The Boy Speaks and Feminists Weep

There are times when raising a boy is like wrangling with an alien. No matter how much I try to humanise him, he remains obdurately Boy. One afternoon last week he dealt me a double whammy.

It is starting to rain when we get home from school so I enlist his help to bring in the washing. As we start unpegging the washing, the following conversation takes place:

Boy: I'm not touching anyone's underwear.

Me: It's clean. And anyway, what about me? I have to touch everyone's underwear. 

Boy: Well, I'm definitely not touching your bras.

Me: Whatever.

Boy: Actually, no, you know what, I am going to touch your bras! And then when I am older, I can boast to my friends that I have touched a woman's bra. Because it's every boy's dream, right?

At which point he starts racing around the washing line looking for bras. I say nothing but think it's quite sweet that he still thinks it's the bra that's the thing, not what goes into the bra. Later that afternoon, we are watching TV and an ad for Pampers comes on. As the young mother is shown leaning over her baby, changing it's nappy, the Boy exclaims:

'Yuck, I hate this ad!'

'Why?' I ask, 'it's just a baby's bottom.'

'No, it's that woman's boobies. They are way too big! It's disgusting!'

I have no response. I am literally slack jawed with speechlessness. On seeing my expression, the boy says:

'What? I'm a nine year-old-boy!' 

As if that explains everything.

Where did I go wrong?

I've tried to bring up my kids to be relaxed about their bodies, and the human body in general. My mother was taught by the nuns at her boarding school that she should never be completely naked, unless she was in the bath. There was an elaborate system for getting dressed and undressed that kept the optimal amount of flesh covered at all times. I don't know if my mother stuck to this regime religiously (pardon the pun), but she was certainly very modest, and very fond of wearing layers of undergarments. Slips and half-slips, camisoles and petticoats were all part of her moral armour. She would even wear a vest under a sundress.

She could never bring herself to talk to about sex. My sister had to tell me about 'the facts of life'. My mother was educated, confident, out-going. She hated the repression her upbringing had left her with, but she couldn't break the cycle.

So, naturally, I don't want my kids to have any of those hangups. I've tried to engender a nonchalant attitude to the human body. Up until recently I thought I'd been reasonably successful. But I'm beginning to realise that are two things I just can't fight: he's Nine and he's a Boy.

Tomorrow, tomorrow...

I'm sitting in my garden enjoying the sunshine before the inevitable Bank Holiday wash out. I should be working - there is The Novel, all loaded up into Scrivener and ready to go. I need to revise that horror story I wrote a few months ago and send it out to magazines. And there's a really big, prestigious short story competition that I want to write something new for. So plenty to do, but I'm not doing any of it. I haven't done any writing since signing off on the final version of my story for the 33 anthology. I've even been neglecting this blog. I am officially in a creative slump.

Procrastination is, of course, in my genes. My father invented 'just in time delivery' long before the Japanese applied it to their manufacturing industries. There was always something more pressing to be done - like decanting all the dry goods in the kitchen into identical containers, and then getting out the labelling machine (yes, you heard me, he owned a labelling machine), and labelling the containers, because now we couldn't tell what was where, what with all the jars being the same. In his dying days, I remember one of the fabulous Macmillian nurses we had handing over to her colleague one morning and saying: 'Watch out for this one - if you stand still too long he'll slap a label on you.'

I had a very,very long engagement - about five years, I think. But I was still woken at two in the morning of the day of my wedding to hear my father bashing out his wedding speech on the word processor.

I don't understand what procrastination is for. What evolutionary purpose does it serve? It never, ever helps to put something off. I always feel better when I finally get around to doing that one thing I've been transferring from one to-do list to another. I get the decks cleared and I swear I'm not going to let things get away from me again. And yet, within a week, I'll be going to bed every night with the weight of things undone bearing down on me, certain in the knowledge that I won't do them the next day either.

At least with other bad habits, there is usually some pleasure or short term benefit to be gained from indulging them (I'll give you a minute here to reflect on your own worst habit and why you're never going to give it up). With procrastination, there's no upside. So I hereby vow to you, dear readers, to stop procrastinating. Starting tomorrow.

Grosse Pointe Belfast

Another weekend, another reunion. Specifically, Hubby's 25th school reunion. I got to go the event in two capacities - as supportive spouse and as a fellow alumnus of the same school, albeit in the year group below his. So I had the advantage of being an inside-outsider to the whole thing, a writer's favourite place to be.

While some people had kept in touch, many hadn't seen each other in a quarter of a century. Most, it seemed to me, turned up out of sheer curiosity. And curious it was. For a start, you would never have pegged the people in that room for all being the same age. Some looked ten years older than they should, some ten years less than seemed possible. Some had been old when they were young and now had the lives they and everyone else had predicted. Most seemed to be happy and successful, but they couldn't all be. As people sized each other up and tried to read between the lines of each other's potted histories, the atmosphere was anything but relaxed. 

Some people were instantly recognisable, but most were honest enough to blatantly check name tags before embarking on conversation. Memories don't flood back. Fragments and threads work their way around the back of your mind while you make conversation. You can spend seven years in the daily company of a person, but put twenty five years between you and them and it can be like struggling to remember the details of a dream. The harder you try, the less real it seems.

Inevitably, the old cliques reasserted themselves. The lads propped up the bar and got lairy. The girly-girls took to the dance floor and bopped to early eighties pop pap without a shred of self-aware irony. The outsiders remembered what it was that was so uncool about these guys in the first place. 

As a teenager, and later at university, I always envied the kids who had privileged and seemingly uncomplicated lives. The ones from conventionally middle-class families, who were members of clubs (tennis, rowing, rugby), who skied in the winter and went on foreign holidays in the summer, who were bought a car for their eighteenth birthday but never drove drunk or too fast, who never seemed to suffer from teenage angst but made a seamless transition to the adult world. And there is still part of me that is jealous of the ease with which they seem to negotiate their world. 

Self-confidence is one of the things I want to instil into my own kids. But sometimes I worry that self-confidence will segue into complacency. Without my own sense of outsiderness, my life might have been easier, but not necessarily better. You need a little sand in the oyster to make a pearl. I want my kids to have drive and ambition as well as confidence. And yes, I know much of that is down to nature as well as nurture. But still, I think I'll make them pay for their own first cars. Hubby and I will be spending the money on a cruise. Or possibly a skiing holiday. Or a midlife-crisis sports car. Whatever pisses them off the most.

The Boy Speaks

Some gems from the boy, to cheer your Easter.

'Mummy, my friends were so surprised to hear that you are 41! You look so much younger, like everyone says you look about 39!' 

*  *  *

Boy: 'No, I don't want any stuffing with my turkey. Why would anyone want to eat cotton wool?' 

Me: 'I'm sorry, did you say cotton wool?' 

Boy: 'Yes, isn't that what they stuff dead animals with?'

Me: 'Only if they are taxidermists, not cooks.'

Boy: 'Oh. I still don't want any.'

*  *  *

'Hey, Mummy, how come you always make such good gravy at Christmas and Easter?'

Which leaves me wondering what's wrong with my gravy the rest of the time.

*  *  *

Daddy: 'I'm going to my school reunion next week. Some of my old teachers will be there.'

Boy: 'What, they're still alive?'

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be

Reunions are in the air. In a few weeks time we are going to Hubby's 25th school reunion. And last weekend, two hundred people danced the night away in Belfast for the first (but I suspect not the last) Delta / Plaza reunion.

The Delta was a sort of underground club, colonised by Goths and Physcobillies and every other teenage tribe that lurked in the shadows in Belfast in the 1980s. It was filthy and probably a fire hazard. It opened after the pubs closed. I can't remember what time it closed at - I was never sober enough to be able to read my watch. It was brilliant, and it was awful. I was fifteen when I first went there and I felt like I had found my spiritual home.

Not so long ago, someone started posting photos on Facebook from the Delta days. Every now and then a picture would pop up with my name attached to it. I ignored them.  Interest grew, someone set up a fan page. People sent me the link. I ignored it. Inevitably, a reunion was organised. I ignored that too.

Part of the problem for me is, while I had some of the best nights of my life at the Delta, there were some very dark times too. I look back at my teenage years and wonder how I got out of there alive. But I have a problem with nostalgia in general. It makes me uncomfortable. When someone starts to wax lyrical about the 'good old days', it makes me wonder what is wrong with their 'here and now'. And I have no interest in re-formed bands from the 1980s and 90s. I don't want to listen to music from another lifetime. I like the person I am now much better than the person I was then.

Don't get me wrong - I don't want to get old before my time. And judging from the pictures on Facebook this weekend, everyone else enjoyed the reunion perfectly well, without analysing themselves into a tizzy. But I don't want to recapture a youth that, quite frankly, didn't have that much going for it first time around. Except for the fact that had it not been for the Delta, I might not have got to know that young man in the photo up there. Twenty five years on, he's still an handsome devil, and he's still my man. And we've both still got all our hair, despite the predictions of our parents.

A reasonable question.

It's one of the joys of parenthood that we seem to lose most of our capacity to feel embarrassed by ourselves just at the stage when our children feel embarrassment most acutely. I've started doing many of the things that my mum used to do that I found cringingly uncool. Like complaining. I'm not talking about general moaning, but proper 'I feel a letter coming on' complaining about bad service and that sort of thing. And then there's the dancing. I consider myself quite a nifty mover. On Wednesday mornings you'll find me in the front row at dance class, giving it my all, with jazz hands. But in my own kitchen, for some reason I'll start channelling my own inner middle-aged woman. There is lots of ill-advised frugging and boogying. The kids either ignore me or physically restrain me, lest I injure myself.

The Boy is gradually bowing to peer pressure and has started to find various body parts (mostly female) utterly unmentionable. But it's not his natural mindset. He asked me the other day over breakfast whether my boobs every got in the way. Reasonable question.

Last week he fell and hurt his shoulder and I had to take him to the hospital for x-rays. We were sitting in the x-ray room, waiting for the radiographer. It was a huge room, full of massive equipment and banks of buttons and switches. As we waited, he looked around the room. 'Mum, what are those?' he asked. There, hanging on the wall, was a row of black rubber plates, shaped like, well, underpants. They ranged in size from teen-tiny (newborn size, the sign said), to alarmingly huge (for large adults, apparently). I read the sign about this display: Gonad Shields.

Of all the exciting, unusual things in the room, this is the one my son homes in on. And I wasn't sure where to start my explanation. I'm pretty sure that, having just turned nine, he knows the basics of reproduction, but not the mechanics. So I started at the beginning: 'Do you know what your balls are for?'

I'm very glad the radiographer didn't walk into the room at that point. Now that would have been embarrassing.

Sauce for the goose?

Hubby is disappointed. We have just booked our trip to Barcelona, just for the two of us, to celebrate the fact that we have been together for twenty five years. The flights are booked, the hotel organised and then he discovers that FC Barcelona are playing at home on the day we leave. He has always wanted to go to a European match, and it doesn't get better than at the Nou Camp. I feel bad, but it's too late to change the bookings.

On our second day in the city, we are strolling back to our hotel. We take a slightly different route, just for the fun of it. We stumble across the FC Barcelona store. We decide a Barca shirt would be the perfect present for the Boy. We go in. At the door is a big notice: Sunday's match has been rescheduled to Saturday night. There is a scrum of men at one of the tills. We enquire - yes, indeed, tickets can be purchased. Some thirty minutes later we leave clutching a printout that confirms that we have bought one of the few remaining pairs of tickets.

Hubby is delighted and so am I. But the reaction of other people is perplexing. 'Oh', they say to Hubby, 'What will you have to pay the Wife for that? She's going to do some serious shopping now.' Huh? Since when was this not his holiday too? Since when did couples go on holiday and do nothing but shop and eat cake? Since when did women become such selfish harridans?

I'll tell you since when - since we've been told for the past God knows how many years that We Are Worth It. Since we've all been getting out our credit cards to buy into the designer lifestyle, because We Are Worth It. Since we decided that we all needed Me Time, which is definitely not Him Time.  Since handbags and cocktails and shoes and girlie nights out have been elevated to the status of rights, not luxuries. And it's all complete bollocks. Or whatever the female equivalent metaphor would be.

We spent our Saturday night at the football, and I loved it. I loved that Hubby was so excited, I loved that he was getting to do something he really, really wanted to do. I loved the whole experience, seeing the similarities with, and differences to, English football, watching the people, soaking in the atmosphere. It was great fun, and we still had dinner together afterwards (albeit at nearly midnight).

Hubby and the Boy have decided that when the Boy is old enough, they are going to do their own version of the Grand Tour, visiting the great football stadiums of Europe. I think it is a marvellous idea, but I'm a little jealous too.