"You with your Mother's Pride and Poetry...!

My word, it's been a little quiet around here lately... Where is everyone?!

I've been less than chatty here as I haven't had a lot to write about. As you know, my son, Grizzler, is away at University. It's only about 20 miles from home so I still manage (if he doesn't outrun me first) to get my paws on him for a cuddle, or to steal a begrudging kiss of his cheek, about every couple of weeks. For the rest of the time, he's living relatively independently, he hasn't starved, and he's managing to get by and to get himself out of bed to lectures on time for the most part. Hip, hip, hooray!

I know when I first started writing here at Mad, Manic, Mamas, when Sara and I decided to launch a blog to help parents of struggling teens, (or should that be struggling parents of teens?), I wanted mainly to vent at how tough I felt it had all become.

...I wanted to feel less isolated in coping with issues presented by living with teenagers; Like how difficult it was coping with the Teen Tantrums, which had turned out to be far worse than Toddler Tantrums.

Those years when you worried endlessly about what was ailing them, because they had no voice, only to find yourself years later, roundly berated and shouted out, sometimes on a daily basis because a sock couldn't be found or a hoodie wasn't dry enough to wear...

And people kept on saying that things would improve. That, in time, the relationship between Mother and Son would be restored.

And that day - those days - finally came.

Distance has given us absence, and indeed fondness. He tells me that he loves me once again. He texts me with the treasured words that I'll never delete them from my 'phone.

I never stopped telling him I loved him, even when I wondered where my sweet boy had gone.

I won't say that it's all sweetness and light.

When he comes home from Uni to stay for a while, sometimes he slips back into familiar territory, crying to be fed every half hour like a helpless baby bird, when I know he is more than capable of fending for himself. He's six-feet-five, for god's sake!

And sometimes I find myself back in the old Drama Triangle: Victim, Rescuer, sometimes Persecutor...

I feel guilt that I am not a good mother, when I know I should be patting myself on the back for being a 'good-enough' mother.

We all should, if we have succeeded in raising adaptable, confident, communicative kids who can thrive all by themselves in the outside worlds.

I wrote these words a few months ago on my own blog (when I was writing about tattoos, when he'd come back from a school trip with an ear-ring like Captain Jack Sparrow!), and they brought me here today:

"I want to say something deep and meaningful about having children, and knowing that they are only on loan to us, their parents, for a short time - and, that, like my peaceful dove, they will spread their wings and fly in an altogether different direction to that which we might ever have dreamed up for them in life, while we looked away in fact, just when we were exhausted from the day's activities, and were thankfully tucking them in for the night, together with lop-eared teddies and favoured scented blankies...

I know that their random acts of boldness, burgeoning maturity, and sometimes even licentiousness, should only serve to remind us that we do not own our children, nor their bodies - That they are theirs to do with as they wish, in actuality...

And then I go and wibble on about tattoos, changing the subject until I am able to cope with the temporal nature of love, life and art again..."

And B R E A T H E!


The title of this post comes from one of my favourite songs by the Eurythmics...

It's Fhina, by the way!