Realisations:
- I own a seventeen year-old.
- Boy Seymour has now left primary school.
Sh!t the bed. How does this kind of thing happen? One minute I am embarking on the adventure that is adulthood, whereby I am applying for mortgages and getting used to being called Mrs something. The next, I am facing the prospect of having three offspring at BIG school, and a fourth fast approaching the end of Key Stage 2.
In fact, Little Seymour Number One is off being an adult at this very moment. The other day, 24 hours after turning seventeen, she set off on a National Express coach to the West Country. It was her birthday treat to visit her great friends there, and she was excited. But, never having travelled much, the train presented too much of a challenge. Hence, we opted for the coach.
How wrong could it go? I wondered. She needed to change at Heathrow, but there was time for that. To ask someone, and to find her onward bus.
Instead, the child (for that is what she is, and shall be for as long as I can call her one) got off too early! She must have seen she was at Heathrow and jumped the gun a terminal early. Thankfully, a nice lady saved the day, or poor Number One would have missed her link and cocked up her adventure wholesale. She’s now in Bude, wetsuit shopping and having a thoroughly fabulous time.
Little Seymour Number Two has been brave. Despite a hectic week, she’s opted to go to an ill-timed Scout camp on the last evening of the academic year. She’s only just started at Scouts, so doesn’t know many people, and even though we still had a whole kit list to work through at 6pm, she made it to camp by seven.
As for Boy Seymour, he didn’t make it to Scout camp. He’s had a busy week too, which started off with him getting in a 3.15am on Monday morning after a breakdown on the way back from his fishing trip to Devon. He is emotional after leaving primary school, and tetchy. I was in two minds whether to send him to camp, after all, it’s character building, but he is in summer school all next week, and so maybe a break is in order. To send him or no? What is the best thing to do? That age old parenting conundrum, to which there is no definitive answer.
Mini Seymour – my baby – is thankfully still at primary school. She’ll be in Year Five in September but to me, she is still very little. She is currently playing with dolls on the brand new carpeted stairs, being a child. It makes a change from watching Netflix all the time.
And so we embark on our summer holidays. Again. I remember a time when summer holidays mattered to me only because I was a teacher, and they represented six weeks off. Paid. What on Earth could be better? But summer holidays with kids are fraught with even more parenting conundrums: how much screen time is too much? What exercise should they be doing? Are they bored? Are they happy..?
This job does not get easier. I find myself worrying more now than I ever did when The Four Little Seymours were little. There are the hormones and the grumps, the idealistic views and the temper tantrums, the low-self-esteem and the self-righteousness. From eight to seventeen, I have a whole rollercoaster of young human emotion just ripening before my eyes here under my roof.
My god, I love them. But I am acutely aware now of just how big a responsibility this parenting lark is. They’re like sponges, soaking everything up. One wrong move and I have blown it. Sometimes, the responsibility feels so huge that I just want to give up and admit defeat.
Actually, though, if that were the case, I’ve already blown it. Because we are all fallible; children, teenagers and parents. Nobody is perfect, and maybe that’s the most monumental lesson of all.
So maybe, during these school holidays, I might try to lower my expectations of what we will achieve. Maybe I won’t sort the house out. Perhaps my novel will remain unwritten. Quite possibly, the children will argue.
Basic survival is the real goal, and so I shall aim for that.
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