Three pots for fusspots
Thursday, August 05, 2004
Into serious blogging frenzy now! This is the result of spending days in the company of my children. Spending the best part of 12 hours every day in anyone's company, day after day, is a challenge, however much you may love them. Children tax the resources even more. And when there are three children with very distinctive personalities each adamant that their take on things is right and that their needs should be met first, well - that's hard to deal with in a spirit of continuous tolerance and equanimity.
Meal times are the great focus of bad energy. I approach each separate meal resolved to impose a single menu: in the end I usually cook three different things. Am I weak? Am I the victim of food tyranny? I tried the hard man act for a while. My children lost weight, I gained ulcers, and we wasted a lot of food. Eating is supposed to be a pleasure. Sitting down and sharing a family meal should be a focal point of the day, where views are aired and shared. This falls apart if all the conversation is about who's eating what, tears well up as a hated dish is served, and someone storms off in protest.
It's hard to remember that they are children and are acting like children. One of the reasons I get so angered, not so much by the decision of one or the other to dislike something but by the refusal to try new things, is that my mother is so fussy. My childhood meals were so constrained by my mother's dietary neurosis that I believed for some time that there were only about four different things to eat in the world. That's an exaggeration, of course. Here I am, almost pushing my children into neuroses of their own as I try to manouevre them to be unlike their grandmother. Aagh!
I know there is a school of thinking that children should eat what's given to them and if they don't like it - tough. This smacks (excuse the pun) of corporal punishment. The people who advocate this approach are inevitably the same parents (and sometimes non-parents) who believe that hitting children is OK. That's a healthy response to someone you love! I know that for some people pain is closely allied to sexual gratification but I find it hard to accept that pain is a part of a healthy expression of love. Power, yes. Dominance and bullying. The inability to convince or accept. All these things, yes. Love? No. Not even respect. How can you respect someone you're hitting?
Respect is something that we tend to dismiss when we talk of children. We're happy to demand and expect respect from children but there's very little mention of giving children respect. Kurt Vonnegut wrote a wonderful novel many years ago called "Cat's Cradle". A major character is a guru of sorts who bemoans the fact that there is so much love in the world but so little respect.
I can go along with that. Respect, like integrity, has become an unfashionable concept, mired in misconceptions of Victorian rigidity. For anyone wanting to understand the notion of integrity and wondering what living a life of integrity means I would recommend my old friend Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein.
That's a lot of reading.
Meal times are the great focus of bad energy. I approach each separate meal resolved to impose a single menu: in the end I usually cook three different things. Am I weak? Am I the victim of food tyranny? I tried the hard man act for a while. My children lost weight, I gained ulcers, and we wasted a lot of food. Eating is supposed to be a pleasure. Sitting down and sharing a family meal should be a focal point of the day, where views are aired and shared. This falls apart if all the conversation is about who's eating what, tears well up as a hated dish is served, and someone storms off in protest.
It's hard to remember that they are children and are acting like children. One of the reasons I get so angered, not so much by the decision of one or the other to dislike something but by the refusal to try new things, is that my mother is so fussy. My childhood meals were so constrained by my mother's dietary neurosis that I believed for some time that there were only about four different things to eat in the world. That's an exaggeration, of course. Here I am, almost pushing my children into neuroses of their own as I try to manouevre them to be unlike their grandmother. Aagh!
I know there is a school of thinking that children should eat what's given to them and if they don't like it - tough. This smacks (excuse the pun) of corporal punishment. The people who advocate this approach are inevitably the same parents (and sometimes non-parents) who believe that hitting children is OK. That's a healthy response to someone you love! I know that for some people pain is closely allied to sexual gratification but I find it hard to accept that pain is a part of a healthy expression of love. Power, yes. Dominance and bullying. The inability to convince or accept. All these things, yes. Love? No. Not even respect. How can you respect someone you're hitting?
Respect is something that we tend to dismiss when we talk of children. We're happy to demand and expect respect from children but there's very little mention of giving children respect. Kurt Vonnegut wrote a wonderful novel many years ago called "Cat's Cradle". A major character is a guru of sorts who bemoans the fact that there is so much love in the world but so little respect.
I can go along with that. Respect, like integrity, has become an unfashionable concept, mired in misconceptions of Victorian rigidity. For anyone wanting to understand the notion of integrity and wondering what living a life of integrity means I would recommend my old friend Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein.
That's a lot of reading.
