I know, I know, we shouldn't carry bitterness as it only eats us up - but, as much as I loved my mixed education school with all my heart, they really fucked up circa 1986/7...
At the end of first year (year 7 for you English folk) little envelopes went round, inviting those folk who were fabulous at French and LATIN (WTF is good at that??) third languages. Pupils could choose between German, Greek or, as obviously was much needed in Belfast in the 80s - Russian. Only a madman chose Russian or at a push Greek, so the majority went for German. Then there were some kids who weren't up to scratch at languages but were still in the top stream of classes, who had 4 gaping periods to fill while the rest of the class learnt their third language. Subsequently all the boys in this sub group got 4 periods of art. Amazing. Us girls? Extra Home Economics. How sexist is that? So while the boys enjoyed screen printing, watercolour painting and pottery - we learnt how to make a good home; sewing; knitting (I'll give them, I enjoyed it) and ironing...
I'm still stewing about this. Because, below dear reader, are the things we SHOULD have been taught in those 4 periods:
1. Periods. Yes, yes, by that stage the majority of us had started menstruating - but that isn't the point. We should at a much younger age - with the boys - have had classes explaining that 50% of the population bleed once a month. The more we normalise this, the less women have to carry some bizarre inbuilt shame about the whole event. I had only learnt about periods by finding a jolly silver book in my Mum's drawers - sponsored by Johnson and Johnson - where pretty girls in colourful jeans all looked to be getting on just splendidly with life while being 'on.' The drawings depicting where one put a tampon almost caused me to have a seizure - (that fits where??) and there was no mention of horrific cramps, nausea, painful breasts, tempers that would start a riot. I had no idea that a period lasted for 5 days until I got my first. I also remember my acute embarrassment when Jeremy H discreetly tried to give me back my blue Tampax holder in form room - after I left it his brother's car, getting a lift home after a party when I was 15. I denied it was mine. Jeremy looked at me, puzzled as he knew it could only be mine (Jezza had no sisters). I denied all knowledge of it despite my mates going - it is yours CM. He binned it. My handy - won't crush your tampax - little holder was gone. All because I was too ashamed to admit I had periods. The more both sexes know and understand about the curse, the less it becomes one.
2. Money management. Granted, I was pretty good at this - never taking out a student loan and always working every summer during uni to provide for myself for the rest of the year. But then came my 20s in London and the gloves were off... 'Santa Bob' (as I called my bank manager) provided any loan you wanted - but they eventually came at a price. I took out my first mortgage, alone in my 20s. I had no idea what I was doing - but thankfully had a great financial advisor that a flatmate rec'd. What if I had known how to negotiate buying a property rather than simply telling the estate agent 'but I want it so much.' By my next property I played the game - looking at other properties on their list and acting like I had only the vaguest interest of buying my house; knocking the sellers right down... Imagine, if we had been taught all this at school? What a mortgage is; repayments; how to save; taxes; being a freelancer etc etc...
3. The eternal juggle. Deep down I think I started this here blog because I had no idea how to juggle motherhood and work. NO fecker ever said to me : you might be getting a 2:1 hun but it aint gonna make a pic of difference when you have kids. I had no idea just how hard that was. Particularly being a freelance presenter, as I was back in the day. Friends in the most stable of jobs (something I have never ever had in all my life) still had to cut back working days, organise childcare, work into the night to make up for leaving early as their kid had a doctor's appointment/was sick at school/ school's endless inset days etc. etc. No one ever told me this. No one said: it is going to be the hardest challenge of your life trying to make a living at what you want to do and raise two children. I mean, every day the school sent letters about: quizzes, lunches; trips; harvests; plays; needing jazzy jars and tombola gifts; volunteering at the Xmas/summer fair; the PTA; choosing governors; teacher leaving gifts; plus all the parties/play dates/Halloweens/easters etc. It was a full time job running your kids' social diaries let alone your own.
I read back on my early blog and have no idea how I got through it. The one thing I do know, is: it was a SHOCK. Whilst there is some acknowledgement that men have a role to play in all this parenthood malarky - there was ONE man on my daily school run. One. Society still expects the buck to stop with women. They are racing around half mad with these exhausting expectations of somehow looking great, working like demons, raising angels and keeping a pristine house. It is madness. Don't even get me started on the second mortgage one needs to afford childcare. I very deliberately left 4 years between by kids because I had just got a dream job on a soap when my son was 2 and I wasn't about to suddenly get pregnant whilst trying to get my head around a new career. Plus, I never would have coped with 2 under 4 at home. I would have gone completely insane with loneliness. I need people.
I will be forever grateful to that soap and all the folk I worked with there as they honestly were my sanity and salvation in the years I felt like a single mother. But my god I was exhausted. Pretty much all of my earnings went on childcare. I paid for the privilege of being utterly spent. Something has to change. Women need warned. I may add, that not every woman wants kids of course - but I wish I had known a little bit more about JUST how violently my life would change before I had a kid. It wouldn't have deterred me - but the whole process would have been less of a mindfuck.
4. Menopause. YUP. Another shock. For most women I know they work out they are menopausal because they think they are losing their minds. I'm not going to post the 40 or is it 50 something symptoms that can come with 'the change' but it is safe to say I do not know a single women - not one - who isn't struggling in some way because of it. At the very least there is the tiredness; the heat; the mood swings and often, the clawing grasping anxiety that threatens to overwhelm. So it is really good then that we can spend 5 days waiting on the phone and finally speak to a 25 year old male GP who has had 45 mins training in the meno - and will offer insane solutions. Or we can get bloods taken (not good as hormones - those little buggers - change daily) and pay £££ to go privately to try and get the holy grail: testosterone (which once got is a MALE one because there is no female testosterone available in this country, only in Australia!). Oh and what creator made women menopausal as their daughters are becoming teens? That combo is really winning. Throw in aging parents and well, why not give us more to cope with Lord? Do we take HRT or not? Does it increase the likelihood of cancer? Why is our hair thinning and friends talk of skin tags? Why is it nigh on impossible to shift a pound but the minute we eye up a piece of cheesecake we put on 3 pounds overnight? Why are our shoulders wider? What is this apron belly? And most of all WHY did I not know any of this?
5. Empty nesting is the hardest of all. The week my son turned 18 I was a weepy mess. Husband kept looking at me like I had finally lost my marbles - but it was June, almost summer and I knew that after which, he would be off. Seeing Stevie Nicks play Landslide didn't help the matter one jot. (Dare you to listen and not cry). Technically my nest is not empty for 5 more years as I still have Sproglette here - but still, I miss my son. He's living his best life in Manchester and relishing freedom and a big city to live in - and I'm thrilled he is happy, but there is a little ember of sadness.
We spend our lives as mothers building our whole worlds around our kids and then - they go. My good friend Marina used to tell me that her favourite night of the whole year was Xmas eve as her kids were under her roof again. Now both of her children are married, one with a child of his own and I asked her how she got through this transition? She replied: I have no idea, I think I still am dealing with it. Even Madonna admitted she wept and wept when her daughter left home - because nothing prepares you for the letting go. It seems like 5 minutes ago you were standing on lego pieces, doing the nit check and struggling through the witching hour of bath time/ dinner/bedtime and then collapsing on the sofa, struggling to stay awake through an episode of The Wire. This summer in Cornwall, my mate B said to me - this feels like an ending - as both our sons were heading off to Uni. Neither of us were ready for it.
Of course, they have to cut the apron ties - and no one wants a Norman Bates situation - but I find myself on a Mon/Tues and Wed when my daughter and husband are out at her football from 4-9 (I KNOW) staring into the abyss. Cuddling up to the dog and expecting conversation. Wondering how I went from NEVER having a moment to wee in peace to suddenly oceans of time on my hands. Why do more folk not talk about this transition? The moment that you drop them off at their stiflingly hot halls and walk out the door, thinking: but he only knows how to boil pasta - how will he survive? Husband seems to have adapted to this whole new way of life as a family of 3 with ease. I'm very close to my eldest - perhaps because we had 4.5 years as a wee team when he was little. Perhaps because he gets me in a way that belies his 18 years. I may have less laundry to do, one kid less to nag about the room cleaning, less food to buy - but I feel 'less' in some way - like a part of me is missing.
6. Mindfulness. I kid ye not. Mental health wasn't even a twinkle in the postman's eye when I grew up. No one avoided going to school (if you did, you missed out on everything - whereas these days kids have phones - they don't need to physically be in school to know all the goss); children were still caned in my day. In fact my P6 teacher (we were 9/10 years old in that class) bumped into me in Zara in Belfast about 12 years ago and enquired after a boy who had been her class with me. She was still haunted by him being 'slippered' by the headmaster in the corridor as she had told the head that he was difficult to handle. (The kid had lost his mother only 5 years before and clearly was still traumatised). When I spoke to the said boy - he hadn't forgotten either - it had rightly stayed with him too. (Slippering is what is says on the tin - being beaten with a slipper. Hard.).
Listening to Jamie Dornan (an alumni from my school) on the 'How to Fail' podcast - he mentioned that he didn't fear fancy photographers and celebs when he was modelling as a direct result of being encouraged to fear the masters in big black gowns at his school. He refused. 'They are just people,' he said. My school encouraged fear: fear of detentions, fear of teachers, fear most of all - of failure. As Jamie mentions, it was getting kids ready to be doctors, lawyers, civil servants. Creatives less so. Thankfully I hid up the attic rooms of the art department with teachers who later came to my wedding - who 'got' me. But there was no place for emotional needs, or an idea that the creative fields were fulfilling. When I explained at my career's meeting that I wanted to be a journalist or writer - I was told to do Psychology at Glasgow Uni. I fecked that off and went to London to a Poly that became a Uni - with folk like Charlie Brooker two years above me. Thank god I did. But my school didn't encourage this. They didn't encourage an idea that success lay anywhere outside of what you earned. Jobs = status. Obviously it was 80s/early 90s and so no-one gave a jot about pastoral care - and the very notion that teens could struggle. As their brains develop, and bodies rage with hormones, they have to negotiate working out who they are, their place in the world, friendships, sometimes difficult home lives and all the while get straight As and avoid a detention? In what world is that acceptable?
Imagine how brilliant it would have been if those two periods could have been about our own emotional wellbeing? About conflict and resolution; toxic relationships; boundaries; developing a sense of self? I know that now kids get PSHE - but creating emotional resilience will set you up better for life than just learning about safe sex...
I won't go down the rabbit hole of how I believe the entire education system needs an overhaul and how most kids do not fit into a 'one size fits all' type of learning. I wonder in the AI world, what will become the most useful skills for one to have - and what will be obsolete? Of course I cannot blame my school for much of the above - it was of it's time; in the 80s girls didn't play football and even when I was in primary school boys wrote 'lists' of the prettiest girls in the class to the ugliest. This was deemed acceptable. I have a diary entry aged 9 where I come third at swimming but get dropped to bottom of M's list because I answered him back in class. I'm genuinely gutted by this. It saddens me that we girls were taught to compete against each other under the male gaze...
So - what do you wish you had been taught at school? I'd like to add plumbing skills, how to put up a shelf/picture and build flat pack furniture. Or is that just me?
