Closing the gaps

We always try to give our kids the things we didn’t have.

For some time it has struck me that the aim of parenting as far as my friends are concerned, is to give their children the things in which they feel their own childhood was lacking.

My friend was the second eldest, the dependable one, of four children. Her family was not wealthy, often struggling financially during her formative years. Looking back, it’s the ‘stuff’ that sticks out most in her mind. The new clothes which she didn’t have, the shiny car her parents didn’t drive.

When she had her own daughter, she became a single parent. After living on a tiny budget for two years, she began paid employment. At the time, despite her intelligence, she was young and not well qualified. She didn’t have the pick of the job centre but set her mind that her daughter was going to have the things she missed during her own childhood.

That was eight years ago, and her daughter is no spoilt princess, but she has lovely clothes, shiny, hi-tech toys. Her mum drives a shiny car which is updated yearly and she lives in a comfortable home. For this, my friend holds down three jobs.

The one thing her daughter doesn’t have is time.

My childhood, on the other hand, was a world apart from hers. Both my parents had full time careers, which ate into time at home as well as during the working day. We lived in a big house with a large and intriguing garden in which I was largely unsupervised. My grandmother lived with us and I was rarely entirely alone but most of the time neither of my parents were around.

I had everything most children would want. My bedroom housed ever expanding libraries of books and toys and I kept up expensive hobbies without worrying that the money wouldn’t be there to pay for them. My parents had new cars every year and I went to a private school.

The one thing I didn’t have was their time. From the age of 7 months I was farmed out to a
childminder and put into school early.

And now I have two children of my own: one large, one small. I am a single parent living on a tiny income, trying to find ways to squeeze some earning around my daughter’s waking patterns. We have very little in material terms. A few of the nicer things we have were left from my separation and are getting tatty. The possibility of replacing them is always just out of sight.

This is the only job I have and I take it just as seriously as any other. I do my best to give my children my time and my presence. Maybe they’ll grow up and work non stop to provide their kids with everything they could desire, but to my mind, parental time is missing from so many children’s lives that without it, the stable childhood that is needed for people to grow into stable adults is disappearing fast.

At once I have the same and opposite view to my friend. We’re both trying to fill the gaps from our own childhoods, but they are different gaps and so the method of filling them remains individual.

Letter from Afghanistan

It began one very drunken night in late September 2005: one very drunken night. A matter of weeks later and the man with whom I’d spent that drunken night had joined the army and was enjoying the rigours of Basic Training. A few weeks after that and I felt duty bound to ask whether he was alone before I told him over the phone that I was pregnant with his child.

He was not the first person to know about my pregnancy, but about the seventh. I would have been happy to tell him sooner but he’d been on exercise and, frankly, had just about had enough of me acting like a weirdo anyway so I didn’t think he’d call back straight away.

There was never, ever any doubt in my mind that I wanted to keep the baby.

Of course, this is wrapped up with how the rest of my life was going at the time which was, in truth, bad. On the work front I was screwing up my job due to choosing it badly, on the money front I was skint and on the relationship front I’d broken up with the rebound fling (shortly before the drunken night in September) only to realise that all I’d done was postpone the sadness and emptiness of the loss of my previous relationship. I’m entirely prepared to admit that if these had all been better, then having a baby in adverse circumstances might not have looked so appealing.

But this is it. I defend absolutely the right to access safe abortion but I’d only ever take that choice in the most extreme of circumstances.

So Mr One Night In September (Mr ONIS) said that I had his full support whatever my choice was. I had already made that choice, he flatly refused to tell me what he would have done, on the grounds that if he wanted me to terminate the pregnancy I’d be upset and if he said that he really wanted us to have the baby I wouldn’t believe him. I still don’t know his initial thoughts on finding out I was pregnant.

Pregnancy is an odd time which can wreak havoc with feelings and bodies and during which, because of the British Army, I barely saw Mr ONIS and would honestly have had trouble picking him out of a line up.

The baby, our little girl, arrived two weeks early. I wouldn’t want to bore anyone with the details of her birth. It’s enough to say that I managed to time it perfectly as MR ONIS was on weekend leave. He met my mum for the first time in the labour room, and behaved impeccably throughout.

Since then, since he’s been in my life as much as our daughter’s, I find that new parts of my personality are coming through, and his accepting and steady nature has rubbed off a little on me. I stopped taking myself so seriously, chilled out a little and got a lot happier in the process.

Having not asked for her or planned her, there is no doubting the quality of fathering that our daughter receives, despite the army taking him away regularly and sometimes completely out of contact on exercise. I adore him as a human being but most of all as a father, I’m in awe of the way he’s taken it in his stride and consistently shows how much he loves her.

The most impressive thing is the impact that observing Mr ONIS with our daughter has had on my dad. I have never been the ‘Daddy’s girl’, when my sister in law told me that “you’re always your dad’s little girl” I remember thinking “No I’m not”. And I wasn’t. We weren’t close and had nothing apart from genes in common. I was a burden and a nuisance: the third child he didn’t really want but was stuck with anyway. Seeing Mr ONIS refer to our daughter by various clichéd pet names (‘angel’, ‘princess’, ‘beautiful’ etc), my dad began to use them about me. It was as though, once there was someone to model the behaviour of ‘having a little girl’, Dad treated this as instructional and followed suit. Suddenly, as an adult, I have become my dad's little girl.

Further, Mr ONIS values what I do. I am at home with our little girl now until she starts school. I’m fairly typical of modern mothers who experience guilt at their own choices as a defining feature of motherhood. (Few men have the same contradictory expectations foisted on them by the media and Society At Large so, no, I’m not including them in that statement.) I often feel that I should be doing everything better, shinier and with paid employment. Often, my degree feels like a waste.

It’s difficult to remain indifferent to the conflicting media messages about being a mother and, whatever your choice, it helps to have a supportive someone telling you how well you’re doing. I have that someone and he’s called Mr ONIS (not his real name).

But Mr ONIS has been away, playing an important-but-not-frontline role in the War on Terror [sic] in Afghanistan, since the beginning of April.

I made up my mind, from the outset, that as he hadn’t asked to have the massive emotional tie of a child, and that the rest of his army career hinged on how this tour went, I would do what I could from this end. To this end, I have sent him a weekly parcel of a copy of Nuts [sic and sick], puzzles from the Guardian, books, silly toys, toiletries, sweets and, fortnightly, a copy of Bizarre magazine. I’ve written emails or eblueys almost daily. He’s been away so long now that it’s just become a habit. Every week I say to the newsagent “It’s not for me!” as I pick up his copy of Nuts.

Inevitably, this hasn’t been matched by communication from his end. Realistically, it was never going to be. Where I can comfortably write (or talk) for hours, he keeps his own counsel a lot more. The letters I’ve had in return have been few and jokey. It’s not worth upsetting myself over, though. I have no idea what things are really like out there, no idea what he’s seen. I had never considered, in my boring civilian life, that anyone might be listening to or reading my communications but there is no escaping that possibility during a satellite phone call to a soldier on ops.

At first I was worried about who I’d be without him, but as the days, weeks and months have been slowly crossed off the calendar I realise that for the first time in years, I am happy. I’m not happy that he isn’t here, but I’ve found my feet, made social links, I’ve been writing again for the first time in (?) ages. The garden which Mr ONIS began excavating and remodelling is finished, I’ve been on holiday, redecorated, acquired large houseplants and dyed my hair pink.

The question now is not who am I without him but who I’ll be when he gets back. I realise this is horribly navel gazing but he’ll have changed (inevitably), I’ve changed. Will he still like me? Will we get on?

I don’t have the answers, and although, actually, the time has gone fast, I am now as nervous about his return as I was about him leaving.

Trapped In The Night Garden

“The night is black and the stars are bright and the sea is dark and deep.”

If you, like me, are the parent of a toddler you will probably recognise these words immediately as the opening to In ‘The Night Garden’, the now ubiquitous television show aimed at pre-speech and early speech toddlers. The gently hypnotic narration can lull even the most stubborn two year old into at least a temporary calm.

However, that has been won in part by getting parents on side. That’s not always difficult, because the parents of very young children (frequently mothers) mostly welcome a quality programme which will allow them thirty minutes respite to close their eyes, play catch up with the housework, read, chat on the phone or even (shock) watch with their child.

These days, there is not excuse for not knowing that excessive television is harmful for developing brains (and possibly for fully developed brains, too), but restricting television time can be a challenge in an age when so many channels of digital and satellite are dedicated to beaming in the dregs of children’s television. The absence of television can equal high effort parental input activities which leave the parent (usually mother) frazzled, and using television to give yourself a little bit of a break can be utterly guilt inducing.

‘In The Night Garden’ stands head and shoulders apart from the maelstrom of nonsense that passes for children’s entertainment. Possibly because it is equally hypnotic for tired parents as it is for young ‘uns.

The soothing colour scheme of the set is green on green, with characters sleeping in dens in caves and bushes, on a boat and in a magical bed which comes when you call it, out in the open and gently shaded air. Multicoloured birds sing individual songs which harmonise together at the end of each show to form one big chorus. Of course, they are not called ‘birds’ in the Night Garden, they are ‘titifers’.

A friend recently confessed, sheepishly, that she’d quite like to visit the Night Garden and crash out in Upsy Daisy’s bed under a starlit canopy of leaves. Someone else is captivated by the interior of the Tombliboo bush and I’ve been coveting Makka Pakka’s colourful duvet cover and minimalist cave bedroom for months. ‘In The Night Garden’ is the chill out room to the frenetic pace of some of the other children’s programming on television. In fact, it was created in part as a response to the permanent state of anxiety we feel about almost everything in the early C21st.

Aside from the seductive design and hypnotic narration, the Night Garden is exceptionally well thought out, as commentary from the show’s creators, Anne Wood and Andrew Davenport, who also developed the Teletubbies product.

Each episode runs like a well executed lesson plan, with an ice breaker, an introduction, a story and a plenary session where you figure out what just happened. Structurally, it borrows from books with different markers representing the turning of a page or the ending of a chapter, and the recap at the end features the same story told using more formal language, such is the difference between books and speech.

Reassurance is a major theme in ‘In The Night Garden’, beginning each time with a ‘shared moment’ between parent and child at bedtime and repeating the same predictable pattern consistently throughout. Clues lead to expected and sensible answers, friends look after each other and everything is as it should be. Arguably, these are features which many parents feel are missing from their lives, but begs the question of whether one half hour shot of viewing can fix that.

An inevitable part of reassurance is the social and emotional aspect, which is heavy handed in ‘In The Night Garden’. Whilst all the characters have roles within the overall social and emotional well being of the Garden, there is one character in particular which seems to do the majority of sorting out, cheering up and general companionship. That character loves flowers and kisses, dancing and singing and has the signature colour: pink. Yes that’s right. The key vehicle for much of the programme’s feel good factor is Upsy Daisy... A GIRL.

Alright, she’s not actually a girl, she’s a doll, but she’s unmistakeably a girl doll which wears a skirt and has pink ‘hair’.

Really, this is a minor factor in the story of the Night Garden, but there it is, again and again. An entire cast of characters which, without any suggestion to the contrary appear to be male (with the exception of Mummy Pontipine who, frankly, is so neglectful I’m surprised the NSPCC haven’t intervened) and a lone girl who does what girls, ladies and women, those ‘loveliest of creatures’ have taken full responsibility for since the first hints of the Industrial Revolution.

Admittedly, the burden is shared, and Upsy Daisy doesn’t carry the full weight of it alone. Makka Pakka washes faces and everything else in sight like a demented child given a sponge for the first time, before the novelty has worn off. The characters, unlike small people, are endlessly compliant at having their faces washed, which provides an excellent model of behaviour for toddlers everywhere. Additionally, the Tombliboos seem utterly capable of brushing their teeth (in mouths which don’t open and using tooth brushes as big as their heads) without the supervision of either Upsy Daisy or Makka Pakka. Surely they deserve a gold star for that?

The thing is, Upsy Daisy is a sweetie. She’s the kind of girl who thinks of others and helps them whenever she can. She’s Carrie the Caregiver, for crying out loud.

I’m not suggesting that ‘In The Night Garden’ is a primary vehicle for social change, but it is setting a standard and giving parents expectations of the kind of behaviours they want to encourage in their children. More specifically, girl children: every other character is probably a boy and with the exception of brushing their own teeth and a slight obsession with hygiene, they behave in much the same ways as boys have forever and are not discouraged from doing so. Why not? Because for boys, this behaviour is not detrimental: it’s good to be a risk taker and to have a laugh. Upsy Daisy, on the other hand, is channelled into acting for the happiness of others, all the time.

Although it is unlikely that any toddler would absorb this behaviour via a television programme and proceed to act it out for the next seventy years, the idea that it does nothing to challenge the Cinderella Complex (Colette Dowling) whereby girls are groomed socially from birth to grow into adults who take responsibility for the social, emotional and often physical wellbeing of others. This is important and exhausting but undervalued work. The Tombliboos, on the other hand, get to act silly and are disproportionately rewarded for managing to do basic things. Give it twelve years, and you’ll see this is how boys are treated. With regard to almost whatever they do, it is worth more than the default ‘feminine’ work of the Upsy Daisies we continue to nurture everywhere, without a second thought.

Wide Mouth Frog Story

Shopping in Borders on Sunday morning, I noticed a children’s picture book telling the story of the joke of the wide mouth frog. It is beautifully illustrated with a hand puppet wide mouth frog in the centre of the book, ready to make the joke come alive.

In case you are not familiar with it, the wide mouth frog joke is highly visual and involves two main faces, one for the wide mouth frog and then another for the wide mouth frog when she’s trying to pretend not to be a wide mouth frog. It goes along the lines, with many variations, of a wide mouth frog going to the zoo to ask other animals what they eat until one says it eats wide mouth frogs.

It’s a joke that can be taken on face value, and certainly doesn’t appear at first glance to have sinister connotations, and the range of voices and facial expressions make it popular with children.

I’ve got a small problem with it, though.

(Small problems with cultural products come naturally to me, raised in the era of boycotting South African bananas and writing to the BBC to complain about the portrayal of Black people in soap operas.)

My problem is with the provenance of the joke.

Despite being an avid collector of jokes, my first encounter with the wide mouth frog was neither in a playground or a pub, but in Alan Dundes’ 1987 book ‘Cracking Jokes: Studies of Sick Humour Cycles and Stereotypes’. This is not light reading, but fantastic for anyone who may have noticed patterns in the way stupid jokes break down into trends and come and go. Not the clever jokes that are always funny, but the ones that are kind of silly and all fit into a wider category.

Dundes links the popularity of certain jokes with current events. Although it is easy to dismiss such a theory, as there is rarely hard evidence to work from, it is at very least plausible to say that the surge of dead baby jokes that appeared in the late 1970s mirrored the Roe v Wade case, and that the wave of elephant jokes was actually relating to the popularity of the Democrats in the USA in the early 1960s. Linking in with the wide mouth frog jokes, Dundes and his co-author Roger D. Abrahams offer the interpretation that the elephant in the jokes represented White America’s elephant in the room: the end of segregation and the big and righteous push toward equality for Black America.

The wide mouth frog jokes came later than the elephant jokes, beginning to enter circulation in the early 1970s USA. Most tellers of the joke were unable to offer much in the way of interpretation, but Dundes’ conviction that jokes do not exist in a vacuum but as part of a society and popular folklore begs further analysis of this category of jokes.

This concept fits with the idea that humour falls broadly into three central categories, although that itself is hugely oversimplified. The three categories are: incongruity; superiority and relief. Dundes’ explanation of the metaphor behind the wide mouth frog jokes dovetails neatly with the third, tension relieving branch of humour.

This is where the fact that such a book has made it into print and into a major bookselling chain becomes slightly shocking.

Dundes argues strongly that the joke is in fact an analogy of the survival tactics of Black Americans. This works on two levels, the first is that the frog enters the zoo from a free world. On entering the zoo, it enters a closed society with unwritten rules and the frog has to learn to toe the line with these rules or face being eaten.

Although this can be taken to apply to outspoken people of any political persuasion when coupled with the speech patterns required for the joke, the need to conform and quiet down appears to be directed squarely at Black Americans, or at least a certain stereotype of Black Americans that was in circulation in the early 1970s. This is evident in the way sounds are made if you force your mouth into a maniacal grin when you speak. It produces a peculiar accent similar to ridiculous clichés of ‘Black American’ (Southern?) speech. As such, the wide mouth frog joke provides a socially sanctioned outlet for white people to ‘talk Black’, though, as Dundes notes, “what the Whites who talk Black say is that Blacks ought to be forced to talk White.”

But it seems that I’m alone in finding the wide mouth frog story book really, really offensive. After all, it’s a silly joke about a frog in a zoo. The book is sturdy and colourful and involves little more than silly voices. Unfortunately, I’m not convinced.

As Dundes says: “Racism need not be conscious to be destructive.”