More misadventures in parenting.

Newsflash: Doing parenting right is actually impossible (everybody who is a parent rolls their and thinks 'tell me something I don't know', while everyone who isn't a parent thinks 'meh, bet I could do it'). Anyone that tells you anything different is lying to you. The only thing you can do, if you’re determined to do it right, is to do your best as often as you can and try your very best not to ruin them completely. I’m not falling for your social media updates that make it look as though everything is fine and dandy all the time and your kid’s a genius and you’re making perfect future adults. I call bullshit.

Raising kids is the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do, by orders of magnitude more difficult than anything else. Every day I get something wrong. Every day I mishandle something. There is so much stress I sometimes doubt I’m still completely sane. One idea to tackle our increasingly-desperate overpopulation problem is to vet prospective parents physically and psychologically to ensure their suitability. As the years have gone by I have felt more and more convinced that I would have failed such a test.

Obviously, there is the flip side to that. There’s plenty of good stuff – it’s as rewarding as it is frustrating, but sometimes it seems the rewarding part is because of them and the frustrations are all my fault. Case in point: Not long after going back to school this year, I was informed by our youngest that the school would be letting the kids dress up as their favourite Roald Dahl characters on his birthday. We discussed it on the way home and she told me that she wanted to dress up as Sophie from the BFG.

As these things go far too often with my brain, Roald Dahl’s birthday then completely fell out of my head before I could write it down or tell anyone else. The school usually let us know by letter – no letter this time appeared in the school bag. Predictably then, the day came around and we walk Emily to school in her uniform. I then start seeing other kids dressed up as Willy Wonka, Matilda, Oompa-Loompas and also a fair few Sophies. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that feels the way letting down your 8-year-old kid in this way feels. A pit opens in your stomach, through which your heart falls. It is the most wretched feeling.

Emily was pretty stoic about it all to be honest. I said maybe she could pretend to be Matilda, seeing as Matilda spent a lot of time at school in the book. She put on an old Halloween costume to see grandparents that afternoon and told them she’d dressed as the Grand High Witch. At home that afternoon she played dressing up games. All of this I found out after I’d got home, and all of which pushes home just how badly I let her down. I am the worst.

Now it’s all over, and she’s forgotten about it. We still get on, but it is still hard work and I’m still doing a lot of it wrong and some of it right every day, but I’m glad she doesn’t remember it. Since then I’ve bought a notepad that I keep in my pocket all day every day so if something like that happens again I can stop then and there and write it down. Hopefully that way I can let her down less often and not feel like that again.

Weeks without wi-fi.

I recently spent a week with family and friends in the Brecon Beacons at the 2018 Green Man festival. It’s a relatively small independently-run music festival that is a bit different to the behemoths like Reading or Glastonbury. We spent the first three days walking, playing tig in the dark and making tie-dye t-shirts. The last four days are generally spent camped out in front of a big stage listening to whomever turns up. Usually it’s people I’ve barely heard of but am usually pleasantly surprised by – Baxter Drury, Anna Calvi and War on Drugs were probably favourites this year.

The kids love it – this is the second year we’ve been and towards the end of it Katie noted that she’s looking forward to going home to the wi-fi, but she hasn’t missed it as much as she thought she would. I think to have this time away from constant access to the online world (I know other people’s fancy mobiles still allow them access, but none of that for me or Katie – at least until she’s older) is crucial. I embrace the possibilities and the promise of the Internet as much as the next person, but to be away from it all is so refreshing. Even if I do enter modern times and eventually get a posh phone I still want to make a point of disconnecting when away on holiday, because there is a positive mental, emotional and physical effect of leaving all that behind, especially at the moment with so much of it being toxic.

Multiple people shared a story on various social media platforms recently about how those making their fortunes in tech that we all consume so avidly strictly limit their own children’s access to that same tech, ensuring their childhoods are spent in the physical world. One of the most sought-after schools in Silicon Valley has a total technology ban for under 11s. I don’t know how much of that is true (after all, how far can you trust something shared over social media?), but it isn’t something that would surprise me.

Unplug. Go to a gig. Get lost up a mountain or in a forest for a day. Spend a week away. The circus of fools will still be here when you get back.

Newish occasional feature: Ending with a song relating to the post:

Animals: We Gotta Get Out of This Place. “There's a better life for me and you.”