in praise of quaintness

Sometimes there are moments when looking at my children, I register the specialness of that moment and store it away in my memory, a treasure to hold on to.  This morning I sat watching my 7 year old daughter, home sick from school, sitting by the heater, listening to an audio book of Anne of Green Gables while French knitting.  She is totally absorbed in the story unfolding and the tricky task of hooking strands of wool around the metal loops of her knitting bee.  She is content, concentrating, oblivious.  Apart from the overwhelming love I feel for my daughter, I am also struck by the quaintness of the scene.  Such an old fashioned little girl – apart from the ipod on which she listens to the audio book.  This leads me to reflect on the type of childhood we hope to allow our children; both my partner and I are very much of the mind that childhood is not something to rush through but something to dwell in for as long as possible.  We limit our children’s exposure to TV – NO commercial television at all, our family TV viewing is generally something like Dr Who, Antiques Road-Show or Grand Designs.  We encourage reading, writing, drawing, tree climbing, playing in the garden, cooking, knitting, sewing, hammering nails in bits of wood.  We discourage any form of gender stereotyping and avoid like the plague anything that even hints at the sexualisation of little girls.  Both our girls  are now very good at judging if something is ‘inappropriate’ – like the dance moves and song lyrics they have to learn for a school concert or performance.  As parents, we are often incensed by the images and stereotypes that bombard our children on a daily basis, outside of the home, and sometimes even at school.  We don’t want to home-school our children or bring them up in a bubble, quarantined from contemporary reality, as much as that sometimes appeals.  But I hope what we can do is give our daughters the tools to deal with the daily bombardment, to develop a strong enough sense of themselves to be able to know what’s important and what’s not.  I hope our children can stay children for as long as possible; that they can be quaint and whimsical and creative and themselves.

the things we keep

Today I went through some of my mothers papers that had been sitting in bags and boxes in our bedroom for well over a year.  My mother died nearly 18 months ago and I have been putting off this task, knowing that it would be difficult.  But today I went through the various bundles of photos, old and more recent, my mother’s nursing certificates and letters of reference, a collection of cheque book stubs with balances brought forward and all cheques accounted for. My mother was a very organised and orderly person.  There were the mother’s day cards I had made, the letters my father had written to her when she was on trips home to the UK.  And the letters from my Grandfather to her, all signed ‘love from Daddy’.  There was an old chocolate box full of cards to my parents congratulating them on my birth – quite an event as my mother was 40 when I was born and I was her only child.  I remember going through this box of cards on may occasions when I was a child, enjoying all the pictures of bears and baby girls and pink ribbons.  Many of these things made me cry, as I expected they would.  My mother is so present in all of these things – it makes her absence now all the more painful to me. 

There were also many things that weren’t there that made me wonder why.  There were no letters from her mother, who died suddenly within a year or so of Mum moving to Australia.  I know they were very close so it seems strange that there are no letters from her, or indeed any letters before about 1977.  Although I haven’t been through all the boxes of Mum’s things yet, I don’t remember seeing any letters from her sisters in the UK, with whom she corresponded on a reasonably regular basis.  I have a feeling that my mother disposed of much of her correspondence.  I can imagine her having one of her ‘clean outs’ which could often be quite ruthless and unsentimental.  My mother was the opposite of a hoarder – she regularly shed things.  And seemingly letters were amongst the things that she did not deem worth keeping.  I’m not sure that they contained terrible family secrets that she didn’t want me to find out – I think she just felt no compulsion to hold onto the past.   I have found my mother’s lack of sentimentality in some instances quite disconcerting.  All through my childhood and into my adult life my mother held onto a neatly folded tissue containing my baby teeth.  I can remember where she kept it in her dressing table – it was always there.  After she died and I had to pack up her things, there was no sign of the baby teeth.  I can’t imagine why she would have disposed of them after all this time.  She never asked me if I wanted them.   Another example was an old reel – to reel tape recorder with a recording of me, aged 3, talking about a ‘koala bear’ eating porridge.  A few years ago I got the recording digitised as we were worried the tape might deteriorate.  I returned the tape to my mother and then some time after that she disposed of the tape machine and the tape reels.

So it was all the more strange going through her papers to come across a small envelope containing an RSVP to her 9^th birthday party from a little girl called Winnie.  I’d never seen this note before, I have no idea who Winnie was, or why this small envelope and its contents has survived for nearly 80 years when so many other seemingly significant things have gone by the wayside.  Perhaps it had survived in my Grandfather’s papers (he definitely WAS a hoarder) and my mother came across it when she was going through his things after his death.  I will ask my aunty if she remembers a little girl called Winnie but as she would have only been 7 years old at the time, she may not . 

And going through my mothers things leads me to reflect on how I deal with the dilemma of what to keep and what to shed as I move through life, accumulating things.  We have boxes full of children’s art works and school books and little things they have made – and our girls are still young.  There are years ahead of accumulating and shedding of things not regarded as important enough to keep.

I still have a collection of my own school books and art – a collection that has been pruned over the years but much of it survives.  I wonder how I will deal with the hard choices of what to keep and what to discard and what I will leave for our children.  

The Adventure of Childhood

I watched a fantastic documentary last night on ABC called 'The Lost Adventures of Childhood'.  With a five year old about to start school I have been thinking a lot about what we have given her in preparation for school. Have we done enough 'stuff'?,  ie shouldn't we have tried to fit in more extras like music lessons and dance classes as well as the swimming lessons she loves.  I've been feeling anxious, thinking that in some way I had wasted this precious pre-school time when their brains are like sponges and their neurons are firing and connecting all over the place.  Have I in someway limited her development and potential by not doing all this 'stuff' early?  Watching 'The Lost Adventures...' put it all into perspective and reassured me that perhaps we haven't been so far off the mark.  Our two girls love spending hours in the garden - making potions and 'cooking' and collecting magic stones and building little gardens and climbing trees (the five year old at least) and decorating the pavement with chalk and making 'paint' and dressing up and doing 'shows' on the trampoline and teaching each other tricks and pretending to be birds and building hiding places - in short, having Adventures.  The documentary made a very strong and compelling case for the importance of play as a way of learning important skills like independence and initiative and problem solving and communication and negotiation and of course developing creativity.  As far as I can see, these skills are clearly more important and core to success as a human being than whether you can dance or play basketball. The program shed light on the worst excesses of 'hyper-parenting', however well-intentioned, and debunked some of the myths about team sport being 'character building'.  In one fantastic and inspiring example of the real benefits of play, a drab school playground was transformed by some cardboard boxes, large pieces of fabric, chalk, fun 'props' like walking sticks and other miscellaneous objects intended to stimulate creative play.  The results were quite amazing.  In the playground, the children's approach to 'playtime' completely changed from filling in time to a fantastic chance to create their own adventures.  And in the classroom, the teachers were struck by the change in their students - their concentration, problem solving, initiative and group communication all improved noticeably after only two months of playtime adventures.  The school didn't need to spend thousands on fancy play equipment - a couple of cardboard boxes and some material did the trick!  I found this incredibly inspiring and also reassuring.  Kids can learn more from old fashioned play than from hours of 'extra-curricular' activities that in reality just leave them exhausted and overwhelmed.