I remember it well ...

 I've been thinking about birthdays today - not least because it is the birthday of my firstborn. Now he's a very adult person and has been around for longer than the clarity of my memory would lead you to think, and that's the point, really, of this post. All through Saturday, I was remembering that Valentine's day over 40 years ago, when I was leaving to go to the maternity hospital and suddenly my husband turned up, having been sent home from work because the school boiler was burst. No maternity leave, just chance making the mid-term weekend slightly longer. And then I could go on to remember the very strange day indeed when I was subjected to then customary rigours of being induced on my due date, and faces came and went, and I lost interest in how my life was going to be changed for ever and concentrated on the more pressing (as you might say) matter in hand.

The birthday is actually today, because even with induction and much yelling from two midwives, the business of labour took so long. But it is the clarity of the memories that lead me to the conclusion that actually one's birthday is of far greater importance to one's mother than to oneself.  I think that unless one is a small child excited about presents and parties the whole business of remembering the actual day is one in which only a parent can fully participate. I remember with some angst my lack of
preparation for the birth - my refusal to go out and buy baby garments, for some reason connected with superstition and not counting chickens. My parents, I remember, turned up one afternoon at my flat in Hyndland bearing a Mothercare bag and insisted I stash it somewhere sensible ...

We, of course, had complicated matters by deciding to move to Dunoon. Mr B was already working

there, and the early mornings were fraught with getting up in the dark and wondering if the ferries would be running. There were nights when the boats were off and he couldn't get home. There was the strangely transient feel to my existence at the very time when I suppose I should have been building a nest. And I can remember it all.

I suspect we're all the same, we mothers. My mother - above, holding a rather small me - used to tell me how, high on whatever pain relief they gave you in these days, she hallucinated that there were men dancing on the roofs of the houses on the other side of Great Western Road from Redlands. She also told me they offered her tripe for her tea. (She declined.) And she always made sure she gave me something great for my birthday - many of the most esoteric books on my shelves came through her.

The other baby photo is of the one whose birthday falls today. I won't embarrass him by giving him a name. But I wanted to record the moment I realised that no landmark birthday of my own has ever seemed as unforgettable as his - or his brother's.

But that's next week ...

Waste of parents?

I'm currently working on a fascinating project to put online a great collection of letters from my father written during 1945 and therefore covering the end of the war with Germany and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan - and I'll put up a link just as soon as I get started on the text. But in preparation for starting I've been reading these letters, and I've been learning.

Two things leap to mind. The first is of interest, probably, only to me: I was going to be called Caroline Mary. The initials are the same - but I can't so far find out when I became the me that I know instead. The other, however, is more profound. I was wondering why I knew so little about my own parents, so little about what they thought about the big things. I realised that in fact it was because I hadn't asked the right questions - especially of my father, who died when I was 32. Ok, you say - you were an adult. What stopped you asking the questions?

And the answer is, I think, that I didn't know what questions to ask. I also lacked the confidence to ask them. I don't think I became that confident questioner until ... well, until now, I suppose. I simply didn't know enough. They were my parents, and that was enough - a kind of force-field prevented my straying too far, and I didn't know the way anyway. So that feeling that keeps coming over me - the idea that we waste our parents, the resources that they represent - is something I have to recognise and, to quote Larkin, clothe as destiny. Maybe we are all destined to "waste" our parents; to dismiss their recollections as old hat or irrelevant, to assume that we know it all without recourse to their wisdom. Maybe the force-field is omnipresent between the generations, and maybe it is inevitable and even necessary.

So I forgive myself my thoughtlessness, and will attempt to make amends to myself now. And while I'm at it, I shall keep on growing up.

Maybe.

Moving swiftly on: parenting and education

Considering my own childhood - and I realise it must seem odd to many - led me inexorably to think about my own role as a parent trying to encourage children to learn, do homework and so on. I was about to say that by comparison with my own parents' involvement, I was a complete failure - but then I thought about the outcome for both sons and decided that was a tad sweeping. So what do I remember?

The Word Tin. Son no.1 used to produce this, when he was in P1, with a look of doom. We had to pick words out of a tobacco tin (where on earth did I lay my hands on this item?) and he had to recognise them. At the time he was four and a half and it was torture. Later, there was more amusement to be had in thinking up outrageous sentences with which he could demonstrate the meaning of words. And that, I have to admit, is all I can remember from the Primary school years. I have very little recollection of what - if anything - I did to help no. 2 son. He used a thing called the word-maker, and progressed to a sentence-maker, but I didn't seem to do anything. Could this be because by then I'd gone back to work?

When your children attend the secondary school in which both parents teach, the experience is somewhat different from the norm. I was certainly involved in helping both sons with English - rescuing one from having to do North and South for Higher by spending a whole Easter holiday studying the Larkin set texts so that he could use them in the exam a month later actually involved me in the most God-awful scene with his class teacher, who happened to be my boss. I did a bit of Standard-grade Latin with both of them. And when no.1 son became editor of the school magazine, he recruited me as the Editor-in-chief because it was more convenient for him - and look where that got us.

Actually it got me into what I see as the most important single piece of education I ever undertook. I don't know how many evenings I spent in the school while both sons in turn ran the magazine, teaching myself to do desktop publishing (Adobe Pagemaker) when they left and the boy who knew how to do it let us down, sharing hilarious pressure with successive generations of student journalists when the photocopier jammed/ran out of ink/got too hot, going off with them to competitions in Edinburgh and to the Scottish Parliament, sitting in on interviews with Frank Pignatelli, then Director of Education for Strathclyde, and John Smith, leader of the Labour party. Pupils who were shy learned to use the phone, to contact advertisers, to sell advertising; others learned touch-typing without ever taking Business Studies, coaxed ancient Macintosh Classics to work years after they should have recycled, learned to use the scanner and the value of white space on the page.

Did this make up for the fact that we had television on every night? That there was a small telly in the older son's bedroom, linked to the ZX Spectrum but also to an aerial? That they both had radios and listened to music incessantly, from an early age? That we allowed an 11 year old to have a modem and a year's subscription to BT's precursor of the internet (what on earth was it called?) so that he would come and beg: "Can I go online now?" before he was in secondary school? At the time I felt I was failing, when I'd find one of them sweating over something for the magazine the night before some important exam, but now I'm less sure.

But there's so much more to think about in this early exposure to the medium I'm using now that I think I'd better leave it to another post. It's a long way from the Word Tin ...

Home and study

This recent line of thought about learning has taken some interesting twists. I suppose most of us take for granted our own peculiarities - until we're brought up against the effect they may have on others. I was intrigued by Katya's comment about home education for her children: how does one educate one's own? I mean, I know I chucked in the odd bit of input when my offspring were doing English, or Latin - but they were pretty young when I stopped interfering with their maths homework. My own parents helped me - I've already mentioned how my father supplemented the lamentable teaching in English that my otherwise admirable school provided, and my mother used to sit poring over passages of Virgil until she had, as she put it, "broken the back" of the nightly translation exercise for me. But how extraordinary that my father (with his 1st in English) should then turn his attention to my struggles with Physics, in order to assist me in understanding, if I remember correctly, the principle of moments.

I hadn't thought about this for years, until Mrs H pointed out that for a family of four to sit in one room every evening with the homework going on at the table while individual tuition took place at various moments between the hours of 6pm and 9pm was, to put it mildly, unusual. My sister and I had masses of homework, and yet I never, in all my school and university career, worked later than 9pm - because my father was sure that any work done past that time wasn't likely to be worth much. (And here I am blogging at midnight - was he right?) After 9pm I would look forward to an hour or so's reading before bed - we had no telly in the house until I had graduated from Uni. So structured, so easy to fall in with - would I have succeeded at all if he'd been less interested? Or would I simply have pursued my own interests and never, ever have passed higher Maths?

It's hard to imagine that happening now, and yet I still believe that if parents don't interfere in their children's education in some way these children have a much harder row to hoe. They have to provide their own motivation, find a silent space away from the telly, resist the temptation of Facebook or Second Life - or use these and other tools creatively in the educational process.

And does anyone still prepare translations of Virgil any more?

All change...

This Navajo woman has absolutely nothing to do with my subject today other than her faintly quizzical expression and the fact that she is wearing clothes which go some way to identifying her role - either in life as a whole, or at the moment the photo was taken. You wonder if she wears traditional clothing all the time, or merely when it is a suitable moment so to do. And this brings me to my point.

Are you the kind of person who dresses in the morning in the clothes you will wear till you go to bed? Or do you have activity-specific clothing which will come on and off through the day till your bed is so littered in the day's discarded garments that it takes half an hour to deal with them before sleep is possible?

I have to confess to being the latter type. I used to watch films in which the man of the house would return home from the office or similar place of employ, perhaps remove his jacket, and sit down to dinner/a drink/ whatever. I used to marvel at how uncomfortable this might be, and at the dangers of spilling his soup down his tie when he was not actually dining in a posh restaurant. My father came home from school, disappeared briefly, and returned looking like a genteel tramp in that his jersey frequently had holey elbows which he would refuse to let anyone patch. We were never allowed to sit around in our school uniforms - though I think on some stressful evenings of school orchestra and much homework this rule was relaxed.

Today I have had no need to be particularly respectable. If I had been in Glasgow for the day, or at church, there would have been a decent pair of trousers and a shirt - maybe even a skirt - lying around waiting to be put away. But I have been out twice, soaking the trousers I wore the first time and resorting to my waterproof ones the second. Now I am wearing the ultra-comfy but fairly unspeakable jeans whose forgiving waist will see me through dinner. My fleece has some splodges of dried dough on it - for today was one of intense domesticity - and my shirt has been a favourite for at least 20 years. On my feet I have a pair of bright green Holey Soles. Had today been a swimming day, I would have worn a different set of comfy clothes to haul off and stuff in my locker.

I have a friend who mocks my quick-change tendencies. She has no qualms about wearing new jeans for a muddy dog-walk, and has a waist which does not mind an unchanging waistband from dawn till dusk. She wears, washes, discards. My mother would have had a saying for her:
"Aye at the head of the heap."

See what parents do to you?

Commitment and nags

As I've bragged (or should that be brogged? - a neat amalgamation of verbs) about the success of edublogs like Progress Report I think it's only fair to acknowledge that wildbanks has been a complete failure in terms of encouraging a student to work and progress. The joyous bit for me was that I felt able to tell the parents that they were wasting their money and my time and that we should cease trading forthwith - how often did I long for that freedom in my classroom days!

I often reflect on the discrepancy between parents' ambitions for their children and the inclination of said children to do anything to fulfil these ambitions - which the child may even profess for themselves. On the other hand, it was just great when one of the Progress Report bloggers came back sua sponte with an onslaught on her Higher work - for then I was reminded of the drive created to improve and succeed.

In the end, of course, it's all a matter of commitment. Some people reach that stage of maturity earlier than others; some people have wonderful nagging parents who sacrifice their own peaceful lives to keep up the pressure. That's what I had when I was at school, and I've never ceased to marvel at the way my father - a famous Glasgow English teacher in his day - helped me with physics while my mother would do the preliminary work on my Virgil translation because I had so much homework. I hope I in turn was able to carry on the noble tradition of nag-in-chief despite the temptation to do my own thing.....