You're an embarrassment!

Are our children genetically programmed to be able to make us squirm in public? And in return, are we as parents able to do the same for them?

I took Lilly for her check with the school nurse yesterday. A very nice, prim and proper lady, who I would have liked to do my best to impress, but with whom Lilly didn’t seem to want to have anything to do. She just stuck her fingers in her mouth, tilted her head to one side (a gesture which she uses in pretence of shyness), and looked at me whenever the nurse spoke to her, as if I was meant to be giving all the answers.

Not wanting to seem like an over-anxious parent speaking for her, I left her to it, and adopted my own techniques to suggest by body language that this was their game and I was just a spectator. But I think my nonchalant way of looking around the artwork on the classroom walls, coupled with what must by now be a rather spaced-out-prozac look in my eyes, and the nurse probably wondered whether Lily and I had any kind of relationship at all!

So went the questions: ‘What’s your favourite story, Lily?’
Silence.
‘What does mummy read to you at bedtime?’
Mummy sits with clenched teeth waiting for Lily to gush about her ‘information book’ that we paw over every night. My mother bought it for her – a children’s encyclopaedia – and she loves reading it at bedtime. Her favourite extracts are ‘all about floating and sinking’ and ‘the passage of food through our body’. Ok, so I've got a geek for a daughter, but I love her. But instead – silence. She looks at me accusingly as if she’s never heard the idea of a bedtime story, and has clearly been missing out.

The nurse looks nervously at me – obviously I’m a mother who is not only on prozac and not the least bit interested in my child, I also never read to her.
Finally the silence is broken with a little whisper from Lily, through her finger sucking, - ‘I like sleeping beauty’.
Liar - I thought! She has nightmares whenever we read that. But never mind, at least she has broken the silence and proved to the nurse she does know how to speak.

Next we move on to food: ‘Tell me, Lily, do you have school dinners?’
‘Yes, only on a Friday’.
‘And what do they give you?’
‘Sometimes they give me chips and chocolate cake’ – another lie. The school has recently gone all Jamie Oliver on us and they are served a fantastic array of fine home cooked foods – with not a chip or a turkey twizzler in sight.
‘What’s your favourite food, Lily?’
Ah, I know this one – blueberries and strawberries, she can’t get enough of them.
‘Chips, pizza fingers, peas…and tomato ketchup!’ comes the triumphant reply.
Another nervous glance in my direction.
‘You know you should eat fruit and vegetables too, Lily? What’s your favourite vegetable?’
Lily takes an age, her eyes rolling around the ceiling and her mouth working overtime on her fingers, as if sucking harder will somehow remind her of what a vegetable is. This is the child who will eat a plate full of broccoli if you give it to her, and devours about five pieces of fruit for breakfast.

At this point I gave up. The nurse was obviously not going to ask her what she ate on the other four days of the week. If she had, I could’ve been made to feel a bit better if Lily had told her she always has fruit with her packed-lunch, and drinks only water!

What we lost on the food front, we more than made up for on the physical skills. Lily impressed the nurse with her skipping ability and the length of time she could stand on one leg without falling over. I felt vindicated! A child who lives on chips alone can’t skip and hop with such dexterity, surely!? One more sideways glance at me and we were dismissed with a full bill of health. So off we went, Lily miraculously regaining her voice the minute we left the room, and me feeling like I’d just been observed by Dr Tanya Byron for crimes against parenting.

But I feel I got my own back later that day when taking her to ballet, even if Lily didn’t notice. Lily has recently taken up ballet. She’s been desperate to go for ages and we couldn’t get a place for her. Then Bill managed to find her one in a rather posh little village a few miles from where we live. So although none of her friends go, we thought she could start there and see how she settles. Bill took her the first couple of times and I think he rather enjoyed being amongst all the well-healed mums in their four-by-fours with their fake tans, fake hair, but obviously very genuine designer labels. Of course Lily is too young still to get caught up in all the pretences of class consciousness, but Bill and I haven’t failed to recognise we don’t fit in – and I’m sure it won’t be long before Lily starts wondering why we don’t have a seven-seater silver people carrier and matching his & hers Cartier watches. In fact Bill said he felt like he was in a scene out of Billy Elliot the other day, when we drove up in our clapped out, back-firing old car, with Lily in her worn out ballet shoes, and holes in her tights! So she can embarrass me in-front of the school nurse with a pack of lies and disgraceful social skills, but us parents are pretty good at doing embarrassing things too. Be warned!

But the last word must surely go to Poppy. When we were out shopping on Saturday morning she stood in the middle of a busy shop and proceeded to sing an entire rendition of YMCA at the top of her voice for all to see, complete with arm actions and swinging hips. That’s my baby!

...And you wonder why I’m on prozac..!?