I’ve done something wrong so I get sent to mum’s bedroom. First time I’ve been sent there, not sure why. I guess the punishment is boredom? Or maybe being punished itself is the punishment, with the cost of misbehaving being the shame of getting called out, and the frustration of having your freedom temporarily removed. The “why” doesn’t matter at the moment though, it doesn’t feel personal yet, just an order to follow. That makes sense to me, I can follow instructions, and I trust my mum unreservedly. It only got hard later, when the things she did didn’t make sense anymore.
I see some chocolates on the bedside drawers, and pop one in my mouth. It’s absolutely the most disgusting thing I’ve ever tasted, I spit it out immediately down the back of the drawers. Turkish Delight, vile stuff, but the box looked so interesting!
Being with my sister Emma later, with her partner, and their little 3-year-old son Cody, seeing how they handle discipline and patience, I learnt a lesson for myself. I snapped at him once, he was getting on everyone’s nerves, blowing a trumpet right into their dog’s ear. I’m not happy with what I did, but you have to make those mistakes for yourself to figure all this out.
I saw that he didn’t recognise how significant the change in my tone was. Why would he? He’s watching cartoons about bananas in pyjamas, that’s his world. His mind can’t conceive of any of this yet, emotional subtleties, the nuances of expressed feelings. We’ll teach him what it all means over time, hopefully with few enough mistakes that he doesn’t remember when we made a misstep. A small child’s lifetime, that’s how many second chances you get.
And anyway, you can’t always be an angel. They need to see what emotions look like. They need a mirror for themselves. That’s how we learn who we are, not just through what we do, but what we see in other people, how we look when our selves are reflected back.
Still, from then on, I was sure to try different ways of keeping my cool and communicating in ways that weren’t angry. Because there’s always a choice, and they don’t know the difference. But it’s easy for anger to become the norm, if that’s how you’re predisposed to behave — just as it’s easy to feel joy regularly, if you’re the type of person who habitually seeks it out.
It’s like I always tell myself: Thought becomes action, action becomes habit, habit becomes personality. Nearly everything we do is on impulse, the action effectively uncontrollable in the moment we perform it, so the only way to change is to decide who you are beforehand, to change the initial thought itself.
I don’t want being “someone who snaps at kids” to be part of who I am, so I need to change my thoughts. There needs to be a step, while I’m still conscious of myself and before things boil over uncontrollably, where I act differently to how I did last time. Expression without hostility. So I’ll try a few things out, experiment a while, drill it down until the problem’s solved, do it enough times until it’s a habit. Teach Cody about anger and frustration in a way I’d have wanted to be taught. A way that doesn’t hurt.
Back in Mum’s bedroom, I’m in her bed and my stepdad comes in. He doesn’t notice me and starts getting undressed, and I see his spotty bum. What a weird thing to have, I think, a spotty bum! The bums of my brothers are all pink and round, but his bum is so lumpy and strange.
I’ve briefly wondered later why I didn’t say anything, but you wouldn’t, would you? In a new situation like that, you don’t know what you’re meant to do. You don’t have the words for it yet, and you won’t, until you’ve either spoken them, or heard them.
In a friendly local pub with Cody, a bunch of us around a table, some old man catches his attention and chucks a small bag of Maltesers his way, maybe bought recently with Cody in mind. There’s an immediate hush. That’s one of the worst things you can do, you’re taught at school, to accept things from strangers, especially sweets. Only bad men do that, men as dangerous as the high voltage signs on the fences around electrical buildings.
A moment passes. We’re all waiting in anticipation for what Cody does.
But he doesn’t know what should happen next. He’s not been in this situation before, he knows he should be polite and say thank you, but you don’t talk to strangers. What a dreadful position to put a child in. I don’t know this man and immediately judge him for what he’s done, but later realise that he must be oblivious, maybe no children of his own, else he’d know better.
Another moment passes. Emma says, do you know what to do? Cody shakes his head, no words for any of this. She says, “you can say, thank you but I don’t take things from strangers”. Cody has the words now, but the whole situation has left him stunned, so Mummy says the words for him, with a tone of firm confidence. Next time he’ll know what to do, another life lesson, one of millions he’ll experience while he’s still a tiny living sponge.
The first words I remember from my mum were on my birthday, we were at TGI Fridays. I don’t know how old I was, it was before I started puberty, maybe Emma hadn’t been born yet. I asked if I could have desert, a huge sundae with gooey chocolate and ice cream, and a wafer shaped like a bear or a heart. She said OK, and I’m delighted! But as I’m eating my way through my birthday treat, she tells me that now, I can’t have the pudding she bought at home, she’s going to have to throw it away. It was my favourite too, a huge thing of tiramisu from Sainsburys.
I said nothing. I didn’t have the words for it.