Neurotics

Now there’s a girl who’s comfortable in her own skin,” my father-in-law said about my daughter, his granddaughter. She was about one year old and we were watching her bounce happily in her high chair, egg smeared across both cheeks as she shoved pieces of fritter into her mouth. I realised with pride it was true: she was comfortable. My pride was followed quickly by unease. How long had it been since I could say I was comfortable with myself?

Well, you’re writing in the ‘Guardian’ so probably ‘never’!

My daughter is almost four now and I’ve thought of my father-in-law’s words many times since that day. She’s at a precious age, no longer a toddler and still just on the precipice of childhood proper. She interacts with the world without self-consciousness and has not yet learned that society may expect something different from her. When she expresses hunger and when she eats, she does so with joyful abandon. When she takes a mouthful of something delicious we can see a whole-body response: she closes her eyes, tilts her head back and dances her shoulders up and down.

Because she’s a child and so lacks inhibition - part of growing up is of course learning social inhibition, which so many adults these days appear to lack. 

Many girls will learn, if not explicitly taught then by cultural osmosis, the notion they shouldn’t be outwardly hungry. Whether a girl’s hunger is literally for food or it’s yearning for something greater in her life – a high-powered career, an unabashed artistic practice, a passionate affair – she is often taught to not be so honest in her expression of it.

*sighd* 

Watching my daughter’s strong sense of self has forced me to reflect on my own adolescence through the early 2000s, when our wildly misogynistic pop culture filtered down to the schoolyard. I once overheard a high-school boyfriend say I looked ugly when I ate. Instead of dumping him, I simply stopped eating when we were together.

Teenagers do stupid things pt 732489... 

Later, in my 20s, when Instagram brought with it the first wave of diet culture masquerading as “wellness”, I was primed to try it all: juice cleanses, appetite-suppressing teas, “quitting” sugar. I once lied to a colleague that I was eating soup for lunch when I had, in fact, poured green juice into a bowl.

 Women trying to make it in work do stupid things pt 732489... 

These memories are horrifying to me now and thank God for that. Thank God that in my daughter’s world there is no morality ascribed to food, there is no good or bad, or that most disgusting of office kitchen diet-speak, naughty. There is just desire and pleasure and satiety.

It might be a little trite to say that adults can learn from watching children interact with the world...

It certainly is. 

Nothing Will Change Until There Are Consequences...

A woman whose ‘monster’ XL bully mauled three young girls after it reacted in a ‘very aggressive’ way to a knock at the front door was allowed to walk free from court yesterday.

Since she probably weighed less than the killer mutt, she resorted to a rather unusual choice of intervention when it pounced. 

Victoria Hewitt wrestled with seven-and-a-half stone pet Karma as it savaged and ‘dragged’ the ‘screaming’ children at her home and desperately tried to coax it away from them with ham she grabbed from the fridge.

A brave neighbour eventually wrestled the animal to the ground and Hewitt desperately yelled ‘Shoot the dog’ when police arrived. Officers sedated Karma, who was later destroyed.

What a waste of sedatives! 

Hewitt, 42, is understood to have registered the pet under a new law brought in weeks earlier that required them to be registered - but also stated they must be kept securely. The semi-permanent makeup artist appeared in court yesterday where she was handed an eight-month jail term, suspended for 18 months...

*sighs* 

Judge Anthony Bate heard the dog had belonged to an ex-partner of Hewitt who left it with her.

 🎵I might have known, there is always some man...🎵

She took steps to manage the risk it posed, including installing a pen and stairgates. Karma was also muzzled when out on walks and kept in a different room when visitors called by. But Judge Bate said while the precautions were ‘well intended’, they were limited and ‘inadequate’, allowing the powerful pet to cause the terrible injuries.

They were always going to be limited and inadequate because she had no chance of physically intervening when the mutt decided to do what it was bred for... 

He also ordered her to carry out a 20-day Rehabilitation Activity Requirement, in which an offender takes part in activities designed to address the behaviour that contributed to the crime and attend supervision appointments with a probation officer.

Good luck finding an activity designed to address the behavior that makes these women fall for unsuitable men who skip town and leave them holding a four-legged ticking time bomb! 

This Is Just Insider Language…

For me, becoming a mother was an experience as disorienting and confusing as moving to a new country. I had to learn new behaviours and customs as well as which brands of nappy and baby food to buy. And little did I know that moving to the Netherlands after the birth of my first child would entail having to learn a whole new tongue besides Dutch.

Which one? 

I’m not talking about motherese, the high-pitched singsong ways parents speak to their children, but about the highly specific language mothers and fathers around the world now use to talk about being parents.

Eh? 

Unsure of myself, I started reading parenting books and spent a lot of time on online forums, where I tried to find answers to my questions – or, when there weren’t any, then at least some support or understanding.

Not the place I'd choose to go to for that, but you do you, eh? 

It was on BabyCenter that I first discovered this new parenting language. I often found myself resorting to Google to understand what people were saying. I had to familiarise myself with acronyms such as DS and DD (dear son and dear daughter), CS (caesarean section), EB (extended breastfeeding) and CIO (cry it out).

All groups evolve their own language, didn't you learn that on the internet?  

It didn’t take me long to notice that even the things I read in Polish were translations of books by English-speaking authors such as Tracy Hogg’s Secrets of the Baby Whisperer, which I suffered through just to try to understand why my daughter would not stop crying. Spoiler alert: it did not help.

Well, since you're supposedly multilingual, what does it matter? 

My copy of American parenting expert Heidi Murkoff’s What to Expect When You’re Expecting was in English – despite being translated into 50 languages, including Polish – and after a while so was everything else I was reading.

And why is that an issue? I cannot wrap my head around what this column is really about...

And, of course, books and articles about the way parents in Europe and other places raise their children are extremely popular in the US and the UK. However, from my experience, US and UK parenting ideas have a bigger sway in Europe than the other way around. What does it mean if the English language has such power to influence the way mothers and fathers raise their children around the world?

I don't know, and you don't advance a theory, so why is it concerning you?