Wednesday, August 11, 2010

In the quiet.......

.... of the morning, I just want to spend a few moments writing.  Not about anything in particular, just writing.  It's  just gone 6.30.  Yesterday I took the boys to a violin concert (a 30 minute one!) and we went to the park afterwards.  Not an amazingly special kind of day, but actually, in parts, it was incredibly hard work.

We watched the beginning of a film in the morning - Braveheart, with Mel Gibson.  Part way through, a girl gets her throat cut.  The AC was hysterical about this.  I had to go upstairs to him.  He sat on my lap like an infant and cried and cried and cried.  We went over what if *I* died.  We went over how other people are affected by death.  We went over a lot of old ground that was not as sorted suddenly as it had been.  When I came down, J was confused - after all, the AC watches Doctor Who on a regular basis and sometimes people die in that.  No, I said, that's a story.  This is history.  Death means something different to the AC than it does to most children.  The fact that he and J had talked about it being history and based on a true set of events meant that for the AC, that woman had really existed, had had parents who loved her and would be hurt by her death, had a husband who loved her and would be crying like Mummy had cried, and so she wasn't a story book character any more for him.  J got it.  AC and J talked about it for a long time whilst T-boy was in the bath.

T-boy was also Very Hard Work today.  I will have good manners, and I will have children who help in the house, and I will have a child who is rude and insolent.  We spent a lot of time today just talking about why he thinks it's ok to be rude to me (it's not, says he!) why he thinks he doesn't have to do as people say (no-one ever does what he says) what it feels like when someone is rude to him and how that translates to other people, and so on.  Will it make a difference? I don't know.  Something has to, because as I said to him, if it keeps up, I'll just say I'm not having him here without his father here.  It's my house, my rules.

Speaking of the house, which is getting there slowly, sooooooooooo slooooooowly, lol, I was thinking about how this will all translate one day.  How eventually we will move from here to a place that is bigger and so on, and I was thinking this because we finally watched Sundays "World's Squarest Teenagers" which is about the Amish community and 4 of their teens on rumspringa being over here, staying with different people.  It's a really good programme and aside from opening my eyes to how the Amish live, seeing their ideas about the things that we do has made me think about looking at my life/house/activities from the outside.  This week the subject of submission came up, and it was good to have a lead into that discussion with J about it.  He's still finding his feet in the house, and I don't think things will settle down until we are all back at school and there is some kind of routine going on again, but he understands where I am coming from on it, and clearly finds it desirable in a woman.  It's not in a black leather sexual kind of way, which it is so often portrayed as (that kind of thing has it's place in a trusting relationship and may never find it's way back to my evenings again as, lets face it, leather looks good when the body is all in the right place, but when things are on the sag, it's not such a hot look........) but as a way of thinking and being.

I like it.

And now I need to go and live it lol!  Lunches for all today, I think we'll picnic at the park for the children and I, and J needs lunch, then we'll all have something chickeny for tea from the leftover chicken - cheese and chicken pasta bake perhaps.

Laters peoples!