You can do it: babies, students and the need for cliches

I teach journalism at Goldsmiths College (surely a line that should be in a Pulp song) and term starts this coming week. The teaching is mainly classroom based and practical and I enjoy it a lot, especially seeing students' work improve over the course. 

But what I am most proud of is the few occasions over the six years I have done the job where I feel I have really made a difference to someone's life, not by teaching interviewing skills or sending an assignment back until the apostrophes are in the right place, but by being encouraging about a job interview or a competition entry or an internship so that they decide to go for it. Where this results in success the course of their lives can be changed, and where it doesn't it often gives them the enthusiasm and fire in the belly needed to apply for other things which then changes the course of their lives. 

So many students I meet seem to have never been told they have as much chance as anyone else, that they have to be in it to win it, that they'll miss 100 percent of the shots they don't take, and all the other cliches which mean the same thing. While they have already done well getting into a competitive university and onto a competitive course, me saying this about jobs and work related opportunities is sometimes the first time they have heard it. 

I remember having dinner in my mid twenties with a man who was older than me and enjoying success with his journalism and books. How was it I was so confident, he asked me. Much of that confidence is a facade of course - isn't that the case for everyone? - but I realised that the confidence I do have is from my parents and grandparents (and now my husband), and to some extent teachers, consistently encouraging me, saying well done and showing an interest in things I was applying to do. 

A baby and a student are different in many ways of course. But playing with my baby just before term starts has caused me to reflect a little on the similarities. Because every day with the baby is about encouraging her to achieve what it is she can already do - this jigsaw, that peepo, this rollover, that waving - and pushing her to achieve more - hand clapping, crawling, chewing etc. Some of these, crawling for example, other babies can do already. But encouragement is not about saying 'they can do it so why can't you', it's about saying 'work hard and one day you'll be able to do that too.' And though the goals are different, the method, despite the 18 years or so age gap, is exactly the same. 

Miffed about Miffy

When I was pregnant I found the entire set of Miffy books in our local Oxfam Books for £1 each. I loved these Dick Bruna books when I was a kid and wanted to get them for our baby to enjoy, so I bought the set. Except for one - it just didn't feel right buying Goodbye Grandma about the funeral of Grandma Bunny for a baby whose Grandma and Nan are both very much alive. Not only that but the book focuses on a church funeral and, well. let's just say the word rabbit only contains one religious word within it and it's not vicar.

Turns out the stories aren't quite as scintillating as I'd remembered and the rhymes seem to have lost something in translation from their original Dutch. Maybe that's why reading them now as an adult my favourite is the entirely wordless Miffy's Dream in which Miffy floats off on a cloud. meets another bunny, slides down the moon and watches shooting stars. Surreal, yes, but makes me cry every time.




I was particularly proud of my bargain when I saw the same books for sale for more than £1 each in a bookshop on Lamb's Conduit Street in London. The shop has a lovely selection of children's books and I suspect many of its customers are people buying presents for children they know who are being treated round the corner at Great Ormond Street Hospital. That's what we were doing. Which is why I found it a pretty cynical marketing ploy that all the Miffy books cost the same except for one - Miffy in Hospital. Now that's cheeky.

A day off?

We've been ill - nothing serious, a cold or virus making our ears fuzzy and our necks achey and our throats swollen. The baby has been fine but less so the parents. If we were our pre baby selves a good night's sleep, a day off work and a hot toddy would have sorted it. But we're post baby selves and guess what, turns out the parenting doesn't stop. The baby still needs to be fed, kept clean and entertained. She still needs (yes, needs) enthusiastic parents telling her several times a day that she is beautiful and clever and the most wonderful person ever created, reminding her that even if all the container ships in the world were piled high with containers and filled with densely packed love, it wouldn't be a patch on how much we love her.

I cried when Goodynuff Dad said he was ill too. I wanted to be allowed to be ill myself, to have a day where I could be looked after and to have just a short break from the nurturing and the enthusiasm. So I turned to Goodynuff Grandma who looked after all three of us. When, I asked, would I be allowed to be ill myself, to not have to worry about looking after others, to take a teeny tiny day off from the responsibilities of being a mum. Oh how the gods must laugh hearing me ask this just eight months in. Goodynuff Grandma is 61 and turns out she was feeling a little under the weather herself, yet still had to look after us. So I guess the answer is never.




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This reminded me of another blogpost by When you ARE that woman about her own mum in which she says:

"Last time I stayed at my parent's house I wanted to borrow a pair of scissors. I walked to my Mum's room. She was in the loo. I called in and asked her where the scissors were. I had to search carefully for the memory, as it was so commonplace I missed the importance of that non-anecdote, and every other time I've done it. Her personal space, her body, her bedroom, doesn't really exist in the mind of me, her child. I am as boundary-less as a toddler, and my mother, even 33 years on, still can't have a piss in peace. No wonder she went to work." 
Read the whole post here.

What I really want

When we were trying to have a baby, and it was taking rather a long time, we had an appointment with a doctor who, having analysed my blood tests and hormone levels and prodded and poked, asked me what I wanted to get out of the appointment. "A baby" I said simply. He looked taken aback - I think he wanted me to say clomid (a fertility drug) or ivf or something medical. But it was true - I desperately, primally, wanted a baby, and I thought I was being both clever and honest in saying that was what I wanted.

Now I have my daughter however I realise that having a baby is not the endpoint, it is the beginning. No, what I want is not a baby, but a baby who then grows into a toddler then a little girl, then a bigger girl. I want her to be a teenager then a young woman. I want her to be a mum, to be a middle aged woman, to be a grandma and to be old. When the doctor asked me what I wanted from that appointment I might as well have said I want to be a grandma one day. See, turns out not just that I wanted baby, but that I wanted to begat generations.

None of which is fair to the baby of course. She may make choices or have choices thrust upon her that mean she doesn't have children, or that her children don't have children. She might emigrate to the other side of the world. She might decide to cease contact with me. The moment she became herself and not an abstract want on my part, was the moment those decisions became no longer anything to do with me.

But although they will not be my decisions, I hope she follows the rule my parents taught me, that we cannot hope for a moment to repay our parents for the love and (emotional and material) support they give us, but we can repay them by doing the same for our own children. I hope we bring our baby up with family at the heart of her life, and a happy childhood she will want to replicate for her children. All of which was a little too complicated to tell the doctor of course.