Yesterday I got up and did the school run. It was interspersed with a lecture from me to my daughter about how she really should do the athletics meet that had been selected for after school. What is it with girls and sport? It's a widely held observation that many girls give up sport by the age of 14; the effort and coaching involved in maintaining sport as part of my daughter's life is huge. She's good at it and it makes her feel good, but getting her motivated sometimes borders on that awful kind of parental pressure. I don't want to be a pushy parent, I don't need her to relive my sporting past through hers. I don't want to exist vicariously through her and achieve first place in the running race, metaphoric or literal. The reason I want her to do sport is because:
She gets endorphins.
She is part of a team.
Sport becomes a facet of her life that she can always draw from.
Beating heart, stretched muscles, interested brain - all good.
It makes her stronger.
It makes her confident.
She releases stress and toxins.
It will make her more resilient in life when it gets hard(er).
It's something she can do that is not on her phone.
For a teenage girl all of the above are important. So it's with a heavy heart that I exert pressure on her to try to maintain the sport in her life. It comes at a price and I dropped her off yesterday feeling wretched that I had been too hard on her. Texted apologies later and we mended the rift. I walked the pup at the beach feeling anxious that I'd upset her, that my reasoning had been off, that she misunderstood my message. This is the abiding emotion I notice right now, parenting a teenager. Conversations are often followed by my analysis and regret and a wish to re-run things. It has become harder to make myself understood as the generational gap widens.
But by mid morning I had shaken it off. I instead went for a bike ride with my husband who was working from home, we cycled to a waterside pub, sat outside and ate scampi and chips and then cycled home again along the canal towpath. We watched our son play cricket in the afternoon at one of the most beautiful schools in the county, surrounded by countryside. It was an idyll and I was reminded again of how lucky I am. I have a friend who has moved here 'down from London'. This stereotype (the 'DFL') applies to those who have moved South to escape the city and with whose eyes I can see a whole different place to the one I grew up in. They relish the beach, don't notice the summer people, take up every and each opportunity to suck the marrow out of living on the coast. I try to put myself in their shoes.
Meanwhile my friend Dawn came to stay. Twenty four hours in her company is enough to reset me. She listens to my bullshit, says it's bullshit and then listens to more bullshit. This is the measure of an old friend.
At dinner, my husband asks me why I keep buying Orichiette pasta. I tell him it's because I like the name. Simple pleasures.
Over half term my son persuaded me to get him a fish as a pet. In my day that meant a fish bowl and a goldfish. Turns out things have changed and now it means filters and aquariums and special processes to check nitrate levels in the water. And not a single goldfish but a whole shoal of little minnow-type fish. Like everything else in the world, it's all got super-complicated. Anyway, I had said I would, so we did and now we are a week into being fish owners. One of the fish is not happy; we have four. Her name is Victoria. My son is worried about her as she stays at the bottom of the tank and doesn't shoal with the rest. It's pretty pitiful actually and I now have the guilts about the fact that I can't improve Victoria's life. No one likes an unhappy fish! I'll keep you posted...!!
