wistfully looking back

a lot of the lovely folk I chat to on Twitter (and on other mummy boards) are young mums. That is not that they are very young or that being young is wrong, but they are younger than me (my definition of young!) and they often have young children (ie younger than mine!) so for clarity - they are younger than 40 and have kids younger than 10...

any hoooooo back to the point

they talk about how lovely their children are (they are all correct of course) they talk about the little things their children/babies do that are lovely, sweet and clever, and they are still all right on the mark..... and then they talk about the lovely life ahead of this tiny angelic person and I feel my heart skip because I'm there......

and it's not all good, (trust me she used to be the perfect angel)

how ever perfect the love the children receive they are not always lovable, they whine, they refuse to eat any food except cake, they say "but {insert any other child's name here } is allowed to" they lie, they fight, they argue (constantly about everything and anything) and worse, far worse they get let down by their so called friends.

They come home from school in tears because someone said they no longer like them, they get bullied, they don't understand why other children don't share, and why other children think that being nice is the same as being stupid.

sometimes I wish that my child's perfect first few years had been tougher, that I taught her the world was nasty, because you know what? it is nasty, and it has nasty people in it and you can't always be there to protect your child. So I feel like martial arts may be the next after school activity we go for. And I wish it didn't have to be.