Five things I don’t want my daughters to know about me

The issue I have with the prompt by Ella from Notes at Home this week is that my mother reads my blog. There are always things you don’t want your children to know about you and, given that they are as yet too young to read and use the interweb, I am confident that, were I to share my deepest personal embarassments with the entire world via the blogging medium, I would have time to edit the information.

But my mother can read (in the right light) and regularly interrupts me mid-monologue to tell me that she’s “already read about it on my blog”. Just so that you know, I have a good relationship with my mother- I see her a couple of times a week. It’s worrying that though I see her that often I have frequently written about my weekly traumas before I fill her in on the details. I can only assume that this is a (scary) indication of how fast-paced the times in which we live are.

But I digress: MY MOTHER READS MY BLOG. I have no desire to bring my impeccable conduct as Eldest Daughter and Role Model to Brothers 1 and 2 [insert hysterical laughter here. It’s a great joke!] into disrepute. I like living on an pedestal [again: insert laughter. Brothers 1 and 2 will be wetting themselves, so why not you?]

Disclaimers out of the way, I don’t want my daughters to know:

1. I had my ears pierced when I was four. In my mother’s defence, since she is not the bad parent she may seem to be at this point, I ground her down with repeated requests. Hourly repeated requests. Around the clock. And she had a two-year-old who didn’t sleep. As the mother of a child who is a carbon copy of my two-year-old self (I’ll have to rely on both my parents agreeing to this fact independent of each other) I can see how this would lead to the inevitable. My daughters will not ask hourly because they will be brought up to believe that it is against the law to have them pierced before they are thirteen. Oh, and they will NEVER know that I had a belly button ring.

2. That I swear a lot. I put this down to learning to drive too late in life. I’m hoping to curb my enthusiasm with alternative swear words, before they are old enough to remember that they heard me utter expletives.

3. That I don’t have the first clue what I am doing. You don’t get a manual when you give birth, so raising children is entirely down to instinct, a smattering of common sense and a bit of shouting. I believe they call this making-it-up-as-you-go-along. Naturally they will be brought up to believe that we had a careful structure of parenting.

4. That I had boyfriends before I met their father. They will of course, think that it is against the law to have a boyfriend before you have finished University; that illegal to have sex before you get married and that you are not allowed to get married until you are at least thirty. Otherwise you will be sent to a convent.

5. That I am guilty of benign neglect: that I leave them to amuse themselves whilst I try to juggle blogging, writing and cooking. When I am not neglecting them, I fill their weeks with activities, exhausting myself finding fun experiences and new activities and crafts. I do this because I worry incessantly: I worry for them, about them and because of them. I worry that I am not doing enough with them. I worry that I don’t teach them things. I worry that they will remember their childhoods as boring because I was always busy typing, or demoralising because I shouted in frustration, or swore, or told them I’d send them to a convent.

But the abiding thing I want them to remember about me is that, whether I get it right or wrong, I did it all out of love. If I didn’t love them I wouldn’t worry. If I didn’t worry, I would sleep better. If I slept better, I wouldn’t shout. It’s when I don’t shout that they should start worrying!