Spare Me the Curated Family Life

Originally posted on Medium on June 8th 2021

(The above is an actual picture of my son and me, looking askance at each other earlier in the week at some historical monument or other.)

It’s been half term here in the UK, and unusually the weather has been glorious. The downside is no one can currently leave the country without having to go into quarantine for ten days afterwards, so all the people would be taking “hot dog legs” photos by the poolside, while their offspring plot world domination at kid’s club has had to actually entertain the little scrotes here instead. And thus, we all got to observe a nations’ tiny tearaways hurling themselves off a World Heritage Site near you, with added performative parenting.

(Yes, I am jealous of the kid’s club thing). Anyway…

Call me old-fashioned (and I am, by anyone’s standards, an older parent, so it’s actually quite reasonable), but I didn’t think that parenting was something that we were assessed on. I say this because sometimes it feels like every social media post demonstrates some aspect of “doing parenting,” as if you’re providing documentary evidence for a social media management assessment. Into how to use social media to bug the crap out of people. The equivalent of a Live, Laugh, Love decal over the kettle. Be a lovely happy family by all means, but you really don’t need to go on social media to tell us about it.

Arty filter…CHECK! Little darlings behaving for a nanosecond…CHECK! Personal Loan arranged to buy tickets for two adults and three ferals…sorry, children…CHECK! Really smug comment…CHECK!

No one is fooled. There is no such thing as a family outing where someone doesn’t mutter “For f***’s sake” under their breath at least once. It’s a myth, so please stop infecting everyone else with your fictitious familial bonhomie, it’s a sham, and you’ll be putting less pressure on yourself and your loved ones if you gave it up as a bad job.

Plus, we see you hissing stony-faced at your child in the car park. We can see it from a mile away because we have all been there and will be there again.

It’s also quite demoralizing if your kid has different needs. There is an abundance of “normal kid stuff” that my son really can’t get into. His aversion to loud noises means that going to a funfair is auditory hell. Loud music and people screaming can often send him running for the hills, as do crowds. If I’m honest, it seems legitimate and reasonable from where I’m standing, but there’s this prevailing belief that all kids love noise.

Doing performative, edifying stuff with a kid with different needs is either impossible or requires the diplomatic skills of someone who negotiates at armed sieges regularly.

Being asked if we can go home before we’ve even arrived has featured heavily in my life over the last week. This also involves bickering about wearing clothes suitable for the weather, the application of sunscreen, food, water, heat, cold, car windows…you name it, it’s in the mix. But perversely, he does enjoy it once you’ve crowbarred him out of the house.

I know we’re not obliged to go anywhere, and Smalls would probably prefer it if we didn’t, but thanks to lockdown, I’d have turned up to the opening of a biscuit tin as an excuse to get the hell out of the house. I basically had to swap one set of trying circumstances for a rather different set of trying cases in the name of protecting my own precarious sanity.

The thing is, I like the posts where the picture looks lovely, but the parents have injected a little of the real situation into the proceedings. The dark underbelly if you want. The kind of comment that’s ripe with twisted comedy.

“And 10 minutes later, we found James trying to persuade a tiger to eat toffee…”

Similarly, Before and After photos involving losing a battle between a beautiful dress and a particularly fragrant puddle tickle me greatly. Those make my evil little heart sing. Basically, because they make me feel like less of a parenting hot mess, it also shows that life with small humans is surreal and chaotic.