Differing Parenting

From my oft-neglected blog:

Men and women approach parenting differently. I understand that and it makes for some awfully funny incidents in my home now and again. My husband is a real sweetheart but I think he was supposed to be born as an ostrich. Only he buries his head in the newspaper instead. Of course it need not be a newspaper, he could just as easily lose himself in his laptop or watching a movie he had watched 153 times before. The point I am trying to make here is that he can continue being engaged in an activity of his choice even if nuclear war had broken out just beyond the front door.

Now I am a stressed (well it is only my fault – I think I make stress an art!), completely wound up sort of person who is chronically unable to relax except when reading a book perhaps. Also I am very suspicious of humans, animals, nature, God – in short, everything. Of course I still trust in complete idiots and pay for it but that’s another story. So my approach to parenting is – don’t trust the kids one inch not because they lie (they don’t – well not yet anyway) but because left unsupervised, they are capable of acts that will defy your wildest imagination. My husband knows that – I tell him often enough. And yet he is capable of supervising them by watching TV and being completely ignorant of the acts of vandalism they commit three feet to the side of him! How is it possible you ask? I have no idea. They would have asked him for something – he would not have heard or maybe he would have grunted in response. This, my offspring take as consent to drag a chair to the cupboard and pull out things or eat up everything in the snack box thereby ruining their dinner or grabbing the box of crayons I had carefully hidden on the top shelf and coloring every object in sight (they did color all over the TV pretty thoroughly once). Okay – all the guys who are reading this (if there are any) will get rather miffed at my descriptions and probably think I exaggerate – so I give you a wonderful little incident that happened almost two years ago. Fasten your seat belts…

This happened on a Sunday afternoon. My weekend afternoons are inviolate – I read for an hour or too up in my room in solitude and my husband is with the kids. So that day I went up as usual and after about ten minutes my husband walks up and says the kids are fine downstairs and so I keep my book aside and we catch up on stuff (this is while I was working so weekends gave us a few precious hours to share news). After a while I asked what exactly the kids were doing. He replied very casually that they were cutting newspaper sheets – good for fine motor skills development. I jumped up like I had been shocked by untold volts of electricity buzzing through my body and raced to the stairs. He thought I was overreacting and said – it’s only been five minutes – what are you getting worked up about? In the middle of my mad dash I glared and said “You actually left them alone with two pairs of (admittedly child friendly) scissors??!! Are you nuts?” The rest is legend in my family. I reach the living room to see bits of hair trailing from the sofa to the powder room and all the way to the guest room and at the end of it sat my daughter (she was 3) looking like a half dozen rats had a go at her hair. I stood with my mouth open for a while before I asked her who did it – she said her brother did it and her brother stoutly maintained that she did it. I went berserk.

Anyway, we did take her to have her hair re-cut and the chap there looked at us with horror and asked us where we had had her hair cut so badly. We coolly replied that she did it herself and paid double.