Letters to my daughters (January ‘23): SELECT

My darling girls

Music lessons on a Saturday have become a bit of a challenge, haven’t they. And I don’t blame you for the complaints: getting up to go to a music lesson at 9am on a Saturday morning is demanding. I know – you’re tired from the week at school, and you probably just want to play Minecraft in your jimjams all day. I know.

But the thing is, I really want you to have a chance to learn about music and instruments and sound. And this is a good education. So, I override your choices and I stick true to my own. It is important to me – and so it becomes, necessarily, important to you too. Like it or not.

Urgh. “Like it or not.” That doesn’t seem right. I have been thinking about this recently – as I select what our summer holiday might look like, as I book you in to another after school club, as I prioritise a trip to a gallery over a visit to see friends. “Like it or not” suggests you don’t know what is good for you, and that the power is all mine.

As you grow, your preferences are becoming clearer – not just to me but to you too. You are becoming more assertive in what you want and how you’d like things to be. And I’m all for that. I spend my working day talking to clients about what they want – and how to achieve it. It feels wrong, somehow, to deny you that same opportunity to flex and express yourself. Choice and control.

But where is the line, or the balance, between those things I see as valuable and therefore important for your development– and those things that you would rather do instead? When do you get to choose what is best for you? How can we compromise, avert conflict – and feel happy about the shape of our lives? Control and choice.

This feels like a real work in progress – and something that will be in flux for as long as I feel I have a degree of control or influence over how you spend your time. You don’t know what is out there – and so I feel the need to lead you towards things that might inspire or excite you, albeit a to-do list I believe as valuable. (What do I know?)

And how far should I push, especially since one of you tends to say a firm ‘no’ to things before you’ve even tried them?

My feeling is that your childhood will not be remembered for the specific events, or the minute details. You might not even remember Andy or Maxine at Saturday morning music club. Like most of us, I suspect you’ll recall how you felt rather than the fine details of any event or phase itself.

I can recall specific events and significant people from my 8- and 5-year-old self, but mostly I remember how things seemed, and the strong emotions that came and went with what I experienced. I get a sense of a time or place, or what something or someone was like – like a taste or a flavour that either pleased me or not.

So of course, as your parent I want to make choices for you both that give you a sense of a happy, inspired, interesting childhood. You probably won’t remember the details, after all. That’s what we all want, right?

But maybe some of the feelings worth remembering, in time, will be about how you overcame difficulty, or how we came back from something that went wrong - building resilience and courage to do something new. Maybe some of the choices I make now will test you, stretch you, help you to grow.

In time, even now, you will know what the right choices for you are – and I hope I will have the wisdom and courage to let you make those decisions (and mistakes) for yourself.

I don’t want to push or coerce you to do things you don’t want to do, but I do think that my choices, however difficult or different they may be to your own, will teach you something – both about me and what I feel is important for your childhood, and about yourself as you face the challenge, or the pleasure, or the ambivalence towards a given situation.

My job now is to select wisely and to know the battles I want to fight. I’ve got to be able to stand by my choices and articulate why I feel these experiences are worth the arguments and the effort. I can’t promise I’ll always get it right, and I know that I will get some choices for you wrong.

So please be forgiving for the dud choices I might make and just know I am doing my best, sometimes with an ever-increasing degree of uncertainty and doubt about what the right thing to do actually is!

When you do find the parenting ‘how-to’ manual – please send me a copy.

Lots of love, your Mama X

p.s. I found something you (my first born) did at school this week in your book bag. It was a sweet piece of writing about what your dream is. You could have chosen anything, but it was about being the best recorder player you could be, the best in your group.  

You had to say how you were going to reach your goal and you stated you’d need to go to your music lessons every week and practice hard.  

Maybe I am not making such bad choices after all, and the fight to get there for 9am on a Saturday morning has more to do with Minecraft in your jimjams than I realise X