Voodooesque

so, how is it that other people feel they have the right to just barge in all over your life. to sit at your table, eat your food, sleep in your spare room (on the new linen, no less) and tell you that your views and choices are wrong. people that you're not even related to. how the country is much better than the city to raise children, how the flowers must be picked off a courgette because they're all male and inhibit fruit growth.(it's a squash, lady!)how none of the laundry needs ironging because of her expert folding (with fag hanging from corner of mouth so lovely aroma on garden dried clothes)and how you can'r possibly have your new kitchen designed the way you've imagined because it makes absolutely no sense and why haven't we out offspring name down for all suitable schools yet and there can't possibly be as many primarys as i've said i've researched in the area and oh no i should never engage an architect because all i need is a competent builder.

i know she means well. i know she does. i know she feels i need some sort of supplementary parenting. but really.

offspring's day nursery told me when i dropped her off at lunchtime that, come september, they want to put her up two years instead of one. there's no question its for the best in terms of her ability and stimulation. but where does it end? its two more years until she starts school proper (september birthday) which means if we chose a state school she'l be so far ahead the teacher won't know what to do with her in a room of 20 plus where half can't even go to the bathroom unaccompanied, let alone read and write. she'll be ditfferent, she'll stick out. not a good thing in school.i don't want her to hate school as much as i did. don't want her to feel like she can't push herself and explore how her mind works for feaqr of exacerbating that gap. maybe my social skills were exceptionall bad so I couldn't bond with the other children full stop, it had nothign to do with the fact that the teacher was always singling me out either for being ahead and disruptive or ahead and disruptive and aggressive. the first few years of school being told either that i couldn't possibly have read all the books in the scheme and made to stand on my chair and answer the comprehensions, or that there was no time to set me additional work when i'd finished but could i please stop talking and redo what i'd already done. then comes the inevitable mental checking out, followed in latter years by the failure to fulfil potential notices every report card. wish you had written more. could do better. fails to apply herself. I don't want my child in a system like that. discipline, sure. not some sort of free for all everyone doing what they want all day. but an education that recofgnises that academia isn't everything. that different children are good at different things, that they learn in different ways at different speeds. if the kids weren.t cattle hoarded into batches of thirty plus and taught by computer programme, teachers would be able to more adequatelyy cater. I don't want to send her to small classed private school. small classed not just in sense of sheer numbers, but such a tiny social fragment that she thinks the world some homogenised place. it's bad anough that we now live here in this monocultural annex of civilisation, i don't what her experiences to be further narrowed.

I want to steal her away. take her home with me. show her the magic. i also know it's not her magic its mine. its a selfish thing. she's been here two thirds of her life, she doesn't really know what else there is. doesn't know i can't never really live here.

posted by dodo @ 3:03 pm