To Three Or Not To Three: Surprises

(Periodically, I've been writing some posts about whether or not to go from two to three children. This is one of them, but no, in case you're concerned, I'm not pregnant - this is not about THAT kind of surprise).

Babies are cute. Babies are so cute. 

Seriously, how cute are babies?

Wanna know what's cute? Little tiny people (I'm talking about babies).

Goodness me but babies are cute. 

Know what else babies are? Snuggly.

Smiley. Funny. 

Sweet. Adorable. 

I'm a bit of a hard-edged, cranky lady at times, but I absolutely love babies. I always knew I would love having a baby, and I did.

Can I be honest? Part of the reason I have wanted another child was that I didn't feel ready for the funnest part of parenting - ie, the baby part - to be over. (Uh, anybody else? Just me? Okay).

But lately, life has hit me with a few surprises. My kids are well and truly not babies any more, and there are no more babies on the horizon for us. But I'm surprised by how not-sad I feel about this. I didn't know that I would love my children more now, as four-year-olds, than I did when they looked as cute as they do in these pictures.  I didn't know that they would delight me more because I would know them better.

I didn't know how much time with a four-year-old girl would be spent watching her hopping. "Look, I'm hopping! I'm so hopping!" and skipping "Look, Mummy, this is how you skip. I'll show you". I don't have the heart to tell her that actually, that's not how you skip.

I didn't know how unexpectedly innocent a four-year-old boy could be. He found his cousin's toy gun and pointed it at his own head and clicked the trigger. I looked on, horrified, while he beamed and said "Oh look, Mummy, a hairdryer!"

I didn't know how wonderful it would be to have a child who could take themselves to the bathroom.

Lately Pink has become convinced that she can run much, much faster if she is wearing very short shorts. "Mummy, I can do hard things if I am in my running shorts!" she says, and sometimes "Look, I did it because I kept on trying!" Magical thinking and determination? I think this girl will be able to do anything she sets her mind to.

It's not all sunshine, of course. Pink, particularly, can't stand being wrong. "I was NOT biting my toenails, Mummy, I was only LICKING them". (Well in that case, carry on).  And Blue can't seem to stop needling his sister until she snaps and bites him. Sometimes they still drive me to the edge of distraction, then over the border and into the neighbouring counties of frustration and despair.

But I love them more than ever. And they are more fun than ever.

Being with these kids, aged four, makes me think, often, of my favourite African proverb about raising children. I'm sure you know the one beloved of Hillary Clinton: It takes a village to raise a child. This proverb is not like that proverb (and is yet another example of how 'Africa' is not a homogeneous place, but that's another blog post).

When I was growing up, my family spent a few years in Kenya and the proverb my parents often quoted while we were growing up came from the area we lived in while we were there. I don't know the whole thing in the original language, just the first few words that my parents used to sometimes say to each other as a kind of shorthand: abante bana. Abante bana means 'other people's children' and the whole proverb translates to mean: Other people's children are like cold snot. 

How true this is, right? I've got to admit that it resonates far more with me than the village one. And I think this is where I was going wrong when I was thinking about what it would be like to have older children. Thing is, I had no idea what it would be like to have my own older children. I'd only spent time with other people's older children, and once they weren't cute babies any more, I kind of lost interest. Anybody's baby is adorable, but other people's children can be kind of like cold snot.

Not my own children, though. Their unraveling limbs and changing faces and disappearing lisps don't make them less adorable, less precious to me. I worried that they might but they really, really don't.

I would have loved any baby, but now that they are older, I love them. 

And honestly, feeling that difference is the best possible kind of surprise. 

Save the Date

During the time I've been writing Hypothetical Future Baby, I've come across two fantastic quotes about the collision of writing and real life, about the desire to write versus the need to do other things. Here's the first:

It used to be that I couldn't write when there were dishes in the sink. Then I had a child, and now I can write if there's a corpse in the sink. 
 - Anne Lamott

I can't remember where I read the second one, so I can't remember who said it either, but I have thought about it often when I have decided to run upstairs to the computer during nap time to do some more editing instead of wash up. It goes like this: 

You can't have a finished book and a clean kitchen. 

This is painfully true. And so today I want to show you this:

My kitchen, right now. I can hardly bear to look.

and tell you that Hypothetical Future Baby is finally, being released on September 3rd!  

I'm so excited I can hardly stand myself. Online launch party invitation to come, as well as details on where to buy.  For now, please save the date!

Ten Pounds

I look at this little dude, and all I can see is bacon

So Facebook thinks that I'm dieting.

If I just click on a link (and pay some money, no doubt), I can find out how to get rid of all my belly fat by just following one weird old diet tip.  Alternatively, I could join Weight Watchers (another click) or get liposucked (a third).

Facebook can't even see me - Facebook has no idea what size I am - but somehow it knows I want to be thinner. Because the  horrible truth is that I do want to be thinner. I don't even really know why, but it feels to me like life would be better if I was thinner. Curse you, Facebook, and your freaking omniscience.

To be clear: I am not a pixie, but I don't need a crane to hoist me out of bed, either. I'm a Medium. Shouldn't it be fine to be a medium? Shouldn't I be fine with being a medium?

And actually, I mostly am fine. I think I look fine. When I think about why I want to be thin, it's really got very little to do with how I look, and much more to do with how other people think of me. To be brutal, it's about power. Every pound a woman gains means that she loses a little respect from society, doesn't it? I like respect.

How did being thin get to be about power? I'm not really sure, but I do know that I'm not imagining it. I read a book last week where the heroine saw her old nemesis, Carly, and - shocker - in the ten years since the two women had last seen each other, Carly had gotten fat. Fat! And the heroine used to be really intimidated by Carly but now she doesn't have to feel intimidated by her anymore because Carly is fat! Oh the irony. Ha ha ha ha ha! Obviously, whatever the power dynamics were in the past, as of now Carly is the loser because Carly is fat. 

Hilarious.

And not at all unique. Things like this are everywhere. It's kind of accepted that women who are bigger are less, and that leaves us all chasing some kind of thinner, better version of ourselves, even when we really should know better. We've all got ten pounds that we want to lose, don't we? (Don't we?) I like to think that I'm reasonably level-headed, but I've been trying to lose ten pounds for approximately ever. And then when I stopped pushing our twins around in a giant stroller last year, I actually put on five, so now it's fifteen. I'm sort of constantly trying to lose fifteen pounds, in a low-level not-really-doing-anything-serious-about-it way. It feels reasonable to me from day to day, until I look at the pattern it creates in my life and realise that what I'm really doing - what so many of us are doing - looks a whole lot, from the outside, like chronic discontent, like chasing after the wind.

(Who is benefiting when I am chronically discontented with my body? I could blame the patriarchy or the diet industry or my husband and dissect what maybe they might get out of it but honestly, I don't think anybody at all benefits when I let things like this add a whole extra layer to my crazy).

One of the reasons I want to be thin, I guess - and one of the reasons we think it's okay to look down on people who aren't thin - is that thinness and self-control kind of look like the same thing. Bigger women must be greedy, or lazy, or something, right? They must be controlled by food, and who has any respect for someone who is controlled by food? I don't want people to look at me and assume that they see someone who lacks self-control. If I'm thin, I feel like I'm above reproach (and I know what I'm talking about: I was thin once; it was great). That's why I always want to lose that final ten pounds. Especially when that ten is really fifteen.

But honestly? Honestly, when I'm just eating food because I enjoy it, I'm not controlled by food at all. I'm just having a great time, because food is delicious and I get to eat it three time a day. Know when I'm controlled by food? When I'm on a diet. That's when I'm thinking about food all the time. That's when I'm planning and scheming and weighing and thinking and obsessing. That's when I can't think straight because I'm always wishing that I could find a good reason to eat some Haagen-Dazs and knowing that I never never can.

That's the crazy thing, here - slightly-squishy me looks like she is obsessed by food, but totally is not. Thin me, on the other hand, looks like a paragon of self-control but is actually thinking about food constantly. Those days when I'm really seriously trying to lose weight, that's when I'm controlled by food. (Food and, frankly, vanity. Not self-respect - vanity).

Here's an idea: how about I think less about how I look on the outside, and more about how things really are on the inside. How about deciding that I'm fine just as I am, at least until I hit the high-risk category for heart disease.

I choose contentment.

I choose not letting something as boring as fat control my mind and my thoughts.

I choose that. I really, really do.

Just as soon as I lose these last ten pounds.

************

(oh, and by the way - I finally got around to joining twitter, yikes. Welcome to the 21st century, Claudia. I put my new buttons on the side!)

Never What I'm Expecting

This story is in three parts.

***

Pink is devoted - devoted - to her baby dolls. She and Blue both got one for Christmas, and neither of them were interested. They sat on the toy shelf for about three months, ignored. "Do you want to play with your baby, Pink?" "No." "Do you want to play with your baby, Blue?" "Nope". And so it continued. Then one day, I picked up both dolls, handed them to Pink and said "Look, twins!" and a switch flipped in her little head - she had no idea what to do with one baby, but two babies? Now that's something she can get right behind. From that day, she has always referred to them as 'my twin babies'  and they go everywhere with her. "Where are my twin babies?" she asks, constantly, and I tell her: "In the pram / under the sofa / in the tree" or whatever the right answer is that day. Every evening, she forgets to take them upstairs at teeth-brushing-time and then, when she gets into bed, she yells "OH NO! MY TWIN BABIES!" and thunders down the stairs to get them.

(Did I mention that she calls them Pink and Blue? Well, not Pink and Blue, but Pink and Blue's real names? Unless she's having one of her girl power days, in which case she calls them Pink and Pink).

It's all pretty cute.

***

When I was in Australia, my sister and I were brainstorming ideas for my book cover.In the end, I've gone for this cover:

which - I'll be straight with you - I totally love, but getting there was no picnic. Laura was taking a ton of photos of me because hey, photos of me are free, and photos of other people have to be paid for. (The baby on the final cover is from a stock photography site, although Pink remains convinced that it is Blue). We were wanting to  find some way of getting across the concept of an anonymous baby - a hypothetical future baby - and were tossing all kinds of ideas around.
"How about a doll?" suggested one of us, and the other one thought that might be worth trying out, so we got the props ready. Then we suddenly stopped.
"Is this weird and skeevy?" I wondered. "White lady, brown doll? Like the child is some kind of accessory? Isn't that exactly what I don't want adoption to look like? A crowd of social workers might hunt me down and destroy me if I publish that."
"Hmmmmmm," she said. "Let's take the photo and see what it looks like.  Here, start with this white doll, maybe that won't look so weird - "
For the record, it did look pretty weird.
"Okay, maybe not that," she said. "Especially not the one where you are holding the baby by the foot as if it smells bad and you are about to drop it. Let me take a photo of you and Pink instead with all the dolls." And she did, and it was so horrifying that we immediately made an absolutely no dolls on the book at all decision.

See, there are lots of good things and lots of bad things about independent publishing. One of the good things is that you get to have total control over all of the fun bits. I've always loved book covers and I love that I got to design my own for this project. But then one of the bad things, of course, is that if you end up putting a weird, unflattering and borderline-offensive doll-photo on the front, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

Also, obviously, it's a truckload of work. I really had no idea how much until I started doing it.Turning a book manuscript into a book object is actually insanely complicated. How can it be so hard to just insert page numbers logically? And how can Garamond italic be so offensive when standard Garamond is so beautiful? All this stuff is interesting and fun, but sometimes incredibly frustrating and astonishingly time consuming (hence my quietness around here lately).  I was reading a writing blog that made a great point: we are all so familiar with books, so used to handling them, that it's easy to underestimate how complex they are. So. Very. True. (And I thought - that reminds me of parenting. Because I saw other people's kids all around me all the time, because I was so familiar with their presence around me, I underestimated how complicated it would be to actually DO all that family stuff. But that's a different post).

***

On Tuesday, we were playing upstairs with the children's birthday toys - a train set and a play kitchen, since you asked. I was all for them sharing the two, but Jay thought they should start learning about having individual things, and I daresay he's right. On the morning of their birthday, when they unwrapped them (to squeals of delight), Pink's rapturous comment was "Oh hooray! Now Daddy and Blue can play with the trains and Mummy and Pink can do girls' things!"  Uh. "Girls can play with trains too, Pink," I said weakly, but my voice was drowned out by the sound of her offering everybody pieces of plastic chicken and slamming the oven door enthusiastically.

By Tuesday, the constant catering was beginning to pall and she flopped dramatically onto the bed and sighed deeply. "Mummy," she said, "when I see my new Mummy again?"

Uh, what? 'The new Mummy and Daddy' feature heavily in our adoption stories, but that's Jay and me - and then I realised she meant her first mother, and said "Do you mean your birthmummy?"
She nodded her head. "My birthmummy AND my birthdaddy" she said.
Woah, this is important. I thought.
"Does that make you feel sad?" I asked. "Would you like to see them?"
An emphatic yes.

I paused while I tried to think of something to say that would let her know she could share her feelings openly and freely; that this was an important but un-threatening topic; that she has the right to feel however she wants to feel about her own important and complex relationship with her other mother. Blue, of course, was still playing with his trains.

"And what would you say to her, sweetie, if you could talk to her now?" I asked, as gently and neutrally as I could.
"I would say 'YOU HAVE TO HAVE ANOTHER BABY!' " Pink said. "And then she would have another baby and we could take it home".
"Uhhhhhhhhh...." I said [and yeah, what would YOU have said????] and then - (when in doubt, ask another question) - "Why would you say that?"
"Because I want MORE BABIES!"
"Uhhhhhh.... okay." Clearly she's not having issues deciding whether this family should stop with two children. I envy her certainty. "I don't really think that's how it works, though, sweetheart." Does it? "If she had another baby, Pink, that would be her baby. It wouldn't be our baby".
"I want to go to my Ethiopia and get another baby!" she wailed. She then told me what she would name the babies (turns out that actually, it's twins again! What kind of luck is that?) and in the end the conversation - which really did start off being about her other mother, I think - was totally about wanting to be a big sister and control the lives of two babies who are - coincidentally - also called Pink and Blue. Just like the real children. And the twin baby dolls.
"Well, when you're a grownup, Pink, you can have as many babies as you like," I said.
She scowled at me.

No matter how much I've read, no matter how much I've thought, these conversations are never, ever, ever, ever what I'm expecting.

"I want another baby NOW!" she said, and I, lost for words, just had to say "I'm sorry Pink, but for now I think you're just going to have to be happy...

look away!!!!

...with the dolls."

The Evening After The Morning Before

Is it normal to have actual chest pains at the thought of a fourth birthday party? This morning, as I was icing a cake and preparing the house for an influx of miniature people, I could actually feel something like a band squeezing my heart. It was pretty painful, but there was a silver lining - at least if I have to go to hospital, I thought, I won't have to supervise ten children in a small space who are all hopped up on way too much refined sugar. 

I do know, by the way, that it is theoretically possible to do a party without a huge amount of sugar, but frankly I'm not sure what the point of that would be. They can have carrot sticks any day, and if their birthday party isn't fun and different then why would I do it? I'm not putting myself through this pain for my own edification. Also - let's be honest - things like healthy snacks require both preparation and planning, and neither of those are my special gifts. Neither is any other kind of party planning. In fact, I'd say that insofar as this birthday party had a theme, it could best be summed up as  Denial. I recommend it, I think. The way it works is that you pretend your children aren't actually having a birthday, and refuse to discuss or think about any details of a party until about four days beforehand when you pick a time at random and then send frantic invitational texts to their friends' parents.

The advantages of this approach are obvious - the late notice means fewer children can come; you can honestly answer all those what are we doing for my birthday questions with a legitimate I don't know; and no paper invitations means that you make significant savings on postage. However, the downside is - well, the chest pains, as you frantically try to do about three weeks' worth of organising in a few hours.

"What are we going to actually do with these children?" I said to Jay, during the ten-minute planning session we had on Thursday.
Jay suggested that he take the children down to feed the ducks. We live about twenty metres away from the river and the Thames Path goes practically right by our house. Just in case you think that makes us fancy - our tiny house was originally built to house abbatoir workers, since the river was the most convenient site for that kind of activity (don't think about that too hard. I try not to).
"Okay, ducks," I said.
"Musical statues?" he suggested. "Or maybe What's the Time, Mister Wolf?"
"We don't have a big enough yard for that" I said (because it's true).
"I know," he said. "We can just play it on the path beside the river."
"Problem with that," I said, "is that ten kids will kind of block the path, and then half of them will get run over by cyclists."
"Well okay then," he said. "Not the actual path, in that case. Just the bit before you get to the actual path."
"You mean the street?" I asked.
"Yeah, I guess" he said. "We won't play there for very long".
"The way things are going," I said, "I think people are just going to remember this party as the one where Jay and Claudia encouraged everybody to play on the road. What else are we going to do with them?"
A long pause.
"I don't know," he said. "Maybe television?"

I really wish that at least one of us had some kind of aptitude for this sort of thing. I begged my friends at work for help, and one of them suggested - brilliantly - the idea of sitting all the children down at a table, giving them some plain biscuits (you know that means cookies, right?), a few bowls of icing and some sparkly sprinkles and standing back while they 'decorate'. I told Jay about this, and then we had an argument about party bags. He's anti. I'm not really pro, but I don't really see how they can be avoided when you have ten little faces looking at you expectantly.

"Party bags always seem to have: something sticky, something to choke on, and something that will stain. Surely we can manage that? " I said.
"It's the principle" he said. "It's just plastic junk. Children need to accept that not every party has party bags."
This didn't sit right with me, and a day or so later it hit me why: any sentence that starts with Children need to accept.... is going to end in floods of tears. I can't be doing with that. In the end, I won, and we prepared to send the children home with their dubiously iced biscuits and tiny toy cars that were absolutely exactly windpipe-sized.

The chest pains continued as I iced an octo-alert onto a bought cake, introducing the party's sub-theme: copyright violations. Half an hour before it started, I realised I'd left an important part of the snack menu in a friend's car.

Then the children came, and it was awful. The whole thing was awful. One little boy licked all of the doritos and Blue got in massive trouble from Jay for some unsanctioned sampling of the cake.

Do you know what though?

In a horrible way, it was also kind of fun. I'm sitting here, about ten hours after the party ended, still wearing my paper octonauts hat and remembering that Blue walked into the kitchen then and said OH WOW, LOOK AT MY CAKE! He wasn't judging my skilz at all. The whole thing was an MSG and sugar-fuelled disaster, but they loved it.

They loved it.

Roll on next year.

I think.

War Stories

So a friend of mine recently had a baby. (Shocking, I know). She had difficulty conceiving this time around, and during that time I was the person she turned to.

I was happy to be there for her (obviously; she's my friend). But then she got ready to actually have the baby and suddenly I was surplus to requirements. I have exactly zero useful advice about what to pack for that particular journey. And then it all happened and the baby (lovely, of course) was born and I remembered how weird things always get after that.

There's this ... ritual that groups of mothers always go through when someone comes back to the group after giving birth. You know the one I mean, right? I mean the so, what was your labour and birth like? ritual. It's like the so, show us your ring! engagement ritual, but with way more mucous and placentas.

It's always a strange word salad of body parts and intimacies. It always sounds sort of like:
"Well I was only four centimetres, but then I remembered that when I was at four centimetres with Rose, Dave had gone to get coffee and ..." and then someone breaks in with "... I was being pushed down the corridor in a wheelchair, screaming and begging for an epidural..."and then suddenly everyone is talking and it's all "Honestly, I had no idea meconium was going to be that colour" "and he's yelling 'Push!' and I'm saying 'I am pushing!'" and then someone always says something like "Well when I had Charlie, of course, I thought I was never going to be able to poop again" and then everyone goes mmmmm-hmmmmmm, mmmmmmmm-hmmmmmmm because they have heard this story so often that it's practically like they were there when Charlie's shiny wet head started crowning. Suddenly I know all about all of their lady parts and they're sharing all this incredible detail but I never volunteer any information about my lady parts, ever. After all, they aren't doing anything interesting.

It's a strange and one-sided intimacy, and I've realised that I'm tired of not knowing what to say when other women swap these labor-and-birth war stories. More than that - I don't even know what to do with my face. Am I supposed to look interested? Curious? Sympathetic? Repulsed? I know what all the words mean, obviously, but I don't have any first hand experience. I don't have these war stories. I'm not ever going to have these stories.

I do get it. get it. I get that it's a big thing (fwoaaahh, I think a person just came out of me!) and I get that there is a lot to process. And I know that it's an important bonding experience for women, to swap The head was HOW big? And it came out of WHERE? stuff, but it makes me feel distinctly un-bonded and lonely. This is the weird side of adoption - the bits of the fallout that have nothing to do with how I relate to my children, and everything to do with how I relate to my friends.

After all, I don't think there's anything more isolating than a universal experience that you're not a part of, is there?

Four years into adoptive parenting, and sometimes these feelings still take me by surprise.

Twenty-Five Things I've Learned From Five Years Of Blogging

So Saturday was my blogoversary. Five years. Five years! It's been so much fun. Thanks so much for being here with me; it means more than I can say. Here's to the next five, right? (What a thought).

Anyway. I could reflect on the last five years, but I've already done that - see a) the archives and b) the book. And I generally try my hardest not to blog about blogging (see #8 below) but after five years of reading and writing blogs, I think I've earned this. So here goes, internet - here are my top 25 rules of blogging for fun and profit.

Look What The Postman Brought Me!

this is my happy face, believe it or not.

Paperbacks for checking. This is starting to get real, people!

By the way, I'm planning to have a launch party on facebook when it's time to go, a bit later in the summer. You'll have to photograph your own beverages and show me pictures. Please come. It'll be fun.

There will also be a giveaway of some of my favourite adoption books. I'm trying to narrow down my selection - there are so many good ones that I'm having a tough time choosing. Parenting Your Internationally Adopted Child is looking good, though. And Red Dust Road. And My Fathers' Daughter. And ... yeah. It's a tough job making these decisions, but someone's gotta do it.

So. Don't make me sit on facebook taking photos of my own champagne and winning books I already own all night, okay? Come. Promise? That means YOU.

But now - I'd better go - I have some shiny shiny covers to stroke.

Acceptance

So the other day, a friend was visiting and we were talking about our kids, of course, because we had already talked about television and we are too washed up and tired to talk about anything else. Our children are the same age and after we'd discussed all the boring stuff that people do in these situations, she said conversationally, "Do you know what, Claudia? I know they are the same age, but I really think my girl seems like she is a whole year older than your two." Then, on seeing my face, she added "I just mean developmentally."

my genius children

I was shocked into silence. My mouth was saying nothing, but my mind was working at warp speed.

What a ridiculous thing to say, I thought first. My kids are fine. FINE I TELL YOU! 

And then - How dare you, anyway! How dare you say that about my children! How could you be so ill-mannered? I have a good mind to pour my coffee all over you. 

Then I thought about all the stuff my children can do, and my mind continued with anyway, my children are doing all kinds of hard emotional work that your precious princess will never have to do. They are learning about families and complications and dealing with talking about how many parents they have, and why they never see two of them. They are facing the fallout of huge, grown-up decisions they had no hand in making, and they are doing it with such grace and good humour for such tiny people - I am so proud of them, every day. They are doing amazing things. EXCUSE ME if we haven't got around to spelling yet. 

But this was quickly followed by Oh no, when ARE we going to get around to spelling? Sometimes I don't think they'll ever be ready. They'll be behind before they go to school, and then they'll never catch up and they'll never be able to get a job and I'll have to keep working forever to support their cheerios habit and oh no, she's right, they are a year behind, she's right.... 

In other words, I cycled through the first four stages of grief- denial, anger, bargaining, depression - in under thirty seconds.

I quickly changed the subject, but I've continued to think about it, obviously. I  have been thinking how this conversation was actually pretty different from the ones that people normally have about kids' development. Those usually go Oh, your child isn't SPELLING yet? Really? Oh. Okay. Oh well, I'm sure they'll catch up. 

I know this stuff is well meant, but it always makes me think Oh yeah? And if not, then what? 

Because this is a weird thing about having three-year-olds. People are still talking as if they are all going to achieve equally. Uh, yeah, not so much, I don't think. We don't really know who will do what at this point but I do know some children will be capable of more than others. And if my child is at the bottom of the bell curve, if my child doesn't 'catch up', what happens then? There must come a point where people stop telling mothers that their child is going to catch up, a point where everyone realises yeah, that kid is really not ever going to be like the other kids. Or even if the child doesn't have obvious problems, there must come a point where the teacher realises that this child isn't going to set the world on fire, academically. This child is never going to catch up to Princess Perfect and her gang.

Maybe I should thank Princess Perfect's mother for her refreshing honesty. Or maybe I should just start criticising her kid's development, and see how she likes that. "Oh, Princess Perfect can't sing arpeggios yet? I guess it's like my children are a whole year older. I just mean musically." 

But what would be the point of that? Because a) it's rude, b) who cares what her child is doing, c) no, really, who cares, d) honestly? Who cares and also e) it's still as rude as it was at a).

But people talk as if this stuff matters. People tend to say that each child will 'catch up' with whatever imaginary milestone is being discussed, apparently, but if not then what? All this oh, they'll catch up makes me think the speaker feels like the alternative is too awful to even contemplate. If they don't catch up, does that render them unloveable?

Colour me obvious, but achievements and milestones are not what makes kids - mine or anyone else's - precious. I know we don't really think this is true, but if that's the case why do we talk like we do, about catching up, with all this boring competitiveness? Why did Princess Perfect's mother feel like she could be somehow proud of her child's superior development (whether imaginary or not)? I don't want my kids thinking that way about themselves, as if this is what makes them worthwhile. I don't want my kids thinking that way about other people, either. And by the way, I think this goes for the Oh, she may not be very clever but she's very kind stuff too. What happens when our children also have below average kindness? Because even that stuff isn't dished out evenly, is it? Not in my house, anyway.

My point is this - it's not a game. It's not a race. It's not a competition.

My children are unutterably precious to me for one reason, and only one - they are my children. They do not have to be better or faster or stronger or cleverer or taller than anybody else's to earn their place in my heart.

After all, isn't this why kids need families? The strongest, the fastest, the cleverest, the prettiest - they are the kids who would probably survive wherever and however they grow up. Families are what the rest of us need. Families are the places where we clutch our average children close to our average chests and run our fingers through their average hair and whisper in their average ears that nobody, nobody is more precious to us than them, and we say this because it's absolutely, totally true.

You know what? Maybe my children really are developmentally behind Princess Perfect. Maybe they always will be. And I would spare them hardship, if I could. I would like them to be clever and tall and beautiful and a dozen other things that would grease life's wheels for them. But I can't, and I wouldn't love them any more if I could.

I do think that my two are largely fine, developmentally, but that's not the point. And Princess Perfect's mother really was rude, but that's not the point either. And it's also not the point that my two are scaling emotional mountains no three year old should have to climb, or that actually, they may never 'catch up' academically, or that I may need to pay for their breakfast cereal until they leave home at forty-five.

The point is that we're a family, and I love them, and they're precious, and they're mine. And really, that makes the rest of it seem kind of irrelevant.

Public Service Announcement

Because sometimes I think we all need a bit of this.