#atinylife gamer²

The best thing about having a teenager is having to defend your own parenting decisions to an ungrateful compassionless apple-of-your-own-eye. Did I say the best thing?

The other day, my oldest asked why I let them do so much gaming. Apparently one of their friends had asked how my kid had negotiated this Elysium. For most of the week, unless they are eating or doing their jobs, they are ‘allowed’ on screen.

I’m negotiating for more ‘time away’ but I’ll have to exchange it for weekend virtual sleepovers.

You might be judging me here, and I don’t mind. I judge myself, too.

All my oldest’s friends are online. They’ve had a pretty hard time of it, even before lockdown. So I might feel bad, but I’m going to let them game. They are doing stuff they find difficult every day.

#atinylife gamer

I’m not a gamer. Not really.

However, I make an exception for an obscure little puzzle game called Chain Cube. You bash cubes with the same numbers on them into each other, and then they make another cube with the sum total of the numbers. My current score is 12564886.

I’m playing it less now. In those cranky days of home-learning, when the children needed me there, not to teach, not to do it for them (probably because I said I wouldn’t), but just to be in the room while they worked. Sometimes I had to sit in-between their two rooms.

It was the perfect activity. I could always be interrupted – and was, always – but I wasn’t sitting staring at the wall, waiting to be told that this spelling or that maths was too difficult.

Thanks Chain Cube. Sanity saver.

#atinylife Work

It’s the launch of Pushing out the Boat Magazine today, and I’m reading my poem, Farmer, from their current issue. I try not to be a writer writing about writing, but after I really had trundled behind a load of manure wondering what it was all about, this happened:

Farmer

Trundle a house-sized load of turnip-fragranced earth along the B6365.

Pile up shite in steaming heaps edged with frost.

Bring the cows in. Bring the cows out.

Leave fifteen sheep in a field full of cabbages.

Combine-harvest a field in the dead of night.

Bring the cows in. Bring the cows out.

Perhaps all work is, from outside, baffling.

Words put down in one order, shifted to another field,

the excess loaded onto a trailer,

carried with care along the B7476

as a line of cars trundles behind me, mystified.

#atinylife medal

Having trans kids requires a very particular kind of parenting. One of the things that happens – and there are A LOT of things that happen, not all of them are this good – is that (some) people tell me I’m wonderful.

I know! How very dare they?

Thing is, I don’t want, nor do I deserve, a medal. What, for accepting that my kids are who they say they are? I’d like to think, if you’re reading this, you would do the same for yours.

Yeah, maybe I go out to bat for them most days. Sometimes sticking up for them means I get hurt. Lose people I love, distance myself from others. But: I still get to walk around this world as a cis woman. My life is, and always will be, easier than theirs.

That’s part of cis privilege.  

#atinylife school run chat

‘Mum?’

‘Uh-huh?’

‘Do adults still say nasty things about me?’

‘…’

‘I don’t know. Not to me, but I don’t see them anymore.’

‘Remember when XXX’s Mum said she wasn’t allowed to play with me anymore?’

‘Yes. I do. She was always very supportive. To our faces.’

**

‘Mum?’

‘Why don’t you like XXX anymore?’

‘Well, she said some horrible things about trans kids.’

‘What did she say?’

‘I don’t want to tell you. It’ll upset you.’

‘No it won’t. Tell me.’

‘OK. She implied that if you shared a room at a residential you would rape your room-mate.’

‘…’

‘I’m sorry. It’s not true. Obviously.’

‘I’m asexual!’

‘You’re also 11 years old!’

‘I can’t say the word I want to say. So I’m just going to mouth it.’

‘Sorry, love. I do try to keep you away from all this sort of stuff.’