The mighty jungle

Just when you think you’re getting a handle on this parenting lark, someone throws a curve ball at you. It starts really early too. You bring this tiny bundle home from the hospital and all hell breaks loose as you try to learn everything you need. Just as you get the hang of it, baby starts crawling; then walking; then discovering its own will and verbalising it. It seems to me to be one long phase after another.

When we came to Bangkok Son was 11 and about to move to secondary school. At the end of the summer we moved he would’ve been taking himself off on the bus to the local town. Therefore both children were being carefully trained for some months to go short distances alone. This was fine. There was something sort of timely about it: Son wishing to stretch wings and mother, biting her nails to stumps, watching him out the window as he made his way into the village and finally disappeared from view. Mother: totally relaxed at growing Son’s desire for some independence … tearing hair from roots until he reappeared in sight from the village, hopefully clutching pint of milk/loaf of bread…

However, the ‘allow the children some independence’ programme came screeching and skidding to a halt on moving to Bangkok in summer 2005. Mother, in her new territory and not having the lie of the land, kept her cubs close. Cubs, used to a certain level of freedom, were most unhappy at this change of pace; they growled and lashed their claws.

Three years along it’s possible to say with the arrival of mobile phones in the children’s lives and a sense of balance and knowledge of the city for me, that things have reached normality again. And so it continues. We allow, in incremental steps, a little bit more freedom most times that it is requested. I consider this my job as a parent. They will leave home (whether that’s in Asia or Europe) and I want them to be independent, confident, well balanced young people.

They are both showing every sign of being so. Just yesterday Daughter achieved a First …school bus to sky train and travelling on her own to our stop, where she alights and walks home: an incremental step for most, but for a 12 year old and her mother, a giant leap. I don’t want to sound smug (I think I do) but my nails are no more, and I keep looking out the window to spot my cub even though it’s an hour too early to expect her.

And then today, another curveball: a demo at Government House may spill over into other parts of Bangkok, and it is advised to ‘exercise caution’ when being out in the streets. I spent the morning rearranging her travelling timetable and contacting school to try to inform her of it.

Blimey, it’s a jungle out there.