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.