One of the curses of being a “parent blogger” is the amount
of parents that are seemingly winning at this parenting lark when there are
days where I feel like I am just about holding it together. I know the reality
behind everything; some days are better than others, we are all in it together
and all have our highs and lows.
Yet, sometimes it’s hard. The idea that I have to somehow do
all the adult things, all the home educating stuff and help guide my children
into being “upright and well-rounded citizens” is a bit much. But, sometimes
life throws a lesson at you and you have to grab it with both hands and run
with it.
William and I recently had one of those moments.
When William was in preschool he was a really loving, friendly
and generally happy little chap. The first term of school he was happy, excited
and was keen to go to school. He was put in the top group in his class and the teacher
was praising him for his ability but then it all changed; William became emotionally
unstable.
Every single day we were dragging him to school kicking and
screaming. His nature of being a gentle soul changed and he was aggressive,
unhappy and something would “snap” and he would go into full meltdown stage.
He was in a predominantly male class and there were lots of
arguments, bullying and fighting and in the end my little boy wasn’t surviving
let alone thriving.
It didn’t take long for William to return to the boy that he
once was. Home education was definitely the right move and I haven’t looked
back or regretted the decision to teach him. However, William still has real
surges of emotional instability.
There are some very clear triggers: Large social situation
with 10 or more people, injustices where something has “wronged” him or gone
wrong and if he hurt himself and is in pain.
One thing that calms him is his cooking and baking. He takes
his role as “My Little Chef” very seriously and the meticulous aspect of
building his creations allows him to concentrate on an end goal.
Something that has become a little tradition for him is to
design and create his Uncle’s birthday cake. Last year he really upped his game
and made a Lacoste shirt cake knowing that Uncle N loves Lacoste products.
It was his highlight achievement last year and the pressure
was on to create another masterpiece. His idea, following his Uncle’s love of
campervans, was to make a Victoria sponge VW cake.
He isolated himself in the kitchen and the baking commenced.
With two mixtures now in the oven we waited, as we always do.
Time was up and it had fully baked but it hadn’t risen. It
was flat and a tad doughy.
Oh well. These things happen. It could have been a number of
things that made it go wrong.
He rolled up his sleeves and got on with his second attempt.
Yet, it went wrong, again. From the same batter only one had risen. Using the
remaining batter he placed one more attempt into the oven. Luckily, this time,
it was a success.
Time to make the buttercream; every attempt was a fail. The sheer
heat of the kitchen was against us and the buttercream was literally melting.
Yet, we finally made one and got it into the fridge.
We then had to roll the icing and you can probably guess that this didn’t
go well either. We couldn’t get it even when rolling it out and when we did it
tore when we lifted it.
This all was around 4 hours from start to finish. William,
understandably, was becoming frustrated and upset. Every stage we went through
something went wrong and you could see the little pressure on his face. I
realised that it was futile to continue but every time I asked him he wanted to
persevere. The last and final attempt with the icing and something clicked with
him. He shouted, he got angry and I was ready to jump in and calm him down.
Yet, he took a deep breath, looked at me and just said “Daddy,
I think we need to stop and give up”. We made ourselves drinks, sat to calm
down and tried to run over all the things that happened and came to conclusion
that “sometimes things just don’t work the way we want them too and that’s okay”.
In many ways this probably seems like a minor thing but for
me it was a big move for him. He could have snapped and gone to 100%
instability but he didn’t. He got angry and quite frankly I don’t blame him but
he took it on in a calm way and moved on. The lesson, from my point of view,
was learnt and, as William kindly pointed out, we had cake to eat.
I forget sometimes that he is still really young and these
things can come at different times. A lesson was learnt and we grabbed it with
both hands. It may have been a struggle but I took it as a parenting win! A
parenting win, a lesson learnt and a cake eaten must be a good day.
4 comments:
Brilliant story. We home schooled our daughter for a spell.
Love how you are building resilience in him. Ofsted would so happy 😉
Glad it worked out in the end and to be fair, I did offer to eat the cake that didn't quite work out ;-)
He is so clever Martyn. I had my own cake business until Alice came along and even I had days were it just doesn't "work" He's very talented and I'm placing my bet now for a future bake off star!!
Ahh he's so good teaching you to bake, bless him. It can't go right every time can it? It does sound like he's managed to take an important lesson from it.
Nat.x
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