Tuesday 6 December 2011

Cold

Sometimes I fail. Sometimes I don’t go the extra mile for my daughter. Sometimes I take the easy option. Like today.

Tonight, my daughter should be at her last Girl Guides meeting before Christmas. But she won’t be.

It's an outside meeting, involving a long walk in the cold to look at the Christmas Lights, and ending up with a pit stop for chip shop chips on the Market Square.

I started my usual stream of consciousness plan of action in my head: “Right, she’ll need her thermal gloves and socks on, but her hands and feet will still be cold, because of her poor circulation, which means she’ll feel more hungry and more tired, because the cold does that to her, also she obviously can’t have chips, so I should send her with a bag of Skips as an alternative because they’re reasonably low calorie, but what about the smell of the chips, that'll be torture, and then they said they’re also having a hot chocolate, well, where from, and will they be able to give her ‘light’ hot choc if I provide it, and where exactly will they be at 8pm, because she's so obsessive about her bedtime lately I've been picking her up from Guides half an hour early , but if they're out and about how easy will this be?”

And then I stopped.

I was tired. I should have organised this before. It would just be easier if she didn’t go.

This is why I looked at my daughter and I said: “Do you really want to go? And watch all the other girls eat chips? And get cold and exhausted?”  

Of course, when I put it like that, she said “No”.

I’m not very proud of those questions. They were too harsh, too leading, and too cold. They go against the grain. Against our usual ethos of sorting stuff out, working out wonky, roundabout solutions, and finding alternative ways for her to join in. 

It wasn't my finest hour.


Song is The Ruts - It Was Cold




2 comments:

  1. She goes to Guides?? Well done you. I gave up taking Eve after 3 weeks...too heartbreaking to pick her up, two hours after her normal bedtime, obvs exhausted and finding it impossible to keep up with the chatter and noise of the other girls. She loved Brownies, wish she could have stayed there longer. Still looking for suitable after school activities.....
    Rachel xx

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  2. She's previously done really well at Guides (see Camp and First). I think it helped that a lot of the girls had been to school with her when they were younger and had been through Brownies with her, so made allowances for her 'lagging behind' in conversation. But because we've moved and she doesn't know the girls, and because of her recent struggles with late nights, I'm not so sure she can cope as well as before. Hence my cop-out on this occasion, as described above!

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