Nelson Mandela

Two posts in a week, must be some kind of record, but it's hard to let a man like Mandela go without acknowledging something of his magnitude.

I read The Long Walk to Freedom before I set off on my travels, with a friend, from Johannesburg to Cape Town. En route we passed Nelson Mandela's house and I was struck very much by this man. Last night when we heard the news I shed a tear and this morning driving home from school drop off, another few tears fell from the old eyes. But the saddest thing that hits me, is not that Mandela has died, because he is now free, but that my children can't grasp the cataclysmic hole this man shall inevitably leave.

I was trying to part this information to my youngest this morning
"You know Nelson Mandela died last night"
"No, who's Nilsom Mandayla?"
"He was a great man from South Africa, he was 95!"
"Sun Africa? Why was he 95?"
"He was 95 becasue he lived until he was 95 and he was in prison for 27 years!"
"Oh, what made him die?"
"He had a lung infection, he was 95 and weak and he fell asleep and didn't wake up."
"What is lung? Why do lungs kill you?"

Yes, all these things are the things to focus on, the lungs, the age and the country. My husband took a different tack.

"Nelson Madela died last night, who died?"
Eldest "I don't know"
"Nelson Mandela..."
"Yes, he was 95!"
"Yes, he was an anti- Apartheid icon"
"Yes, I got a reindeer in my calendar Mummy!"

We'll try again, this is a day that should be remembered, if you can remember. A man like that is inspirational. He shall be missed, by my husband and I certainly, even if my children have no concept of the significance of the day, they know that he was old, even though my eldest's best friend has a grandparent who's "a hundred or something like that!" 95 seems so insignificant, he shall be missed, and I wish South Africa the best of luck in the times to come. RIP Nelson Mandela 1918-2013, what a man. 

Transience

It's not often one gets to reflect on the passing of time and the brevity of moments that come and go with it. But in this run up to Christmas I find myself looking back at my childhood and comparing it to my children's. I remember waiting for Christmas and thinking how far away it was, then it came and then it was over, and then it was another interminable period of time before the next one. I know this is how my children are feeling now. They are helping themselves willy nilly to their Playmobil calendars (given to them by a friend, hands down, the best calendar I have EVER known.) it doesn't matter that they now won't have anything to open for another 3 days, it's the opening and the having that seem to be the order of the day.

I have given this at least 20 minutes thought, and I really think that this all comes from "stability". My children, so far, have grown up with two parents who only fight in the mornings on a regular basis. I grew up in a family where my parents were at war, most of the time. Divorced by the time I was two (parents, not me) and the law courts seemed to be the only place that decisions could be made. We were at two different homes, (3 if you count country pad, you're probably weeping at the hardships of my massively overpriviledged life!) we had about 3 different Christmases, 4 holidays a year and I was shipped from school to school to school until I was so used to it I kept everyone far enough away so as to enable me to flit from one social group to the next without being missed or pulled up. Mother died when I was 12, putting an end to the mother father feuds but not to the hither and thither, boarding school life affords. This disheveled, broken home upbringing, seems to have bred permanence in me I believe. I can keep anything, forever. I have lip balms dating back to the dinosaurs, when The Body Shop "was must have" as opposed to "last minute retro". I still wear clothes that I was given at Christmas when I was 17. Fashion means nothing to the stead fast! The only trouble with this though, is when I lose something, or someone asks to borrow something, I have a real fight on my hands to remind myself that it isn't the end of the world, sometimes things come back, and sometimes they don't, no one is dead or pregnant, embrace transient.

My children on the other hand, would spit a sweet out mid mastication if it weren't for the fact that it were a sweet and they are determined to have no teeth left by next week. They keep hold of NOTHING. Scalves and hats are fleeting ideas, we buy them, people present them, where the hell are they all though? My youngests Taggi's have traveled far and wide and never made it back. My brother had one shipped from Japan for her birthday (as the Taggi company has stopped producing the originals) and we've lost that a thousand times. Now, I, like Gollom, don't allow "The Precious" out of my sight because I feel the loss so deeply. Youngest is sad for about a mili second and then goes off to open another door of the calendar, rip something off the wall or attend to any of the fenced goods she keeps turning up with, to include two pens from two of her teachers, we've taken them back twice, one of them has arrived back here. Cleptomania, it turns out, is for life not, unfortunately, for Christmas.

I do have to say though, having reflected for another minute, it would appear my eldest seems to be a little better at it. She has things she hasn't even opened. necklace, ring and bracelet combos still in their packaging, crafty things in their boxes in the "craft hole" in our house. She, like me, goes a little bonkers sometimes when she loses something, and I know that it's my evilness that has stamped that into her. She sees transience as the plague. I admire her for that, to cherish and nurture is to value in my book. However, she can't make her mind up for love nor money. She knows she wants an animal that moves, but she originally asked Father Christmas for a remote control horse, we aren't getting a real one and that's final, but I said it wouldn't fit down the chimney, so she said she'd have a remote control puppy, kitten and pony, and a skipping rope that counts and lip balm and all the things my sister has on her list and..."

Perhaps these are all bad examples, and at the end of the day, who actually gives a shit? Shower them with everything and hope they're grateful someday. Don't shower them with everything and perhaps they'll still be grateful one day. Transience is life, the only thing we can actually be 100% certain of are death and taxes, and as far as I am concerned I wish neither of these things upon my children, so remote control whatever the f*** ever and a thousand Taggis and all the rest of it it is. They may not thank me, but my goodness they'll love Father Christmas, they'll have a smile on their face, and by that time I'll probably be drunk so to hell with forever and permanence, it's Christmas cheer and excess we're all about these days, isn't it?

    

Nits and Worms

I am ashamed at my lackadaisical approach to this blogging medium. This thing called life (filled with children) seems to have got the better of me and for those 27 people who logged in yesterday, an indeed anyone who's clicked in in search of some morsel of dreadful gripery, I apologise. Hopefully this is a new leaf and I shall endeavour to post if not twice a year, then at least once.

As the title of this blog would suggest, we here at Stuperior HQ have been very busy.

Nits and worms really isn't something we parents like to talk about over cocktails, which, by the way, we are ALWAYS drinking.
"Margery?"
"yes Wilhelm?"
"Your children had nits and worms of late?"
"Oh yes Wil, they're riddled with them"
"Oh good, could you pass the egg white? This Amaretto sour isn't quite totally coating the inside of my mouth!"

No, no. People like to hide the fact that their child/ren are crawling from head to foot with foreign infestations of a pest like nature. Nor for me though, I was ready, like a panther about to pounce on its prey, for any infestation to come our way. Worms we had had before, ghastly business, kept my eldest up in the night, not even The Mighty Calpol/fren could abate that. To Dr we went and worms was touted as cause of this, medicine dispensed and family was doused. So when the email came from school that my daughters class needed to dose their children up to the eyeballs to get rid of said infestation, we were ready and worms were culled, for the time being anyway.

Nits on the other hand, very different story. I longed for nits, prayed for the day that one person in my fold would scratch their head one too many times so that I could Tae Kwon Do my nit comb out and flush the little buggers out. I walked up and down the supermarket aisle reading the backs of nit comb packaging, lice formula packaging and trawled the Internet for the best way to rid one of these suckers.

The day finally came when our friends arrived with nitful children. Immediately I was gripped by panic. I tried to make my neck as long as possible so that my hair was as far away from the lived in hair as I could possibly be. My Xray vision kicked in and I was literally scanning bonces as they passed by. Once friends and children left I ran upstairs pulled my patented nit comb out of the packaging and set about my hair til my scalp bled, nothing. I threw myself down the stairs, grabbed the nearest child and frog marched my bewildered family (including the dog) up the stairs so that my nit comb might be successful. NOTHING.

It wasn't until my husband threatened to call the police if I combed anything again, that we let the guard down, and then my friends, the flood gates opened. My youngest started scratching her head like a mental, but I had heeded my husbands words, so had to rely only on my scanners again, and once we hit the bike shop on that Saturday afternoon, I was rewarded with a visual of two lice making merry in a flowing strand of my youngest's hair. I prized the bike from my eldest's hands and carried the youngest, still honking a bicycle horn that she'd removed stealthily from a display, straight to the car and made my husband drive like a thing possessed to the supermarket that contained the golden aisle.

I had practiced this manoeuvre over and over again in my head and so slid straight to aisle 4 bottom shelf and grabbed Hedrin Once Gel (best at first sign) The Nitty Gritty comb as well as a plastic "all original comb" for good measure and a Hedrin lice killer spray and back flipped to the only free do it yourself check out and stashed, clandestinely mind, all products in a well prepared bag.

Once home, the floor was mine. I stapled my youngest to a stool, sprayed her hair with the "Once" and combed all combs through her hair to my own triumphant glee every time I caught a louse or an egg or fluff even. This was a happy time for me. I then set about my own hair and found critters amongst the healing scabs. Deep joy! Sadly the other two members of the family yielded nothing, but two weeks later the eldest succumbed to lice and a week after that my best friend phoned to tell me that she had them and then one morning when my husband walked in to the bedroom to say he thought he had nits (he didn't) the two girls and I cheered with delight.

So the point is. These are rites of passage, rites that say that we have made it as a parent, we'll look back on these times fondly and long for the time we can lasoo our child to an inanimate object so we can scour their grizzly scalps with a fine toothed comb in search of something living. Treat it like the chicken pox, it's over before it's begun, and then, my friend, you can call yourself a parent, no?

Old Fashioned Misfits

I was thinking of maybe being positive for a change, but then as I went about my daily doings the title of this instalment kept flashing through my head. I was thinking along the lines of picnics and children frolicking through meadows in this majestic and well deserved sun. But all the while, as these fleeting images were conjuring up fervent images of joy and hope, all that was going through my brain was the actuality of social misfits.

I am one. Born of one aspirational mother of married "posh" decent, whose mother abandoned her children to successfully snare an actual (papers have declared it) Tycoon, and one father who by marrying my mother was moved right up into the dizzy heights of extreme wealth, notoriety of bastard proportions from the peaceful / tough realms of a bullying father and an over compensatory mother from the badlands of Isleworth and Sunbury. A marriage that was fraught with warring families and obvious social disparity that ended in acrimonious divorce. Not the best of starts in life, then the death of my mother when I was 13, apparently lead to me being labelled as a homeless 13 year old by one knowing psychologist. With all this baggage, is a wonder that I even dared have children, as we very much know that the apple never falls far from the tree, but nature tricked me and provided me with the two most precious things a life could ever call for, our daughters.

Anyhow, digression is my forte, as we know. The other day I was semi invited and duly followed, into the, as I saw it, Dragon's Den of mothers from my daughters school. I am, as I seem to have mentioned in almost every piece, a total and utter social spastic, for want of a better word. I become paralysed when meeting people, unless it's an exceptionally good day and the person I am meeting is a little bit more on a back foot than me. I become weirdly depressed and heavy of heart and what is tantamount to a fart comes out of my well educated mouth. People around me, particularly the person introducing me, get uncomfortable and it's not long before they cast me aside and wait until the time that I have become so swollen with angst that I leave. True story. This is what my children have to follow, this is the example that I have seen I set. What hope do they have of becoming confident, well rounded individuals, when there mother is an ellipse, a bad one at that, of inadequacies and baggage that cannot be shifted?

I hate the school playground at drop off, and weirdly enough, so does my daughter. I try very hard to put a brave face on it, but those farts just line up at the exit to my mouth and all I really want to do is dump and run. But I can't, my daughter won't let me, because she too has farts where words should be. I tell her, I think, as a vain attempt to get her to where I am still trying to get, that "remember, you are 10 foot tall and eat lions for breakfast." I make her repeat that mantra, probably also a little bit so that we can waste time in the hope that the bell will go and she can run into the classroom where everything is in the teacher's control.

She is amazing my eldest, and when on form she commands her little sister and her peers as efficiently and admirably as any dictator, so it's there, as it is with most of us, but at those times when it's sort of most important it eludes her, and me, and we're left farting on the corner like the apple that fell not so far from this tree.

My youngest has harnessed all of these neuroses and pulled them around her like a Rhinoceros skin and she just barges through many situations and completely switches off if something is being said or done that she doesn't like. Again, not what the handbook would tell one to do, but it's very hard to veer her out of this, because when talking to her, right after you say her name, she tuned into a better life where things happen that she is fully involved in.

My children, as I have mentioned, as I am sure yours are too, are the most precious things the world has ever provided me with, but it's my pollarded tree branches that are causing the apples to wobble, and eventually land, if not right under, then certainly within spitting distance of my arbre. With this in mind therefore, I need to get to the bottom of the baggage and check some of it in surely, but where the hell to start? Old fashioned are these misfits, we want new world confidence at all occasions, no?

People

It has not gone unnoticed by Eagle Eyes me, that there are other humans out there who also do this blog thing and keep up with it on a regular basis, they probably have a readership that would make me blush, but the people who read them are probably as vacuous and insincere as the words on the pages. I mean no harm to all other parent bloggers, but I do beg on bended knee, that if you should find it in you, you should tout me about, let's see if we can't drag a few more bastards down with us, hmm?

Anyhoo, rumour has it, that there are other parents out there who have slipped out of the almighty ring of "ahhhmaazing Children" where dusters, rather than gloves, are used every round and instead of fighting, they are just loving and caring and sharing, mmm mmm, Amen to that sister! Just be sure, that I will find you, the rose tinted glasses have been put in the same place as the favourite things that my children cannot keep hold of, so we have to improvise or replenish. Yes, they, glasses, not children, have vanished into oblivion and I, like the boy in Sixth sense sees dead people, I see real things. It is a curse, but it also helps me reconcile the fact that actually, if someone is telling me about their child's perfection, I can see that "charlie always flushes the loo when he's finished!" or whatever, actually means "Charlie flushes the loo when he's finished, because if he doesn't we beat him with a cat o'nine tails until we think he's remembered!" Or "our children are really good sleepers" is often code for, "our children sleep really well because by the time they get to bed at 3am, they've physically and mentally run out of options!" or "our children eat really well" can also mean "we starve our children so that when they sit down their eyes are on the prize!". It's not always the case, but it make me feel better to imagine that it is, so I'm running with it. Some people are probably really good at this parenting thing, but that doesn't help me, so I'm just casting that aside for bitter vitriol, it's so much more therapeutic.

The last couple of weekends or so, I have found myself in the company of lovely people who tell it like it is, who admit that their children, whom they love dearly, are satanic at most stages of the game, but there are those occasions when you feel that the balance has been redressed and you no longer pick holes in your judgement. The little mites that you see before you aren't so bad and you don't worry about your foundations as a human being, or wonder where the hell it went wrong, and if this truly is how it is, why the hell reproduction is still so totally en vogue?

A friend of ours said she'd been on a parent gym course, sounds amazing, I shall, and indeed have been, thinking about it a lot and hopefully, one day, before end my children, I shall send myself on it, but again, the holy grail of book  "How to Listen so Your Kids Will Talk and Talk so Your Kids Will Listen" was touted as the thing to follow. A copy is still definitely by my bed, my youngest asked me to read it to her on Sunday morning. I duly did, and about two sentences in I realised that I should really get back on and read it. The parenting struggle is a long one, and in the end, hopefully your children'll leave home and become sentient beings, high fives, pat on the back, job done!

This weekend, we were invited out to supper for a friend's birthday party, he probably regrets it now, but we had a great time. My husband and I took our panting spaniel A game and were positioned in between people neither of us knew. I'm never great at these things, but now that we're in the country I have to pant a little harder and try hard to make friends and influence people, or at the very least, as is often the case, make people tolerate me. The people either side of me were also good parental citizens, and we put the worlds to right. Best comment of the year so far, was from one of the guys who was telling me about the lunch that he'd had with his child. Long and short of it was, that he'd had one of those times when the child had erupted into something that neither parent could wholly recognise as human, and the father had prayed that he'd warn a T-shirt saying that he actually has two children, just the other one was at home ill, and that they weren't parents who couldn't cope with only one child, they were parents who regularly couldn't cope with two children. A classic that made me laugh and realise that we are all, truly, in the same boat.

I don't want to say it, but I sort of have to at this juncture, I love children, but I couldn't eat a whole one! You have to, don't you?
  

End of Term

Yep, it's that time of year when schools nationwide selfishly relinquish responsibility for the care of our children, it's madness. Solid weeks with your children, perish the thought, venereal disease is probably easier, but on the plus side, no school run!

I was massively excited about my eldest breaking up for the holidays, despite the fact that it means I now have two of them at home, I have gone wild in the isles for the whole thing.

Geaster (as my youngest labelled it) holidays were kicked off nicely yesterday with a monumentally long Easter celebration service. My youngest lasted about 10 whole good minutes before farting, laughing at the farts and then humming loudly, climbing under everyone's chairs and standing on my lap so that no one behind us could see. That was amazing.

We've, all three of us, decorated an Easter bag each, mine even looks like I paid attention. I've plotted out the route for our Geaster egg hunt with a trial run this weekend with friends, there's no room for error. Mary Berry has provided us with a recipe for an actual Easter cake with 11 balls of marzipan on top, one for each of the disciples (not Judas, she tells us, because, and this is my guess, he's off betraying a marzipan Jesus somewhere!) We've baked a cake recipe this morning just to see if Mary's promise of "great result every time"  really are so, proof is in the pudding.

I am, in fact, writing this sat in front of my daughter's school. I've been here for half an hour, for some reason, I really want this holiday to get under way. Bring out the panting spaniels, as far as I am concerned, I've got pointy elbows, gonna get my child first from school for this holiday even if I have to push and shove. This Easter holiday is in the bag baby, it's all a bit nuts.

I think it's some latent thing from my childhood that's rearing its head, I remember sometimes being the last child waiting, the excitement of the holidays and the things that came with it. Now I have The absolute want to make some things tradition for us all to look back on, and I think cake and pick ups are a great starting point. So, to anyone reading this, enjoy your holiday, maybe it'll be traditional maybe it'll be totally nontraditional, either way, balls out has to be the best way, doesn't it?

Mums to Bitches!

I know I know, can't get away from the slang, but it's very much a case of once you pop you really can't stop, it's all I can think about. Have my older daughter rapping "we're lovin it, lovin it, lovin it, we're lovin it like that..." on the school run this morning when we were very late and stuck behind a tractor who was having to negotiate illiterate, mouth breathing mothers who can't drive.

Beside the point. The point is, I have come up with an idea for a telvision programme that I think will make most mothers chomp at the bit with excitement, could be fathers as well, but then the title would need tweeking, it's still very early stages, anything is possible.

So, here's the idea, a sort of cross between The worst place in the world to be a... and Pimp My Ride, except instead of pimping cars we'd absolutely be pimping people. To explain, take a mother, me for instance and send her off to do something completely and utterly away from the day to day. So, we'd probably have Gaby Roslin and Chris Evans or Ricky Gervais as the presenters, they would say, this week we have Marelka from Salisbury, Marelka loves cooking and eating and hates mothers that drive badly on the school run and people who don't pick up their dog poo. She has two girls aged 5 and 3.5 and in her spare time... What spare time? For three weeks Marelka has agreed to leave her husband and two children and head to New York where she is going to shadow Trixie Skinny tits and become a lap dancer. The show will then follow the three weeks and by the end you'll see how it all goes. It doesn't have to be a lap dancer, it could be Deborah Meaden, she's a bitch, or a farmer or a taxi driver, just has to be something different that you become ace at or you have to go home. Might not be one mother, might be a team of mothers trying to be one thing, that would give it more of an edge.

As I have said, it is very early days, but if you are interested in becoming a mother bitch or father bitch, let me know, we can see if this one has legs and Channel 4 might go wild for it, in which case I'll need people to sign up or it won't work, I can't do it every week, might get boring and the children need care and attention, the dogs gone deaf so he can no longer fill in.

It's got to be worth a try, hasn't it?