Children 101

I think I have got stuck at about page seven of this particular instruction manual.

With that in mind, it is probably a very good thing for the world that I didn’t choose to throw my DNA into the gene pool and have any of my own children, as I doubt that any sort of maternal instinct would have magically materialised. I suspect any child of mine would have had a rather strange upbringing and would have turned into an equally odd adult like myself.

For those few of you that chance upon this blog (I know it’s not many; I read the stats), one of the many cataclysmic changes that have occurred over the last twelve months is that I now spend quite a large proportion of my time with two fairly young children.

Luckily for me, they are not pre-school, as I think I would have thrown the towel in at that point. I don’t “get” small children at all; I can’t understand them and have no little idea of their basic needs. Oddly, I am also quite scared of touching them, possibly because I was never touched much as a child, other than out of sheer necessity. It’s not an instinctive response at all – and wasn’t one even when I was a child myself.

Babies are far, far worse; I find their helplessness terrifying and have absolutely no idea of what to do with them. They inspire no basic caring response, which means that I am a strange woman indeed. On the rare occasions that I have held them, they sense my ineptitude and scream the place down, only stopping when given back to their rightful owner.

However, I digress. The two children I spend my time with are currently ten and seven. My own observations of them is that the older one is trying to be a small adult, but is not sure how to accomplish this; the other is most definitely still a small child. Obviously, there is a lot more than this, but I think this is a subject I need to be simplistic about.

Naturally, this floundering individual has varying degrees of success with them. Maybe I’m not quite as bad as I think I am, but I do find it hard work; I don’t know how to pitch conversations, how to manage them, or even how to deal with things on a day-to-day basis and find my lack of understanding of them means that my patience is pushed hard.

I can’t really be “me” with them as they would never comprehend me, so instead I project a “schoolmarm-ish” me and hope that at least they will continue to respect this person reasonably. It places a fairly convenient barrier between me and them and means that I can stay in some sort of comfort zone, a region where I don’t feel utterly at sea.

However, even at this level I struggle enormously. I don’t think I was ever really a child; I wasn’t encouraged to be, but was rather pushed and jostled into adulthood as quickly as possible in order to fit in with the rigid family structure I was surrounded by. Because of this, I don’t understand the psyche of children at all, in fact find them too simplistic, can’t comprehend the beasts that don’t have the complexities of my own head.

I’m know this is my failing, but I don’t know how to make any more progress than this; page eight in the book seems a long way off and today, while I am handicapped by a raging sore throat and headache, feel I have got as far as I ever will.