Parental Doubt

All it takes is one comment for the parental self doubt to creep in. Whether it’s someone randomly telling a new mother she’s holding her baby the wrong way (yep I’ve had that – but really, if he was uncomfortable he would let me know me so shut up!) to the latest:

Master Six comes home and casually mentions: “Mum, when I was walking to school this morning a mother told me to tell my mum I was too young to be crossing the road by myself.”

This time though, the self doubt only lasted about half a minute - Maybe I was a bit premature in letting him walk alone to school… but then we had walked the same route numerous times as a family and taught him to look three different ways before crossing the one and only street.

I had to ask: “You didn’t do anything dangerous when you crossed the street did you?”

“No, I stopped and waited till there were no cars like you taught me.” I can tell when he’s lying and he wasn’t.

No, this mother was just a busy-body who hadn’t yet cut the umbilical chords connecting her own children, I decided, and began to feel my hackles rising.

But even so, I walked the same route the next day with Master Six and made sure I had a good description of the “orange-hair, white-shirt, green-car, that wasn’t a van but had a sliding door” - driving mother who had given my son this indirect ticking off to his mum.

“Is that her?” I asked all the way to school, rolling up my sleeves.

Ok, that last part was a lie. I’m hardly the type to start a fisticuffs outside the school gates, let alone even confront her, but, for some reason, I still wanted to know who this Martha Stewart was.

We didn’t see her but I still met a lot of other lovely non-judgmental mothers that morning and had a good chin wag instead. It turned out Master Six is quite popular at school and, no sooner had we entered the school gates than a team of children came running up and, after calling out good morning rituals, began chasing his younger brother and sister round the yard like they were a couple of Pied Pipers.

Note to self: remember to dress them in running shoes next time.

But back to the orange-haired, white-shirt mother driving a green car with a sliding door that’s not quite a van – aka a people mover. When prompted further that night Master Six ventured: “Well, she said I looked scared and I didn’t say anything but I thought in my head ‘I’m not scared’.”

No, he’s an intelligent, well-trained six-year-old who’s been taught how to cross a street so maybe it’s time someone dealt with their own apron strings before passing judgement.