You can’t afford to lose your temper when you’re poor

A few things about the extraordinary vulnerability of being a parent who is poor:

• You can’t afford to lose your temper. (You could lose everything).
• You can’t afford to unwind by sharing your problems with someone.
• You can’t afford to be tired and stressed and making less than perfect decisions.
• You can’t afford to cobble together solutions; for your own protection cobbled together solutions are illegal.
• You can’t afford to take time off work to deal with your kid, who is now stressed and tired and making not so great decisions, too.
• You can’t afford to pay fines, even ‘reasonable’ ones – so you end up being imprisoned.

No prizes for guessing the race of this mother who is now in jail in New Jersey.

 

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Opinions I hold that almost no-one agrees with

1.

Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott’s paid parental leave scheme is progressive because it treats maternity leave with the same degree of legitimacy as sick leave for women in the workforce, and his scheme also provides more generous leave entitlements for parents and their newborns. (Hopefully the scheme also helps encourage women with great career potential to stay attached to the workforce long enough to rise to positions of seniority where they can remove institutional barriers that are holding back disadvantaged women). But for goodness sake, I know what Abbott meant when he said ‘women of that calibre’ and it was not a clumsy way of saying ‘I hear you sisters, ‘work life balance’ is crazy difficult and we must do what we can to assist you all’. Abbott’s comment was transparent snobbery. It should alarm us as feminists because the conservative side of politics has a long history of promoting motherhood to patriarchy-approved women – ie. white, married, middle-to-high income – while not only denying support for, but actively undermining, mothers outside that spectrum – eg. single, disabled, non-white, incarcerated, poor. I’m not suggesting that the parental leave scheme is harmful to poor mothers but it isn’t immediately helpful to them, and particularly not if it is sold with the overt message that some mothers are more equal than others.

2.

Angelina Jolie wrote a perfectly sound (and engagingly heartfelt) article about her decision to have a double mastectomy.  Her article will be beneficial for women encountering the choice in similar circumstances, and also for destigmatising mastectomies generally. But it is not a particularly insightful piece. The screening Jolie promotes in her article is unaffordable to many in the US and the preventative surgery she ultimately decided upon has problems of its own that are not explored in the piece. Her article also emphasizes genetic risk at the expense of environmental factors which are far more significant in contributing to cancer rates. This is a concern because genetic factors are corporation-friendly but environmental factors are decidedly not. (For an excellent overview of this criticism of the breast cancer campaign I recommend Barbara Ehrenreich’s essay “Cancerland”). Jolie is not a writer or a medical specialist, she is an actor, so there is nothing offensive to me about her article being relatively narrow and personal in focus, but the response to it almost everywhere has been somewhat.. star-struck. Jolie didn’t write the bravest and most important story for women this year – can’t we just be satisfied with her writing a significant story?

3.

Australia has a problem with anti-intellectualism but this bold article, “Why Australia hates thinkers” doesn’t prove it. Credit to Alecia Simmonds, the author of the piece for getting people talking and also for naming names when she makes her criticisms. Both of those achievements are important but Simmonds’ article reads like having dinner with a scoffing ex-pat. And I should know, I have dinner with such an ex-pat every year when they come back to Australia to visit. (Love you, Dad).

In her article, Simmonds cherry picks a handful of idiot commentators from Australia and then unfavourably compares us to the cultures of France and England. But having been to both those countries I know that these lovely places have their share of over-exposed buffoons, too. Australia’s anti-intellectualism could be demonstrated with less anecdotes and more identifiable measures. I find Simmonds’ swipe at Andrew Bolt for dropping out of a university degree depressing also. His views are repellent but so are those of Dr Steven Kates (ie. “the damaged women” vote), and Kates completed a couple of degrees and teaches in a university. Judgementalism about education levels is a perfect way to prove that anti-intellectualism is justifiable in Australia.

And while we’re madly dividing between us and them, those of us with higher degrees would do well to be careful of defensive statements like those in Simmonds’ article about how poorly paid and noble academic professions are compared to other jobs. I agree that such jobs are paid less than the general public understands but neither description plays too well to the 50 per cent of the Australian workforce who work in full-time jobs for less than $58,000 a year. Some wages truly are embarrassingly humble and so are the working conditions, which can include plenty of unpaid overtime but with none of the autonomy of academic jobs. And who is going to tell a childcare worker her job isn’t a noble one? We’d be better to say that there is a squeeze on workplace conditions that many occupations and industries, including academia have in common.

The article has some very tired old Australian stereotypes, too, that could benefit from re-examination; like, are children here still ashamed of being smart? A huge surge in private tutoring and an obsession with NAPLAN testing among parents suggests otherwise to me. And what of the idea that Twitter is no place for academic thinkers – my feed is teeming with them and links to their work.

But I absolutely agree with Simmonds’ belief that there is a problem with anti-intellectualism in Australia, I just don’t find her article terribly convincing of the fact. Anyway, if you haven’t had enough of this complaint then Jeff Sparrow makes some of these arguments and others in a great response, “Why Andrew Bolt is not an imbecile” at New Matilda.

And to finish up.. a less controversial view of mine? This article is well worth reading. Anne-Marie Slaughter’s “How to make the U.S. a better place for carers” in The Atlantic:

Focusing on infant mortality is not typically on a white feminist agenda in the U.S.; the babies at risk are children of poverty, who are in turn more likely to be rural whites and ethnic minorities. But an infrastructure of care must provide care for everyone, just as roads and bridges provide transport for anyone who can drive or afford a bus ticket. Care is for the vulnerable, the sick, the disabled, and the dependent. All of us, rich or poor, qualify as vulnerable and dependent for at least some period after birth and before death.

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You must read

“Feminism and the terrifying dependency of children” by Cristy Clark over at Larvatus Prodeo. Cristy and I have long been expressing our increasing frustration to one another with the dominance of liberal feminism over motherhood and I’m so pleased she wrote this post about it. This post of Cristy’s should be essential reading for any feminist writer before she dips her toe into motherhood topics.

Liberal feminism has failed to adequately respond to the realities of motherhood, because it has primarily focused on helping women to overcome their historic status as second-class citizens by becoming independent. This vision of equality has led to the struggle for a range of positive measures for women, including:

• the rights to education, to work and to receive equal pay;
• the right own property;
• the right to participate in public life by voting and running for political office; and
• the right to bodily autonomy, including the right to refuse to consent to sex and to terminate unwanted pregnancies.

All of these rights are important prerequisites to equality and all of them have historically been denied to women, particularly after marriage. The struggle for these rights is also an ongoing one, as they continue to be denied to the majority of women across the globe and remain under threat even where they have been achieved. Nonetheless, this vision of equality falls down when the reality of dependency enters the picture. For women who are, or become, dependent on partners, families or the State, liberal feminism’s vision of equality through independence becomes unattainable.

The right to education, to work, or to participate in public life is of limited value, for example, when participation requires that you disencumber yourself from dependents of your own.

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Some women want to stay home with children and feminism needs to make peace with that

Alexandra Carlton has an article in The Age this weekend, “The retro housewife” that proves it is just as possible to build a faux phenomenon in Australia around smart women dropping off the career ladder to become domestic over-achievers as it is to build that case in the United States, though this piece is more nuanced than others of its ilk. Pretty much all my thoughts on this faux trend are here in the article I wrote back in March for Daily Life so I won’t be repetitive, and for the record Carlton, herself, argues by the end of her piece that the trend is overblown; but I will pick up on two points from her article.

My first comment is that I truly hope Anne Summers, who I have always found to be very measured, isn’t quite as scathing about my generation of mothers as Carlton forecasts her to be in her forthcoming book.

Feminist and author Anne Summers is exasperated by the domestic revival. “If women want to quilt and craft and sort out their linen cupboards on a weekly basis that is their business. But don’t claim it is a superior way to live,” she says. In her book The Misogyny Factor, to be released next month, Summers writes scathingly of a new generation of middle-class “yummy mummies”: “How could it have come to this – and so quickly? Not even a generation after the women’s movement fought for the right for married women to keep their jobs, to have equal access to promotion, and to be paid the same as men, scores of women are walking away and saying, ‘We’d rather be Mummies.’”

Writer and feminist commentator Clementine Ford agrees, and adds that while cupcake baking in and of itself is a blameless pursuit, giving up everything to devote oneself to unpaid domestic work is “self-sabotage”.

And my second point also relates to the sentiment above, which becomes a concluding point made by Emily Matchar in the article:

But, she says, for the new domesticity to become more of a revolution than a regression, it needs to better build a base of equality – the day when it’s just as common to see a man cooking a meal from scratch or stirring a vat of jam while his wife brings in the primary income.

No.

We will know we’re living in a world of equality not when just as many men as women are staying home making jam and looking after babies but when women can talk about their life making jam and looking after babies without everyone freaking the fuck out.

When women can make observations about the sense of purpose and fulfillment they experience from being at home with their children, and when they can say that their desire to be with their babies feels different to that their male partner experiences, and when they can describe their children as needing to be with them – when they can do all that and we, as feminists, do not reach for the panic button? Then we will know we have finally found equality. It won’t be that men and women will necessarily be living the same lives with the same roles, though it may look like that, it will be equality because women’s passions, ambitions, choices and failures will be, like men’s, free of constant scrutiny and criticism.

Until then, as feminists, we are too often pandering to a neoliberal viewpoint that ultimately devalues care work and sees women acquiring legitimacy only through marketplace transactions. By all means fight for women’s place in the workforce, it’s vital activism and I’m a working-outside-the-home mother myself, but don’t for a minute think you’re really challenging the patriarchy until you’re questioning the way in which capitalism relies upon a framework of unpaid care. It is equally a mistake to see the desire to be at home with children as either essential or universal in women, but as feminists, it matters less whether you think it good or bad for women to feel this way, it is instead crucial for the movement that you accept that some women do feel this way and that it is an authentic and strongly held feeling for them. Some women might be flinching from complexities in their life by relying upon conservative gender roles to express their preferences but for many this drive is real. Maternal desire is real.

Accepting that this is the case is not some call for women to be free to ‘choose their choice’ – it is, rather, a time for reflecting upon the internalised misogyny that allows you to assume, without questioning, that self-actualisation cannot simultaneously include mothering.

Cross-posted at Hoyden About Town.

UPDATED: This is also a great reply from Amy Gray to “The retro housewife” article.

Carlton’s piece is interesting for the fact the retro wives mentioned who run blogs – some of whom, it could be argued, draw a limited or decent revenue or opportunities via that pursuit and thus aren’t strictly women who don’t work or are already very comfortable financially – and that the contemporary feminists interviewed are by chance without children. Though I am sure it is not a conscious choice, it does subconsciously set up a vaudeville battle between “the” feminists and “the” retro wives – no kids, kids; feminists, non-feminists without allowing for the fact that there can be and is considerable overlay.

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My new article: Returning to work: a walk in the park?

I love my work and I’m terribly grateful for the flexibility my employer provides. I’ve had the benefit of maternity leave (both paid and unpaid), some flexibility in my start and finish times, and occasional work-from-home days in emergency situations. It has made all the difference; I have a career and two children and I do not feel torn in half by the process. And my appreciation makes me a very loyal employee, too, so it’s win-win. So I must share a confession: if I had been asked to write this article a couple of years ago, here’s where my conclusions about working part-time would have ended. But I would be lying if I said it has all been easy.

Combining work outside the home with the work of rearing children and running a household has often been a grind. Working part-time has been the best of both worlds, and in some ways a taste of the worst of both, too. We frequently fall short of money, I’m exhausted, the house is disorganised, often I fight a sense of not being taken seriously in the workplace, the children sometimes feel ignored, my after-school care arrangements are in a permanent state of near collapse, and I’m getting increasingly petty about wanting the corner office again. Like the Wall Street Journal article, the workplace is both encouraging and discouraging of mothers returning to work.

Essential Baby asked me to comment on the Wall Street Journal article and write about what it was like for me returning to work after maternity leave.  My article is here.

Update: Corrected the link, sorry everyone.

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While I was at work

The school holidays can feel a bit sad when you’re at work and your kids are at the beach with their grandmother.

1. Lauca and Cormac looking at the last remains of the shipwreck.

2. Lauca watching creatures in the rock pools.

3. Cormac and Lauca.

 

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Review of “Boomer & Me” by Jo Case

Memoir writing asks for the same kind of intimacy between reader and writer that comes with friendship. Unless a memoir is genuinely trusting of its readers it ends up lacking sufficient openness and risk for connection. While I understand their motivations, I am well and truly done with memoirs written by authors who are so guarded about themselves or so protective of others around them that there is nothing much left to hang on to.

Boomer & Me: A Memoir of motherhood, and Asperger’s by Jo Case is a really lovely read because while Case is kind-hearted and considered, she is also willing to share some spiteful and irritable tales from the heart of motherhood. By far, Case’s most enjoyable and endearing complaints in the book are about an overly pious and judgmental school mother, Vanessa, who consistently demonises Case’s son, Leo while that mother’s boys try to both befriend and scapegoat him.

‘Leo said a bad word,’ says Angus.

‘Right.’

I give Vanessa a questioning look.

‘I think he might be upstairs. In Angus’s room?’

I nod crisply and climb the stairs. The door is locked. I knock. No answer. I call his name. Vanessa is close behind me. She pokes a wire into the lock and gives it a deft twist. It seems she’s done this before. Leo is glowering behind the door, arms crossed

‘I have had the worst day in my entire life.’

‘What’s wrong, Leo?’ asks Vanessa, bending so her eyes are level with his and putting a comforting hand on his arm. ‘Don’t exaggerate, now.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘We’ll talk on the way home,’ I decide, grabbing his hand and leading him downstairs. He grunts out a goodbye to Angus, under duress.

Angus waves cheerily as Vanessa gives Leo his lolly bag and follows us down the hallway and to the gate, waving us down the footpath. They had a fight over footy cards. Angus said his were lame. He said they weren’t. They bickered.

‘And you said a rude word?’

‘No.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said Angus was an idiot.’

‘And that was the rude word?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Did you get sent to time-out?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Vanessa shut you up in Angus’s room?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What did she say to you?’

‘She told me never to use that word again.’

***

Vanessa runs across the schoolyard to catch up with us, greeting us with white-hot charm. She launches into a monologue about a headache and her annoying mother and reading George Monbiot. I focus all my conscious attention on not being rude. Which translates into curt nods and lots of ‘yes’ and ‘really?’.

‘Have you recovered from yesterday, Leo?’ she asks.

‘Yes.’

As we near the end of the cul-de-sac, she turns her attention to our dogs. Doug lurches at her, barking. Leo looks her in the eye. ‘He doesn’t like you,’ he says.

I’ve read and loved rather a lot of motherhood memoirs over the years.  But this book, I’m surprised to admit, is the first one I’ve read that is written by a contemporary, urban mother of Australia.. and it was refreshing. I realise, once again, how important it is to include books in your shelves describing lives you recognise. It was both compelling and comforting for me to read about summer rain during Christmas Carols in the park, attempts to find an affordable house in an inner-city suburb, and making the time to write one’s personal blog. While we live in different cities, so close are our experiences that Case reads the same literary journal I read, spends similar evenings alone at the computer writing articles to deadline, and is even friends with some of the same writers as me.

But Case’s story is also a very different tale to mine. Hers is the path you take from finding your child sometimes very difficult, and the guilt and doubt that comes with that, to the ambivalance you experience in eventually getting a medical diagnosis for them. Learning her son has Asperger’s is a relief and a validation for Case, but it also means facing prejudice in herself she’d not known she had towards disability. This is further complicated when Case also finally accepts the same diagnosis of Asperger’s for herself.

Case and her son have the pattern of exclusive time together that single parents with only children have and the depth of connection that reflects this. (Although, during the book Case re-partners with a new man who becomes an unnaturally astute step-parent). Her son, Leo is an adorably quirky, intelligent boy with an earnest desire to oblige, so he is a child you easily warm to in the book. Some of Case’s most charming descriptions of them together are the many bicycle commutes they share around Melbourne.

Boomer & Me is not a dramatic story, there is no great tragedy nor quest for a cure, this is just life meandering through the years. Big shifts happen but they do so through small, deceptively ordinary moments – work, love, travel, ex-partners, family, friends. However, Case is a skilled writer – engaging and crisp while also being unpretentious and self-aware – so the book moves gently but with pace. And in many ways, Boomer & Me is simply the story of an intimate relationship, that between mother and child.

In accordance with disclosure guidelines, please note that I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher.

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Some mummy blogging is actually political blogging

In my experience of both writing and reading so-called ‘mummy blogs’ all of these political issues are regularly discussed, but the entire genre is dismissed as not only personal (and, thus, somehow apolitical) but as vapid and embarrassing. Parodies and critiques of ‘mummy’ or ‘mommy’ blogging convey the impression that women who dare to write about their children and their experiences of mothering are self-indulgent, privileged and, crucially, undeserving of public space…

.. The underlying message of these parodies and critiques is that mothering is a highly private act that does not belong in public discourse and, indeed, has little of value to contribute. The idea is that until women leave the private sphere and (re)join the paid workforce, their perspectives and experiences are irrelevant and intrusive. In this context, I would argue that ‘mummy blogging’ is actually quite a radical act, through which women of my generation are claiming a share of the public sphere and demanding recognition for the work that we perform and the relevance of our experiences to public policy.

Fantastic post from my friend, Cristy over at the Australian group political blog, Larvatus Prodeo.

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Once more around the dancefloor (on work life balance)

Somehow I missed this public argument between Jeremy Adam Smith and Linda Hirshman when it happened several years ago.. how? Anyway, with all this leaning in and out the argument is as fresh as if I cooked it up this morning for you.

So what’s really behind Hirshman’s attack on caregiving fathers? Dads like me and Rebeldad are not really her target. Instead she is attacking the very idea of caregiving, a position ably dissected by my colleague Chip. Hirshman has argued that if taking care of children “were the most important thing a human being could do, then why are no men doing it?” I’d like to turn that around: if no men are doing it, Linda, then why are you attacking me and Rebeldad? It is as if she finds the very fact of our existence threatening–as do a lot of people.

In fact, men take care of children every day, which in her masculinist mind might make childcare a more worthy activity. But instead of allowing the reality of male caregiving to modify her ideas, she simply denies that it exists. To Linda, childcare isn’t something to be shared equally and happily between men and women; that’s not her agenda. Instead childcare is an unpleasant, undesirable task that the privileged classes should outsource to women who have less education, less money, and fewer options. I don’t see how this is going to make the world a better place.

I’m totally on Jeremy’s side with this argument because he’s a friend and he’s right, Hirshman has missed some critical steps in her thinking  about feminism and maternal desire (though I still appreciate some of her contributions), but no doubt about it, the woman can write a rather snappy jab.

The Dialectical Smith didn’t even stay home a year, but lived exactly the life the mommy activists dream of. He posts: “You know, my wife and I tried [both working part time] (she . . . is fortunate to have a unionized part-time teaching job that provides full health care) and I must say that it was extremely difficult to maintain . . . I’m interviewing for jobs. For our family, it might better for one of us to work full-time while the other stays home . . . I’m sort of thinking that maybe it’s my wife’s turn to stay home.” A few hours later: “Well, for us the issue is resolved: yesterday I accepted a full-time job . . . Poof! I’m no longer a stay at home dad and now it’s my wife’s turn to stay home — actually, she’s still thinking about whether she wants to go back to work. I hope she doesn’t; I want her to have time with the boy.”

Poof. I’d hate to be the woman with the desk next to Dialectical Dad, taking family leave while he minds the workplace.

Further on the issue of neo-liberal economics and its hold over feminism, the discussion is currently getting quite a head of steam on it (I’ve written about it a lot over the years, too) and here are two worthwhile articles on the matter.

“Feminism’s Tipping Point: Who wins from leaning in?” by Kate Losse in Dissent:

The fact that Lean In is really waging a battle for work and against unmonetized life is the reason pregnancy, or the state of reproducing life, looms as the corporate Battle of Normandy in Lean In. Pregnancy, by virtue of the body’s physical focus on human reproduction, is humanity’s last, biological stand against the corporate demand for workers’ continuous labor. For Sandberg, pregnancy must be converted into a corporate opportunity: a moment to convince a woman to commit further to her job. Human life as a competitor to work is the threat here, and it must be captured for corporate use, much in the way that Facebook treats users’ personal activities as a series of opportunities to fill out the Facebook-owned social graph.

By arguing that women should express their feminism by remaining in the workplace at all costs, Sandberg encourages women to maintain a commitment to the workplace without encouraging the workplace to maintain a commitment to them. And by launching a feminist platform, Sandberg is able to contain the broader threat that a feminist critique poses to Facebook’s business, simultaneously generating more power for herself and her organization — Silicon Valley “revolution” at its finest. This maneuver, as I learned in my years at Facebook, is how the game is played, and both Sandberg and Zuckerberg play it well. The question the rest of us have to ask is, what does the game do for those not at or near the top? Are workers playing or are we getting played?

“Hijacking feminism” by Catherine Rottenberg in Aljazeera:

This, unfortunately, is how the “truly liberated” woman of the 21st century is increasingly being construed. What is particularly troubling about this feminist moment – especially since both women espouse liberal ideals – is exactly how little emphasis either Slaughter or Sandberg ultimately places on equal rights, justice or emancipation as the end goals for feminism.

The move from a discourse of equal rights and social justice to “internalising the revolution” or, in Slaughter’s case, “a national happiness project” is predicated on the erasure or exclusion of the vast majority of women. Put differently, the feminist project these women advocate does not and cannot take into account the reality of the vast majority of US women. A national project it is not.

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10 things I enjoy most about Lauca age (just turned) 8 yrs

Previous entries here. Feel free to skip these posts, they’re more a record for my kids than anything else.

1. I got something really right with you recently. I don’t know if my parenting is getting worse of parenting successes are less obvious with older children but this kind of parenting certainty is a rarity these days. I don’t want to intrude too much on your privacy here but you were really experiencing some serious reluctance with school and you were a nightmare in the mornings before school drop-offs when I am at my most harried getting ready for work and you and your brother ready for kindy and school. I started to think you were just a very objectionable little person. But little by little I figured out how bored and disillusioned you were at school and I patiently raised it again and again with your teacher, who was excellent, and she moved you ahead with your school work but it wasn’t enough. Plus, you were having this super difficult time with some of the social dynamics you were quietly battling alone – I wish you’d known it was something you could talk about earlier rather than thinking it was something you had to figure out alone. And then this year I realised that a year of being patient was enough for us and I went and sorted things out with your principal and your new teacher and now you’ve been accelerated a couple of grades and moved up into a new classroom with another brilliant teacher. And it is like magic, you pretty much found a love of learning again and you’ve been motivated and enthusiastic about getting ready in the mornings (mostly) and it doesn’t feel like the whole family is falling apart every morning. I am very proud at how adaptable you’ve been with your new class. It’s a tough process and you’ve been very brave and mature about it.

2. You’re reading Judy Blume books because I recommended them and used to read them when I was a kid and you love them. It’s very gratifying for me. We don’t share enough of these common interests because you’re obsessed with a lot of pop culture that wasn’t my greatest love as a child – like Star Wars, though I do like how much you’re into the politics of Star Wars.  You finish the Judy Blume books in one sitting so I guess I will need to find new books for us to share together.

3. Your face is maturing and I feel like I am getting little previews of your adolescent features.

4. We have a very, very good connection when it comes to your emotional and social concerns. I can pretty much always figure out what is happening for you and to calm you with it and help you resolve things. When this happens I notice you will surprise me with tight squeezes for days afterwards and you will regularly stop to tell me how much you love me.

5. I accidentally humiliated you the other day. We were waiting for the doctor and you assumed my doctor was male and I teased you telling you that was sexist to make that assumption, and you were so mortified you hit me in the face with the magazine you were reading, which mortified me. The waiting room was full and everyone got to see how badly brought up you are. Then you cried loudly and indignantly and refused to apologise even though my eye was really hurting. But we made up in the car afterwards and you were right, I shouldn’t have teased you. Anyway, I am proud of you that you feel so strongly about not being sexist. You have incredibly strong ethics about social justice and hypocrisy – but not so much about violence with magazines.

6.  You like to write and illustrate your own children’s books. Your stories are always about cheekiness.

7. You are very gentle and loving and patient with babies and toddlers. Mothers with babies beam when you are helping them or admiring their babies.

8.  You’ve maintained your friendships with your male friends over the years just as well as those with your female friends. You’ve never felt the need to suppress those interests of yours that aren’t traditionally girly nor to hide your less conventional friendships from peers. You also intervene when it comes to bullying. The other day a mother came to thank me at school because her son had been held down and choked by another boy and she said her son told her you came along and physically freed him from the bully.

9. You are developing interests of your own that you research independently on the Internet. This is also worrying because I don’t always know what you might come across, even though your computer is locked down with some fairly tight controls. But you will take something of interest to you and run with it – children raised by animals, Korean architecture etc. Also, you will research pop songs you’ve discovered at other people’s houses and new dance moves.

10. You’ve stayed incredibly affectionate as you’re growing up. I don’t get to cuddle you enough though. But sometimes you will come to bed to sleep with me and you still snuggle right into me just as you did as a baby. I love when you come to my bed to read. When I am writing I will often find you in my bed reading a novel in the quiet. I like that you see my bed as this special place for reading.

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