The worst part of the school year

October 25, 2013 by 9 Comments
school play

This is not my son’s play. In fact I believe there are no rabbits in our show this year

Is there a parent alive who is looking forward to the end of year school concert? If there is I don’t believe I have met them.

We have the “pleasure” of having our end of year concert early this year which is why I am feeling this pain a little earlier than usual. Added to the end of year concert delight we have the added bonus of a huge capital appeal fundraiser where we will not only try to catch a glimpse of our child singing out of key but we will also have the added pleasure of being asked to fork out a huge amount of money for this privilege.

It’s not the concert that I object to so much, and let me preface this whole outburst with the fact that I am an ex school teacher and I know how hard they work and I understand the need for practice, but it’s the HOURS and HOURS of rehearsal time that gets me.

At this point, as my son misses another day of school to practise lifting his hands in the air over his head for four hours, I am feeling a little over it. Not as much as him mind you, but still.

Can you imagine sitting through hours and hours of rehearsal where all you have to do is clap your hands over your head? Yes, you are right in assuming he does not have a lead role. I believe if you have an actual role in the play you have to move into the school to practice 24 hours a day. Or so it seems.

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So after spending about three months practicing lifting his hands in the air over his head I will go and watch him on Sunday night. I won’t be able to see him because all the kids will be wearing full school uniform and they look like sheep in their uniforms. Trust me, no one can discern one child from the other. If I do spot him I will spend about ten minutes deciding if I am close enough to video or if I should take photographs. If I take video I can be 100% assured no one will ever watch it, and that includes me even checking to see if it worked. If I take a photo it will live on my phone until the next time I drop it in the toilet by mistake. Don’t ask. By the time I have finished deliberating his part will be over and I won’t have seen it through any lens at all. Incidentally this will make no difference to either of our lives.

At the end of the play they will be asking for a donation. Now I LOVE my school and will happily donate to their capital appeal but I do think that I would be happier to donate more if he hadn’t missed so many classes to practice the hand lifting gig.*

By Monday when the play is over everything should return to normal. But it won’t because the kids may be so tired from hand lifting that they can miss half the day of school and start at 11:00. No wonder so many people go into acting!

Do you love or loathe the end of year concert?

* with no offence to people whose roles are more onerous than hand lifting.

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Reading through rose-coloured glasses

August 28, 2013 by 21 Comments

magic_faraway_treeThe very first book that I ever read to my child was The Enchanted Forest by Enid Blyton. Granted he was three days old and two months premature so he probably wasn’t riveted by the land at the top of the Faraway Tree. He was focusing on important things like learning to breathe by himself and growing eyebrows.

But I read happily. And repeatedly. Let’s be honest not only was the sound of my voice meant to be beneficial to our bonding (and it was the only contact we were allowed) but I had really been looking forward to rereading those books since I finished them at about age ten.

Like many other people of my generation I grew up with Enid Blyton: Mr Pink Whistle, Noddy, The Wishing Chair, The Naughtiest Girl, The St Clare’s series, The Circus series and of course The Famous Five. And I tried to make my son grow up with the same memories by reading him all these books, while I still had a say.

Wherever you stand on the divide as to whether Enid Blyton was a “good” writer, a homophobe or a xenophobe there can be little denial of the pure escape that she offered in the pages of her books. Especially when looked at simplistically – as a child listening to a story, not as an adult looking for symbolism and classical literature.

No parents, lots of adventure and a guaranteed happy ending.  The children in her books were responsible, mature and extremely industrious characters. They could catch thieves with no legal intervention, they could travel to far away lands and still be home in time for dinner, they could get through the entire school holidays without ever nagging their parents. And they never seemed to need toys, in fact I can barely even remember the characters spending any time indoors let alone at home.

Sufficeth it to say that as soon as he could make himself understood my son made it clear that Enid Blyton was not his choice of bedtime reading. It’s a funny thing how kids can sense the time setting of a book just by the opening lines. It’s also very funny (to them) that she uses the names Dick and Fanny. Actually now that I am older it’s also a little bit funny to me.

So instead of reading Enid Blyton we read Rony Roy, Dov Piley and Jeremy Strong, H Larry and Paul Jennings and many hundreds of others. We read for so long that we even graduated to people like Anthony Horowitz and JK Rowling. Reading aloud was part of our bedtime routine right until he started reading better than I did and was getting lost in books himself.
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Yesterday I read a report outlining the fact that many parents were no longer reading to their children at bedtime. Apparently two-thirds of parents surveyed read to their kids less than once a week by the time they turn five.

News reports

Research, to be released today, shows nationwide 83 per cent of parents with children aged between one and four read to them at least once a week. It’s a different story once youngsters start school, when the figure drops to 36 per cent.

I know I only have one child and the HUGE luxury of time and resources. I also acknowledge that it’s much easier to look back at parts of your life that have long passed with rose tinted glasses and more than a hint of “wasn’t life perfect then?” but Lord I loved reading to my son.

I loved rediscovering the stories of my youth (before my son stopped me), I loved seeing the world through the eyes of a child, I loved my son lying next to me listening to my voice while his mind whirred and buzzed with the lines of something make believe. Of course I loved it when we moved on from reading “picture books” repeatedly. The same one every single night. Again and again.

There is no wrong way or right way to parent your child, as long as you love them, so I am not saying that reading to my child made me a good mother (loving him did that) but I can’t imagine not having had that time together. I only wish I had been more persuasive with the Magic Faraway Tree – he would have bloody loved Upside Down Land.

Did you read to your kids? Are you still reading? Loving or loathing it?

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If your child is on social media you need to read this

August 12, 2013 by 4 Comments

Social media is not all badOne of the favourite memories from my teenage years was coming home at 16 years old to find that my mother had arranged to have my very own phone line installed INTO MY BEDROOM. I can picture my room and the hideous beige/yellow colour of the phone taking up half my desk. (seriously what was it with the colours they used for phones in the 1980’s?), I can feel the huge rush of excitement I felt at my new found freedom and independence and now, as a mother I can almost imagine how thrilled my mother was at my excitement.

Having my own landline was a BIG THING. It meant I could be on the phone for ages without my mother begging me to give her a chance to use the phone herself or worse, tell me to get off the phone because she was expecting a call. Remember there was a time where we had neither call waiting nor mobile phones.

Talking on the phone to my friends was just one of the ways I had of communicating with my peer group. Writing notes that we passed under the desk was the other and talking face to face. And that was it.

There was no Facebook or Twitter, Skype, Instagram, Kik, Snapchat or text. Very different from my child who is four years younger than I was when I got my very own landline.

But I remember that day when I got my phone and I remember that feeling of freedom at being allowed to connect with my friends. I know how important it is for my son to feel the same way. He just doesn’t use the phone to make calls. And he certainly doesn’t pass written notes. He thinks he’s way too cool for that – why write on paper when you can talk online?

Instead he’s all over social media like a rash, it’s second nature for him to be attached to his friends at the touch of a screen, it’s not a matter of whether he’s engaging but rather how he’s doing it.

This attachment to social media often gets a bad rap amongst parents and sometimes deservedly so. We’ve all read stories of internet stalkers and tales of pedophiles grooming children online are spread so fast they almost seem common place. Even though they aren’t.

But I can’t (and don’t) believe that the world is a bad place where people are trying to connect with 12-year-olds in order to seduce them. Or worse. Why stop him from talking with his friends instead of teaching him who he can and can’t talk to, who is safe, who is best left unanswered and who he should alert me to.

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We read horrific accounts of cyber bullying and point the finger at social media. But bullying happened before the internet. Remember school? The reach may be bigger now and the effects more widely reported. I am not undermining the hideous reality of trolls but I think it would be naïve to think that relentless, continued and persistent bullying didn’t take place before the internet when there was no “block and delete”.

I hear stories about popularity contests on Instagram and I am grateful that I have access to this same technology so I can talk to my son about it. I know that in the 1980’s at my primary school there were popularity contests too and just because they weren’t online doesn’t mean they weren’t just as damaging and cruel. We just didn’t tell our mothers and it certainly wasn’t reported in the media.

I’m going to stick up for 2013 here and the transparency of social media. If my son’s gone out with friends I’m more than likely about to see what they’re doing on Instagram, if he’s commenting on someone’s status it comes up on my Facebook feed. Every conversation he has is being more or less transcribed and I have access to every word of it should I need to talk to him through it.

He is only 12 and he knows that I have access to all his accounts and I am not naïve enough to think that this wont change as he gets older. But when he’s older it wont be appropriate for me to be tuning into his conversations and by then he’ll have learned how to handle himself online. He’ll know that the channel of communication with me is open and he wont to be naïve enough to think that if he puts something online it can’t be found.

It never happened with private phone calls and letters passed under the desk. I think back to my days as a teen and how little my parents knew about what I was going through… it makes me shudder. It makes me happy I am able to communicate with my own child in the same world he is communicating in.

I am not afraid of social media, I use it every day. So does my son. And I’m okay with that.

Are your kids on social media? Are you okay with it?

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The oldest excuse in the book: My parent’s did it and I turned out okay

July 26, 2013 by 19 Comments

smackI am always a bit astounded by the comments that appear online as soon as the smacking debate makes the news again. Granted there are other times that the comments astound (and horrify) me but the smacking issue seems to bring out a lot of defiance and plenty of room for discussion.

Today’s news is reporting that a leading group of New Zealand and Australian doctors from the Royal Australasian College of Physicians are pushing to make smacking children a criminal offence.

Daily Life reports

“The Royal Australasian College of Physicians will call for a legal amendment to give children the same protection from assault as others in the community.

The president of the college’s paediatrics and child health division, Susan Moloney, said physical punishment could escalate to abuse. ”We know that a significant number of child homicides are a result of physical punishment which went wrong,” she said.

Research shows it can lead to depression, anxiety, aggression, antisocial behaviour and substance abuse. In Australia it is legal for parents to use corporal punishment on children as long as it is ”reasonable”.”

Personally I found it interesting (and eye opening) that research shows teenagers who have been smacked as young kids experience more social problems in high school. It is also telling that research shows that a child who experiences physical punishment is more likely to develop increased aggressive behaviour and mental health problems as an adult.
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And I know that there is a difference between smacking and abuse. But I can’t deny that smacking is physical punishment.

But back to the commenters and my own little bit of unsubstantiated evidence based research.  From a brief scan of comment is seems that the majority of people who are in favour of smacking are very defensive about it. Bordering on angry. Unlike many of the people who prefer the idea of using other forms of discipline, who seem more balanced in the expression of their thoughts.  There are also a lot of men who are in favour of smacking. A lot. I would guess proportionally much higher than the amount of men who are full time carers and in the coalface of the “a little smack on the hand when your toddler is about to get run over after having run into the middle of the road” type scenario which you hear ALL THE TIME.

The repeated mantra of “I was smacked as a child and I am perfectly okay” seems to support the research that people who are smacked as children are more likely to  smack their own kids.  Does it also mean they are more likely to experience mental health problems like depression or anxiety,  to display aggressive or antisocial behaviour, have substance abuse problems and abuse their own children or spouse?  I’m not sure.

But I am sure that being a parent is a privilege not a right and and their are certain duties that come with that privilege,  like taking care of your child’s physical, emotional and mental needs. You can’t blame your parents, your situation, your addiction or your hideous childhood and abusive spouse. You have to be the best parent you can be – not the same parent as your parents were.

And after reading the comments I have seen in the media today,  I still wouldn’t smack my child.

Are you a smacker? Do you think I have stereotyped you unjustly? Where do you stand on the smacking divide?

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Kate, there are a few things you should know

July 19, 2013 by 6 Comments

kate-middleton-pregYesterday I read that Snooki had written a letter to Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge to give her a bit of parenting advice. Snooki is a reality television personality best known for being a cast member of Jersey Shore. She is also a new mother and she can (sort of) write so why shouldn’t she be one of the many thousands that are going to shower advice on to the expectant Duchess?

It’s a centuries old tradition that experienced mothers pass down advice to new mums.  If you have a child, you’ve heard it all before. Chances are you’ve passed on your own advice to new mothers.  It’s done with every good intention kind of like Snooki writing a letter to The Duchess of Cambridge.  And me telling Kate what I have learned, because if I had the chance to talk to here this is what I’d say:

Don’t get stuck on what the books say. Your baby doesn’t read and humans don’t actually come with manuals.  All the books that are written about babies were written long after babies came along.

Don’t compare your baby to any other baby but especially not to the baby in the book (just in case you failed to take heed of my first point).
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Feed your baby whatever makes you happiest.  If you ever waiver about this one look around the table when the extended family and a few select dignitaries get together for a cucumber sandwich and a cup of tea and try and pick out the ones that were bottle fed and the ones that were breast fed. You won’t be able to.

I’m not sure about palace sleeping arrangements (although I have no idea why I remember the fact that you are actually living in an “apartment”) but if you want to sleep with your baby – do it. I am quite sure your alcohol consumption is low enough to ensure that this is perfectly safe. I don’t think there has been any valid scientific study that says you can spoil a baby with love. Conversely if you have help and you want the baby to sleep in another wing – go for it. Your baby will eventually sleep  – how he or she learns is irrelevant (go back to the dinner table scenario if you will – you wont be able to tell the adults that were left to cry or those that were comforted to sleep). As long as YOU are comfortable with what you’re doing it’s right for your baby.

When you look back in 5 or 10  or any years time that one horrendous feed isn’t going to make a difference, nor that one story you didn’t feel like reading, nor that sleepless night, nor that pre-packaged, preservative filled meal you fed your baby. Try let go of your guilt, it’s the worst part of being a mother

That said, enjoy what you can because when you do look back you will never regret the time you spent with your child. You might regret missing the opening of a castle or regret the fact that you said you’d officiate at the launch of an old aged home, you might regret that you never ate that red velvet cupcake with the cream cheese icing while the royal bodyguards had their backs turned but you will never regret time that you spend with your child

Whether you are the future Queen of England, a reality TV star or a mum in the suburbs it doesn’t change a thing – having a baby will change your life in the most profound, meaningful and beautiful way possible. And if you love your baby then whatever else you do is right.

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The perfect job

June 6, 2013 by 12 Comments

motheringOne of the things that happens when you suddenly stop working 20 hours a day 7 days a week is that you have a lot more time to think. Not about work and page views and headlines but about family and real views and heart lines.

Naturally, given that I am slightly neurotic and an extreme over thinker , I’ve spent a significant amount of my newly discovered time worrying that somehow I missed out on my family during my years of 20 hour days.

Let me just preface everything I am about to say with the fact that I support/respect/admire/love women that work outside the home just as much as I support/respect/admire/love women who don’t.  This is not about judgment or privilege (even though I realise what I privileged position I am in), this is not about pointing fingers or blaming the patriarchy or the feminist movement– it’s just about me, my position and the way that I feel about my own experience.  Read this paragraph again and again every time you feel like I may be judging you, talking about working women in general or your own personal situation.

I don’t resent the job that I did and I understand that it was as much my pursuit for perfection, as the role in a 24/7 cycle site that contributed to the fact that I had no life outside work for at least three very long years.

And I can’t help thinking and stressing and ruminating and worrying about my son.

It’s not that I believe that he missed out on anything while I was stuck in my laptop. He has an amazing father who plays as significant a role in his life as I do, he has an awesome and supportive extended family who have shown him unconditional love and support, and I have the kindest most givinng friends who have loved him as their own.  Added to which he goes to a school where the pastoral care is above and beyond the call of duty. So he’s been fine. Loved, cared for, stimulated, educated and supported.

But I worry that I missed out on him.  I worry that there were things about him I don’t even know I missed.  I worry that I nearly missed him growing up while I was watching the world go by on my laptop.
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Every week there seems to be some flare up in the media about working mothers – either they are really good or they are impossibly bad. But overwhelmingly I read the online comments that mothers make saying “mother’s deserve a break” and “working mothers make better role models” and “child care provides the best alternative for mothers and children” and, at the risk of sounding like the middle class white guy complaining about persecution, I almost feel bad to admit that I am happier not working full time, I am actually much happier to be parenting full time and working part time only when my child is at school. It’s not that I don’t want to work – I’m actively looking for work. But work that fits in with my son. I don’t want him to try and fit in with my work.

I don’t think we’re being anti-feminist or going back in time if we allow women to acknowledge that they want to stay at home with their kids.  I object to working mothers telling me that the mothering experience is lesser, especially those working mothers who have never known any different – if it’s my choice it’s not lesser for me.

If feminism is about choices I want to feel validated in my choice to look after my family. I want to be able to say to people – I choose not to work full time because I am lucky enough not to have to and because above all else I want to be a mother.  Children are children for a short time.

The other morning I confided to my husband that I feel awful that I have become the kind of mum that drops her child at school in her gym clothes and then spends the morning between a treadmill, a coffee shop and sometimes a meeting or two. I told him I didn’t feel like I was contributing.  In the best husbandly fashion that he exhibits on a regular basis he just looked at me and said: “You are making a bigger contribution now than when you were working full time – you are the family glue”

I didn’t feel offended or indignant being referred to as the glue. I didn’t fight with him about the fact that women don’t get to choose the work or family option because of the patriarchy because, more than anything, I want the family option. I feel loved and validated and grateful beyond words that I can be giving the biggest part of myself to my family.

It’s sad that I can’t say it out loud without worrying that someone is going to take offence. But you know what? I’m happier being a mother than I am being any other role and I am trying not to be ashamed to admit it.

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Parenting – you’re probably doing it right before you’ve even read one piece of advice

June 3, 2013 by 8 Comments

134056338(2)I have been sleeping through the night for about 9 years now. Since around the time my now 12-year old son turned 3.

He never really slept through the night until he was close to three years old. I was pretty tired, I probably was very snappy and I most certainly wasn’t fresh faced and doe eyed. But I was resolute that if he woke up in the middle of the night so would I.

I did not want him to cry himself to sleep, I did not want him to wake up in the middle of the night and not have me there and frankly I did not understand the reasoning behind a small baby with no means of expressing himself having to wait a minute before his needs were addressed.

While you may think I am stark staring crazy I am okay with that. It was a choice both my husband and I made very early on in our son’s life. He was a sick baby, he was very tiny and the doctors made silly pronouncements like he was “failing to thrive”. He wasn’t putting on any weight and we were missing NO chances at trying to get him to eat – be it at 1am or 3am or 9am or any time in between.

I read all the books. Yes really, when you don’t sleep you get quite a bit of reading time. I was warned about the “dangers” of letting your baby cry unattended and I was repeatedly “threatened” by the fact that my son would never learn to self settle and hence would never sleep by himself well, ever.

It’s all absolute tripe to me. And the benefit of hind sight is a wonderful thing. My child is 12, he self settles, can sleep on his own and is not the most spoiled creature on the planet – that title belongs to my dog. I am happy not that I chose to never let him cry – but that I listened to my heart. I did what was right for me and my child.

But the debate about self settling, controlled crying and learning to sleep rages on and with the so-called “benefit” of online parenting forums sprouting forth so much militant anger it’s surprising anyone gets any sleep. Certainly the comment moderators don’t.

It astounds me that people can get so angry about choices that other people make. Choices that will not affect them or their babies. Hell, if you want to let your baby cry in the middle of the night (and you love your baby) and I can’t hear the crying – go for it. I didn’t choose to do that for my baby – but that was the right choice for me. And my baby. Doesn’t make it right. Or wrong.

Last week Pinky McKay a famous Australian lactation consultant and baby massage therapist who believes “babies and toddlers are people too and they deserve empathy and respect, not ‘training’ through techniques such as rigid routines, controlled crying or spanking” unleashed what can only be described as a torrent of abuse at people she calls “tamers” (people who use techniques to get their babies to sleep) .

Included in her rant of “Most Frequently Asked Stupid Questions” was this

“1/ why does my baby cry when I leave him in his cot?
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For Pete’s sake (I hope ‘Pete’ was a Cuddler), you have a stone age baby in a space age world! He is programmed to expect a sabre tooth tiger or a crocodile or an eagle to swoop and gobble him up if he’s all alone. So don’t leave him alone in the frigging cot if he gets upset. If he’s still crying, for goodness sake pick the poor little bugger up before he is overcome with stress hormones that will fry his tiny brain and screw him up for life!”

You can read the whole tirade here if you have a strong stomach.

She sure got angry. And the veiled threat of being screwed up for life because of stress does not go unnoticed by exhausted mothers. Exhausted mothers who only turn to her for advice because they love their babies but they desperately need their sleep. Some people cope better without sleep than others. Fact.

Maybe  Pinky herself needs a little sleep and I think she acknowledges this by sort of apologising on her blog the very next day . (you can read that post here)

I get that she got angry that her message wasn’t getting through to people. I get that she believes so passionately in what she does – and to be honest I support her ideas that babies should be treated with empathy and respect, not ‘training’. I get that she just wanted to lash out and have a bit of fun with it.

But I also get that we have created an environment where people don’t trust themselves as parents.

We live our lives online and we read blogs and websites and forums and everybody seems to be following some technique or learned skill and we get frightened and confused and we forget to rely on our selves as good and instinctive parents.

We try and parent like the books say or the bloggers do or the lecturers demand. We often don’t tend to our children the way that our hearts dictate for fear it hasn’t been proven in some study to develop and enhance our kids brains and prevent their futures from becoming frazzled.

I’m not condoning Pinky McKay’s outburst because I do believe that mothers deserve to be supported whatever track they choose to take. But you know what;  it really doesn’t matter what she believes , she’s not the mother of your kids.

Maybe it’s time to stop taking the concept of the virtual village to raise a kid so seriously. Maybe we should just be supporting mothers to do what they believe is right for their kids. Even if we don’t agree with it.

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Where do you draw the line with what you say online?

April 8, 2013 by 14 Comments
Isabella Dutton (photo from The Daily Mail)

Isabella Dutton (photo from The Daily Mail)

I am always careful in what I put online – especially when it comes to my child. I check with him if I share a photo that he is in it and I am mindful of not putting anything out there that I would not want him to read at any time. Not just now but in the future.

It is with this in mind that I was quite taken aback when I read this brutally honest post from Isabella Dutton aptly named “The mother who says having these two children is the biggest regret of her life”

Isabella is 57 now and her two children Jo and Stuart are adults. She has told the world via an article in the Daily Mail about how much she resented her children.  How she wished she’d never had them.

She writes in part

“My son Stuart was five days old when the realisation hit me like a physical blow: having a child had been the biggest mistake of my life.

Even now, 33 years on, I can still picture the scene: Stuart was asleep in his crib. He was due to be fed but hadn’t yet woken.

I heard him stir but as I looked at his round face on the brink of wakefulness, I felt no bond. No warm rush of maternal affection.

I felt completely detached from this alien being who had encroached upon my settled married life and changed it, irrevocably, for the worse.

I was 22 when I had Stuart, who was a placid and biddable baby. So, no, my feelings were not sparked by tiredness, nor by post-natal depression or even a passing spell of baby blues.

Quite simply, I had always hated the idea of motherhood. In that instant, any lingering hope that becoming a mum would cure me of my antipathy was dispelled.

I remember asking myself, ‘Is he really mine?’ He could, quite literally, have been anyone’s baby. Had a kind stranger offered to adopt him at that moment, I would not have objected.

Still, I wished no harm on Stuart and invested every ounce of my energy in caring for him. Even so, I know my life would have been much happier and more fulfilled without children.

Two years and four months after Stuart was born, I had my daughter Jo. It may seem perverse that I had a second child in view of my aversion to them, but I believe it is utterly selfish to have an only one.

I felt precisely the same indifference towards her as I had to Stuart, but I knew I would care for Jo to the best of my ability, and love her as I’d grown to love him.

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Yet I dreaded her dependence; resented the time she would consume, and that like parasites, both my children would continue to take from me and give nothing meaningful back in return.

Whenever I’ve told friends I wished I’d never had them, they’ve gasped with shock. ‘You can’t mean that?’ But, of course, I do.

And further into the article she explains her life with her kids

Tony and I had our rigidly defined roles. I did not look after the children when he was around. So as they played football, sat glued to the Grand Prix or watched the golf, I would creep back to our chalet and immerse myself in a good book. Other mums were running around like headless chickens after their children, but in our household Tony took that role.

We shared many happy times together; I did everything a good mother is supposed to. We had bucket-and-spade holidays on the Isle of Wight; there were endless sports events in which the children shone. I’m sure they would agree that they always felt secure and loved.

It was not that I seethed each day with resentment towards my children; more that I felt oppressed by my constant responsibility for them. Young children prevent you from being spontaneous; every outing becomes an expedition. If you take your job as a parent seriously, you always put their needs before your own.

Having children consigns you to an endless existence of shelling out financially and emotionally, with little or no return. It puts a terrible strain on your marriage and is perennially exhausting. And your job is never done.

I know my life with Tony would have been so much happier without children, less complicated and more carefree.”

I don’t believe either that Stuart or Jo sensed any coolness on my part, although Jo once said, ‘You never tell me you love me, Mum.’ And I didn’t, it’s true. But I reassured Jo that I did love her. She and Stuart just accepted that I wasn’t demonstrative.”

It’s crystal clear she didn’t want children and I almost applaud her for the honesty in which she conveys this. She may not have loved her children in the traditional sense (certainly not in the Hallmark sense) but she acted like she thought a mother was meant to behave.

Clearly her children are old enough to have read it and it’s obvious that she has spoken to them about it.  Why she wrote about it is another story altogether. But does she deserve to be attacked by “better mothers”?

The Mail Online closed comments on the post but not before thousands of people attacked her, not just as a mother but as a person.  The comments were horrific and nasty.  Hundreds of other media outlets picked up the story and the comments were just as vehement.

No kidding huh?

As always it makes me wonder about all the people that write hateful and poisonous comments online. Not just about this story but many others. Somehow it’s okay to write anything in a comment, it’s fair play to be mean and nasty in a response to something but it’s not okay for a writer to do that in a post.

I moderated comments on Mamamia for many years – I think I’ve seen the gamut of responses to other people’s parenting. I’ve been unlucky enough to stumble on some hideous forums that think it’s fair play to pick apart Australian bloggers, I’ve read the comments on far too many stories on other online forums and I’ve seen the vilest of Twitter abuse.

So while I can’t claim to understand what drove Isabella Dutton to write this piece (maybe she just wanted to air her view – maybe she has indeed helped thousands of other mothers who bring up their children perfectly well but hate parenting) I have more difficulty understanding parents that continue to bully and abuse other parents in comments and online forums while proclaiming how much better they are as people.

I’m careful about what I put out there about my son, I’d hate to hurt him in any way.  I am well aware that it’s as easy for him to read the comments as it is the story. And I never want him to think that bullying is okay.

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