In Praise of Imperfection

On parenting, mothering, and loving my children the only way I can

These past weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about mothers, and what we sacrifice for our children. I’ve been thinking about the image of the mother, as working mother versus stay-at-home mother. And I’ve been thinking about nature versus nurture. How much does our parenting influence our kids’ outcome, and how much is their future drawn from the imprint of their innate personality, their destiny already made up in the map of their DNA?

Partly, I’ve been thinking about this in response to recent cultural movements - the (way too late in my opinion) debate around whether or not we should ban smart phones in schools, and the hysteria that has sprung from the drama Adolescence, and which taps into the most primal of a parents’ fear - whatever you do, how many sacrifices you make, your children are not safe, and, if they have a smart phone or tablet, not even in their bedroom; they are not even safe from themselves.

I’ve been thinking about all these things because my kids are now 16 and 18, and they are what I call the ‘pandemic teens’, in that they entered their adolescence proper during the pandemic. While their mum was thrown into Zoom-nation, stuck like Blue-tack to her computer, teaching like a fiend to try to keep food on the table, but also to alleviate the shock of what was happening, my kids retreated to their bedrooms, their phones, and Minecraft. My son entered secondary school in the first year of lockdown, and my daughter lost the thread of study. She was good about meeting with friends and going on long walks, but, prone to perfectionism, she panicked when she fell behind, and in this same secondary school she never really gained traction again. She became severely ill with some awful post viral fatigue, or Long Covid, or whatever you want to name it, and our family went into crisis. (But that is another story.)

Part of the story I am telling you here, is that after more than three years we are finally emerging out of a fallow period, when my resilience and confidence in my children and my ability to parent them properly as a single mother (albeit with an ex-husband who supports them, and a brilliant partner in Prasad) has been tested to the limits, and yet we are still standing. More than that, we are doing okay. My son is moving positively towards his GCSEs, and has discovered, quite late, the joys of revision and learning, and my daughter has just accepted a place at London College of Fashion, to do an Art Direction degree. And there were many moments along the way when I feared none of this would happen. That my kids would not find their way. When I blamed myself and my selfishness for how much they struggled. Mother’s Guilt - Mother’s Ruin. Now, here, I am left wondering - how the hell did we get from there, to here?