hot, he had a couple of late nights, he’s had a busy week at school. But the truth is, his tiredness is exceptional. He would nap for a couple of hours each day (and did until quite recently) and still sleep all night. He’s four and three quarters for goodness sake! If only he’d been such a keen sleeper as a baby. Clearly he’s spoken to his baby brother about the Baby Rules because Ben has decided he won’t sleep much at all either. [We haven’t had much sleep at all for the last few nights. Ben has been awake every couple of hours, Harry has been having nightmares and waking me and then Ben who then wants feeding to get back to sleep. On Saturday night I had approximately 22 minutes sleep and that was from 12.18am to 12.38am. Ben has also decided that falling asleep in the car last week to and from all that shopping was MUCH better than having to go in a cot and has gone on cot-strike. I’m not a fan of co-sleeping but I will do it if it means I get some sleep, but how exactly its advocates imagine co-sleeping works during the day with two busy, devious small children downstairs I don’t know.]
Back to today: when Harry got home we had a relaxing afternoon with low-key activities and a bit more television than we might otherwise have. By suppertime though he was spoiling for trouble, picking on William, getting a little rougher with the baby (or trying to) than I cared for and then when I called a halt to that he decided to start spitting. When I told him to stop, he spat again. When I got down to his level and reiterated the forthcoming punishment if he didn’t stop (how Supernanny!) he spat right in my face. Twice.
The pre-school teacher tried to persuade me that he should stay another term at pre-school because he was ‘immature’. Because he’s four and to me that means he should be immature, I felt it was more important that he should start school with his friends. His school teacher’s comments today about him being tired make me wonder if he is actually playing up in class rather than exhibiting classic tiredness signs like yawning and she is attributing it to tiredness when in fact he is just being a naughty little boy. I will find out more tomorrow. I won’t be asking her if he spat in her face.
Meanwhile I have cleaned up the spit, sent him to bed without his pudding (NEVER use food as punishment! Except when it works!) after an hour-long tantrum having previously removed most of his favourite toys one by one as punishment (oh god, is psychological punishment really any ‘better’ than physical punishment? Can’t I just let my children run free and develop their own wild, creative personalities?). So I sit here gratefully with a cup of tea hoping, really hoping, that tomorrow will be better.
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Posted in Parenting
More ice for my balls
Thursday, August 31st, 2006Over the summer I have been taking both my eldest boys to speech therapy. I was dreading loading all three into a hot, sweaty car on a hot, sweaty day when all of them would probably rather be in bed, comatose with exhaustion from occupying each other for a whole morning. And also when I would probably rather be in bed, comatose with exhaustion from occupying them for a whole morning.
But much of the summer has been halted by rain and the Wednesday afternoon speech therapy has been a welcome diversion from the joy they have trying to kill each other in slow time. Last week however it was sunny and the boys wanted to go to speech therapy as much as I wanted to have them home for the summer ALL OVER AGAIN so I dragged them, flailing like Kate Bush dancing in one of her eighties videos (them not me), into the car and off to the hospital. We had twenty two minutes of moaning and shrieking, alternated like an ambulance two-tone siren for maximum effect, followed by seven minutes (and I was counting by this stage) of refusing to get out of the car, nimbly bypassed by the thought that they might see the slightly unsavoury man that had graced us with his sweaty presence the previous week (they could see he was dirty, but they also mistook his mental illness for drunkeness which would be a fair point except I’m wondering how they actually knew about drunkeness given that nobody in our house drinks at the moment, although god knows I’ve thought about drinking two bottles of red wine straight down without stopping in the hope that I might sleep, or the baby might sleep, or preferably both). So I took another two minutes to explain how some people had a problem in the head and that it made them act funny.
We made it into the waiting room. ‘Where’s the drunk then Mummy?’ Eldest Son asks too loudly. ‘I don’t know and remember, he was a poorly man, please don’t talk like that.’ ‘I’ll wait for the smell to come then I’ll know he’s here,’ he says sniffing the air for confirmation of the man’s absence. The receptionist looks at me with pity. You poor mother with too many children, what were you thinking, have you not encountered birth control? her look says. My look back probably said something like, you’ve NO idea what my day has been like so far, don’t look at me like that or I may be forced to tell my children, ‘I bet that nice lady would love to tell you all about what happens at a doctor’s office’. Or it would have if I’d had the courage to look her way.
Sam our speech therapist, a lovely, young and very patient woman came to get us. The boys adore Sam, she smiles indulgently at their silly behaviour but I feel like saying, you’ve no idea what my day has been like so far, don’t smile at them because it makes them worse, but it’s to no avail because now they’re hyped up like dogs locked the wrong side of a door from a bitch on heat and not only that, but now they have An Audience. The session starts well but soon deteriorates as the heat rises and their attention spans drop. Soon, everything she asks them to do is greeted with a silly comment or action. I take them aside repeatedly and tell them to behave. Eventually I threaten them with the Big Guns: behave or Lightning McQueen gets it. I’m reduced to using a Disney Character to discipline my children. I feel like weeping. Or drinking those two bottles of wine.
‘But we just being silly Mummy.’ No kidding.
After ten minutes even Sam realises today is a lost cause and begins to wind things up. She tells me what we need to work on before next week. We are, jointly, teaching the children to lisp in order to get rid of their speech impediment. How’s that for a solution! I don’t have a lot of faith in this but she’s the expert and without it, the way things are going, they’re going to grow up to sound like Sean Connery: ‘More ishe for my ballsh, Missh Moneypenny.‘ So I listen with one eye and watch the children with the other because with the din they are making my ears are rendered useless. The baby decides he has had enough milk and lets me know by biting me in an attempt to tear the nipple off my boob so he can consume it whole and in the process burps long and loudly enough for us all to hear. I look down and see rivulets of posset dripping down my stomach.
For a moment I sit there with my head bowed. I wonder whether I can tie all three up, bundle them like firewood, put them under my arm and get out without having to look Sam in the eye. When I look up, Second Son William is starting to pull his trousers down. ‘William, wait,’ I implore. ‘Do you need to go to the loo?’. He is looking at Sam, oblivious to my question. He pulls his underwear down. ‘Stop,’ I’m shouting now, envisaging having to drag him back through reception to the bathroom with his bottom half naked. But no, he stands there, in his full glory, pauses for a moment for effect then with both hands he scratches long and satisfyingly between his legs like a monkey.
I am mortified. I feel weak with parenting-exhaustion. I want to crawl up in a hole and die. So I do what any self-respecting mother would do and I laugh. I laugh uncontrollably. Until tears are running from my eyes and I remember how I should be doing more pelvic floor exercises.
And when I look across at Sam her eyes say it all, ‘If I ever thought about whether or not I might have children you’ve made up my mind for me.’
And just then, I might have wished I was the person I was before I had so many children too. But I was laughing too hard.
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Posted in Parenting, Too Many Children
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