A Moment

I was on the train today, squashed as usual around a metal pole and peering over shoulders and under armpits to try to work out what station we were at. The pole holding was more difficult than normal because a girl of about seven or eight kept barging me in the small of my back. I listened to her mother get more and more exasperated with her and manoeuvred myself around the pole in order to get a better look at them (and to stop being barged).

The more I watched, the more I thought the girl might be on the autistic spectrum. She was old enough to know social conventions like not dancing through people’s conversations and not pointing to articles in a stranger’s newspaper; like not pushing her mother into someone’s lap and then laughing loudly about it. Her behaviour didn’t seem deliberately offensive.

The more the girl was annoying (which she undoubtedly was) the angrier her mother became. She spoke to her loudly and rudely (yet not at all firmly) and grabbed at her arms. She shouted a lot but she didn’t insist on anything. The daughter was in absolute control and the mother ended up looking like the unreasonable one.

In the end, I couldn’t decide whether it was mother or daughter that was more irritating. Which irritated me.

The Secret

It’s the end of lunch play and a hoard of girls from my class rush up to me, part way through a discussion about whether they should tell me something or not.

‘Miss, can you keep a secret?’
‘Is it a good secret?’
Excited nods all round.
‘You won’t tell anyone?’
‘Not if I tell you I won’t.’

I’m imagining something about a boy they all fancy or the latest instalment of who’s going out with whom. They’re a hormonal bunch by anyone’s standards and their secrets are a bit beyond midnight feasts and private notebooks. Still, I’m not expecting anything too drastic.

The gaggle crowds around two of the girls, waiting to see what they’re going to do. They grin at each other and whip their t-shirts up to show me their newly pierced belly buttons. One is ten; one is eleven years old. I just stare.

‘Don’t faint, Miss!’
Giggles all round.

I should have asked where they got it done. I should have asked if their parents knew. But for once, my class had me speechless.

I remember two conversations about belly button piercing with the younger of the two girls. In the first one she told me she wanted it done and I told her she wouldn’t be able to until she was sixteen. In the second one, she asked me what I’d say if someone in my class got their belly button pierced. I told her I wouldn’t have to say anything because they wouldn’t be able to get it done: they were too young. She did the ‘but just say they did’ thing on me, so I gave in and said ‘I wouldn’t know what to say. I’d be too shocked.’

I asked her today if she’d had it done already when she’d asked me that question. She said she had. I really had no idea. I would never have thought that anyone would agree to pierce the belly button of a ten year old. It turns my stomach that they already shave their legs. I’ve been trying to find the legal age for body piercing this evening. I always thought it was sixteen. But apparently there’s no legal minimum age (unless we’re talking genitals, in which case, it’s eighteen). Most places won’t do it without parental consent if the individual is under eighteen, but legally, there’s nothing to stop a ten year old piercing anything they want.

I’m actually not a big fan of navel piercing anyway, mostly because the idea of it makes me cringe (and also because my own stomach is really not the piercing type) but this is not the point. Even if I were, I would still find the sight of two year 6 girls displaying their jewelled tummies slightly disturbing.

It’s not that I don’t think that every individual has the rights to their own bodies; it’s not that I’m particularly conservative about body piercing. I just think that a body of that age has so many changes still to go through that it can’t be very safe. I’m also concerned about the generation of mini-adults we have in this country. I’m all for children being treated as individual people, but that doesn’t have to mean that they should be treated as adults. I wouldn’t swap my childhood for anything and it makes me sad how quickly our children burst out of their own. They are becoming sexualised before they are mature enough to understand how to deal with it.

I overheard a conversation in the staff room the other day about inappropriate slogan’s on children’s clothing, the most memorable example being a t-shirt that said ‘future porn star’. That’s extreme, but there’s no shortage of t-shirts saying things like ‘flirt’ or low cut jeans with glittery words written across the seat. Whatever happened to knitted jumpers and change-colour t-shirts? Or perhaps I’m being nostalgic.

When I was ten years old, my secrets were boys I liked and sweets in my room, books I thought my mum would disapprove of and the make up I tried on at my friend’s house. I got my nose pierced on my sixteenth birthday because I could do it without my mum’s permission (which I wasn’t getting). Although I was a rebellious teenager, I was also a scared one. And it wouldn’t even have crossed my mind when I was ten.

What are my girls going to have left to rebel against when they’re fifteen I wonder? And will they still want those glittering tummies or will they just have the scars to prove that once they did?

A Moment

I was painting masks with a group of children this afternoon. We had some exciting new paints that you apply directly from the tube but some of them were stuck and the paint wasn’t coming out. One of the kids asked me to get one of them to work, so I squeezed it hard in the direction of a paint pallet. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. EXPLOSION! The nozzle flew off with a bang and blue paint splattered everywhere: the walls, the plate of biscuits, my top… and four children! They all found it hysterical of course (after the initial shock at least), which was a blessing. They all had to be scrubbed down. One of them got it in her ear, which was rather awkward. I’m crossing my fingers now for good humoured, understanding parents and paint that doesn’t stain clothes!

i

I was walking round a silent year six classroom the other day, looking over shoulders as careful hands began new literacy books. This was the first piece of written work since the summer holidays and the children had been asked to write a story so their new teacher could gage what levels they were working at. I was amazed the first time I noticed that someone hadn’t capitalised the pronoun ‘I’. How can they have forgotten this in six weeks? I was thinking. How do you forget that ‘I’ needs to be a capital letter when it’s been drilled home since you were four years old? As I walked round, I saw more and more children making the same mistake. I couldn’t understand it.

That evening, I was working on something on the computer and it crossed my mind how convenient it is (usually) that Microsoft word automatically changes the pronoun ‘I’ into a capital letter; I never use shift or caps lock when I write it. And then I realised: the kids use computers so much that writing rules aren’t as cut and dry as they used to be. For a start, Microsoft word sorts it out for you and secondly, they’ve all spent their holidays instant messaging and texting. There’s no call for ‘I’ to be capitalised. It’s not that the children have forgotten the rule; they’re just out of practise.

I like it when these things make sense.

"You'll Change Your Mind When You Hit Thirty"

Will I?

I’m yet to be convinced about the biological clock but this is the response I usually get when I say I don’t want kids. I’ve changed my mind about lots of things over the course of my life and I’m prepared to believe I’ll change it again but at the moment, I feel like I definitely don’t want kids. Ever.

What makes this so hard for other women to accept?

Once you reach a certain age, people think there must be something wrong with you if you haven’t had kids. At the moment, people look at me knowingly: their eyes say, ‘you’re young though; you just wait’. They tell me I’ll think differently once I get past thirty. But the older I get, the more shocked people look. I have a friend (with a brood of five) who is terribly concerned that I will be lonely in old age if I haven’t had children. She’s genuinely concerned about my future. But I have a partner, I have family, I have friends… surely I won’t be that lonely.

The idea of the biological clock scares me. I am terrified of waking up in five years time and deciding I need to have a baby. Honestly, I’m sceptical that it happens. Evolutionarily, I’m sure sex drive must be ample to secure the future of the human race. I’m fairly convinced it’s a social phenomenon, a pressure that women apply to each other. If I change my mind when I reach my thirties, I doubt it will be the result of something ticking away inside me. It will probably be because all my friends have had kids or because I’m starting to feel like I might be lacking. Either I’ll think I’m missing out on something or I’ll have been convinced that it’s something I want to do.

I can’t imagine this scenario at all.

I don’t feel any burning desire to pass on my genes and I’m far too selfish to commit to 18 years of active parenting, let alone nine months of another person living inside me. I like other people’s children but I also like giving them back: I like the aunty role. And there’s a place for the aunty role – what parent doesn’t like an afternoon of freedom every once in a while? And who better to provide the opportunity than a childless friend? Surely mothers should want women like me on hand.

Some people are good at doing all the things they want to do. Khaled Hosseini, for example, wrote the first of two breath-taking novels while he was practising medicine. I know I couldn’t do that… I need a lot of time for my writing. If I had such an all-consuming job as that I wouldn’t get anything done. I get little enough done as it is. If I had kids, I know that my writing would suffer. There would just be no way that I could work (which, presumably would be necessary), be a mum and write. This is who I am.

Will it really stop being important when I get to thirty?