D Day

We made it. I know it’s only one anniversary of many, but it’s another hurdle crossed. The sense of relief, that we didn’t drag ourselves over that hurdle in broken pieces but as a fully functioning family unit, scarred and incomplete but healthy, is so reassuring.

On that day, a year ago, when our boy left us to go on into eternity, and we gathered our things from the place we had lived in for so many months, and got into the back of my parents' car, there were two prevailing thoughts in my head.

The first was “How will we ever manage to do things again?” A whole myriad of things swarmed through my brain – eating meals together at home, movie nights, going on holiday, playing games, birthdays, Easter egg hunts, Christmas – that we would continue to do, and yet he wouldn’t ever be doing them with us. I’d forgotten how we did any of those things before him, and I was terrified at facing them all again without him. I had no idea how our other children would cope, especially the band of brothers who had never known life without him as part of their tribe.

So yesterday when I thought back to that day a year ago, there was definitely a feeling of triumph – that we had faced all those things at least once each, and had been able to get back on our feet again afterwards, no matter how hard it was. There is so much comfort in that, knowing that if we’ve done it the first time, we can do it again.

Somebody recently complemented us on how well we were doing but asked if we ever ‘slip’ into an emotional state about it all. I think the thing we’ve found is that we don’t see any of the emotions that come with what we’ve been through as a negative thing. Obviously we have to respond appropriately in certain times, so sometimes we have to hold back if we know it’s not a good place or time, but generally if we feel sad or angry or depressed, we just go with it. We ring each other up, or wait till the kids have gone to bed, then we’ll have a good cry and a wallow with some photos and memories, but it’s always with the view that we don’t allow it to paralyse us or affect any big life decisions. Sometimes it’s ten minutes in the car and sometimes it’s a week where I struggle to get out of bed and avoid spending time with other people as much as possible, but it rises and falls, and so we let it, and we’ve found that the unbearable moments of grieving always pass, and that eventually they get shorter and less frequent, but we will never expect them to pass completely.

The second thought going through my head that day was simply “It’s over”. From the intensity of sitting by a bed for weeks, being ruled by machines and medication, waiting for the last thing you want to happen, trying to fight it when you’ve got nothing left to fight it with, not knowing what to think, speak or pray, to suddenly find it all behind you, and know that you never have to spend another minute of your life worrying about your son because he’s made it through the worst and now is placed into the ultimate, best and most satisfying existence – there’s a huge, release in that moment.

Riding home to tell the rest of the family the news, replaying the awfulness of what we’d witnessed in the last few days, the sky was the most brilliant blue I’d ever seen, totally unexpected after months of grey drizzle. It was glorious, with barely a cloud and in my blurry, non-sensical sleep-deprived state, I just kept thinking that it was like heaven was having a massive party (that lasted for the next ten days) to welcome our boy and to celebrate that his suffering was over, and that they’d made the sky as blue and sparkly as his eyes used to be.

The surrealness of stepping from the dim hospital room and all that we had just witnessed, into the sunniest, brightest, bluest day I think I’d ever seen was huge. And running parallel to all my other thoughts about how we would cope today, tomorrow and forever after, was this picture of the biggest book you’ve ever seen, and a giant hand turning a huge page with great finality, and the words in my head; “A new chapter is about to begin”. There was a hope and a thrill (like the old-fashioned sense of the word that doesn’t just mean excitement, but like a jolt of mixed emotions that pass through the body all at once) that just couldn’t be explained in that moment. Something was going to happen, and it was going to be big and amazing - the pulling together of so much that had gone before, and the unveiling of things we had never seen. I had no idea what it was, I only knew that it had to be from God because it was the most unexpected way to be feeling on that day in that circumstance.

And it really has been like that. The way people have pulled around us, the physical and emotional blessings we’ve been showered with this year, the way the children have flourished, the new friendships that have begun, the promises that we received in the past that we’re seeing coming to life now – really, it’s beyond amazing. Everything I’ve ever believed has been cemented deeper into me because I’ve seen it now as well as hearing about it.

I never thought we would have moved back to Morecambe and be doing what we’re doing now. I thought the only way to move forward was to move away, but when we decided to give it another go, I said to God (in that naive, self-involved way that we all do, as if we’re in charge and He’s not) that I couldn’t go back if everything was going to stay the same. I felt a real assurance that it wouldn’t be. And it hasn’t been.

He has changed so much in us that we are far more equipped to do the job now than we were before. He has kept people on the ground who have blown us away with their faithfulness, resilience and commitment to the shambles we left them in. And new people have come who have brought exactly what was needed into the situation.

So this is the first anniversary of our loss, our son’s promotion into glory, and the beginning of our new chapter. I wonder what the next year will hold.

New Life

A few weeks ago the kids planted some sunflower seeds in little pots. We watered them and waited, and then in various degrees of speed, they begun sprouting. As they did, several of them had little caps on like this;

As I peeled them off to let the leaves open and grow, I was surprised how complete the seeds still looked. My first thought when I saw them was that a sprout had grown through another seed that was waiting to grow, but I realised that would be a heck of a coincidence to happen over and over again. Obviously, it was just the remainder of the seed's shell. 

It hit me really hard how tiny the part that holds the component for making the plant grow actually is. Before it grows, the shell is hugely important. It's where the life pod - the bit that will become a plant - is birthed and protected. It's also what identifies it. I suspect that that the insides of different types of seeds probably look very similar to each other, so we need the shell to show us that its a sunflower seed, and not a daffodil bulb or an apple seed. 

But the shell is not where the life is. It holds it ready, then when its time for it to be released and grown, it breaks open and isn't needed anymore. It dies, breaking down into cells that turn into earth to give life to more broken seeds later on.

And yet we spend so much time on these outer shells. On what they look like, what they should be dressed in, how to beautify them. Trying to make them feel better when they crave something more, so we give in to appetites and indulgences. We worry about how to sustain them financially and keep up with the expectations of everyone else around them. We cling to them desperately, afraid of what might happen if we allow them to crack and be damaged. 

But they are not true life. They are only the precursor to life. And when they are finished with, that's when the true life begins. Something totally completely beyond comprehension happens, and these little brown and white round things give way to tall, bright green things. It makes no sense, but that's what it does. We've all seen it happen.

So what happens beyond death, I have no idea what that looks like. All I can imagine is something that looks like an improved version  of the world I see now, but I'm totally sure it's far more than that. As different from this world as little brown seeds are from tall, strong sunflowers. A million times better than anything we can comprehend. 

If we are planted in the right place, we will flourish, and become all that we were meant to be.

What Wasn't

As I wrote two posts ago, it’s been a strange few months in the Scholes house, with Richard struggling with lots of back pain, and visits to the doctors and physios to try and find out what’s happened. All his symptoms pointed to a slipped and ruptured disc in his back, which we anticipated and were trying to plan how we would manage church and family during the surgery and recovery time afterwards.

We were pretty thrown then, when he went for the scan and the nurse came back in a few minutes later, as we were about to leave, and said “There’s something unexpected on the scan, we’d like to do some more please.” An all-too familiar feeling rose into our throats as we looked at each other, pretended to be fine, and said “Of course, that’s no problem.” He went back into the MRI machine, this time with dye in his blood and for a longer amount of time, and then we saw the consultant who confirmed that although the discs were fine, something unusual was happening at the base of his spine. In the next few days, blood samples were taken, phone calls were made, high levels of protein were found in his blood, and a biopsy, which involved something like a hammer and a chisel akin to a mediaeval torture method, was taken. More scans were done, over every major bone in his body, and a blood clot was found in his leg. Nothing was left but to wait.

This is what we were waiting for: a diagnosis of myeloma. All the symptoms pointed towards it; there wasn’t anything else on the table. Myeloma is a rare form of bone cancer. It is less aggressive than other cancers and is ‘treatable’ – meaning the symptoms can be slowed with medication, and even virtually halted with a bone marrow transplant, but it is terminal. It always comes back, and the life expectancy once diagnosed is up to about seven years.

So the last few weeks, it has felt like someone punched us in the stomach every morning when we woke up. We've been chatting about ordinary things, like trips and meetings, then wondering whether we’ll get to do any of them or whether we’ll be back to living with suitcases by the door and emails from hospital rooms and never knowing what we’re going to do even a week in advance. We’ve had conversations about life insurance and mortgage payouts, and shed tears when we’ve talked about the kids’ educational future and holidays we want to do with them before it’s too late. He’s been thinking about who to train up to take over the church leadership from him, and he started giving his three year old daughter tips on how to pick a future husband.

And of course, we have prayed like the clappers.

Today, I had an amazing conversation with someone in our church who was waiting for medical test results and they had come back totally unexpectedly clear. I was crying and thanking God and whooping down the phone at the good news. When I hung up, I saw a text on my phone from Richard. All I could see were the words ‘myeloma in biopsy’ standing out to me from the middle of it. My heart went cold as a realised that this was what we were waiting for – the actual confirmation of the actual disease that was going to steal my husband. I read it again and was confused by the other words around it. After some of the slowest few seconds of my life, I realised that in front of the word was a big fat NO. No myeloma in biopsy.

No. Myeloma.

Now, I’m very aware that if it’s not myeloma, it’s got to be something else, and that my husband is still in a lot of pain, with something wrong with his spine, and a large blood clot in his leg, and too much protein in his blood – BUT right now it’s NOT terminal cancer, so, like my brother-in-law, who yelled so loud when he heard the news that most of Morecambe must have heard him, today we are celebrating that our future together looks set to go beyond the year 2020 and that it seems like we have just had a death sentence lifted from our shoulders.

We still don’t know what the future holds (and we are really glad for the clarity that has come to us in the last few weeks, asking ourselves where we would go and what we would do if we only had a short time left, and finding out that the answers were ‘right here’ and ‘exactly what we’re doing now’), but we now know what it doesn’t hold anymore, and that’s good enough right now.

And for whatever we do end up facing, this is what I wrote last week, when we were sure the worst was about to be confirmed:



Maybe.
It's time to do battle again. Not that we ever stop - life is a battle from birth to death - but sometimes the battle crosses from the internal and the unseen to the glaringly obvious, where the stakes seem higher and the end result more frightening. In reality, it's probably no worse or damaging to our future than what goes on inside of us everyday, but when the symptoms go public, so does the fight.

What do I mean by doing battle? Realising that there's a much bigger picture than the physical one we see in front of us, and that every thought, attitude and condition of the heart matters. It's not denying the reality of the frightening situation in front of you, but it's knowing that every tear cried does not go unnoticed, but is counted in the price of staying by your post when you feel like crumbling. It's not feeling strong all the time; it's allowing your frailty to drive you towards the ultimate stronghold, Who protects and comforts at all times. It's not claiming that everything in your life ought to be perfect because you're a good person; it's deciding (and redeciding when you feel like changing your mind) that it doesn't actually matter what happens TO you at all - it's what you allow to happen IN you in the meantime that counts. 

So we will fight again, despite feeling battle-weary, because we’ve now seen what God can do in the worst time, and that victory is not all we expect it to look like. We will do whatever it takes to stand firm and keep going, even if we have no idea what will happen in the future. What else is there? Really? Nothing that I want. So bring it on - we’re ready.

"Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him." James 1:12 

Disneyland Paris

We've just returned from a five day holiday at Disneyland Paris (yes, I wrote this two month ago. It's taken me this long to finally add the photos to it, due to a phobia of inserting and accurately aligning more than one picture into blogspot at a time. It's hard work and has taken me several goes. Do you hear me blogspot website managers? HARD WORK). (And don't get me started on the highlight of the text that can't be removed - it makes me want to cry. I only have OCD in one area of life and that's in published material. This is killing me.)

It was incredible. The time of year meant that it was pretty quiet (although pretty quiet at Disney is like peak season for most UK attractions) and so instead of spending half the days in queues, we were able to go from ride to show to meet'n'greet, etc, with only a five minute wait most of the time while we waited for the group in front of us to finish. I think we only queued for more than ten minutes about six times the whole time we were there. It was cold (though not as cold as it should have been) and it rained quite a bit but it was worth putting up with just to be there.

We took oodles of photos, of course, so here are just a few to show what kind of memories we made:

 Waiting to get on a plane. Although the older three boys have been on a plane before, they were too young to remember it, so this was a first experience for all of them really.

Rocky decided the emergency evacuation procedure looked like some kind of fun park in itself with all the slides and inflatable trampolines. He was disappointed when I told him we hopefully weren't going to be going on it.

The reason we got such a great deal: the twentieth anniversary celebrations.

The main guy himself, waiting for us when we came down for breakfast. We made him queue to meet us ;)

The only thing we actually had to  wait in a queue for was to meet the Disney Princesses. Baby totally bowled all of them over, chatting to them as if they were her best friends.

Manly kind of carouselling. 

She was desperate to see Minnie Mouse, so when we spotted her on the third day, we released Baby from her pushchair, and she flew through the crowd around Minnie and threw herself on her. I pulled her away and apologised, but instead Minnie waved the rest of the respectfully waiting crowd away, and brought Baby back instead for some fierce cuddles. Love how you can get away with anything when you're two.

Me and my boys on the Slinky Dog ride (you sit inside Slinky's spring).

 The biggest Buzz Lightyear you're ever gonna see.

 Turtle parachuting.

Loved the stained glass windows telling the story of Sleeping Beauty. 

Rocky meeting one of his favourite book characters. 

Just before filing missing child reports, we found them with Pluto. Apparently anybody wearing a Disney character costume is as safe as (but more interesting than) your parents, so if you see them, you're allowed to abandon your family in pursuit of them. It took a while for them to understand this is not true.

Jack Sparrow was brilliant. The benefit of off-season is lots of time at the Meet'n'Greets. He wouldn't let them go till they perfected their "aaargh"s. 

A favourite spot.

 Don't even know how to caption this. It's just too cute.

It wasn't our first trip to Disneyland.  Five years ago, for its fifteenth anniversary, it had a kids-go-free offer, and we got an unexpected chunk of money, so we decided to go. Turtle was six, Scooby and Ace were four, and Rocky was just six months. It was a busier time, so keeping them all occupied in the queues was really hard, but it was fantastic, and of course our experience stuck with us for a long time afterwards. We always hoped we could take them again in the future, but doubted we could afford it, and then with Scooby's illness, we couldn't plan holidays anyway.

When it was clear that Scooby's illness was a long-term thing, a nurse from our local hospital recommended we should apply for the Make-a-Wish Foundation, so we did. We put Disneyland at the top of the list, as Scooby chattered about it quite a lot, and we knew they often made special arrangements for the medical side of things, which was our only chance of getting insurance to travel abroad. Of course we didn't tell him about the application, but the more ill he got, the more the whole idea of Disney-related stuff seemed to help him through things. When he couldn't do anything other than listen to stories or watch movies, we got through loads of Disney books and DVDs, particularly the Pixar Shorts which he found hilarious. He frequently asked for MRIs because in the scanner, to help sooth the noise of the machine, he could listen to Disney soundtracks. Once we understood why he kept asking for brain scans (!), we downloaded Disney music tracks for him to listen to in his hospital room. And the last few times he was able to interact with his siblings, he would ask them to get on his bed and they would all pretend to be at Disneyland - to be going on a boat on the way there, and then on the different rides.

I was gutted when we got a call from the Foundation to tell us that they were going to grant his wish and I had to tell them that he'd died two weeks earlier.

So when his Child Trust Fund was released to us a few weeks later, we decided that given the choice on what we spent his money on, he'd have wanted us to go to Disneyland. As it was now the 20th anniversary, there were more special offers on, but although we could now afford a large chunk of it, we would need around a thousand pounds to afford the rest. We put the decision on hold while we decided whether we thought we could save the rest somehow.

A few days later we received a letter in the post from a friend of my brother, who we had never met, but he had been following our story and praying for us along the way. He was one of the trustees of a charity that his grandfather had bequeathed, which would help families with sick children. He'd brought our situation to the other trustees and they had decided to grant us some money to spend specifically on treating us as a family to something special. The amount was one thousand pounds.

We were overwhelmed with the generosity of strangers, and the specific provision for something we didn't need but had wanted. It was incredible, and one of the many ways in which God kept revealing His hand to us in the difficult first few months. We booked the holiday, and then had the added excitement of waiting to tell the kids. On Christmas Day, we had wrapped up some of their Disney toys attached to letters, so they were confused to open a huge exciting-looking box only to find their existing toys inside, until they rearranged them to work out what they said!

Thanks to even more generosity of family, and waiting till the last minute for a great deal, we changed at the last minute from driving to flying. Although Turtle and Ace had flown a long time ago, they were too young to remember, so it was a first for all of them to fully experience going on an aeroplane. In Rocky's words: "It made me feel all tickley inside - I think my tummy likes flying!"

I thought beforehand that it was going to be tough to be there without Scooby, and that we might spend some of the time really upset that he wasn't there. But it felt really different for a start. Turtle and Ace were five years older, so they saw and experienced things really differently to how they had last time. And five years ago, we only had three children who could join in and enjoy the experience - this time there was four sets of reactions to watch instead. Plus we'd skipped quite a few things last time because they were "girly" so this week we found all sorts of new attractions that we hadn't seen before, and the boys definitely enjoyed them more than they thought. (We didn't make them queue up to meet three different princesses though - they ended up going on the Star Wars simulator three times instead!)

A couple of times I got a hit of emotion - once as the parade came round the corner for the first time, and also when we were buying their toys on the last day ready to leave, because they were two of the things I remembered so clearly from five years ago, that it was like having flashbacks.

But apart from that (and the plane ride home when it all hit me again), we didn't spend most of our time mourning for him. Of course I thought of him loads, and of course I wished he was there, but it was me being able to experience his reactions that I missed. I don't feel at all like he was missing out on what we were getting to do, partly because I know he DID get to go five years ago, but mainly because I know that what he's experiencing right now far outweighs any trip to Disneyland or any other pinnacle of childhood.  It's not for his sake that I feel any sorrow, but for mine. I feel so impatient to be where he is, and so relieved for his sake that he's not limited anymore (I can't imagine what stage of his illness we'd have been able to take him at if things had worked out differently, but I'm sure there's loads of stuff he wouldn't have been able to do). I'm so glad we were able to treat the other four children to something special on his behalf, and for the way things seemed to come together so well to make it all happen. We've been incredibly blessed, and we are incredibly grateful.

March Mayhem

Anyone spot which one of my New Years intentions I might not be doing well at?

So my once-a-week blog intentions have failed miserably, but I'm okay with that at the moment because the reason is that I've been busy DOING things - good things. Lots of crazy things have happened in the last few weeks, and in March particularly, that have had me here, there & everywhere. A lot of it is other people's personal stuff so I won't go into details, except to say that several friends and family members have gone through really difficult life situations recently, and I've found myself in places I've never set foot in before as a result of walking through it with them.

One of these things has had a massive affect on the others, and that is that Richard has a slipped and ruptured disc in his back. He's been struggling with pain and strange nerve sensations down his legs for quite a while, but at the beginning of February it got much worse very quickly and he's now been off work and lying prostrate for nearly two months. Rest hasn't made it better (if it's just ruptured, sometimes it can eventually heal up) and now we are down the very long route of waiting for a scan and a prognosis, and probably surgery.

So I am doing the physical side of running home and church, while he is using the time to meet with people from his couch, write emails and proposals, and hang out with the kids in as many different ways while horizontal that he can find.

We've never done it this way round before - he's done for me during bouts of illness, and for several months during my last pregnancy, but he's never been laid flat by anything in his life before - he's always just found a way through and ploughed on!

The weird thing is that his immobility has actually meant that in some ways I've been more available to other people than ever before. Usually I have to juggle the kids around everything that crops up, but in the last few weeks if a call's come through that someone's needed a lift to a legal meeting, or a hospital visit, or emergency babysitting, I've been able to say yes without hesitation, because I know I can leave the house for a couple of hours while Richard watches the kids from the couch, so long as I'm around to feed them and put them to bed! The difference between this time last year, when I was completely dependent on other people to drop everything and help us out, to being on the other side of the equation is extremely striking.

The timing of it too, as always, is perfect. In my gradual growth and recovery through our own trauma, there have been marked phases where I feel like I’ve been transitioned from one to the other, and I find myself doing things that just a couple of weeks before I would’ve found impossible. At the beginning of February my mindset and expectations were starting to become firmly fixed, and I had built limitations around myself that I thought were healthy and sensible. March has blown that out of the water and I’m so glad it has. I’ve been stretched, challenged and re-energised in completely unexpected ways, and many words that were given to me last year are beginning to make sense. I’ve been given lots of opportunity to build positively into other people (four speaking appointments in one month – that’s never happened before!) and received lots of wisdom and encouragement that I would’ve missed if I hadn’t stepped out of my comfort zone. In our church leadership, we’ve come across a few situations that had the potential to go very negatively, but instead have brought us on in leaps and bounds in relationships and vision for the future.

The kids seem to be paradoxically blossoming during this time too, maybe because we’ve had to be insular for such a long time and now they are aware of much more happening beyond that. Certain patterns of behaviour we’ve been struggling with for ages have suddenly been resolved (including bedtime battles – hallelujah!) and there seems to be a lot more harmony in the Scholes house at the moment.

So we’d definitely appreciate your prayers for Richard’s back, and for the people around us who are currently struggling with their health and with majorly difficult life situations, but we also want to acknowledge that things are going well in spite of it all and, as always, good is rising up through all of the bad.

And I really need to do a Disneyland update, because it was amazing! Stay tuned...

Winter Wonderlaundry: A Repost

Tuesday 18th November 2008 (when my boys were 6, 5, 5 & 1)

Last night I came home from a friends house and found snow in my laundry room ('room' is an exaggeration - it used to be a toilet cubicle).

'Ahh,' I thought. 'Snow. How lovely. Wait, no...'

Of course it wasn't. I switched the light on, took a deep breath and was gas-fumed by the smell of non-biological detergent. And I don't even buy the powder, I get the tabs. Someone had been very busy.

Whoever it was (and my money's on Snotmee), had very thoughtfully used some of the decimated tabs to try and wash something, which turned out to be a school jumper.

Now, I'm all for the children helping with the housework. I have a list of chores up that they do in return for stars, which they exchange for points, which they exchange for prizes - it's less complicated than it sounds - but this definitely wasn't on the list. In fact, laundry is the one single household job I actually enjoy doing because you get to fold it and iron it while sitting on your behind and watching television.

What confused me the most was that whoever had done it had left the door open on the washing machine, and there was soapy water sitting inside the drum, and (I discovered when I tried to hoover the floor) more water on the carpet. You see, I have tried many times to open a washing machine mid-cycle, and there is no physical way of doing it. Not even if your washer explodes and dies halfway through a wash with lots of important items still inside it (that happened when I was a student). Not even if you're talking with your husband in the kitchen and you suddenly realise that his hand-held computer is being flung round on spin-cycle along with his work clothes (that happened in our last house). If a washing machine has water in it, there is no way on this green earth it will let you get that door open.

Unless you're a five year old child.

I really think that all those scientists who feel that they have all the basic proponents that will lead to the cure for cancer should bring them to my house, leave them in a high cupboard, sit in another room with a cup of tea, and wait for that five year old to conduct an experiment that will lead to the impossible. I mean, it's got to lead to a way of making me money enriching the world one day. It's cost me enough in make up, liquid soap, washing powder and other smearable products.

The School of Parenting: Personality Clashes

I’ve wondered about doing some posts specifically on parenting advice for a while now. The main thing that has put me off is that such an action makes me sound like I think I’m some sort of expert, and I know I’m really really reeeeally not.  I am, of course, a mother to five children though, and as they are all very different and I have made a lot of mistakes along the way, I suppose that does give me plenty of material to share to give ideas about how to react to some of the many different personalities that children arrive with, and to point out my past mistakes in the hope that it’ll save someone else from making the same ones. I love chatting to other mums about kids, because you learn a lot from each other, and are also often reminded about how far you’ve come in your parenting journey.  It’s SUCH a steep learning curve that we need all the help we can get!

Recently, in a couple of conversations about kids of totally different ages (including a first time mum with a newborn), I was reminded of a lesson that I learned really early on that has helped me hugely, and I think is relevant to many parents who’ve got themselves into a negative cycle.

The message is this: Your child is not your enemy.

When my first child was just a few days old, I took him to the wonderful community that every child should be raised in, because of the depth of relationship and experience you find there, and that is church (if you don’t have one to go to, find yourself one). A lovely lady the generation ahead of me gathered to join the throng of women who had gathered around me to coo and stroke my prize, and as she stroked his little face, she said, with a forlorn tone in her voice, “I remember when I had my first son. I thought he hated me.” That’s all she said, and that’s all she needed to say. It stuck with me instantly.

You see, over the years I had worked with a lot of young people, and seen many interesting parent/child dynamics. And I kept coming across this pattern of certain kids in certain families who seemed to have a different relationship with one of their parents than their siblings did. It’s like no matter what they did, they clashed with that parent, and it was usually the mother. When their brother or sister made a mistake, it was dismissed as them being daft, but when that particular child made a mistake, the parent took it as a personal attack. By the time they were teens, they found it almost impossible to live together. I always wondered how as a parent you got yourself into that position.

And I think that lady kind of summed it up. It’s really easy to look at a child sometimes and think they’re doing things purely to spite you, and that there’s something innately wrong with your relationship with them.

It can start from day one. Even if you put aside the trauma that giving birth puts you through – that feeling that your body has just been ripped apart and left you shaking and bleeding and possibly patched back together (I feel a collective shudder from all the ladies) – becoming a mum is a difficult thing. This little person comes into your life, and not only do they need you constantly so your time becomes a much different matter than it was before, but it also cries. A lot. And the books and the antenatal classes said that if it cries, you feed it, and you burp it, and you change it, and you encourage it to sleep. But sometimes you do all that and it still cries.

The trouble is that by the time we’ve become adults, we’ve learned the vital life lesson that the ways people react to you emotionally are important signals we read to know whether our behaviour makes them happy or sad or angry or excited, and we then adjust our behaviour accordingly. But newborn babies don’t give us that rich tapestry of emotional clues - they can only use one – crying. So we hear, all the time, “You’re doing something wrong! You’re doing something wrong! You’re doing something wrong!” And that equals failure in our heads. And that’s where we can get to where my dear lady friend was on day one of her son’s life – assuming that he hated her.

It’s a sad, and yet logical response.

If you happen to have a particularly settled baby that doesn’t cry much, or a great community of people around you who give you great advice and breaks from the crying (did I mention you can find that in church?), or such a massive rush of feel-good hormones because your body is so jubilant at the fact it’s not pregnant anymore (which is what I had, thankgoodness), then this stuff balances out the negative response that crying creates in us. But some people don’t have those things, and so they can start on the backfoot.

Of course, once you get to week six and your baby starts being able to smile at you, life can feel so totally different that you don’t mind the crying anymore, and you begin a new kind of relationship with your child where they give you visual signs of recognition and acceptance (and, in case I’m putting off anyone from having children by my previous paragraphs, THIS is what can’t be bought by all the gold in the world and what makes it all totally worth it). So you plod on a bit further and things can go well.

Along the way, you have other obstacles to get over, like the ogre of comparison, when your child’s behaviour doesn’t match up to other people’s children (that’s a whole other post I’ll do in the future because parental comparison is a MASSIVE thing), and the realisation that having the aim of keeping your kids happy ALL the time is completely unattainable, so you have to lower your standards to keeping them fed, clean and sometimes happy instead. And then you hit the toddler stage.

Probably the best advice to give here is to read this book:

Seriously, it changed the course of where I was going to go and brought me to a better place. Because I had THREE toddlers all at the same time, with different responses to the many changing hormones that were charging around their bodies, and they needed three very different techniques to help handle them. And this book goes through ideas, gives you realistic expectations for your child’s behaviour, and most, importantly, it’s funny, which is really important after trying to get through massive humourless volumes on parenting that make you feel ten times worse about what you’re NOT doing right at vital developmental stages.

Toddlerdom is the point where their predetermined personalities come out with full force and you’re expected to somehow tame the bad, encourage the good and discipline the potential to become all it can be inside this little person who walks around carrying your heart, your dreams for the future, your hopes for the world to be a better place, and the decisions of which nursing home you’ll end up in in several decades time. Wow. No wonder we feel the pressure when things seem to be going wrong.

The main difficulty I found in raising these fiery balls of potential is not facing the child who is very different to you. Those children are usually the ones who fascinate you the most, because they approach life with a fresh set of eyes that you don’t have, so you feel like they broaden your world to new possibilities and get you thinking out of the box. They might also have got these traits from their other parent, which can be the very same traits that attracted you to your partner in the first place.

No, for me it’s facing the same traits that you already have, and struggle with on a daily basis, that are the tipping point in a parent/child relationship. There’s something in watching that tiny person mirroring some of the worst of your own behaviour that makes you want to climb back into history, relive your life, and change all your bad habits and confront your biggest weaknesses, as if somehow if you’d learnt to conquer them years ago, then maybe you could’ve wiped them from your DNA before being given the chance to reproduce and put them back into the human race. It’s so utterly painful to see the stuff you’ve never been able to deal with in your own character, bubbling up in your three year old (that you assumed was a perfect blank canvas before they came to you), that instead of rationally finding a way of dealing with that child’s behaviour and walking them through it, makes you yell “Stop doing that NOW!”

I am so glad that God joined up some dots for me early on (mainly through seeing other people getting it wrong) that prepared me for this battle. I did have a child who was like me in almost every way, and as lovely as it was to feel like I could read his mind, and exciting when he got interested in the same things that interest me, it was also extremely difficult to back down when we disagreed. As soon as I saw traits of stubbornness and pride rising up in him, I would try and stand in his way and oppose him till he backed down. In other words, I would try and fight his stubbornness and pride with my stubbornness and pride. Not surprisingly, it didn’t always go well.

It really wound me up on so many levels. I felt guilty that the reason he struggled with these issues was because I’d passed it on to him; I felt determined to do all I could to never let him ‘win’ so that he would learn that these character traits wouldn’t do him any good; I felt like all my buttons were being pressed so that I kept showing the worst side of myself – it had the potential to spiral into a really negative relationship.

So what did I do about it? By the grace of God, I had to remind myself that I was the parent and he was the child, so I had to handle the situation with maturity and creativity, not pig-headedness (he was a toddler – that’s all he had). So I used techniques that didn’t come naturally to me.

When I saw his temper rising and that he was about to challenge my authority, I tried distraction. Instead of demanding respect and obedience (which ARE important things to nurture in a child), I would point to something out of the window, or suddenly change the topic of conversation, to give him chance to think and make better decisions about what was about to come out of his mouth. With one of my other children, whose main difficulty was concentration levels, distraction would have been the worst technique to use, but in this case it worked to break the cycle of constant heated confrontations.

I also had to be selective about what I challenged him on. I wanted him to always respond nicely, but if he didn’t, sometimes I would just turn away and start chatting to another child instead, to show him that speaking nicely brought about positive results, but yelling doesn’t get you what you asked for. With one of my other children, whose main difficulty was disappearing and destroying things around the house, ignoring him would have been the worst technique to use, but in this case it was like pouring water onto an explosive situation.

I also asked for help a lot. If Richard was home, and I had drawn swords (only metaphorically, honestly), I would sometimes send him a look and he would step in and diffuse the situation immediately. His opposite-type personality to the child in question meant there was never the same clashing between the two of them, and so it often made things so much easier for all of us. (And it works the other way too, with Richard and one of the other boys, who are chalk and chalk. I step in and be the cheese.) (Who came up with that analogy and why?) We never disagreed with or undermined the work of the other parent – we went in supporting each other but by using different techniques.

It got to the point where the real challenges became fewer and further between. Of course, sometimes I just had to stand my ground and refuse to give in, because that’s part of a parent’s job; to bring consistency and help a child learn self-control. But when I did it less often, I felt stronger to be able to carry it through and not get as emotionally het-up as I had been doing (which is another separate post I’ll do another time too).

As he grew, our relationship got better and better because I had resolved that we would never be enemies. When his mood was good, I capitalised on it and used our commonality for bonding times, like playing board games and reading (told you he was like me!) and when his, or my, mood was bad, we gave each other space. So not only did we end up with a great relationship, but a greater understanding of each other that meant we could learn a lot from each other. There were certain traits in me that I saw much more clearly because of the reflection he showed me, and so I learned to deal with them in my adult life in a way I never had done in my childhood and teens. I didn’t realise how much my pride got in the way of relationships until I saw how destructive it looked from the other side. I didn’t realise that my desire to always get things right actually stopped me from doing lots of things because I had a fear of failure and didn’t know how to repair things when I got them wrong.

I am so completely grateful for the relationship with a child who I could have treated as a nemesis, but instead became a great teacher, shaper and friend in my life. Even though our time together was cut short, I look back with no regrets because I know I did my best, and that he became a person who turned those traits of stubbornness and pride into tools of tenacity and determination, and inspired me to do the same along the way.

So that’s my parenting challenge: God put you and your child on the earth to shape and form each other into better people. Therefore you’re on the same team! So what’s standing in your way? What are the similarities in you that clash with each other, and how can you form a path around them so they don’t become a wall between you? Who and what can you use to break the stalemate when neither of you is prepared to back down? There are many ways to discipline and build character into our children, but too often we choose one (whether it works or not) and refuse to change our technique – maybe it’s time to think outside the box.

Hope that helps!