An insight into a mother-daughter relationship

As I've mentioned before in this blog, I feel very privileged to have had great mothering myself.  I was going through the files on some old CD ROMs today and I came across the eulogy I wrote for my mother many years after she died.  (Yes, I know- eulogies are usually written for the funeral; that's another story, and a story which is much more about my very strange relationship with my father, who I suspect was never quite the same after World War II.  I had to wait 16 years after her death to farewell my mother in my own way.) 

As I read the eulogy through, I thought it was a pretty fine portrait of what good mothering can look like.  And so it occurred to me that other mothers might like to read it. 

Apart from the many insights into her mothering technique- what she worried about, what she laughed off, how she approached day-to-day life, how she dealt with frustration and marital blues- the story of my mother through her child's eyes is a fascinating glimpse of lower middle class children's lives in the 50's and 60's. There was never enough money, but somehow she made it work. We certainly didn't get given every new gadget on the market at whim. That seems to have been an advantage when it comes to the richness of our inner lives as children and as adults. And she was a working mother from the time I went to school, at a time when it was something of an oddity.

So I suspect there's much to be learnt from this short history of my mother's life.  Here it is, slightly edited to protect others' privacy.

Modelling happiness: broken families

In this blog I've stressed the need to be authentic, the need to be respectful and the need to model the behaviour you want your child to copy. It all sounds amazingly easy when you're sitting in a chair reading it. Parenthood in action, however, is a very different experience- especially when the parenting relationship is in crisis.

The parent as cab driver: after-school activity overload

Once upon a time there was a world where children spent their out-of-school hours making up their own games, playing on the street with the other kids from their area, entertaining themselves with their siblings and playing board games and card games with mum and dad in the evenings. If they were lucky and their parents were rich enough, they might be offered some sort of music lessons when they were in middle childhood; if they had trouble with Maths or reading, too bad- either mum and dad helped them, or they struggled.

Educational opportunity has improved for children. But there is also such a thing as going too far the other way. James Thurber once wrote a hilarious mock-fable ('The Bear who Let it Alone') about a drunken bear who caused fear and chaos while falling down in a drunken stupor; seeing his error, he reformed his ways and caused fear and chaos while showing off his new exercise regime (the moral of the story being, 'You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward').

So here we are in the C21st leaning over too far backwards, with parents  spending half their lives driving the kids to out-of-school activities- soccer, maths coaching, early music classes, swimming training, reading tutoring, ballet, drama, speech therapy, netball... the list goes on... all supposedly in the name of giving their children vital opportunities, while those same children are starved of time for unstructured fun with their peer group and family.

What does this whirlwind world look like to a child?  And which of these activities are really valuable?  How much is too much?