The Rule (Or All That Glitters…)

It occurred to me recently how much your mind can hurt or hinder you. Thoughts, emotions, expectations, memories… Dealing with people – inlaws, parents, family friends, anyone handling something important to you, say, your children…

It wasn’t any one thing, more a combination of stuff that brought me here. A question from a dear reader, providing counsel to a friend, recent encounters with “tradition” (in inverted commas because I believe like in the name of “religion” people can use “tradition” for personal gain)…

When I used to work fairly long hours, Rockstar was often with a helper, and I had one big house rule that drove me nuts when broken: Never lie. Never let me catch you lying.

There was a big reason for The Rule. I was hungry for information about Rockstar. Any little thing that would make the (relatively longer) hours I spent at work missing new stuff he did more bearable. (Though certainly loving what I did for a living helped a bunch.) Every morsel of information, I would lap up. Hence The Rule. Because of the reliability (or not) it implied of all the other things Rockstar’s then-main caregiver might tell me about my son. What if she couldn’t care less and made stuff up, even if it was just little stories, or exaggerated stuff about my son?

Does he really eat all his food?

Does she really feed him from the carefully-written menus and umpteen meg file toddler recipe book I had printed in color after one of the working-mummy-support-group-uh-bunch-of-friends-and-colleagues forwarded it to me?

How’s he really doing in pre-school?

What does he really like doing all day at home?

Before Rockstar, I didn’t care very much about the helper. As long as the dog was happy and got walked a lot. It wasn’t hard to find helpers who loved dogs. We might have higher-than-you-could-possibly-expect-of-two-yuppies-especially-when-one -eats-out-often grocery expenditure, but when it got too often, we would tut-tut and then it would go down, no biggie.

But post-Rockstar, I cared with an absolute vengeance. Before we went to ESF (and for the record are very happy here), Rockstar at ~18 months attended a pre-school/ “baby class” with a helper (because you were either supposed to attend with your child or send a helper). Every time I asked, and sometimes when I didnt, this helper (who was eventually fired for an accumulation of untruths) would tell me how well Rockstar was doing. He knew how to do everything required of him in the pre-school. He found it all easy-breezy.

It’s possible if she added he’d replicated Mozart’s Magic Flute on the little toy xylophone in school after hearing it played as background music I might have been a little suspicious, but we can never say for sure. There are things that we will always find easier to believe about our children than others.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what I most wanted to hear and I can understand why the helper did it – life’s just easier when you tell the tired working mum happy things at the end of the day.

So then I went to work for months thinking everything was just hunky-dory when it wasn’t. Til the day someone else’s helper blabbed to me that Rockstar was the oldest baby in the class. He’d been held back for some months.

Only 2 babies, twins, hadn’t been held back in our class; other mums who attended with their children every day (unlike yours truly) but were similarly not told about the retention were writing complaint emails. I was completely oblivious, I thought I was supposed to call the school when he came of age to switch to an older class, and had simply neglected to do it – I even remember one day thinking Oh Yeah Gotta Switch Classes, calling the school from the dealer board in between trades, then thinking Ok Done. Check! (the person on the other end of the line simply took down Rockstar’s details without comment, thereby perpetuating the belief I was simply supposed to make a routine call.) Then I bumped into one of the mums and heard the rest of the story. (I erm, blinked and was Uh, I wasn’t just supposed to call in a message?)

After the mums-of-held-back-babies-fallout, this particular pre-school did try to fix it by having said teacher meet each child’s parent – whereupon the teacher told us Rockstar’s then-helper did everything for him so she had no idea he could do anything himself – I was pretty much sending my helper to pre-school. (It likely didn’t help that Rockstar didn’t really like his teacher, probably because she thought he couldn’t do anything yet, and it showed in her interaction with him). It was a non-apology apology. The teacher realized she was mistaken about his developmental level when he got into the older class, which he had to attend sans adult. (This time, she picked up on his developmental stage quickly. Their relationship also improved.) As a teacher, she was professional enough to be honest with me about it and I greatly respect that. Must’ve taken some guts, what with some of the mum-reaction during that time.

Let's all be pink and happy and dance around

This isn’t a rant about the proficiency of caregivers. It was me noticing the dependency I had had on a helper to tell me about my son’s day and the vulnerability, the erm, “exploit-ability,” by a less-than-professional person picking it up. This is the mistake I made and lesson I learned from it.

I’ve had helpers who swear they looooove children, they love my child to absolute bits, they know my child, they know what my child wants, they – hang on. My child already has a mother. Hi there, have we met? Sometimes I don’t even know everything Rockstar wants and neither does he. (At which point I remind him if he doesn’t know what he wants, how is he going to get it? This is also why he “takes a moment” to think and decide what he wants..)

It’s just an analogy, but it’s not like helpers go to erm, Helper School to teach them not to tell you little fibs. But emotionally, if they’re the ones with information we’re dying to hear about our child, it’s hard to not listen. Just bear in mind it can make you fair game for being manipulated by someone who might not care whether it’s professional (or loving or unselfish in the case of relations) to use a vulnerability/ anxiety/ sense of responsibility for their own purposes. Emotion – love, guilt, anger and so on – all easily exploitable. And frankly the kind of character who lacks a conscience about exploiting it is probably the most likely to do so and doesn’t give sound counsel to begin with. Why allow it?

Because when I get neurotic, nervous, is when I forget to think. Being emotional can cost you your ability to think clearly. And btw this is me telling myself, when I get nervous about Rockstar’s adapting to K2 and impending Pri school interviews. (No big secret here – ’tis going to be the season in HK soon, almost everyone’s gonna be nervous especially if you’re a first time parent in HK- even if I claimed I wasn’t in the least bit nervous I think no one’s gonna believe me.)

So I will take professional any day. I need the professional to tell me the hard stuff I might not be able to see myself because I am so heavily emotionally invested.