Tactful omissions: 3. Blind eye

The Impster and I are discussing notable points in the school day.

‘Rupert was running in the corridor again so I told Mrs Roach,’ she says.*

‘What? You mean you told on him?’

‘Yes, we're not allowed to run in the corridor. Those are the rules.’

Tricky lesson number three: always tell the truth, but never dob in your mates.

Unless you're two.

'I'm afraid he’s in the accident book again today,' one of the nursery staff says when I arrive to collect the Boo.

The Boo is always in the accident book.

'Nevermind,' I say, signing the book.

'Got bitten by another child,' they whisper, preserving anonymity at all costs.

'Duncan did it,' he pipes up.*

It is impossible for a two year old to lie. The part of the brain that understands lying simply hasn’t developed. A four year old on the other hand can happily tell you a bare-faced lie. So in our house at the moment we keep replaying variations on a theme:

The Boo: Waaaaaa! She did it.

The Impster: No I didn't. He hit himself over the head, silly billy bumpkin.

Me: Of course he didn’t. Don’t lie!

Sometimes I bother with the naughty step; other times I just let him get on with it and biff her back over the head. I always know if he’s the culprit because the Impster will wail with righteous indignation, ‘I didn’t deserve that!’ It’s perfectly obvious that at all other times she does.

There is a stage in childhood development called Machiavellian intelligence, which kicks in around about the time children start school. They suddenly begin to grasp the power of a convincing lie and how to make it sound as believable as possible, but they still have a wobbly moral compass.

Thankfully the Impster is an extremely poor liar, and folds quickly under interrogation. She looks to me to pull rank, to settle quarrels and dispense justice, and is never more infuriated than when I simply choose to turn a blind eye. I wonder if this is what is meant by exemplary parenting?

* Real names have been tactfully omitted

The liberal vegetarian

Oh dear, have I really not posted since August? Then like it or not, I shall give you post a day for the rest of this week, and hereby I pledge you my troth. Time dictates they will be written breathlessly, and pithily (dearest G, who will probably be the only one who reads them, tells me I am better when I’m pithy). So I shall give you pith today and juice tomorrow, and hopefully will draw the line before revealing too much flesh and skin.

Let me take you all the way back to August and our dining room table where we are having tea. The Boo has just reached across the table and has swiped all the ham from the Impster’s plate. Now he is greedily shovelling it into his mouth with obvious haste and pleasure. ‘Naughty!’ I exclaim in my angry mummy voice, trying to get the reprimand in quickly before the first blow is struck, ‘That’s not your ham and you shouldn’t steal it.’

‘Don’t worry mummy, he can have it,’ says the Impster, and with a slightly superior tone declares, ‘I’m a vegetarian now, so I don’t eat meat.’

‘What? Why? Since when?’

‘I don’t eat any animals. Just like the twins don’t eat animals. I need a special vegetarian option.’

Of course - the bloody twins at nursery. Well, she’s only four, and if I ignore it, perhaps it will go away. Admittedly though, I had not expected her to enter a vegetarian phase for another ten years.

‘Presumably you eat fish?’ I ask as casually as possible.

‘No fish. Or lamb, or chicken, or duck. Or anything that’s an animal.’

Ah ha! Perhaps this only applies to meat that is clearly named after its origins. ‘What about pork?’ I enquire.

‘Pork is from pigs,’ she says, ‘I don’t eat pigs and I don’t eat lambs or anything else that is roasted on a spit.’

Of course – bloody K. Back from a party at the weekend, elaborately regaling us with tales of Patch’s giant spit roast. Last year a whole pig. This year a whole sheep.

‘No surely not,’ says the mighty carnivore when I later hold him responsible for her ethical stance. ‘She was very interested, especially in the photos.’

Yes, dear reader, this is what she saw. K and Patch rotating the impaled beast like a scene from Lord of the Flies.



These phases pass, but not that quickly with the Impster. I recall only too well her purple phase, in which she would dress in no other colour for a whole 15 months. She has nothing if not resolution.

We go to a friend’s for Sunday roast, and she politely but firmly refuses the chicken, on the grounds of vegetarianism. ‘It’s a vegetarian chicken,’ explains our host. But the Impster is not to be won over.

And so the weeks go by, until one day towards the end of September I have the good fortune to be cooking sausages and make the helpful discovery that processed meat is so far from its animal origins that she hasn’t worked out it is meat at all. I pass this useful tip onto friends and family trying to feed her.

October dawns, and I arrive home from the deli with pastrami. The Impster would like to sample it. ‘What is pastrami?’ she enquires having eaten a plate full.

I take the brutal approach. ‘Meat. From a cow.’

‘Oh. Well I’m a vegetarian except for pastrami.’

She has done extremism. Now she is moving onto her liberal phase. As long as it comes from an expensive deli, it can be accommodated. Chorizo, salami, prosciutto, pastrami. All these can be tolerated. I pass this useful tip onto friends and family who take grateful note.

But the end of the month sees the Boo tipping my venison sausage casserole on his head, and the Impster refusing to eat it on ethical grounds. Perhaps it was the word venison that alerted her to the fact that not all sausages are vegetarian. But she can’t help loving food and her resolve is clearly wavering.

Tonight I cook sausage and mash. I can see her deliberating. ‘They’re only 50% pork,’ I lie. ‘Why don’t you just eat half?’ And she does.

The Dark Side

It is well past her bedtime and the Impster has been crafting a spaceship out of two chairs, a table, a frying pan, her tricycle and a load of cushions. We have friends over which is making her somewhat excitable. ‘It’s still not working,’ she says. ‘We need more cushions!’

‘Ah, a typical woman’s solution,’ says our friend H (who is typically male in many ways, and not least in his antipathy towards soft furnishings).

‘Han, Han,’ continues the Impster, tugging at my trousers, ‘Get in, it’s time to go.’

At the moment our family exists in a parallel universe where she is Princess Leia, K is ‘my brother Luke’, I am Han Solo, and the Boo is rather unfortunately characterised as ‘Chewie’ (aka Chewbacca), perhaps on account of his nascent speech abilities. You have to keep up with these personas at all times. For example, ‘where is my brother?’ counter intuitively translates as ‘where is daddy?’ and it can all get a bit confusing. Especially if it’s the middle of the night.

Anyway, you might imagine my discomfort yesterday when she kissed me passionately on the lips, looked intensely into my eyes and whispered ‘I love you’.

‘Good grief,’ said I (with more than a hint of alarm), ‘where did you get that from?’ For I always make a point of trying to track down the primary source of any ‘highly original’ behaviour. 'The Empire Strikes Back,' came her unhesitating reply.

Now tell me if I’m overreacting, but this occurred on the same day as the Boo requested a ‘Jabba the Hut pictch [picture]’ to colour in. He is 19 months, has only just learned to talk and yet within his limited lexicon the following expressions are crystal clear: ‘Em-piire Strike Back’, ‘Yoda’, ‘Prince Leia’ and now Jabba the bloody Hut.

And worse still, every day when I pick him up from nursery now, he runs towards me, arms outstretched, beaming from ear to ear shouting ‘’tar War DD’ [DVD]. Goodness knows what the professional carers are thinking but I imagine it runs along the lines of ‘as soon as she gets that dear little boy home she must just sit him straight in front of the television.’

Well this is a cautionary parenting tale. For our shift to the dark side occurred not as a result of us parking the children in front of age-inappropriate feature-length films, but while sitting down on the floor playing with them. While I was swimming with the Boo, K was at home constructing a Lego Star Wars Snowspeeder with the Impster. And then (strictly for contextual purposes you understand) he showed her the Battle of Hoth scene from The Empire Strikes Back, which, like some supernova explosion, has obliterated life as we know it. Never having watched Star Wars myself, I am now an outcast, an alien in my own house.

Mothers, I implore you, beware your husbands spending quality time with your children. Find a fence that needs repainting, or a shelf that needs erecting, but do not let them prejudice vulnerable minds. Before you know it you will find yourself beset daily by requests to make a Death Star out of a dozen left-over Lego bricks and to recreate a Princess Leia hairstyle from a few curly locks. Inability to perform these miracles will only lead to tantrums which will only be calmed by recourse to half an hour’s viewing of Return of the Jedi.

Right now, here I sit at the computer, poised to make the best of the situation by the ultimate comfort act of ordering more cushions.