Begging your pardon, sir,

but phuck you!

My respect for the office of president is intact. There have been presidents since I was honoured to become an American citizen who might not have been my choice, who might not have believed as strongly as I on certain issues but they have garnered my respect if not my approbation. My respect for the man who currently holds the presidency has never been lower.

I am a hybrid. The product of an English father and an Australian mother. My parents met in Malaya and my childhood did nothing to stop their wanderlust. Thank goodness. Dad had stayed in Pakistan after Partition in 1947, one of a handful of British army officers charged with helping form a new army for a new country. Mum was a pragmatic woman, a nurse who experienced the horrors of World War II in both Singapore and Papua New Guinea. I was their only child. 

Discipline for minor infractions was meted out by my mother – after extreme provocation a slap across the thigh with a floppy slipper would be forthcoming. I remember it being red silk with delicate embroidery, beautiful and gave a decent sting.

Rarely can I remember my father being involved in non-compliance issues. And he never slapped me. But nearly sixty years after the event I vividly recall being sat down at the dining table and given one of the sternest lectures of my life. We lived in Nigeria which means I would have been no older than six.

The reason? I had cheeked Ali. I don’t remember how, or why but I have never forgotten the lesson I learnt that evening before my bedtime story.

Ali was our cook. Originally from Sudan and proud, whenever guests or a camera came into view, to change into white trousers and tunic over which he tied a broad red cummerbund. He would also don a red fez with a black tassel and, lastly, he would pin his medals across his chest attesting to his service in the East Africa Campaign whilst in the Sudan Defence Force. 

Any man who visited out home and who he deemed worthy was saluted. He knew to keep my father’s glass topped up. If Ali didn’t like a guest he would, to my mother’s chagrin, ignore an empty glass and parched throat. He was though a gentle man who adored my mother despite her propensity to gather orphan animals, and for whom he would cut up papaya and pineapple each morning. Something I’m sure wasn’t in his original job description. And Ali loved me, and I him.

It was a long time ago so I can’t remember the exact words my father used after my transgression and he would not have raised his voice but I do still remember the shame. His words would have been measured and along the lines of, “Ali is a dignified man who works to make our lives easier. Particularly yours. Who are you, a child, to dare speak to him in such a manner?”

I do remember being dismissed. I ran to Ali’s domain where I sat on the kitchen step with his arm around me and, crying, gave him my apology. It was probably the first truly sincere apology I had given. 

It is people like Ali, and Sam, our houseboy and others in other countries who worked for my parents, and later others who worked for me and my own family who have made our lives infinitely happier. Without a doubt easier and, once I reached the age of employing people myself, have given me insights into different cultures and countries that I might not have had without their kind guidance. A true privilege.

So why the title of this little story? Because the president of the United States has proven with his craven behaviours toward those who work to make his life easier, and certainly safer, that there is no moral line he will not cross.

I’m not talking about the political animals who serve in his administration – those in front of the cameras, those used to speaking the words people want to hear, those scrabbling to pacify the man’s every perceived slight, to temper his tantrums. I couldn’t care less about them. 

I am thinking of men and women who have worked in the White House, some I’m sure for many years and through many administrations. The men and women who change the sheets, who cook the meals, who dust the furniture and hoover the carpets. The men and women in the background who make sure the wheels of arguably the best-known home in America turn without a single crunch of a pebble. And while I’m at it, the men and women charged with literally taking a bullet for the president. What right does he have to disregard their health?

To flaunt his power by belittling those who are cognisant of the dangers of a virus that is devouring the country with rampant disregard to who it infects. To flout the mandates of mask wearing and spew his vitriol over those nearby. His braggadocio knows no bounds.

By all accounts his arrogance and hubris, his complete disregard for others are behaviours learnt from his father.

My father has been dead for ten years but his words and his actions as I grew up have never left me. Don’t ever forget it is the people, often behind the scenes, who make our lives easier, safer, more pleasant who deserve our utmost and unbridled respect.

So mr president, I repeat, phuck you!

Learning Young…. not to cheat!

This is a blog I wrote in April 2015. In April 2019, following the scandal of celebrities and the well-heeled ‘cheating’ to get their kids into college it is just as relevant.

Education, and parenting, can provoke heated debate regardless of where in the world we happen to live. The ‘tiger mom’ of Amy Chua, who espouses a structured and highly disciplined approach versus the ‘panda dad’ of Alan Paul, who believes “it stifles creativity and innovation”.

Then you have Texas Lt Governor Dan Patrick’s Grassroots Advisory Board, who believe pre-K education is a “godless, socialistic” plot and “a threat to parental rights”.

Like most things there has to be a median way.

In his book Anatomy of Restlessness, Bruce Chatwin wrote, “Children need paths to explore, to take bearings on the earth in which they live….” He believed some of our earliest memories are based around paths, whether to school, to the end of the garden, to the shops; in essence wanting to find out where a path may lead. The journey being as important as the destination.

My “I’m nearly four” year-old granddaughter recently started kindergarten, and is thriving in an environment that allows her to learn, to find her own path and to have a few hours a day independent from her mother.

And there’s the nub. Independence. It seems to me, our role as parents is to set our children up to succeed in whatever endeavour they decide to undertake. We try to guide them. We hate to see them suffer, whether from a snub in the playground, a lost ballgame, a bad grade, or a first broken heart. But if we try and ensure all failure is taken out of their little lives, how will they know how to handle failures that will inevitably face them as adults? There are very few of us who have not had a disappointment of some kind, and it is how we manage those later failures that gives measure of the man or woman we have become.

An article on the BBC website triggered thoughts on how much pressure we put on our children to succeed. Parents in Hong Kong taking extreme steps to ensure their toddlers are accepted into “the most prestigious nurseries.” Only then, these parents believe, will their children gain entry to the best primary, and secondary schools, and ultimately the best universities. One mother has a tutor for her eighteen-month-old daughter, who will need to know how to build a house with bricks, know where the eyes go on a felt face, and in the more extreme nursery interviews, be able to identify different kinds of eggs. Really? Of the five eggs pictured, I felt reasonably confident I got three correct. Tutoring is set to begin for this child’s brother when he reaches the grand old age of eight months. These toddlers are also tutored, and tutoring does not come cheap, in ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and not to be greedy, not to hit little Jimmy, and so on.

Parents in the US desperate for their daughters to get into a sorority have been known to spend up to $8,000 for a two-week sorority prep class, wherein their daughters are taught how to behave. Call me old fashioned, but I thought that was a parent’s job. A study by the University of Mary Washington, published in Journal of Child and Family Studies, reported that children with hovering parents were more likely to suffer from depression, and a lack of self-worth than those with parents less inclined to micromanage their offspring.

There is, of course, a difference in giving children a leg up, and all out cheating. A photo doing the rounds on social media recently showed parents climbing the walls and hanging from the windows of a school in Bihar, India, waving cheat sheets at their children inside taking end-of-year exams. Apparently US colleges expect applicants from China to have falsified transcripts, fake letters of recommendation and not to have written their own essays.

But it’s not just in Asia this proclivity to cheat for our children occurs. Tutors writing college papers for wealthy students is not unknown here. One young tutor earned enough to pay his own college tuition from such an undertaking. An extreme example is of an American mother, Catherine Venusto, a school secretary, who hacked into the schools computers to change her child’s grades. Not just once, but a hundred times. Again, really?

I do understand, and agree, education is the way out of poverty, but parents cheating for their children is not going to help them think. If we want independent, free thinking and confident young people we have to allow them to think for themselves, and to make some mistakes. That does not mean abrogating responsibility for their safety. It means giving them the opportunity to find their own path, even if it means some fraught moments for us. And parenting is full of those gut-wrenching moments. 

In a recent guest blog for ExpatChild.com on the ‘empty nest syndrome’ I wrote, “Helicoptering our children has I think made the ‘empty nest’ that much harder to bear. Our children have become the focus of our lives, rather than a very precious part of it; necessary of course when they are tiny and truly helpless but not so much as they grow.”

We have to let our children go in incremental steps and a good first step is kindergarten, but on their own merit. Not ours.

What do you like about being an expat?

https://blog.internations.org/2017/07/the-greatest-reasons-to-love-life-abroad/

Thanks to Internations. org – it was fun!

What’s a Girl to Do?

There is a strident section of US society vehemently against abortion. They tend to be right leaning, conservative Christians. This piece though is not so much about the splutterings of people denouncing the right for women to choose whether to have a baby or not, no matter what the circumstances of conception. It is about those same people shaming teenage girls who have become pregnant.

To have or not to have a baby. Either choice is brave. More often than not the boy man involved has negligible responsibility for the outcome of their actions. His life will continue uninterrupted. But for the young woman it is a decision that will impact the rest of her life, regardless of which decision she makes.

There are of course many of those against abortion who do not fall into the category of sanctimonious prig. Who support their daughters, their nieces, their young congregants through a confused and difficult time. Who respond to a perceived shame, which can taunt and haunt the girl, with calm kindness. Who offer practical as well as spiritual guidance. I might not agree with their stance on abortion but I admire their compassion, resilience and continued beliefs.

No, my contempt is reserved for those, of any faith, who condemn a girl whether pregnant through carelessness or callousness, who decides to keep the baby then is rejected by those very same so-called believers. Adults who turn their back, who refuse to accept any responsibility for the situation. And many of these people, whether individually or through institutions and churches, do have a responsibility. I rarely advocate others taking the blame for circumstances in which we might find ourselves. But in instances like this, blame can almost certainly be spread around.

What has riled me into writing? It is the report in the New York Times about a young woman of 18 not allowed to graduate from her Christian academy with her peers, because she is pregnant. She has also been ejected from her role on the student council. She is being supported by her parents, one of whom was on the school board but has since resigned in disgust at their stand. She is also being supported by the anti-abortion group, Students for Life, whose president was quoted as saying, “There has got to be a way to treat a young woman who becomes pregnant in a graceful and loving way.”

I was curious about the syllabus of the Heritage Academy, the school in question, and so tried a number of times to get an answer to a simple question. “Does your school teach sex education?” An answer was not forthcoming and my calls and messages have not been returned, which can only lead me to believe the response would have been ‘no’.

The Heritage Academy website proudly trumpets, “Our intent is to honor Christ in every facet of our program.” They demand a signed pledge from parents to that very effect and, here’s the kicker, “….to resolve problems in accord with Scriptural principles (Matthew 18:15), avoiding gossip and contentiousness (Ephesians 4:31; Proverbs 17:14), to be forgiving (Colossians 3:13)….”

I had to look that up and in my bible it reads, “Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also (do) ye.”

When will the communities who espouse such rigid strictures – that of ignorance and abstinence – and enmesh their children and charges in them, learn the world is not black and white? To recognize hypocrisy is an ugly and futile endeavour. There are no winners. Least of all the young women who might find themselves pregnant, and often alone and ostracized by the very people who are meant to be nurturing them.

Students of Heritage Academy also have to sign a pledge. It is a high-minded document – I have no idea if it is legally binding – which demands “guarding my mind against immorality, impurity, rebellion, selfishness, carnality and violence”. Do students entering in lower grades even know what half those words mean?

Demanding abstinence or, as some coyly call it, chastity, is an ineffective, idealistic form of birth control. It is a fact of teenage life – hormones rage. Missteps and mistakes are sometimes made. They are though less likely to be made if comprehensive sex education is given at the appropriate times, in the appropriate manner and to both boys and girls.

We all have a right to our own opinions, but if that view blinds us into turning our backs on pregnant girls, then shame on us all. As always there is a truth to axioms. It takes a village to raise a child.

It takes two to make a baby, it should take at least two to teach it to tango.

I Am Not Your Friend!

I did the recycle run yesterday. It involves a 15 minute drive up the freeway before reaching the outer limits of my comfort zone – I’m a Downtown kind of woman! Heading north on Main Street I passed Ebenezer United Methodist Church, whose billboard proclaimed “A Mother is Your First Best and Forever Friend”. It reminded me it was Mother’s Day in America.

I do not wish to take on the UMC or any other religious entity but I can’t quite swallow the sentiment. I am not my daughter or my son’s best friend. I never have been, nor will I ever be. I am their mother.

I am the woman who loves them unconditionally. Who will fight for them till the end of my sentient life. I know their faults – as they, as adults, know mine. I will disagree with them, and sometimes I will tell them. Sometimes I will sit back, as I have done all their lives, and allow them to make mistakes – often with my heart in my mouth. But we learn from those errors of judgement – whether on a climbing frame, with a college course or with the boy/girl friend. We have to trust our children, no matter how young, or old.

I loved my mother but she was not my best friend. I did not tell her everything – dear God, if I had it might well have sent her to an early grave. My withholding of all the facts kept her alive until she was 92. That does not imply I led, or lead, a secretive life – rather that I chose judiciously what to share.

In the same manner, I do not want to know every detail of my children’s lives. I am happy to be shielded from some of their missteps. To learn of them years later, often over a glass of wine when their sentence might start, “Do you remember when I did / fell / jumped ……?” I shake my head and say “No, you didn’t tell me that. Thank you!”

So who are our best friends, if not our mothers?

As I age I find myself glancing at the obituary pages – now cloyingly called in the Houston Chronicle, ‘Life Tributes’. Sometimes a name or a face jumps up at me and I read the announcement. In America they can run to many column inches. Every relation is listed. No British reserve here. But what strikes me often is when someone has written the deceased was the best friend of his/her spouse. And again I struggle.

I adore my husband – I have done for nearly 40 years, but he is not my best friend. He is my lover. I can understand when a husband and wife die within days or weeks of each other. There is an intangible thread that links two people after a long marriage or relationship. Serious and important issues are always discussed. But do I tell him everything? Absolutely not. That reticence is sometimes for his peace of mind, sometimes for mine. He never asks me the price of a pair of impossible-to-walk-in shoes I have bought, though he and I both know I will never wear them. Unless asked point blank I rarely disclose how much the latest vet’s bill has been. He would never demur on any cost for our pets but it might irk him, so what would be gained? I am equally sure he does not tell me everything, and for that I am grateful.

I would though tell my ‘best’ friend. Whether it is indignation over something, or fear, or pride or happiness. Over coffee. Over wine or if truly joyful or desperately worried, over the phone – sometimes in tears. A friend is a safe escape valve with whom one can vent, so, if necessary, a matter can later be discussed calmly with a spouse.

A friend listens to our wildest rants, to our closest fears, and keeps our deepest secrets – most of which do see the light of day, but long after any fallout or dismay can be felt. They see us at our worst, and still care. Close as they are, they are better able to forget seeing us ugly with bloodshot eyes from a crying jag because haemorrhoids are making life hell, or kids are driving us demented with rage or worry. They are better able to listen, sometimes advise, when a child or spouse is about do something utterly insane or inane.

I have a friend who tells me when I am being unreasonable – and I take it, but I wouldn’t from my spouse. Or my children. She sits on my shoulder, every now and then, as I am about to let rip with a viciousness more often than not wholly unjustified. She accepts my foibles without having to live with them. We tell our best friend things that are too awful to voice – our deepest fears, but which sometimes need a voice so we are able to move past them without embroiling those we love most in the world.

If there were ‘a day’ for friends I would celebrate the joy of having special friends around the world who have made my life so much easier, calmer, more fun with their non-judgmental acceptance of me, and honesty with me.

But as I reflect on Mother’s Day, I rejoice in having had the privilege of having children. I take great pleasure in the fact they both have special friends – but I am not her.