This is my first blog, so please go easy on me. I find it’s
easy to clarify my thoughts in a mind but once I start typing to get them down
they become ^£*%&>$&)*%”! I’d like to share my family life with you,
if you can bear it. The title gives you a clue – it’s a madhouse, indeed, but
we’re no different from any other family in our day-to-day life.
I’m focusing on pre-pubescence quite a bit at the moment. It’s
a gentler forerunner of Puberty – the land of grunts and crabbiness. My older
daughter (Daughter 1) is rapidly approaching puberty. She turned 10 in December
and virtually overnight Mother Nature handed her a wallop to the back of her
head for a birthday present. She leant over head bed and said “It won’t be
long, girl, so Go Forth and be Crabby”. And since then there’s been an onslaught
of daggered stares at her little sister (Daughter 2, currently aged 8 minus
three days) as if she was a permanent eyesore and she should apologise for her
very existence, outbursts of “It’s not fair!” – I particularly like that one;
it’s usually aimed at me and reminds me of my youth – and “I hate you” (although
that’s the big gun so it’s only come out once SO FAR). I’m as yet waiting for “No,
you do it that way” and “I’m going out”, which will no doubt make an appearance
in a year or two. “You’re so embarrassing” was got out of the way several years
ago, incidentally, but that’s hardly surprising.
Daughter 1’s also started developing small crushes on public
figures. The other night we were watching “Splash” (yes, I know, I do
apologise. It won’t happen again…) and she says to me:
“Does Tom Daley have a girlfriend?”
Me: “Err, no – he’s gay, actually.”
Daughter 2: “Who with?”
Me: “Err, I’m not sure.”
Daughter 1: “Oh.”
Daughter 1 is disappointed. I don’t know what her
expectations are, but her shoulders and head go down, but only to disappear
back into a game on her iPad, from which she probably won’t appear until she’s
18, when she’ll suddenly pop her headphones off her head and say, “That’s it
now, I’m ready. I’m an adult now. Have I missed anything?”
That’s another feature of pre-pubescence that I’m noticing:
the withdrawal from family life; a sloping off, a creeping out. 98% of the time
it’s to dive into the iPad. I can’t say I blame her. The Harry Potter DVDs have
all been watched a million times now so that excitement’s worn off, and school
must be constant noise, 9 to 3pm. When you’re young you just put up with the constant
racket at school, but when I go in there from time to time I feel like clamping
my hands to my ears and shouting “Make it stop!” I don’t know how our wonderful
teachers cope. Perhaps they go off to the loos for a few minutes and stick
their heads in their iPads for sanity too.
All I can say is, technology can be blamed for a lot of
things, but it does provide a bit of a Time Out.
