You're Never Alone With A Head Full Of Relatives....

You might think after umpteen years of investigating my internal world, I would be adept at managing the ancestral voices in my head. You would be wrong.

Rooting through the fridge today, I came across a paper bag of slimy mushrooms, the unsuspecting victims of my current domestic lethargy. I was just about to put them in the compost pile when I heard my long-deceased grandma’s voice in my head.

“Eeh bah gum!” she said. “Dost tha ‘ave money to burn?” (She really, really did used to say “eeh bah gum!”, arms thrust under her ample bosom and mouth set firmly, waiting for a suitable reply.)

I don’t have money to burn, nor do I have a mint in the garage or a money tree in the garden.

Chop onion and garlic very finely and sweat in a generous knob of butter.

My son is very fond of home made mushroom soup. I took him to a friend’s for lunch when he was three. “Mushroom soup? “ she asked.

“Mmmm, my favourite” he replied.

She placed a bowl in front of him and he took a taste.

“Is this from a can?” he asked innocently, “because mummy makes her own, and I really only like it home-made.”

“You,” she responded to me, accusingly, “are making a rod for your own back.”

I fear she was right.

Sort through bag of mushrooms, composting the worst and peeling and finely chopping the rest. 20 minutes. Pour large glass of gin and tonic.

My grandma was born in 1912, leaving school at the age of 14 to work in the Yorkshire cotton mills. Life was hard, and food was not for throwing away, even if it was growing its own life forms. She married young and had children straight away, family planning in those days consisting mostly of crossing fingers – and legs – and slapping the husband hard when he came home from the pub. She had an amazing capacity for conjuring up a family meal out of bugger all, and although it was comprised mostly of flour, lard, water and those bits of the animal that the posh folk wouldn’t eat, I remember her as a wonderful cook. I developed a fondness for stodgy dumplings and neck end of lamb as a small child, although I would caffle at the sheeps’ brains, pigs’ trotters and tripe that she would serve up for my granddad.

Sweat mushrooms for as long as it takes to get rid of the slime. About another 20 minutes. Pour another large glass of gin and tonic.

The Mother has the same skill, and would produce daily meals for our family of seven from a bag of flour, a block of lard, a couple of bendy carrots and whatever the butcher was throwing out. The Mother retains her fondness for lard, and will buy some in especially when Sister #2 visits from Italy.

“I’ve bought you some lard!” she announces, the minute my sister arrives on her annual visit.

“Fabulous” responds Sister, “because Italian extra virgin olive oil really is so disappointing when you have been brought up on beef dripping.”

Stir in a suitable amount of flour, and cook it out for at least 3 minutes, stirring continuously.

The Sister leaves after a month, half a stone heavier and about to birth a 9lb meat and potato pie.

Add enough vegetable stock until desired consistency is achieved. Thicken slowly…remember just in time that under no circumstance must it boil. Approximately 3 minutes.

I have successfully abandoned my maternal line’s attachment to carbohydrates and cheap cuts of meat. I still can’t throw food away though.

Add some black pepper, a handful of finely chopped flat leaf parsley and a dash of single cream. Ready to serve.

So I appear to have spent the best part of an hour making a single bowl of mushroom soup. One, measly, single bowl of soup. Granted, I have simultaneously marinated a chicken in garlic, lemon, coriander and chilli and prepared some vegetables for roasting, but nonetheless the voices in my head have convinced me that an hour’s worth of soup-making is morally superior to composting a bag of slimy mushrooms.

If someone could persuade me that feeding my son slimy mushrooms is damaging to his health, I would be most grateful.

More Drivelling Nonsense From The Conservative Party...

Whatever happened to Ian Duncan Smith? Since his whimpering demise from the top job IDS has apparently been heading up The Social Justice Policy Group, a think tank charged with meeting the challenge of social exclusion via policy recommendations to the Conservative party. He has clearly been a busy, busy man because today saw the publication of Breakthrough Britain, a 691 page report rehashing the same old family values toss outlining some truly groundbreaking ideas for tackling Britain's social problems.

My particular favourite is that the government should incentivise marriage through the tax system. Apparently this would work wonders, because there is considerable evidence that children of separated parents do less well at school and are more likely to become involved in petty crime.

My psychology training has led me to believe that children require a stable, loving relationship with at least one parent in order to develop a secure sense of self. Add to that a healthy mix of respect, security and boundaried parenting and you are unlikely to produce a granny basher or drug dealer. But apparently not. My training has it all wrong. All you require is for your parents to be married, and to stay married, and what better way to do that than offer incentives in people's pay packets? God knows, I would definitely stay in a miserable and unloving marriage if the government were willing to pay me fifty quid a month to do it. Well worth it, don't you think? And so good for the children. "I know you are deeply traumatised by the misery of our family life, darling, but don't worry, I am putting the fifty quid away in your post office savings account and it will pay for your therapy when you leave home."

Do you think we will ever again see a government that can actually do joined up thinking? Are there any politicians left who know how to have an intelligent, serious and insightful debate into why we have some of the most serious social problems in Europe and a generation of young people who believe that social exclusion is the norm? Does IDS really, really believe that incentivising marriage will go anywhere towards addressing the deep rooted problems of people living on the margins of society?

I think Betsy has been putting something in his tea. If not, perhaps she ought to.

On Yummy Mummies...

Something has gotten under my skin today. I shan't tell you what it is. I wondered whether to blog it, and then remembered that I already had, back in the days when I didn't have any readers. First aired in November, now to be found on UK Gold.

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What a monster we have created.

Who decided that we should professionalise motherhood? Don’t get me wrong, I object to the double shift that most women work as much as the next card carrying feminist, and I have always believed that raising our children should go down as our best achievement as we prepare to shuffle off this mortal coil. But when our sisters in the sixties and seventies fought for the private sphere to be made political – and for women’s work in the home to be recognised as, indeed, work - did they realise they were tilling the ground for the emergence of a new form of child abuse in the form of the career-mother? I suspect not.

Everybody knows one. The stay-at-home mother who feeds her pre-school child on a diet of Tumble Tots, Monkey Music and Play Group For The Gifted Child, followed by an hour of Mozart, a soupçon of French for toddlers, and some basic pre-verbal algebra. They relax by making pictures with macaroni or baking organic, wholemeal fairy cakes and the day hasn’t ended successfully until daddy has read a chapter from ‘Homer: the Picture Book’. The poor child ends another day wondering whether it has made the grade.

Do they realise that, as mother subjects them to yet another round of work toddler stylee, she is doing this out of love? I suspect not. Do they somehow recognise that mother is doing this out of a desire to offset her own fears of inadequacy? That their own emotional needs are secondary? Eventually, I suspect, they do.

Just for the record, children (in particular very small children) require relationship above all else. Over-structuring their time leaves little room for the spontaneous development of attachment that will provide the blue print for all of their later relationships. That is not to say that intellectual stimulation and structure are not important. But they really should take second place to the child’s capacity to experience itself in relation to a loving and accepting other. Sitting with your child in front of CBeebies, chatting and taking pleasure in their pleasure, is, ironically, probably far better for their emotional development than any number of outings to Professional Toddler Stimulation plc.

You know who you are. Please just stop it.

PS. I have a friend of a friend who is über Yummy Mummy. Her husband is a surgeon. She refuses to do his washing or ironing (she does her own and the children’s) and hires a cleaner on the grounds that ‘my job is motherhood’. I must admit – child development issues aside - I can’t help but admire her chutzpah.

Sometimes Step-Parenting Is Hard

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

Have I ever mentioned the fact that I am a step-parent? We are what the textbooks refer to as a ‘blended family’: me and my son, The Husband and his daughter. We look like a perfectly normal family. The children very easily pass for siblings except that that they don’t invest their energy in trying to secretly maim, shame or kill each other. They get on like a house on fire. They are, in fact, great friends and will hug warmly when they come back to our house after a period with ‘the other parents’ (as we quaintly call them.) I have read a lot about step-parenting. Partly for my work with young mothers where step-parenting is becoming the norm, and partly to reassure myself that it really is as difficult as it feels sometimes.

So we look like a perfectly normal family. Except that slightly hidden from view are a variety of relationships that play out in different ways and at different times.

I love my son with an animal instinct. I am convinced that I would lay down my life for him. I would step in front of the bus. Sometimes my husband is jealous.

I love my step-daughter because she is bright, funny, engaging and loveable. And she is my husband’s daughter and I love my husband. Sometimes she challenges me for her father’s love. She always wins. I would hesitate before stepping in front of the bus. I may not step out. I have my child to think of.

I love my husband just because. (I do not intend to get sentimental or shower him with praise. But I really do love him a lot.) However much I love him, I wouldn’t step in front of the bus. I have my child to think of. Sometimes he wants to be number one.

My husband loves his daughter with an animal instinct. He is a fantastic dad, and hasn’t designated his parenting duties to me, as many fathers will do when they meet a new partner. He is mother and father to her when she is with us. He would step in front of the bus. Sometimes I am jealous.

My husband loves me, and I trust that his love is sound. He would not step in front of the bus. He has his child to think of. Sometimes I want to be number one.

My husband loves my son because he is bright, funny, engaging and loveable. And because he loves me. Sometimes son challenges husband for my love. Son always wins. Husband would hesitate before stepping in front of the bus. He has his own child to think of.

Half of the time we are four. But when we are four, we are sometimes two and two. Occasionally we are two and one. Sometimes we are just two. And each has its own dynamic quietly playing out.

It is only right and proper that my son knows he is first in my life. It is only right and proper that my step-daughter knows she is first in her father’s life. That is how it should be for children. It breaks my heart when I work with young mothers who meet a new partner and consistently prioritise him over their children, so desperate are they for another to love them. Parenting books tell us that we should not allow children to ‘come between’ two parents as it gives the child too much power and an illusion of grandeur. Step-parenting books skirt delicately around the issue. We are afraid of naming it. We are afraid of the primal feelings of jealousy, envy, rage and triumphalism.

Sometimes you have to step into someone else's shoes. Sometimes I back my husband into a corner and compel him to talk about it. That is the deal when you marry a therapist. Things get talked about.

We are a happy family. I’m glad we can think the unthinkable.

On Meeting Our Children's Needs...

I posted recently about the Internal Critic(s), and how we, as children, internalise external hostility or disapproval in an attempt to control our impulses and make our external world safe. I have been pondering since then about how that post was received by people who are also parents. We all have multiple selves who interpret the world through their own particular framework; this is most apparent for those of us who have a (real)* parent self with the responsibility of care-taking and nurturing our own children. Whilst our ‘child self' may have felt validated by the argument I presented, it is possible, if not highly likely, that our 'parent self' might feel guilty about it’s own capacity to raise a child with good self-esteem. I think a post on one strand, therefore, automatically necessitates a post on the other strand. And then Atyllah produced a wonderful post on the problems of the ‘self-esteem movement’ in the US, and how overly positive parenting is producing a generation of young people with narcissistic disorders. A lovely synchronicity.

So this post is for all parents (or prospective parents), in case you had decided you should hand your children over to the perfect parenting brigade for their own well-being.

Winnicot talked of ‘good enough parenting’ and argued convincingly that whilst small babies need parents who can anticipate and meet their needs satisfactorily, developing children need only have some of their needs met by their parents for healthy psychological growth. He argues that:

The good-enough mother...starts off with an almost complete adaptation to her infant's needs, and as time proceeds she adapts less and less completely, gradually, according to the infant's growing ability to deal with her failure... (My italics)

D.W.Winnicot (1951) Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena

Small children are by their very nature grandiose and egotistical. They wish to control their world, to ensure that their every need is met and that the world responds only to their wishes. (Of course they do. Who wouldn't? I would, if I thought I could get away with it.) Our job as parents is to ensure that we do meet their essential physical and relational needs, but, importantly, that we enable them to regulate their internal, emotional experience when we fail to meet their ego-needs. Our job, in fact, is sometimes to let them down and then allow them to feel the rage and grief that ensues.

Kohut called this a process of transmuting internalisation. He argues that failures of empathy allow the developing child the capacity to develop their own internal self-structures which will enable them to deal – bit by bit – with a world that will not respond to their every whim. In other words, if we get the basics right but screw up a bit around the edges, we give our children the best chance they can have of learning to deal with the big bad world. If we indulge their grandiosity then ultimately they develop a fragile ego and fail to cope with the real world when the time comes. If we let them down just a bit, they develop a robust ego that can cope with life’s disappointments.

The important thing is that we do this in a ‘day to day’ kind of way, rather than a ‘I’m going to teach you a lesson’ kind of way (which is why I have a great deal of difficulty with the ‘naughty step’.) If our failures of empathy are persistently punitive or hostile, our children learn another kind of lesson altogether. But we can let our children down, if this is the exception rather than the norm, because by doing so we are actually giving our children a big psychological hand up. Let's remember that children who don’t learn to move beyond their own grandiosity turn into narcissistic adults. I’m not suggesting you should beat your children into submission. But go ahead and screw up just a bit. Trust me, it’s good for them. And if you don’t believe me go and read Atyllah’s post.

*as opposed to the Parent ego state of Transactional Analysis, which we all have whether we or not we have children of our own.