Children and our desperate love…
I’m totally and desperately in love with my cost centres. Smitten with the deep feelings of who they are. I recognise that evolution has engendered these feelings of protection to perpetuate human society but this expansive and all absorbing obsession is something else; it almost seems overkill. Sometimes I deliberately sit quietly around them and bask in the immense pleasure of listening to them nattering away, quarrelling or play fighting. It’s precarious to expound on the joy from their presence mingled with their unwritten ease in being around me in these moments but I could happily close my eyes and wish for it to never stop. Because there are times. Times when they do stop and they are not present even if they are physically with me.
It’s inconceivable until you have been through it to appreciate that when the kids are young you are their everything. You create, can take away and their love is unerring. But suddenly without warning you are not much more than a walking wallet who can make dinner. I’m forever trying to re-kindle the adoration; to be put back on that pedestal. As one of my friends confided in me — she bakes because her children love her for it and for a short while she is their world again. I know my cost centres see through my attempts to elicit a smile shone just for me. Perceive the looks of content that pass between husband and I as we watch them cavort comfortably together. But I don’t care how obvious I am. In those moments I am at my happiest. Ironic that the tables turn and that they have the power to turn me into this desperate, dependent child.
I’m not re-writing the past with a sparkling lipgloss. I absolutely remember that I have had many moments of boredom. From the numbing of children’s play; the repetitive monotonous dialogue of nursery age to the tedium of discussing poo colours with equally saddo parents. And who hasn’t got frustrated at the know it all, scummy, irreverence of the teenager? But despite that. I’m desperate to be liked but also want their respect; craving love but constantly pushing them to be the best they can be; enforcing rules but wishing I didn’t have to; remembering myself as a child and remembering that they are going through it at this very moment.
The relationship between parent and child is quite fraught in many ways. Managing the personalities of the multiple adjacencies with our children through time is tricky. For me parenting is akin to attempting to navigate a network of tight-ropes which are immediately re-configured at each level of youngling maturity. I like to believe our relationships have a natural easiness and perhaps that is true when children are young and require you. But I find myself much more aware of my words and actions with cost centre 2 as he has reached an age where my double standards don’t cut it anymore. Where my words have hidden meanings and are held up to be mis-interpreted, where my actions or lack of them can disappoint him; where my inability to show him true respect hurts his ego. You feel perilous in the knowledge that you can so quickly move from succeeding to scorn in a blink of the eye; ready to fall to your doom with a slip of the tight rope. (He thought I was being a bit overly dramatic here by the way!)
I have this childish vanity that this mother — child relationship will blossom into friendship when we have shed the skin of this parental mantle. As the truth is, abandonment by my children as soon as they can is one of the most piercing worries I carry about my person. But despite this system frailty I think I have done enough to ensure cost centre 2 loves and needs me. With all my flaws, temper and brutishness he does. For that I am forever grateful and more than willing to continue to abase my self to the altar of desperate love to ensure that it remains that way.
