This is a piece in todays Times about Mediation and how it can help divorcing parents and their children. I am posting it on my blog so that those of you who do not get The Times can read it without having to pay Mr Murdoch £1………. My parents divorced nearly fifty years ago.… [Read more…]
January 26, 2012
I have always been open with my daughters about the fact that I spent much of the latter half of my adolescence stoned. That’s why I failed French A level not once, but twice I tell them. That is why I will never win the Nobel Prize for Literature or establish a multi-million pound business.… [Read more…]
January 19, 2012
‘Mr Right could be sitting just below this ad’…. words on the tube this week travelling to a conference to give a speech about ‘enduring love’. The seat below the advert was empty. The small print afterwards read ‘if he isn’t… contact’ (a dating agency), because of course Mr Right is out there somewhere –… [Read more…]
December 16, 2011
It was only once I had children that I understood the real point of Christmas. Christmas celebrates the birth of a baby, a special one perhaps, but all children are special, and none more so than our own. Motherhood unleashes a torrent of a love we didn’t know we were capable of feeling. Not immediately… [Read more…]
December 5, 2011
The mental image of your own teenage child having sex is a pretty gruesome one, almost paedophilic. It’s really hard not to see them as much too young, innocent and in need of our protection. Sex seems dirty, a spoiling of something pure. But things look very different from a teenager’s perspective. Adolescence is all… [Read more…]
November 21, 2011
Teenagers drink alcohol for all of the same reasons as adults. Booze oils the wheels of any social situation. It eliminates fear and inhibition. I still find it hard walking into a room full of people without a glass of wine for moral support even though I am 54. Thank God I don’t also have… [Read more…]
November 4, 2011
One of the tricky things about living with a teenager is that you move, overnight from knowing everything about them to knowing next to nothing at all. You walk into a room while they are on the phone; they walk out. You ask who that was, they say mind your own business They start… [Read more…]
October 24, 2011
Any reflective surface from shop windows to fridge doors provides crucial feedback to a teenage girl on how she looks and who she is becoming. For a mother in mid-life every mirror offers the same terrifying perspective and needs to be turned to the wall. Sags, bulges and wrinkles become enlarged to horror show proportions.… [Read more…]
October 7, 2011
Grown ups can make dangerous assumptions about teenagers - That they need to rebel in order to grow up (actually if they feel they have to rebel there is usually something wrong) - That feeling misunderstood and spending hours brooding in their bedroom is a healthy symptom of adolescence (again this is a sign that… [Read more…]
September 29, 2011
Teenagers do not hold the monopoly on this……… - I am not trying to ruin their fun if I want a fifteen year old to be home by midnight. I just need to know she is safe (and to sleep myself) - I am not being ‘stressy’ when I get cross about the fact that… [Read more…]
February 13, 2012
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