Childhood Traumas and Triumphs - Have They Made Me The Woman I Am Today?

Most people look back at their childhood with fond memories. I recently saw a friend I hadn't seen in over twenty years. It was lovely to chat over dinner and wine and just recall people we liked, people we disliked, who was friends with who, who did what and also our childhood perceptions of our peers and teachers. We also talked of the silly things that we did and how looking back on the time it affected who we are today, as well of speaking about where we're at with our lives at the moment.

So, why is it that my memories seem to be of trivial things? I can recall no incident that specifically pinpoints a time in my life where I can confidently say that an event or person influenced me. So, my memories are tragically lame, but for reasons unknown to me, they're as vivid as though they happened yesterday. Here's a small selection.

1. Somebody nicked my Weebles.

I was only 8 and I loved my Weebles. I had the whole family. I even think I had a playground for them with a slide and swing and seesaw. I spent hours playing with them. I was actually the envy of the whole estate as my Weeble collection surpassed all others.

Our house was an end terrace and the outer wall was brick and interspersed were holes in the wall to allow the wind to tunnel through. These holes were perfect look-out posts for my Weebles, so one evening when my Mum called me in for dinner I put them 'on guard', positioned them in a row, gave instructions and headed in for dinner.

To my utmost horror, when I returned, each and every Weeble had gone! I never heard them call for help and I can still recall standing there in the garden welling up with tears wondering where they'd gone. I was absolutely devastated.

I never did get them back and to this day I know the person who nicked them because they were insanely jealous that their mother wouldn't buy them any. To this day she'd deny all knowledge if I confronted her, but I'm kind of figuring at the age of 36 it would be a wee bit immature to settle the score. Actually, come to think of it, she fancied Paul Brandon and I got to kiss him down an alley first, so that's sweet justice.

2. Crawford Duff pulled the bobble off my bobble hat.

Again, a traumatic experience at the tender age of 8. It was winter and my Mum had bought me a new scarf and hat. These were the winters where the playground would ice over and teachers weren't anal about letting you slide around on it. I remember all the girls would tie their scarves together, forming a long chain that everybody else would hang on to and we'd pull them along like a long slithering snake on the ice. Your scarf would end up three times its original length at the end of the day.

But for some reason, Crawford Duff never joined in. He was a big lumbering fellow - absolutely enormous and kind of baffoonish - lovely chap but just clumsy. I was quite nice to him at school, but my kind manner left me vulnerable as one day he walked past me, placed his dinner plate hand on my head, pushed my hat down and in one swift movement, yanked the bobble off my bobble hat. Then he ran off with it. My hat was never the same again and I didn't speak to Crawford for a week after that. I wonder if he still has my bobble....?

3. Got stuck up a cherry tree scrumping.

I was 11 and it wasn't only boys that went scrumping. I was a regular and I knew the good places to go, so I was totally impressed I was the only person who knew a good cherry tree to scrump. It was down the bottom of a garden and the branches overhung the park boundary - to me that indirectly meant public domain and was therefore scrumpable.

But this cherry tree had a fork in the trunk so it resembled a giant catapult, so me and one other friend hoiked ourselves up this tree, sat in the divide and merrily picked away, throwing the cherries down to other third friend holding the carrier bag for our spoils.

Then the owner came down the garden and saw us. But we were wedged in. Try as we might to get out of the 'V' we couldn't move. Even our friend yanking our legs to try and extract us didn't work, so we had to stay put and incur the wrath of the cherry tree owner.

As luck would have it, they were also the days when home owners understood mischief in children and didn't assume they were little vandals. The guy laughed so hard and ended up getting his ladder out to help us down and for our sheer cheek he let us keep the cherries, but with a stern warning that if he found us up there again he'd frogmarch us back to our parents for a clip round the ear. Top bloke he was! I can't actually recall what my Mum did with the cherries.

4. Two school friends carrying my books and pushing my bike home.

I think I was about 14 for this one. These two schoolfriends were boys I grew up on my estate with and subsequently went to school with. Both of them were little buggers at school and were renowned for messing about, roughing up other boys and generally being little pests. But I liked them and whilst other people shunned them and ignored them, I had a good time with them.

One of these guys came over for dinner this week. This is the guy mentioned at the beginning of this post. I asked him if he remembered at the age of 14, with another friend, suddenly running up behind me on the way home, grabbing my book bag off me and pulling my bike away from me. He handed the bike to his friend and between the two of them, walked the mile home to my house with me carrying my books and pushing my bike for me.

The only trepidation I had was that these two were practical jokers and I can clearly recall wondering on the way home that at any moment they would both break into a sprint or hop on my bike and ride off with my belongings. They never did. They even came up to my back gate, opened it for me and put my bike in the shed and took my bags to the door. Then promptly turned on heel, said they'd see me the next day and walked off!

I asked him this week why he did it and he said, 'you deserved it'. Apparently I was one of the few girls in school that treated him normally and spoke to him as though he were a normal person and gave him the time of day. And he recalled it as vividly as I had - 22 years after the event.

It's funny what sticks in your memory over time and these are memories I know will stay with me till my dying day, even though they are completely random and insignificant.

Coming Unstuck

I do my best to teach my children to be responsible, especially when it comes to them playing with their food.

But then they bite me in the butt and remind me of the days I used to visit the bakery where I worked. The bakers did an overnight shift and many a Friday evening, after a night down the pub, me and some friends would have a game of cricket with them in the bakery with a frozen french stick and a bread roll.

I really shouldn't divulge these things to my children. They use them against me.

The Regression of Free Play

Thinking back yesterday to my post about spending time with the children doing crafts, I was reminded of the post I submitted on an old blog some time back.

It bothers me that I have never let me children wander off to play freely when we've been outside. I've never allowed my son to get on his bike and just cycle off to a friend's house and I've never given permission for the children to play freely outside the front of my house.

I can't really add anymore to what I wrote then. I wish time had evolved differently for our children, and I hope as they get older, they'll understand and forgive me for suppressing their freedom.

Here's what I wrote. Maybe your views are different. How much of a free reign do you give your children and are you comfortable with it?

***

"Maybe I'm just getting old, but the summer holidays aren't what they were like when I was a child. A recent news article hit the headlines indicating that parents these days were too frightened to let their children out to play and that this restrictiveness was harming their childhood. I'm inclined to agree but it's not easy to find the balance between letting your child have freedom to play outside your sphere of viewing and being downright neglectful by not knowing where they are and who they're with.

Thinking back to my childhood my mother had no idea where I was most of the time. I lived on a housing estate that was home to about 40 children between the ages of 6 and 16. We'd all form into our little clusters and spend the day playing games like Kick-The-Can, British Bulldog, Red Rover, The Wild Game and Pom-Pom. Games that took hours as it involved having to run around the entire estate finding each other, or being outside on the front green en-masse playing until the sun set. I was never over-weight and I was NEVER bored.

On really hot days there used to be a superb outside swimming pool in the town centre. It cost 50p to get in. Can you imagine ANYTHING costing just 50p now for the whole day? I'd be up at the crack of dawn, make my sandwiches, fill up my Mum's leftover lemonade bottle with orange squash, grab my swimming cossie and towel and get on the bus. By about 9.00am there would be at least a dozen friends of mine who'd travelled in from a five mile radius and we would spend all day there. The place was incredibly popular and you had to be early to get a good spot. It was the kind of place you parked your towel and bags and nobody moved them - there was a sense of sacredness to the place you picked and nobody violated it, no matter how much they were squashed around the edges or squished into the hedge on the perimeter.

The days at the pool were the only days my Mum really knew where I was. But then the scary thing is, my Mum had absolutely no idea of my ability to swim, which at the age of 12 was very, very weak self-taught breaststroke. With this 'expertise' at my disposal I thought nothing of jumping off the top diving board into the deep end. I still remember now kicking furiously to break the surface of the water, having run out of breath, struggling desperately as my chest started to hurt from running out of oxygen supply. My friends and I would lark around dunking each other under water and throwing each other in from the sides just as we'd got dried. Sometimes we'd thrown in each other's towels too. It was good whole hearted, FUN. Kids that behave like that now are accused of being irresponsible.

So, if my Mum was OK with me going off all day and playing outside with my friends and OK with me going to an outdoor swimming pool, why can't I let my children play outside the front of the house on their bikes? Because I'm frightened they'll fall off and hurt themselves or brake too late and dent the neighbour's car. When I was a kid you fell off, wiped the blood with a handful of grass from the verge next to you and you never did actually crash into that car.

Why is it that years ago you could find huge lumps of chalk in your garden soil to draw hopscotch squares on the pavement and use pebbles as counters? I've not got a single lump of chalk in my garden and the children can't use the pavement because everyone's mounted their cars on it.

Why can't I let my children play Hide and Seek and Pom Pom? Because if I can't find them I panic, thinking some crazed nutter has taken them for a perverse half hour before throttling their little necks.

Why can't my children go to the swimming pool on their own? Because of Health and Safety Regulations citing that children under 10 must be accompanied by an adult and fear stories published in the press about toddlers drowning in 2 inches of water in the garden paddling pool when Mum went inside to go to the toilet.

I miss the freedom of my childhood. Not for me, but for my children. I would love them to have the open spirit I had, the lack of fear, the open space and fresh air and for their only worry to be getting home on time for tea.

Only to gobble it down double quick in order to head out for more fun before it was time to come in for bed before it got dark."

Who Is Your Hero?

This was posted last March. I've put it here because it has reminded me that as parents, Andy and I need to keep a constant watch over our children. Not just in terms of their behaviour and whether their shoes still fit, but their emotional and spiritual well being.

We have an obligation and a duty to ensure our children grow up as stable as possible. Feeling loved and cared for and able to freely talk about any issues that bother, scare, frighten, lift, inspire or elate them.

In Ephesians 6v4 we are instructed not to exasperate our children. I find sometimes I do this when I ask Joshua to do small chores around the house. He gets frustrated that I don't give him time to complete one task before I'm asking for the next one to be done. But while his position is to honour his parents, we have an equally responsible role of making sure that we do not expect too much from him. I think sometimes we also forget that because our children are not mature and grown up and able to handle 'adult' issues, we don't give them the credibility of understanding more than we think they do. But although they understand it, it doesn't mean they have the ability to deal with it.

Last year Joshua's class were asked to write on a piece of paper who their heroes were.

Joshua brought home a piece of paper with quotes on from his classmates all detailing who their heroes were. Some of them were the usual you'd expect from 8 and 9 year old children, but two were really sensitive. We sometimes overlook how much our children take in, but this brought home to me that there's more going on in their little heads than playstations and kicking a ball around the playground.

When other Mums and I read the sheets in the playground there were tears - because these two kids shouldn't have had to be in a position to write the things they did.

James - 'My hero is my Mum because she saved me from being hit by a fire engine even though it meant she got hurt'. She was hit by it instead, broke her legs and was in hospital for weeks.

James - 'I hope that I would be as brave as my Mum was'. James lost his Dad two years ago to Cancer.

One From Last Year

I'm starting to weed through my other blog, the one I don't post to anymore. But before I totally delete it, I'm pulling out threads that have relevance or have just made me chuckle. This post was from last March and it was entitled 'The Spaghetti Tree'.

I love the stage of a child's life where the transition begins from believing everything you're told to finally having the courage to question whether your parents really do know it all.

It happened today at the dinner table. Having requested spaghetti bolognese for dinner and being told there was no minced beef in the house to make it, we rambled on to how it would be great to be able to grow our own ingredients for it at the allotment. Maddie asked where spaghetti comes from, so immediately my response was to tell her it was from the spaghetti tree.

Now, Maddie's not easily fooled. Some days she's sharp, others not so. Today was the latter. Tucking into her fish and chips, she stared in amazement and incredulity taking in the notion of a real spaghetti tree. Then the pause.... the cogs whirring....., then 'you're pulling my leg aren't you?'

'No, I'm not, the spaghetti tree is real, I'll show you on the Internet'.

Then the Google search unearthed that wonderful BBC hoax of 1957 where the nation were fooled for 3 minutes by the reports of a bumper spaghetti harvest and the decline of the spaghetti weevil. I showed her the pictures.

I nearly got away with it, until her even sharper brother spotted the subtitled side heading indicating the April Fool's Day prank.

Laughs all round and confirmation that the old ones are still the best.