Explaining a war to children

When we had our first child, we had a pretty clear view that we should always stick as close to the truth as possible when speaking around and to and with her. I remembered feeling silly or confused as a child when people gave explanations that didn’t made sense instead of telling me plainly about something or explaining it with a lot of confusing euphemisms. So I resolved not to do that with my own kids and thankfully me and himself are on the same page when it comes to virtually all parenting decisions.

This means our kids have always known the words penis and vulva. They’ve been on marches for healthcare and education. They’ve come to vote with us in elections and referendums. They watch the news. They knew our sense of relief when we all saw the electoral college votes stacking up for Biden. And, recently, they’ve seen what’s happening in Ukraine.

I know some people won’t want their children to know what’s going on. They won’t want their children seeing some of the images coming out of Ukraine and hearing some of the stories of what people, including children, are going through, in Ukraine and across Europe as they flee war. When Russia started bombing, our kids heard about it on the breakfast news bulletin on the radio. They had a vague idea of where Ukraine was but not much beyond that.

Some of their schoolfriends have parents who are from Ukraine. They see the blue and yellow flags everywhere, and comment on them. We have a Ukrainian flag hanging at our door. When we made a cake, they dyed it blue and yellow. Our three year old now pushes yellow and blue Duplo pieces together to make a Ukrainian flag. Its lovely and heartbreaking, all at the same time.

Unlike many other things I was “sheltered” from, probably with the best of intentions or because it can be simply too hard to explain things even adults can’t get their heads around, we haven’t turned off the news when the Mini Orchids are around. I’ve changed TV stations when Channel 4 news had a piece on rape being used as a weapon, my thinking being that that was just too far for kids aged 9 and under. But, yes, they have seen the aftermath of bombings and they’ve seen packed trains heading west and children crying with exhaustion. And we talk about war, and why it happens, and why its so bloody unfair and not right but all we can do is help people when we can.

We won’t know if this is the right or wrong approach for a long time. Maybe we should censor what they see and hear a bit more. Maybe they should have to face reality a bit more. What a luxury to have this as a problem, when children in Ukraine haven’t been outside for months and hear bombs falling around them. In the meantime, we’ll keep on trying to balance our choices and letting our children express themselves in ways that help them process what’s going on in the world.

In Praise of (A Small Amount of) Clutter

These are our bookshelves, well about half of them. The other half are in the playroom, which underwent a major reorganisation last weekend. Some books moved from here to there, such as my Malory Towers and St. Clare’s collections. Eldest Orchid is dipping into more and more of my beloved childhood reads and this sparks great joy.

Every so often we get an urge to purge and take out all of the books on these shelves and go through them and 99% of the time every single book goes right back onto the shelves. This process means for about 3 days there’s a system to how the books are arranged. These are deep shelves, so there’s two layers of books on each shelf and sometimes the urge to purge means we rediscover the second layer’s delights.

I have a complete paperback collection of the Drina books I so enjoyed as a child, one or two of which are at the read-so-much-they’re-falling-apart stage of life. To my delight, I was able to get my hands on hardback replacements for 4 of them and they arrived this week. I enjoy the slight editing, with references to Hungary rather than a fictional Iron Curtain country and some of the uniform is nylon rather than silk. I pondered a while on who’s job it was to edit the originals and what decisions were made to bring them up to date. I especially enjoyed the covers.

I have no space for these books, nor do I have space for the 3 library books I collected yesterday. Books on loan to others come back post urge to purge and I forget they need space. There are books shoved hastily on top of neat rows of Chalet School treasures. There’s a cookbook that should be in the cookbook cupboard in the kitchen. There’s probably a stray Miffy somewhere. There’s definitely a less than perfect order to the whole.

While I do prefer less clutter on the whole, I took a moment to appreciate these shelves while shoving my new Drinas in this morning. These are the shelves of people who read books, who dip in and out of interests, who get a thrill from a musty second hand copy and who want to spend more time reading and enjoying the books than keeping them shelved backwards or looking like a rainbow. Sometimes clutter does spark joy, and that’s something to celebrate.

Undoing

My sister sent me this picture the other day. I’m about four or five here, in my homeknitted jumper and Vivienne Westwood-esque skirt. I have a hairstyle I’m pretty envious of right now, given that my fringe has been lost due to hairdressing services being unavailable for months now. I can’t remember this photo being taken, but I do remember those trees and that house. We lived there until I was twelve and I still have fairly regular dreams about it.

This photo made me think about my life when I was this age, and how different my children’s lives are in so many ways. I’ve made some very different choices about how I parent. I’ve grown increasingly confident about these decisions as the years have gone by. Sometimes I wonder if I over-analyse the choices we’re making about our children, but I feel this is still better than just leaving things to chance or not analysing the decisions at all.

I’ve had to undo some of the things I grew up with, and add in some of the things I didn’t. I’m always grateful than himself and I were on the same page about so many of the big decisions around having and raising children before we even got pregnant. It seems to have made things a lot easier and we don’t disagree about how we’re raising them at all. It’s difficult to reject some of the things that as a child seemed solid and immutable, and rebuild some aspects of your decision making process and thoughts about things. But I feel better and more secure for doing this, and I think my children are better for it to.

And I never thought I looked like my daughter but it turns out I do. She is so very much more confident and sure of herself than I remember being at this age, and older. So I guess we’re doing something right.

Tiny Sparks of Joy

Sticking to dry January. I’m not sure it should feel as good as it does to be able to tick one accomplishment (if that’s what I can call it) off the list on the last day of one of the gloomiest months ever, but I’ll take my joys where I can find them.

Home cooking, and using up a lot of our freezer and store cupboard stash.

Reading childhood favourites. Over and over again. I remember my heart leaping one Saturday in the library when a longed for copy of Drina Goes On Tour appeared. I was able to get my hands on a very precious first edition.

A lovely meal to look forward to. And the fact it will be delivered to us. And that we have a nice bottle of Amarone to go with it all.

Little videos made by the Little Orchids. Always fun to see them so involved in them and watching them afterwards.

Normal Is Just What You’re Used To

I’m not trying to be overly dramatic. There’s no Aunt Lydia bearing me off to be raped to produce children for Gilead. There’s no coup. There’s no stripping away of women’s rights. But being forced into a role I didn’t choose has its downsides. I’ve had to get used to what normal looks like in spring of 2020.

I’m not stay at home material, and any thoughts I had towards moving into that role have been firmly squashed by events in recent weeks. I’ve found it hard to be nothing but a parent. The days are dull and I feel my brain getting foggy. I miss speaking to adults who have nothing to do with my children. I don’t enjoy being a poor combination of teacher, friend, entertainer, housewife and woman. I’m losing a little bit of myself in these days that stretch on and on and all look the same.

I try to make plans to give the days a bit of structure. I go to work when I have to and I try to relish that time. I downloaded the app so the children can do their schoolwork and the teachers can maintain some level of contact with them. I give myself permission to be a bit selfish sometimes.

I know I’m complaining too much. Things could be a lot worse. I’m much more whiney and annoying than I usually am. I suppose I can at least acknowledge this fact. I’m hard to be around sometimes, and I’m snappy and short tempered too often.

This is normal for now, and I know it won’t last forever. I know I’ll look back on these days with a certain amount of nostalgia. I hope the children will have happy memories of some of this weird time in our lives. We’re all safe at home, and we’re very lucky.

This is what we’re used to telling ourselves now.

Raising Children Without Religion

One thing we decided on long before we became parents was that we would not, and could not, indoctrinate our children. We were both raised by parents who dutifully dispatched us to Catholic schools and sent us through sacraments, but we wanted a different path for our children. Every year there’s fashion spreads in Irish newspapers about ‘communion season’, and tips from bloggers about what ‘the communion mammies’ should wear. There’s debates in parenting forums about whether to cater the party at home or book a restaurant.

It feels to us, as people who’ve stepped out of this merry-go-round, that the whole thing isn’t as benign as many of our peers seem to think. We’re lucky that our children don’t have to go to a school that others them, and puts them to one side for small or large portions of the school year. Our children are able to say, freely and without difficulty, that they don’t believe in god. And still ‘the communion’ creeps in. They see a religious sacrament presented as a normal cultural experience and conversations are had about our family and the choices we make.

This weekend, I opened up our Saturday newspaper and sighed a weary sigh at the above feature. Apparently we’re not ‘the average parent’ and our children are being denied ‘the big day’. I know the vast majority of people declared themselves to be Catholic in the last census and we know many of our friends struggle with putting their children through religious indoctrination. But still, it jars that a national newspaper is part of the normalisation of the indoctrination of large swathes of the children in this country.

We have been told by others that raising your children without religion isn’t that simple, that there are family pressures and traditions that are hard to shake off. We’re told people ‘had’ to baptise to access schools, and then fear their children will be left out if they don’t do ‘the big day’. I understand all of this. We faced some of these comments and pressures too. It is hard to be part of the change, and not everyone has the same priorities. But every year I wish ‘the big day’ was seen for what it is. And treated as such.

Tiny Sparks of Joy

Photo by freestocks.org on Pexels.com

It’s Brexit day, so knowing that we live in a country that knows how to hold referendums and is pro-EU is how I’m choosing to look on the bright side.

Photo books, political leaflets, ‘cheque enclosed’ – the post box on the side of our house sparked a lot of joy this week.

Getting to the gym, doing a tough class, feeling great afterwards and planning to go as much as possible.

A daughter who is so sure of herself and knows exactly what she wants to wear, regardless of what anyone says.

Catching up with friends and work colleagues, something a more regular set of working hours allows me to do. I could get used to it, but I’m trying not to.

Small Victories.

I’m currently enjoying the bliss of a week off work, a week where I’m not on a tight schedule and can do things at my own pace. The bonus was having himself here on Monday and getting to do the thrilling work of reorganising our food supplies. I’d done a wee bit of stockpiling in an attempt to assuage my mild panic over Brexit so we had a lot of some things. Let’s just say we don’t need to buy tins of kidney beans, stock cubes or flour for a long time. The problem was the stockpiling had become haphazard and things had been hastily pushed into drawers and cupboards misplaced. So we now have nice tidy shelves as the result of not very much work. And I know exactly what we need to buy food wise this week which is not very much, given that we can work our way through our freezer full of meals that I prepared in advance of returning to work.

The other small victory is the steady march of baby and toddler related stuff out of our home and into other people’s homes. This week I said a fond farewell to our faithful IKEA Antilop highchair. This was probably the best fifteen euro I ever spent on our children. It has served us for a total of seven years, having been taken out for visiting children, loaned to others in need, pushed right under our table (meaning the tray was somewhat redundant) and used daily until each of our children couldn’t be left alone in it. It is a dream to clean, assemble and use and while I will miss it (oh the memories!), I’m delighted to reclaim some space and send it off to pastures new. We have a horrible plastic chair yoke we strap to our a dining chair now, but at least it takes up no extra space.

 

The On and On-ness of Children

One place that hasn’t been top of the list of my decluttering/organisation/konmari “journey” is our attic. I’ve been diligent about going through all the other rooms fairly thoroughly, but the downside is that all the excess has ended up in various boxes and bags in our attic. The upside to our attic is that its easy to access. This is also a downside. It is WAY too easy to shove stuff in, close the door and congratulate myself on a tidy set of rooms downstairs.

I had a brief morning of nesting at the start of my last pregnancy and did a perfunctory sift through the baby stuff we stashed up there. I then got sick and tired and anxious and stressed, and any further plans just melted away. I continued to poke around at the space when I had a chance I was very happy with the neatness of the rooms, but a little haunted by what lurked upstairs.

Having been inspired by this post about decluttering and starting with one box at a time, on Sunday I pulled out everything but our (almost never used but won’t get rid of just yet) suitcases, the box containing my wedding dress and the beautifully organised boxes of Christmas decorations and started to organise it. Yesterday, I braved Ikea and bought new storage boxes and packed up some practical and sentimental stuff which I know we don’t want to chuck.

The kids’ stuff is the final frontier. There’s just SO MUCH of it. And we’re not even particularly indulgent about getting them a lot of stuff. It seems to creep in somehow. There’s some stuff we need to keep, some we want to keep (like the little red jacket they all wore home from the hospital) and a lot more we’d happily dump but which our children are inordinately attached too. So, this is a work in progress, but a work which has started nonetheless. Which is an orchid, of sorts.

Tiny Sparks of Joy

The lilac tree in our garden. I cannot get enough.

Looking for a surprise for a tiny new little person.

Finding slightly blurry photos like this on my phone from a budding artist.

These books, especially this one.

The knowledge that by the end of this month, we’ll be enjoying our brand new kitchen.