The only two parenting metaphors you will ever need

Race for life

This weekend, my daughter and I did the local 5k Race for Life (thank you, you can still donate!), to raise money for research into cancer. This is the third time we've done it, and it's become a bit of a tradition to see whether we can beat the previous year's time. Logically this should work, because as my daughter gets older, she gets taller and faster. We won't go into what happens to her mother. 

I didn't sleep well, and woke already tired and fretful. The rain had bucketed the night before, and the terrain was soggy, so I suggested that she and I head into the runners' group, so that we'd have a fresh start — we weren't going for a runner's time, we just didn't want to be slipping over in the churn. 

Within only a few moments, daughter was straggling and slowing to a walk. Not yet well breathed, I was hopping up and down and urging her forwards in what I hoped wasn't too obviously a stentorian manner. She seemed to have a stitch most of the way round the course, and as the metres dragged into kilometres, I was racing ahead, then standing still until she caught up, tapping my foot, and eventually unashamedly hands on hips. Well I say unashamedly, actually I felt rubbish. We were supposed to be running together, it was supposed to be our mother-daughter moment. But there I was with two winners' symbols instead of eyes, champing at the bit and leaving her behind in my testosterone-fuelled desire to kick butt. 

In the final kilometre, my eleven year old gave it one big push, and ran most of it, and we crossed the finish line at an uphill sprint, carried along by the cheering. 

As we looked up to see the time, we realised we'd beaten last year's time by over 3 minutes. We weren't going slowly at all. I was just being competitive. 

In the warm-down time that followed, finally satisfied, I apologised to her. She'd known it was happening, knows she has a mad mother, puts up with it resignedly, told me off quietly. Then we went for ice cream and pick and mix, and wandered through Hampstead, browsing in the bookshop, and fingering sale price T-shirts together. She swam into my focus, my beautiful, calm, determined daughter, so much better adjusted than I am. Doing it her own way. 

Three in a bed

That night, she had a the edges of a migraine, and I put her to bed in our room, hoping to distract her. Husband ended up in her bed, and I slept with her. In the middle of the night, a solid lump of boy interposed itself between daughter and me, with his habitual snuffle, and propensity to sleep sideways. Early in the morning, daughter was beside herself. Occupying fully half the bed, she screeched, "I've got no room! You're always getting in the way between Mummy and me! I can't sleep with your snoring! You always ruin everything, this is MY bed!" No amount of exhausted mumbling from me would stop her, and eventually she had to be ejected, to further screaming. 

Later that day we had to go and buy school uniform for secondary school. She and I made the symbolic trip to be sized up and kitted out, me reliving my childhood, she on the brink of the next big stage of her life. I spoke to her frankly about the excruciating jealousy I had suffered from as a child with a younger brother, always coming up behind me, always edging onto my terrain. I told her very quietly that learning about how jealousy blinds you is perhaps the most important thing I learnt as a child. Understanding and living with her own jealousy was the best way to stop suffering from it — and also to prevent its excesses in other people from harming her. She sat in silence, and listened. She nodded, and we bought hotdogs and candy floss, wandering again in contentment, side by side through the summer streets. What did she hear? What did she take in? I want her so desperately not to fall into the same traps that I did, and I know that I cannot prevent it.