Thursday 20 June 2013

Offspring



I may sometimes allude to the fact that I share my life with children. And while they fill my world with joy I don’t want to harp on about them. I can’t imagine growing up in the digital age and having every little success or failure plastered all over the interweb by my loving mom. Thankfully, back in the day mothers were way too busy to engage in banal status updates and children were seen more as a duty than inspirational blog fodder.

It’s not that I don’t cherish them it’s just that I don’t want to be typecast as a mummy blogger and alienate the demographic that choose to steer clear of the mental, physical and fiscal cliff towards which offspring seem determined to drive their parents. I have born and bred two daughters – no biggie – they are long out of nappies anyway so I’ll let them make their own online faux pas. But did I mention they are incredibly intelligent, gorgeous human beings?

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Carl Honore, author of Under PressureHow the epidemic of hyper-parenting is endangering childhood. Carl has some sage advice for would be tiger-mums about letting children just be children. (Cue the beautiful Jonsi.) It's all about the slow movement which includes education. Slow education lets children explore via an emergent curriculum that is lateral not linear. And slow schools don’t hothouse or teach to exams - I’m looking at you NAPLAN!

So I’ve decided to take a more hands-off approach to parenting. I’ve always encouraged individuality in my daughters – not that they needed it – and given them freedoms that some parents may feel unwise, but I feel they need to be able to think for themselves and learn from mistakes. Of course they know they can always call home and although it sounds counterintuitive, (my new favourite word), like slow education, hopefully a bit of freedom will help establish sound boundaries for learning and growth.

Sunday 9 June 2013

Blindsided


At a routine eye check-up (I’ll qualify routine later) I was told that I was legally blind in my right eye. Immediately my devious mind thought of any benefit I could claim - financial or otherwise – then the reality of the diagnosis began to sink in. Can I keep my driver’s license? Wow I’ve only got one eye left? Blindness is such a freaky thing for sighted people to imagine. I remember as a kid playing that party game pin the tail on the donkey and how we laughed at the near misses and hilarious places we’d stuck the tail.

Doesn’t seem so funny now.

My eyes are what you might call my Achilles heel. When I was in kindergarten, circa 1970, a routine school check up found I had myopia (short-sightedness) and a lazy eye with a slight turn – just for effect. For a year after that I wore glasses with a patch on one lens to try to strengthen the lazy eye. It’s called occlusion therapy. The cat-eye glasses had cream frames and the patch bore a Disney Bambi motif. Remember that kid at school with the patch? That was me. And though I can’t remember the taunts of ‘Cyclops’ it did make me look at the world differently. Besides, being a ginger I was no stranger to name-calling.

The best part about the diagnosis was that I got to go to a specialist in the city every month for eye exercises. This meant a day off school YES!, lunch at the Grace Bros. (now Myer) cafeteria - chocolate milkshake and a cheese sandwich, and one on one time with Mum.

Years later another diagnosis of congenital cataracts saw me in surgery – a routine procedure for octogenarians but not 20-somethings. But maybe my biggest fail optically was when I detached my own retina chopping wood. I’m too ashamed to go into detail but yes it did hurt and no I don’t fancy myself as a lumberjack anymore.

So here I am contemplating another ‘procedure’ to remove the rubber band that has been holding my retina in place since that fateful axe wielding day and that makes my kids look at me suspiciously when they see a glimpse of silicon in the corner of my eye (they think I’m some sort of Replicant), and trying not to consider the possibility of sympathetic opthalmia