Methusula mum shares exactly how old she is on TV

I am really pleased to publicise the fact that older people can adopt but did Sky really have to zoom in on absolutely every single wrinkle and chin roll?

I also would have preferred them not to have shown so much of my parents house as it doesn't really represent my lifestyle as a busy mum in London. I hope it doesn't give the impression all adopters are affluent.

http://news.sky.com/story/1162826/adoption-myths-deter-older-parents

She has been elected to school council. I wonder if David Cameron's mum felt as proud when he was elected Prime Minister. 

She woke up this morning and said she had dreamt that she was elected with her best boy friend, James. Privately I thought James stood a chance but she was heading for disappointment and spent the walk to school giving her all the reasons why it was no failure to fail....

Exhausted on saturday night after a barn dance ( yes, strange thing for me to go to even if I was in the country and not in Hackney) my six year old daughter, in the middle of some conversation or other says: 'well, you are a bit mad mummy.' 

'No, I"m not! What on earth do you mean?' I expostulate. 

'She looks at me considering, 'Well, you are lying in bed watching television at night in sunglasses that are tied together with paperclips.' 

I try to explain that they are the only ones I can find that have prescription lenses in them and  I can't afford new ones. She looks at my sadly, 'yes, but you call them your google glasses....'

Exhausted on saturday night after a barn dance ( yes, strange thing for me to go to even if I was in the country and not in Hackney) my six year old daughter, in the middle of some conversation or other says: 'well, you are a bit mad mummy.' 

'No, I"m not! What on earth do you mean?' I expostulate. 

'She looks at me considering, 'Well, you are lying in bed watching television at night in sunglasses that are tied together with paperclips.' 

I try to explain that they are the only ones I can find that have prescription lenses in them and  I can't afford new ones. She looks at my sadly, 'yes, but you call them your google glasses....'

IfIf

If baked playdoh just isn't modern enough - get a 3D printed sculpture of your child's artwork. 

crayoncreatures.com/ 

Methuselah Style Mentors

advancedstyle.blogspot.co.uk


The mentoring that every methuselah mother requires......

It's easy to lose ones style way when middle-aged spread meets harassed mummyhood.  Here's some inspiration that the future is not all elasticated waistbands, though some of the brighter birds here have some quite frighteningly lurid plumage.

'So go on then, what's your worst word?' 

She had just accused me of saying her bunches were 'cute.'  'You hate the word 'cute 'you said it was your worst word, even worse than 'nice', and I hate the bunches, they are NOT cute,' she shouted. 

Hmmm, well yes - I can't deny it - I had said that I hate the word 'cute', but that because she was using it to describe an extortionately priced plastic pony in neon pink that she wanted to put in the shopping trolley. As far as I am concerned 'cute' is a word used by Mattel and Zapft copywriters with nefarious desires to brainwash my child. 

And I had also used to the word 'cute' to sell her something. We were already ten minutes late for Breakfast Club and her hair takes twenty minutes to brush out. I'm truly embarrassed that she caught me out, as a copywriter I usually try to steal my words from better sources. 

"And what's your worst word?' I asked. Distraction is an excellent thing when trying to tease a comb through a child's dreadlocks. Her answer was quicker than an ask for ketchup: 'no' and 'but'. 

I suppose her choice is very normal but I was astounded that she even had a mental filing system that could index best and worst words, let alone spit out specific searches Google-fast. She must get really sick of hearing ' no,' to have the answer that fast. It's a bit depressing, I thought I was doing quite well at trying to be positive.  Sometimes I even try and look as if I am thinking about it rather than just saying 'no' when she suggests going to the park in the middle of the night - it's so much easier to chat about the possibility than deal with the tears. 

'And what's your best words?"
'Yes' and 'Mmm,' she says - quick as a flash. 
 'Why Mmmm?'
'It shows you're thinking about it...'
Hmmm, I thought 'Mmmm' just meant I was making Bisto.  

I really am amazed she listens so well and hears these words. But this is the girl who counted the stairs as a toddler saying ' shit, shit ,shit.....' -  because that's how I usually ran down them when I was late in the morning. 

I thought I was doing so well to have modified all swear words out of my language. Now it seems the bar has just been raised a bit higher. They f*** you up, your mum and dad, even when they don't say f*** any more, they just say 'no.' 

But then, life is full of 'no's', so maybe I'm just helping her practice ways to ignore them....

Today is Good Friday. I took O into the village to buy stamps and we happened upon a group singing hymns by the river. We joined in and were given Hot Cross buns afterwards, which almost made up for the embarrassment of singing without accompaniment in public, while people walking their dogs stared at us as if we were some crazy cult.

“I don’t get it,” said O as we walked home, eating the buns, “So God was the Dad of Mary, yes? And Mary was Jesus’s mother, yes? So how can God be the Dad of Jesus too?”

“I thought God was a She,” I said, harking back to an earlier conversation as a diversionary tactic, away from the complications of the immaculate conception. My mouth was full of Hot Cross Bun, but that's not really an excuse - there’s never a good time to answer a hard question.

I have a friend who told his toddler right from the start that Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy were just fibs made up by adults. I want to be truthful and give answers with integrity but she’s making me appreciate just how trivial my mind has become – I’ve given up even questioning the big questions.

“I don’t know, lets find out,” might become my mantra, in future.

She

We were wandering home from school today and she looked up at the sky and said:but how does God know where we all are and what we are thinking - how does she do it?

Mamihlapinatapei, and other fascinating words


I have been thinking about the language of computers and whether it would be good for X  to learn one. I have also been working hard to untangle the language of researchers at the global company TNS. These very clever people seem to have a remarkable ability to tie up single sentences in more knots than you would find in a macrame pot holder. Meanwhile X has been playing hard with language. She and her best friend (I love her, mummy) have started to speak a language all of their own. X has now started to speak it to me. I was so flattered to be included that I started speaking back to her in jibberish. Now we walk down the road jabbering nonsense to each other. I say nonsense but mainly we intuit what each other is saying.  We laugh a lot in this language and don't use it for snapping and whining.  If ever I was lost for words with her it might come in handy. 


It occurred to me that one of the reasons that X might be so interested in speaking a foreign language is that almost all her friends are bilingual and have a 'special' language which they use with their mothers. T speaks Finnish to hers (no father around) , S speaks Icelandic (father doesn't speak Icelandic), N is only just learning English over Russian (no father around), and her best friend A ( I love her, mummy) speaks Danish to her mummy. I could go on- there are so many examples. It seems such a shame that X's fascination with language at this key moment in her development (this is the time where children naturally learn language) is going to waste as I only can jabber with her in make-believe meanings. Maybe we should learn a new language together. I do try to speak a bit of French but my French is woeful.


I did learn one new foreign word today: mamihlapinatapei, which is apparently Yagan for "the wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but are both reluctant to start."  
Good, eh? We haven't made up that one yet, but then I'm not sure we've ever seen two people looking at each other in this way. Maybe they were and we mistook it for British reserve. 

 CRACKING THE CODE  FOR THE FUTURE

I arrived at work depressed having read a newspaper on the bus. X's future just seems so grey when you look at the economic future and the lack of opportunities for children as they grow. Then I arrived at work and got really excited- suddenly the future seemed full of possibilities again. 

The other day someone at work had sent around a petition (the intranet email stream at Digit is one of the best things about working here- it is so inspirational ) to get children coding in school. I signed the petition (  coding in schools petition- sign it too! ) and thought what a good idea. But last night a brilliant creative technologist, David Rosser, and designer Christine Winkless had taken the campaign further. They developed a poster to help the campaign. See their poster and read about their idea to teach children coding in schools  on the Digit blog: http://blog.digitlondon.com

It really inspired me, especially when David said:" if I was taught coding at school I would be so much better now- I didn't even start till I was 17!"

I know what he meant- all my career I wished I had understood earlier how art and writing was used commercially.  My teachers thought that everyone at our school would be teachers, doctors or work in government, they had no idea about anything creative at all. Had i known it might have changed my attitude to life and work.

I believe that discovering that you can make a perfect colourful circle or flower out of a few things you type in is something even X, aged 4, could get into- she loves using my computer. Hell, maybe I could even get into it too!  

PS: neilperkin thinks it's exciting too!

Making Meanings 

The process of adoption and the process of online dating are similar for the prospective parent in some ways.  I know because I have done both. The thing that really struck me is that both required -for me- a large amount of faith over experience.

There may be people who go onto online dating sites without feeling that love has let them down in some way, but most are striped through with desperation and disappointment like a humbug. Similarly, though there may be people who feel that it is better to adopt than have their own children, for the vast majority it is desperation at being childless that gets them into a situation where they have to fill out forms saying what they can or can't cope with by way of challenges. 

As a prospective adopter I had to overcome a shell of cynicism lacquered layer by layer over years of hopes that had fried to a cinder so that now it was almost as indestructible as the shell on a beetle that could survive a nuclear explosion. But once I started to examine possibilities of matches I was amazed at myself, the way that I started to make meanings just on a photo about why a child might be 'meant to be' for me. One baby looked a bit like the illustration on a book I'd liked as a child. I laughed at myself for dreaming up such spurious  meanings but I also couldn't help myself.

When I met my daughter it was special for being so beautifully, pure of such made up meanings. It was purely her looking at me and then turning away to look at the cat- which was far more interesting. I was glad that somehow I had managed to avoid cloying up the meeting with manufactured meanings and preconceptions, though I have no idea how this happened. I think it was because the situation leading up to me meeting her was so fraught with legal and other issues that I really didn't think it was going to happen. I was in such a spasm of cynicsm that I really didn't think I would run off with her, even though I had been allowed to meet her. My mind was frozen with amazement. The meaning I have made on this, in retrospect, is that I am glad it felt so pure of artificial meanings.

I was thinking about the need for humans to make meanings because X is still making up meanings regarding daddies and the lack of them and I don't know whether to say more might confuse further or not. Meanings are slippery little fish. The meanings she is making about daddies aren't so wide of the mark as they were. She doesn't think her daddy has been stolen by the police any more. Now she thinks he is in Africa - this is something to do with her hair and something I said about it.  But she doesn't seem too bothered. We had a three year old to stay for a sleepover last weekend, It was fun, she slept in our bed with us. We all spent a large amount of the night tripping to the loo but they both managed not to wet the bed, which was a first for X. In the morning, over breakfast, X asked her friend if she had a daddy. The little friend said she didn't. X said she didn't either. They both seemed pleased with this state of affairs. "I've got a just got a mummy too," said X. "You either have a mummy or a daddy but you don't need both." Our visitor agreed, nodding her head and adding: "my friend at nursery hasn't got a mummy or a daddy - but it doesn't matter because he's got a scooter."

The metaphor of her name may become the metaphor of her life in some way.

What's in a name?

If you are called Sky I imagine it may impact on your image of yourself.  If you were called Crystal you might have a totally different self-image. If you are called Faith would you be different than if you were called Charity? I am guessing, as there are so many visual connections, these noun names inspire more meaning than the difference between being called Anne and Jane. 

X realised that her name has a meaning today. She explained to me that she is like it- though she didn't seem sure how.

I expect that this metaphor will grow throughout her life. I can imagine boyfriends writing love letters about it, friends sending card with pictures of it, her going to places where she decides it has special meaning for her. It was nice to be there when she first understood the metaphor and to tell her once again that it was her tummy mummy who gave it to her. 

i-Prodigies

Take a look at these incredible children: 

 the TED speaker and app developer

 

 the game developer

musicprodigy

And I am thrilled that X has got to two sentences per page in her reading. She can read 'can' and 'man', and -on a good day,even 'cannot'! Given that at 18 months I was told she had a developmental delay of 6 months- a third of her age - I am, if anything, even more amazed by her progress as I am staggered by these children. And today I am going to think about all those children, teenagers and adults who struggle to do up their own shoelaces. When I was adopting I remember saying to the doctor that I didn't think I was up to looking after a child who would never be able to tie their own shoelaces. I had forgotten what tricky little blighters shoelaces are. I had it all wrong back then. I really had no idea what I could cope with or not. That's what makes the list you are given asking you to tick which disabilities you can cope with so  impossible. You have no idea what you can cope with or what a disability might entail. You just hope you rise to whatever parenting challenge you are given. And I think I would find a child who was already a TED speaker a pretty challenging child as well.........

YAAAAAMS

She had yams and scrambled egg for tea last night. J, her much-loved childminder, (and one of the happiest woman on the planet) told me proudly that she ate the lot. It was an awful, awful lot. I know because it came out in a technicolour yawn all evening and well into the night. Actually, not technicolour, very pale. Yaaaaaaaa-m she roared into the potty we had by the bed, over and over again. She was so, so good, not a spot spilt anywhere. And it just went on and on. I felt so useless, just rubbing her back and saying good girl over and over again, as if she was a dog. Finally, at about two, she fixed me with steely eyes, over the top of the potty and said: tell her not ever to give me so much again. 

But this morning, just as I (laid low with sleep deprivation and a stinking cold) was thinking of 

wantonly giving up a whole days pay and staying in bed and watching daytime tv X was ready to go again. If she couldn't go school she wanted to be back at J's, hanging around with me just wasn't cutting it So I delivered her back to J, told her not to give her so much of anything X didn't want- but plenty of water- and trudged off to work.

It wouldn't surprise me if it put her off yams for life. Last night they didn't just disagree with her- they violently argued....

The TNS Digital life site I have been  working on has just gone live!!!
https://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23tnsdl>  

TWO LITTLE STORIES


So the little girl who is too scared to speak at school tells me that she stood up and told the class all about the fairies she and her cousin made from spoons. But maybe she is making it up - not sure. As a novelist might say, it is an unreliable narrator telling the story. Apparently at least one person in the class asked a question: why did she make them? And she replied: because I wanted to. The debate may take a while to reach Paxman standards but I was impressed with her determination to stand up in front of everyone: she set of to school this morning  waving the fairies like magic wands. I remember the first time I made a presentation as a graduate trainee and how nervous I was. She isn't that shy as it appears I don't think- she just chooses her moments. 


We were watching tv after story time tonight and X piped up: "Oh look, there's the lady who picks up K from nursery." And it was - the well-known presenter who happens to be friends with K's mother. To X it's not important she's on the telly what's important is that she picks up her friend. I'm not surprised X has this attitude as she is used to seeing herself on her mothers computer all the time on You Tube. It is interesting that the availability of seeing oneself in digital glory on You Tube might be actually lessening the impact of fame on tv. I can't help hoping so- it might lessen the lure of mindless Big Brother celebrity status. 

Drawing the line -and I'm not talking arty fun. 


It was a challenging morning with X displaying to the entire congregation that I have no authority over her whatsoever. I took her out of the service twice to give her talking to but it didn't modify her behaviour and she wrestled with me at the altar. It was all rather undignified. I got so angry that I told X she wouldn't be allowed to go to a party later. This was stupid as I was pleased she had been invited. I didn't know whether to follow through with the punishment or not.  It was a mess. 


I tend to shirk taking authority but I also don't want my child to be disrespectful. I find the balance hard.  This is also confused by the fact that X is highly opinionated and disrespectful with me but is so unconfident  at school and in new situations that she rarely speaks and I am constantly told she needs more confidence. Maybe her teachers would feet differently had they seen the way X demanded my communion wafer at the altar and created a riot when I wouldn't give it to her. 

My issue was voiced the other day by her friend K's father who said, in his soft Trinidadian accent: "I want him to understand the boundaries but I don't want to stunt his spirit." However,  screaming at the altar was the boundary for me. I had to draw a line.


I spoke to my mother and sister about my behaviour- and X's. I moaned to my mother that it is harder as a single parent as she feels she has a more equal relationship with me than other children as she gets involved in choosing more with me: what tv we watch, eat, and the like. "Yes, well, lets just say we all got a bit worried when you insisted she have an opinion over which new car you bought and she was only two," said my mother in a soft yet important way that indicated this had been discussed quite a bit. But then my mother has only to whisper and all her children sit up straight, even though we are all now over fifty. 


I talked to my sister. Our conversation was naturally informed by our own upbringing: "I  totally know why you don't want to be authoritarian," she said, "but every time I've held back from taking control with my children it has come back and bitten me in the bottom later."


Hmmm, talking of biting, I had an email from the Ex this week reminding me of Big Biting Incident in which X bit the-soon-to be--Ex in church which led to him acting like a modern-day version of Mr Murdstone and our relationship unravelling as fast as the hem on a Primark dress. But-just for the record- I still feel that once a child has said sorry and clearly means it then that should be The End of the matter. 


While I'd been talking to my mother and sister  X had been having a quiet poo and a little think: "If I'm not allowed to go to the party does that mean I can have the present for myself?" she asked, eye firmly fixed on the main chance. Oh, and by the way, she now wants to be called Tinkerbell- Angelina, which doesn't strike me as a name for a shy retiring wall-flower. 


Did Tinkerbell-Angelina learn any lessons today? Not sure. All I can say is that I tried my absolute best to exert quiet authority and insist on respect and it was exhausting. It is so much easier to be yelled at or just do a bit of pointless yelling. But Tinky-Angie taught me a lesson the other day when she told me that she thought K's father was the best daddy she knew. I asked why. "Because he tells him off when he's naughty." This little fairy seems to be asking for some stronger discipline, it seems to me. Out of the fairy-horses mouth, with bells on. 























Just so I never forget
like the rest of the world she likes to sing Adele in the car. 

It's never too late to adopt.

It's never too late to adopt.

We are on the BAAF blog- check it out  here.