How (not) to talk to your children

We were standing waiting to pay in the supermarket. My daughter, then about three years old, had been keeping up a slow whine for some time already – apparently, she desired to eat a Vienna sausage right at that very instant.

See, there are proper mothers, who wouldn’t dream of feeding their children Vienna sausages, and there are exhausted mothers, who just think, ah, what the hell – what’s a bit of compacted offal compared to five minutes’ respite? I belong to a sub-category of exhausted mother, called Exhausted Mother Still Suffering The Odd Pang Of Guilt, or EMSSTOPOG (frankly, we’re too tired to think of a better anagram, so that will just have to do). Anyway, the manifestation of this particular pang of guilt was that, although I was definitely planning to feed my daughter a Vienna sausage, I was also going to bang it in a whole-wheat roll, with freshly sliced tomato, good quality butter and a bit of cheese, thereby transforming it into a vaguely healthy meal, I thought.

‘I want it now!’ shrieked my daughter, waving the sausage in my face.
‘Wait ‘til we get home, darling,’ I said lovingly, through gritted teeth, simultaneously attempting to put the frighteners on her with a black glare that only the teller could see,
‘… and I’ll put it in a bun for you.’

My daughter escalated the volume impressively, jabbing the air with the sausage for added emphasis. ‘I don’t want it in my bum!’ she yelled. ‘I want it in my mouf!’.

Simultaneously, all over the supermarket, I could see customers reaching for their cellphones, clogging up the lines at Childline. My daughter got to eat the sausage right then and there, and I learned a valuable lesson about communicating with one’s children: if you try it in public, you’re never going to win.

Even in private, as the children get older, communication becomes an increasingly complex proposition. There was a time when we had it totally sorted: ‘But why do we have to go to bed at 8? None of our friends ever have to go to bed. In fact they never have to sleep at all; they were awake long before they were born, even. Why are you so mean?”

‘Of course, we’d love you to stay up all night,’ my husband used to respond mildly, ‘Nothing we’d like more. But unfortunately we got an email from the government saying all children have to be in bed by 8. So you won’t be able to join your mother and me for dinner and a glass of wine just yet. Maybe when you’re 21. We look forward to it.’

But the other day, while we were having the argument du jour in our house, which involves computer time, I could feel the tide turning.

‘The thing is,’ my husband was explaining patiently, ‘we understand that being told to get off the computer after half an hour, just when you’re about to bash someone over the head and steal their gold, is an inconvenience. But our hands are tied. We got an email from the computer company saying that –‘

‘When did you get this email?’ interrupted my son.
‘This morning.’

‘Oh, well that’s alright, then. Because we’ve just got another one, saying they’ve thought about it and now believe all children should play computer games for at least two hours every day.’

‘Ah, yes, I know about that,’ said my husband, without skipping a beat. ‘That wasn’t real. It was a virus. The Day of Reckoning Virus. They think it’s caused by having too many underage children online at once.’

See what I mean? Close shave. We might even have to start talking properly to our children, any day now.

My 4-yr-old daughter’s big fat divorce

My daughter, who is four, appears to be going through a very traumatic divorce. I have seen her speaking earnestly into the remote control of her brother’s dinky car, and every so often she asks if she can use the phone. There is clearly something she needs to get off her chest.

‘Who do you want to speak to?’ I ask.
‘I need to talk to the father of my children,’ she says.

It seems that the father of her children is not pulling his weight. My daughter frowns furiously as she dials the number. But she also frowns furiously as she eats her breakfast, drags the dog around (the dog is twice her size) or pages happily through her library book, so maybe that doesn’t count.

‘Children’s Father,’ she says into the phone (he’s a bit lacking in the name department), ‘Where are you? Where’s the food? You said you’d be here at three o’clock. Where are my children?’
I imagine the father of her children shuffling around nervously on the other end of the phone, trying desperately to get the blonde off his knee and to think of a good enough story. But he doesn’t stand a chance. I have been on the receiving end of That Voice too many times, so I know. It’s quite nice to see someone else in such big bog.

‘Stay right where you are,’ says my daughter firmly. ‘I’m going to come and fetch you right now.’ Then she hangs up and wanders off to do something else. This is not an isolated incident. Children’s Father is slipping up Big Time.
My husband – or should I say, the father of my children – is very concerned about the whereabouts of the father of her children.
‘But where is he?’ he asks her. ‘What does he do all day?’ I am not discounting the possibility that there may be something slightly wistful in his line of questioning.
‘He’s in a restaurant,’ she says distractedly, waving her hand vaguely in the direction of the Spur. ‘He’s always in a restaurant.’

Just so you know, my husband and I have one date a week. Just the one. We are by no means always in restaurants. And I have never phoned him to ask where he, my children or the food are … well, besides that one time after that one party, but that was really just so I could work out where I was. So I have no idea where any of this comes from, unless she is channeling one of Willie Nelson’s many wives.

My daughter has two children. One is 80, and the other is 16. They are allowed to watch Power Rangers whenever they like. They also don’t have to bath, brush their teeth or go to sleep. If their father would just pitch with the food already, it could be a great life.

Occasionally, we compare notes. ‘So,’ I say to her. ‘How’s it going with your children? Do they also wake you up all night for no apparent reason?’ ‘They did,’ she says, in The Voice. ‘Then I started taking them for a wee before they went to bed, and they stopped.’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Right.’

On the way to school last week, my daughter told me that the father of her children had tragically died during the night. Apparently a cheetah managed not only to find him but also to stomach him, which is more than the rest of us could do.

It’s hard to know what to say, but I did try to conceal my delight. After I’d dropped her off, I phoned my husband to tell him we’d had a death in the family.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘maybe widowhood will treat her more kindly than marriage did.’

But the next day Children’s Father, like the sleazebag he is, had somehow managed to slither back to life again. I’m sure my daughter is pulling the long con on us: by the time she’s old enough to bring someone really dodgy home, my husband and I will be so relieved it isn’t Children’s Father, we’ll welcome him with open arms. It may just backfire, though – I am getting very fond of my waster son-in-law.

A brief history of time

People who say being a parent is a one-way street have no idea what they’re talking about. As your children get older it becomes a more and more reciprocal relationship … all about give and take. You give them unconditional love and in return they give you sleep deprivation, lice, adult mumps, heartbreak, pink eye, that sort of thing. At least it’s not all just me, me, me.

So our children got pink eye. They went left eye, right eye, left eye, right eye, and finally settled on both eyes. They needed a lot of hugs at this time, which is something nobody discusses with you when you sign up for parenthood. In spite of this, the children got better. Then my husband got pink eye. He went left eye … and before he could even contemplate going right eye, everything else went west.

I have been watching my husband for a long time now, and one of the things I have picked up is that when he is annoyed about something he gets louder. To the casual onlooker, he would look pretty much like business as usual, but that’s because, unlike me, you haven’t been observing him in his natural habitat for years. Believe me, the volume goes up. When he can’t sleep, for example, he thrashes and churns like an angry sea pounding against jagged rocks. The pages of his book smack together like gunshots. He switches the light on with a crack like a baby bird being crushed underfoot. His brows crash together like cymbals. It’s sometimes very loud at 3am in our house.

But the pink eye was different.

‘Have you noticed,’ I asked him after a while, ‘that when men get pink eye they start to limp?’
My husband stopped mid-hobble. ‘Have you noticed,’ he said, ‘that women over 35 start to generalise?’ As you can see, we keep a very intellectual home. Scientific observations float in the air like dander.

Which is why, when our son asked who the cleverest person in the world was, my husband had the answer just like that. ‘Stephen Hawking,’ he said.

Satisfied, our son wandered off to do whatever it is that he does when we’re on holiday, which is mainly harass his 14-year-old cousin Robert, and we continued to do whatever it is that we do when we’re on holiday, which is mainly toss around scientific theories about the world in general and our immediate surroundings in particular.

But in the middle of it all, our son came back.
‘You said Stephen Hawking was the cleverest man in the world,’ he said accusingly.
‘Yes,’ said my husband indulgently. ‘He is.’
My son was unimpressed. ‘Well, Robert tells me he can’t even wipe his own butt.’
‘That’s why he’s the cleverest man in the world,’ said my husband, who is seldom stuck for an answer. ‘He gets someone else to do it for him.’

When the brief history of your son’s time on the planet is only six years long, things like the ability to wipe one’s own butt are huge milestones in terms of grappling with the universe. And anyway, it was a bit too soon to get into the theory of relativity.

But relativity is actually what it’s all about. On CNN the other day, I saw a programme about humour. The interviewer was asking a group of women whether they thought a sense of humour was an important character trait in their partners. They all agreed that it was. ‘But what does it mean?’ asked the interviewer. ‘It means he can make me laugh,’ they said.

Then he asked a group of men whether they felt the same way. ‘Oh yes,’ they said. ‘A woman with a sense of humour is definitely what we want.’
‘But what does it mean?’ the interviewer asked.
‘It means they find me funny,’ said the men.
It’s just me, me, me with those guys, isn’t it?

The God and Frida Kahlo

One hot and windy night Harry, our beautiful dog – he of the huge heart and stupendous bollocks – just keeled over and died. My heartbroken husband buried him in the back garden, and the next morning explained very gently to our children what had happened. They were utterly mesmerised.
‘Where is he now?’ our son asked at last.
‘I buried him in the back garden,’ said my husband. ‘Should we go and put some flowers on his grave?’
‘No,’ said our son. ’I think you’d better dig him up. It’s breakfast time.’
Not much understanding of death, then.

About a week later, a concerned fellow parent at nursey came up to me:
‘Your son told me his dog was dead,’ she said. ‘So I said, ‘’Is he in heaven?’’ and he looked at me as though I was completely crazy and said, ‘’No, he’s in a hole in the back garden.’’’
So not much understanding of God then, either. Oh, the guilt of being a secular parent. What the hell is one meant to do about death and deities?

My husband and I had a brief discussion (as parents, there is no other kind) about Life, Death and the Whole Damn Thing. I spoke eloquently about the Meaningful Christmas. He countered with the Freedom of the Guilt-Free Existence. I mentioned the Pomp and the Piety and Arcane Expectations of Organised Religion. He elegantly massacred the Paffy DIY At-Home Tailor-Made Yuppie Spiritual Kit. I recalled a girl in Class 1 with me, raised as an atheist, who wrote with her pen in her fist rather than between her fingers. I felt these Facts were Related. He pointed out that I was Off My Head. I constructed a careful position about Conscious Suspension of Disbelief. He sliced through it with a lethal blade made of Meaninglessness and Moral Vacuums.

All this took about three minutes, and I hope you don’t understand it, because we didn’t either. But I think in the end Religion won, although I wouldn’t bet my afterlife on it. Anyway, we decided to start mentioning God every so often to our children – you know, sort of casually bringing Him up in conversation, as one does. You can tell we’re novices, though, because my son is now under the impression that ‘The god’, as he calls him, lives in the cable station at the top of Table Mountain. Apparently He shares this prime real estate with Jesus and Frida Kahlo.

I’m not entirely sure what Frida Kahlo is doing there, but what I do know is that Mary does not live in the cable station. I imagine she and Diego Rivera have got things to do, places to go.
Anyway, according to the gospel according to my son, The God, Jesus and Frida Kahlo frequently go for a walk in the evening, and when they do, they leave the light in the cable station on for when they get back. And occasionally they have friends over for dinner – Mary and Diego? – who arrive in the cable car. All in all, they seem to have rather a social time. Sometimes, when the spirit moves him (or, in this case, when the Spirit moves Himself), The god sits happily on a rock and throws snowballs at the clouds to smite them and break them apart so that the sun can shine through. Messing about with the weather is more or less what The god’s job entails, which seems to me – and I may be way off beam here; it’s been a long time – to be a pretty good summation of the old testament, what with all those floods and fires and volcanoes and things. Look, as a world-view it may be unlikely to gob-smack the major theological philosophers of our time, but it’s a start.

The only problem with all this is that it means we can never go up the mountain again. It may be a bit too existentialist to confront a three-year-old with a drafty docking area when he’s expecting a warm and happy home, resonant with the happy laughter of an unholy trinity hell-bent on doing a spot of snowball-smiting. And anyway, at this point I’m not sure I could deal with the disappointment myself.

Why it’s your duty to shout at my children

I don’t think I am a hypochondriac, at least not on the scale of Other-People-Living-in-this-House, who really suffer. Of course, Other People have worse headaches, colds and flu, too, so it’s only logical that Other People would suffer more acutely from hypochondria. Sometimes the condition is so acute that euthanasia might be the only solution, and I am occasionally tempted to help out … but that’s another story. The thing is, hypochondriac or not, my voice has been getting progressively more hoarse over the last few years, so naturally, as one does, I assumed I had throat cancer. I went to see a specialist and explained my diagnosis.

‘Please tell me that’s not why you’re here,’ he said tiredly. I assured him it was.
‘You realise you have more chance of being struck by lightning while waiting in line to pay for your winning lottery ticket,’ he said, which may have been overstating the case just a touch. Then he threaded a little camera thingy up my nose and down my throat, which was part diagnostic procedure and part nyah nyah nyah-nyah-nyah.

Apparently I have Singer’s Nodules, which are like small calluses on the vocal chords. They never go away. Rod Stewart and Bonnie Raitt cultivate them, but then they make money out of sounding like strangled cats. I just sound like a strangled cat.

‘Do you do a lot of shouting?’ he asked. ‘Are you a singer, or an actor or something?’
I told him I was the mother of two small children.‘Ah,’ he said.

My husband and I were having breakfast with these very children in a chic little café recently – never a very good idea, and a particularly bad one when the café is in a shopping mall. Like sharks, children are more dangerous when trapped, and I find running away from them is always more difficult when there are walls in the way. Worse than that, I am discovering that the older they get, the harder it is to pretend I have never met them before when they misbehave. They know my name, and they’re not afraid to use it.

Anyway, there we were, doing what all other parents do – trying to complete a sentence – while our children played Shock and Awe behind some billboards. We used to call it Hide and Seek, but that doesn’t really indicate the potential for massive destruction of other people’s property and senseless loss of human life that their particular version offers. Every so often, we’d say things like ‘Not so fast!’ or ‘Gently!’ in that irritatingly useless way that parents do when they’re trying simultaneously to have children and a life, which had absolutely no effect. But when the security guard – a man in uniform – came up and asked them nicely to stop playing with the billboards, not only did they stop at once, they also cowered under their chairs for ten minutes or so. It was fantastic.

My husband was inspired.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘Let’s hire someone in uniform to shout at the children every so often. How about a stripper-gram? We’ll pay her to keep her nurse’s uniform on and yell at them a bit.’
I think it’s a great idea – and how bad could it be as a job? Except maybe for the part about having to wear a nurse’s uniform, but my husband seemed particularly keen on that detail.

My theory is, people don’t shout at other people’s children enough. Firstly, if we’re the only ones telling our children off, they’re going to grow up thinking all other grownups are great and it’s just us who are boring old farts. So by not shouting at our children, you’re making us look bad, and frankly, I think that’s shabby. Secondly, there’s safety in numbers, and those of us tall enough to lean on bar counters should stick together. United we stand, divided we are at the mercy of the midget monsters. And thirdly, if someone else had done just some of my shouting for me, I wouldn’t be sitting here now with Singer’s Nodules. Go to your rooms. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.

Swearing for children

So …. the swearing thing. It’s bound to come up at some point, isn’t it? For the first couple of years, our children thought our dog’s name was ‘Bugger Off’.

I am very fond of bad language, so I probably cling to it more than my husband does. Some of our friends have given up swearing for their children, but frankly, I think we’ve given up quite enough for ours already, and I was damned if we were going to let that go, too. First the drug trafficking, then the swearing … who knows where it could all end?

Fortunately, my husband and I agree that while children in general – and ours in particular, of course – have their good points, what they don’t have is the same rights as adults do. While we are very aware of their constitutional status (I recently overheard my husband saying calmly to my yelling, stamping son, ‘ Of course, it’s your constitutional right to have a tantrum, and I’d like you to know I fully support you in that endeavour. But you are still going to wear your hat’), like Bill Cosby’s mother, we also believe that we brought them into this world and we can take them out. In other words, for the time being, we’ve got the power, a-huh a-huh.

So we decided to sit them down and explain to them that there were words grown-ups could use but which they couldn’t. Our children accepted this point of view without question, but they did feel that they needed to have those words listed for them in order to avoid any future confusion. We sat there very seriously and swore at them for about five minutes in level tones, gently reminding each other when we thought we’d left something out (‘Dear, I’m not sure that you mentioned *&*%^’).

Our children were politely attentive, and they have remembered every word – and I mean every single word – of that conversation. They never swear. Instead, every so often they get a faraway look in their eyes as they envisage their rosy future, and say very clearly to whoever happens to be around (usually a colleague or an elderly relative), ‘My mommy says when I’m big, I can say ‘’Fuck’’.’

I don’t believe this is nearly as disingenuous as they make it seem. And as a conversational opening gambit, it’s not very successful either, because there are a limited number of responses one can make. What do you say – ‘How nice’? ‘I bet you’re looking forward to that’? ‘I’m sure your mummy and daddy will be very proud’? But as a toe-curling parental slap on the wrist, it’s extremely effective. Children are ruthless in meting out guilt to their parents, which is something worth bearing in mind on the few occasions when you have the upper hand. Take no prisoners, I say.

The following was not one of those occasions. For some reason, the other day I found myself watching an episode of Thomas the Tank Engine with my daughter. I would rather poke myself in the eye with a wet fish than do this voluntarily, so I’m not exactly sure what I was doing there. Is it just me, or does everyone find Thomas a loathsome little prat? Anyway, there I was, minding my own business, thinking quietly to myself what a self-righteous, boring toad of a train he is and wondering what it is that children see in him when my daughter turned to me and remarked conversationally, ‘Fucking troll’. I was just about to say, ‘Isn’t he, though?’ when I remembered I was having a conversation with a two-year-old.

‘I beg your pardon!’ I said, ‘What did you just say?’

My daughter eyed me with mild interest. ‘I said, ‘’Fat Controller’’,’ she said, pointing at the screen. And there he was, the Fat Controller – one of Thomas the Tank Engine’s many odious friends.

‘Oh,’ I said.

I swear she was smirking when she turned back to the screen.

Baby, baby, it’s a wild world

Just because we live deep in Cape Town’s city bowl doesn’t mean our children are going to grow up to be sophisticated townies with no idea of how to behave in the boondocks. Not with a father who drinks brandy and coke, is the proud owner of a Venter trailer and who supports the Ray Crebbs Checked Shirt aesthetic, in any case. (If you don’t know who Ray Crebbs was, then I think you may be reading the wrong column, but he was the only honest man in Dallas, which is why he was so badly dressed).

Our children are already beginning to identify the wild life that surrounds them in their everyday lives. They have only to hear the distant wail of a car or house alarm to identify it instantly: ‘llama,’ they say, with all the knowing insouciance of Peruvian mountain children. They can even distinguish between species of llama – the other day the fog came in, and the foghorn at Sea Point started its mournful wail. My daughter cocked an expert ear. ‘ Sea llama,’ she said confidently.
Despite all this evidence of environmental expertise, my husband still worries that our children are going to turn into cappuccino-swilling yuppies any day now, which means they may force him to sell the Venter. To postpone this apocalyptic event, every holiday we can we head off for a place that stinging, biting, slithering things like to call home.

Holidays with one’s children are like peace on earth – a nice concept, but somehow you know it’s just never going to work – and holidays with one’s children where the Wild Things Are can be absolutely terrifying.

Last holiday was a case in point: one morning, we were all wandering along the beach minding our own business when a boy came running up to us, holding a long, pissed-off-looking snake by the tail.
‘I caught a water snake!’ he was shouting. ‘Look at my water snake!’
‘That’s not a water snake,’ said my husband, who knows about these things (see: Venter). ‘It’s a boomslang [one of the most poisonous snakes on earth, albeit back-fanged]. Put it down.’
‘Someone help me put it in the box!’ the boy shrieked, completely uninterested in this little snippet. I have noticed that all boys go through a deaf period when they are about five years old. Some get over it, some don’t.

Our children clustered around the boomslang, waiting for it to sing. They know snakes sing, because they have seen The Jungle Book 16540030002200021 times. The boomslang lifted its head and licked its lips promisingly, just as though it was about to swing into the special requests section of the programme. I couldn’t move. My husband leapt forward to stand between it and the children, who started to wail because he had the best seat in the house.

Now that the boy and the snake were eye to eye, he started to reconsider the wisdom of his position. He let the snake drop to the ground, where it mustered as much dignity as it could before putting its hands in its pockets and sauntering off into the trees. See, now that’s unlikely to happen in the city bowl.

On the way home after the holiday, the children were fighting about who was allowed to look out of which window and for how long – you know, as one does. Suddenly there was a burst of colour in the sky: about 10 paragliders hanging in the air.
‘Look!’ said my daughter. ‘What are they?’
My son took a long, informed look. It was out of her window, so he dragged it out a little.
‘They’re Parrot Gliders,’ he said finally.

Parrot Gliders and Llamas? I think that’s a pretty exotic way to grow up, frankly.

The playground – and beyond!

Before I even get into this, I would just like you all to know that we have a very happy home where very little untoward goes on. OK, so occasionally my husband might haul the vacuum cleaner out into the back garden and hoover those little yellow and black bugs off the lemon tree, which some people might find slightly odd. But he maintains that not only is it the only thing that works, but it will also give our son something to complain about when he gets to art school (‘you think your father was anal? My father was so bad that he hoovered the back garden…’ etc).

The point of all this was to show you that despite the fact that my son refuses to come home with me when I fetch him from nursery, he is not having an unusually bad time at home. But I think maybe I should just shut up while I’m ahead.

Actually, ‘refuses to come with me’ is too mild a description of what he does. He runs away screaming and hides while his friends try to hold me back, pulling at my skirt. I smile down at them fondly, in case their mothers are near. ‘Bugger off,’ I hiss, without moving my lips. It isn’t easy, I can tell you. Or he tries to attach himself to some other family in the hope that they’ll just take him home without really noticing. While I have always encouraged my son to believe that anything is possible, I do suspect that his new family might eventually notice the triumphant cries of ‘Feety ambient!’ emanating from the back seat – which is what he believes Buzz Lightyear’s rallying cry to be. I know you thought it was ‘Infinity – and beyond!’ but you should listen up.
What I would really like to do in this situation is bury my son in the sand pit and hope that the tide comes in, but the other parents might consider it bad form. The truth is, there are very few options available if I don’t want to prove to everybody that I am in fact the monstrous parent he makes me out to be. It’s so humiliating to be snookered by a three-year-old. I have tried picking him up forcefully and dragging him off across the very public playground, smiling gamely while he kicks me in the shins. It didn’t work. I have also tried smiling gamely while I kick him in the shins, but that didn’t work either, and the crowd was definitely on his side. I don’t know about spectators these days …. nobody seems to side with the underdog anymore.

I have some very kind friends (I don’t know how they slipped through) who tell me that the way to handle tantrums is to hold your child close while reassuring him that you love him in a low and gentle voice. Firstly, he couldn’t possibly hear me over his own bellowing, which could rouse the child protection unit in Beijing. Secondly, you can’t get near enough to hold him close. It would be like trying to snuggle up to a windmill in a gale force wind – misguided and futile, not to mention life-threatening. Perhaps their children will grow up to be better people because their parents managed to be so kind while allowing themselves to be beaten up, but you know, I’m just not that nice.

I while ago I read that a couple tried to sue the county council for not warning them in advance that the child they had adopted was ‘uncontrollable and vicious’. Apparently they won a bit of money, but were penalised because they refused to give up on the child, and ‘their love and acceptance of him reduced their entitlement to damages.’ It would be handy to have someone else to sue, but unfortunately in our case I’d have to sue us, and I don’t think we can afford the damages I would try to elicit from us.

Now I take a book with me and read it under a tree while I wait for everyone else to leave. This reduces my son’s options to the point that he is forced to regard me as a reasonable choice. Then I hold his hand, perhaps a little more tightly than is strictly necessary, and walk to the car. I get behind the wheel and listen to really loud music on the way home, whispering ‘Featy ambient!’ triumphantly to myself all the way.

The problem of the nethers

The nursery my son attends has the same name as a local rehab clinic, so when my husband got the telephone number from the directory the other day he ended up having a mildly weird interaction.

‘I’d like to get a message to my son,’ said my husband.
‘Of course,’ said the guy at the other end. ‘What’s his name?’
My husband told him. The guy flipped through a book.
“I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but he doesn’t seem to be here anymore.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ said my husband. ‘Who fetched him?’
‘I’m not sure,’ said the guy.
‘What do you mean, you’re not sure?’ said my husband. ‘I thought you were supposed to keep track of these things. Please check again. He must be there.’
‘Do you know where he would be?’ asked the guy.
‘He’s in the toddler group,’ said my husband.
Silence.

They worked it out in the end, of course, but the potential for problems when two completely different things have the same name is obviously huge.

Which brings me to the issue of ‘the nethers’, and what to call them. Those who are sensitive to these things should probably block their ears at around this point, but it happens in the best of families. In our family, for instance, for reasons I won’t go into here but are definitely not what you may think, my son refers to his nethers as a ‘kinkie’, while my daughter finds herself in happy possession of a ‘kookie’. This is something they confirm unpredictably, like at a large family gathering, where they will say loudly, ‘Grandpa has a kinkie. And Lynn has a kookie.’
‘Quite right,’ you say. ‘Have some more chocolate cake.’
‘….and I’ve got a kookie and Sarah’s got a kookie and Andrew’s got a kinkie, and you’ve got a kookie, and –‘
‘Absolutely,’ you say. ‘Should I feed you this delicious mouthful of chocolate cake?’ And then you ram it in.

The other day we were asked to attend my son’s drama day at school. As the children are only three years old, the real drama lies in getting them to do anything at all, but the teacher had a very novel approach:
‘OK,’ she said, grabbing an assortment of children, ‘you be an egg, and you be another egg, and you be some flour, and you be some sugar, and you be some baking powder, and we’re going to mix you all together. Now,’ she said to my son, ‘I’m going to give you some smarties for your eyes and some raisins for your mouth – and what are you?’ My son shook his head coyly. ‘You’re a COOKIE!’ said the drama teacher brightly.

My son turned horrified eyes on me and fled the stage immediately. I think that incident alone is probably worth at least a couple of years in therapy, and when he discovers the real meaning of the word ‘kinky’, he’ll probably need a couple more.

I think it was Woody Allen who said something along the lines of a parent’s only real duty to their offspring being making enough money to keep them in therapy for as long as they need to be. In which case we (and he) have probably got our work cut out for us.

But my husband and I are ahead of the game. Every time our children have so much as a glimmer of a smile, we take a picture of them. This is a cunning plan so that the day they start complaining about having had an unhappy childhood, we will have piles of evidence to the contrary. Our lawyer has the negatives in a safe. One step ahead, that’s us.

Pithed off with presents

It was three days after our son’s third birthday that he came strolling into our bedroom with a goldfish in his hand, saying, ‘It’s not swimming’. What might have slowed it down a little was the fact that it was no longer living, either. Shortly afterwards, its little fishy friend also turned up its fins. Perhaps goldfish mate for life, and it had died of grief. Perhaps it too had overindulged on the bacon and eggs my son had fed them for breakfast. Or perhaps goldfish are just not a great birthday present for a three-year-old.

Gifts are not something our family is particularly good at, on the whole. My daughter was given a battery-operated banjo by her grandparents for her second birthday – which means that now when she ‘walks alone’ and wanders off on her silent tantrums, she has a banjo under her arm and is accompanied by a (very flat) rendition of My Darling Clementine. It’s like living in a bad Country and Western movie. At least she liked it, which is more than I can say for the present I chose for her: I don’t know whether to be proud or disappointed that she has steadfastly ignored the iron and ironing board we gave her (I know, I know, but I thought if she wore the combat boots she inherited from her brother while she ironed it wouldn’t really stereotype her in the long run). In fact, her brother is very pleased with the iron, which he uses to squash flies. That is when he isn’t squirting his water pistol (another gift I deeply regret) into the plug socket, pretending to be ‘Buzz Lighter’. It probably is quite a good way to launch yourself into space, actually.

The first present my husband ever gave me was a bottle of Southern Comfort, one of the few alcoholic drinks I never touch. Much as I respect Janis Joplin’s taste in music and men (Jimi Hendrix, anyone?), I have never really been a great fan of her taste in self-medication (Southern Comfort and heroin). Besides, this was early on in our courtship, and I was still under the impression that love meant seriously romantic presents that would show you’d been listening. You know how one day you mention how much you loved the illustrated Wind in the Willows as a child, and he smiles lovingly, and six months later, on your birthday, he presents you with a first edition? I don’t recall ever mentioning how fond I was of Southern Comfort, but maybe I was drunk at the time.

My husband is not a great mentioner, so when he did once mutter something about wanting a jigsaw, I was delighted. I found it very endearing. I saw it as a sign that he’d like to spend the winter in front of the fire with me, children asleep in bed and dogs curled up at our feet, symbolically putting the bigger picture together. Of course what he actually had in mind was a potentially lethal weapon that could cut things into fancy-shaped bits and would make a noise loud enough to drown out the sounds of wailing children, thereby ensuring peaceful weekends in the workshop. He is no fool, that man. He was polite, if mystified, by the 1000-piece puzzle he actually got, which is more than I can say for my own reaction to The Fish Tank.

This was a bloody great saltwater fish tank containing several thousand mullet that careened madly from side to side. Unlike the goldfish, they showed absolutely no sign of quitting. After a couple of years of heaving the tank from room to room in an attempt to avoid their nasty little accusing faces, we forcibly relocated the fish to the sea (all right, my husband forcefully relocated them, but it was him who invited them in in the first place). They belted off like a grim swarm of enraged midget torpedoes.

One final thing: before all you ichthyologists out there get really pithed off, I would just like to apologise unconditionally for our deplorable record in the fish department. In recognition of the fact that we are the Stalin of the seas, I hereby promise that we will never again allow a fish into our house. Not unless it is swimming in butter and a light dusting of parsley, with a lemon – rather than a rocket – stuck up its ass.