red mum

Parts of this you may have read before, sorry about that.

RM Column May 9th – Turn that down

Saying teenagers make a lot of noise is nothing new but I have to say the Young Wan has been taking things to new decibel levels lately between her mobile phone, her new ipod and of course the auld stalwart, her music system in the bedroom.

I am being driven nuts. I am actually boring myself saying ‘turn that down’, well actually it gets to the point where I end up roaring ‘TURN THAT DOWNNNN’.

Like most teenagers her mobile phone has become an extension of her hand and she seems to be constantly texting with the very irritating and constant noise of her hitting the number pad.
The straw that broke the camel’s back recently was the all-evening click, click, click, click, click, click of her two-handed teenage texting and it began to grind on my nerves. Between the clicking and the tinny sound of her ipod I told her to ‘gowan away and play in your room and give my head a bit of peace’.

I have to say that I didn’t think I would ever be saying that to her again, I thought that had passed around the time she stopped playing with dolls.

When she is at home there is a steady noise level in the house normally going on in all four corners, not to mention the obvious drain on the national grid and my wallet. You can bet the music will be left on in her room, the tv is probably tuned to a music channel, the radio will be on in the kitchen, meanwhile she’ll be listening to the ipod and texting.

She appears to be incapable of doing dishes without loud music, loud enough to drown out the telly.

You find yourself saying that she must be nearly done just leave her to it, but like a slow and steady irritation all of a sudden it creeps up on you and you break before yelling about loud music and how it can be heard all over the street.

She will turn it down then leave it a couple of minutes before slowly and surely turning up the volume slowly. This is another one of those occasions where you wonder if your offspring think you stupid and incapable of realising what they are at. Then the yelling ‘turn that music DOWN’ starts again and so the cycle starts afresh.

That has been bad enough but I recently bought her a new ipod and unlike the other one she had I have not been able to turn the volume down on it.

Ipods allow you to set a higher level for the volume on your computer, this means you can set how loud the ipod can be played at which is great in terms of trying to protect hearing from damage.

On another and more selfish level I want to turn down the volume because the level she has it at sometimes can be heard from another room with two doors closed and the television on; still somehow the tinny noise of the player is audible.

It’s funny though because I will give out yards about the noise yet when she isn’t at home you miss it. But don’t tell her I said that.

RM column May 1 – Closing doors

SOME of you will remember that we have moved recently from a small, cramped and totally inadequate two-bedroom(ish) flat we lived in for far too many years. We have gone from cold, drafty, old and nearly dilapidated accommodation to a snazzy, warm, well-maintained and newly decorated two-bedroom cottage and we love it.

I don’t know whether it is down to a manic-amount of washing machine loads, the thrill of having a washing machine still has not waned and when we first moved in I would say every item we possess has been washed, but our electricity bills have been too high for my liking. As a result I find myself pulling out plugs on phone charges, turning off lights, turning off the electric shower at the main when not in use and saying things that would make my Dad proud.

Things like ‘it is like Piccadilly Circus in here’ in reference to the fact that every conceivable light has been switched on in the house. My Dad said that to us all the time when we were kids and I laughed out loud the first time I heard it pass from my lips.

One of the other amazing things we have gained since moving has been cupboard/storage space.
Now I can buy the more economic bulk items because we have places to store them. For years I was unable to do anything like that, there just wasn’t the room to put it anywhere in the last place.

The funny thing is we have twice as many cupboards in the kitchen than in the previous flat and somehow, God knows how, the stuff I had somehow has filled up the twice as many cupboards with little room to spare.

I have no idea how that happened because I took the opportunity to cull so much during the move, yet somehow my kitchen stuff has reproduced with a population explosion spreading to filling out all the available space.

It would also appear that we have a poltergeist because every time I walk into the kitchen all the cupboard doors are open, so I close them all up again.

This happens a couple of times a night, of course the poltergeist is a 16-year-old who seems to find the closing of doors abhorrent. The battle cry at night time when she goes to her bedroom is ‘shut the door after you’ or ‘this isn’t the star ship Enterprise’ or ‘were you born in a hospital with revolving doors?’ so I suppose it makes sense this ‘born in a field’ mentality follows through to the kitchen as well as her bedroom.

One of the worst things about the other flat was the fact that the first thing you saw when you walked in was her room in all its filthy glory. Now you see into her room as you leave the house and straight into the outrageously messy build-in wardrobe in her room.

Whether I like it or not, the cupboard pulls me like a siren (without the pleasure of course) and before I know it I am tut-tutting at how messy her new room is.

So I offered her a little advice last night, if you even want to pretend that your room isn’t the cess-pit that it is, either close the bloody door or at the very least close the wardrobe door. Then I won’t get pulled in and what I don’t know what hurt me. However I think that is being too sensible so for now I will just keep closing doors.

Just going to post up some columns, I’m somewhat behind.

RM column April 24 – Bullying

An OECD survey which is the largest ever conducted in Ireland and researching students’ performance in particular subjects uncovered a staggering 43 per cent of 15 year olds who said they were bullied during the school term in which the survey was carried out.

The bullying part of the survey was not the main leaning as to why the survey was carried out but obviously stood out as something very important that needs to be attended too immediately.
Most parents will be very concerned by these findings and despite the high profile campaigns around bullying the problem seems to be getting worse.

The Young Wan has had her own experiences of this with ex-friends who mounted a vicious and constant attack on her through her bebo pages and on the phone. One of the things that struck me about it at the time was the complete and utter ferocious cruelty in their actions.

Fair enough that they didn’t want to be friends with her anymore, they are teenagers and will drift in and out of friendships but their behaviour around it was just plain wicked.

Personally I was quite happy the friendship was gone with this gang. While I witnessed some of their behaviour I was completely thrown when they constantly rang our house with nonsense messages. We both laughed at most of them until I heard one that made me stop in my tracks. This particular message said that they hoped she died.

The Young Wan was getting more and more upset and I wouldn’t let her answer the phone. While she was trying to be brave and handle it herself, thats my job. At the very least she watched me deal with the calls and at various points she even managed to laugh out loud at my side of the conversation. I felt this was important, that somehow I was taking the power those horrible kids had over her and helping her cope with it.

I found it startlingly that they didn’t care that they talked to me, instead they put on dopey Belfast accents trying to imitate me as brazen as you like. They knew I knew who they were so my tact at the end was to keep them on the phone to waste their credit while saying nothing. No point in adding oxygen to their bullying fire.

For the day or so during the climax of their relentless bullying campaign the Young Wan walked around the house holding her tummy complaining of stomach pains. She was dreadfully unhappy and I loathed seeing my normally happy and bubbly daughter like that. Were all these incidents related, you bet they were.

As they were not friends/ex-friends from school, I couldn’t go through the school but I did approach the parents of one of them who were wonderful and supportive and talked to their child. It didn’t stop completely at that moment but petered out over the following days and by that stage herself was less affected by it. Since then the ringleader has apologised and wanted to be friends again. Thankfully the Young Wan has more sense and while accepting of his apology she now knows the cut of their gib as they say and won’t be going there again.

Do I think those lads wanted something bad to happen to herself? Mostly I don’t, but if anything had happened to her, I would have bayed for their blood and would have probably had to be restrained from killing them myself; I saw the effects in the Young Wan to their behaviour and would have happily kicked them up and down the road.

There seems to be a bit of a mob-mentality about it all and little empathy. That’s one thing that I hope I have instilled in herself; being considerate of other people. She may be my princess but I want her to treat people with the respect they deserve.

I think it is very easy to bully now. We have seen how people react on the internet, in fact there is a wonderful cartoon explaining just how over the top people behave, which you can see by going to this link.

While the cartoon is humorously done, the message is the same people lose all sense of manners and decorum on the internet and I would not be surprised if some/a lot of the bullying has been carried out on bebo and by texting. It is easy for messages in these mediums to read worse than intended or easily misconstrued, it is also easy to lose the run of yourself and possibly overreact and become aggressive in ways you wouldn’t in real life.

Now it is time for more to be done to tackle this problem, children are suffering, their education is suffering and in many cases the mental (and physical) scars will remain with them throughout adulthood.

Offenders need to realise the impact of their actions and more must be done to penalise those behaving in this way. Schools must be given the right tools to deal with it, it is clear from this survey that despite everything that is happening in schools to tackle bullying it is clearly not enough.

RMcolumn April 4 – Picking the Leaving

THE TIME has come for the Young Wan to pick her subjects for the Leaving Cert. As important as this is the preparations into it all feels a bit hit and miss to be honest. Aside from the fact that reaching this stage is urrghh, I can already feel the pressure of LEAVING CERT EXAMS starting to rear their ugly head.

I found the pressure of the Junior Cert dreadful and it was only once it was all over that I was able to give a half sigh of relief, the full sigh didn’t come until the results arrived in September. And the thought of two more years of constant fretting about how much work the Young Wan is or isn’t doing leaves me absolutely cold.

Of course the Young Wan was also under pressure but at times you wouldn’t have known it at all.

So now we are at the choosing the subjects stage and the proceedings were kicked off with a parents meeting in the school during the week.

Oh God don’t get me started on parents meetings; the fact that they are held during the day is one of the most ridiculous and lazy things I have ever heard in my life. I have the utmost respect for teachers, I think they have a very hard job, but take a fecking night and talk to parents, believe it or not some of us work and believe it or not it can be hard to get time off work to attend this things.

And in some cases I am quite sure if a parent can’t make it there would be some who think they are not interested in their child’s education.

The Young Wan’s parent teacher meeting this week started at 12.30, so I was in work a couple of hours before I had to leave. It was due to finish at 3.30pm so it is not even a full morning or a full afternoon, it was half and half meaning that I was only in work for about two hours that day as there seemed little point in trying to head through all the traffic to get back into work for the last hour/half-hour.

I am lucky that I am allowed the time to do this, flash back to a couple of years ago and another work place and that would not have been an option at all.

Anyhoo back to the meeting; we sat there as each teacher got up and in English and Irish and explained about each of the subjects.

“Biology is the study of living things…” When I heard that or something similar, I thought ‘shoot me now’ but I sat on and listened to all the different subject descriptions, how much work they have to do and then my ears pricked up at the mention of a lottery.

All the chosen subjects have been placed into three lines with about three subjects in each. Each student has to pick one from each line but nothing is guaranteed. So far two of her preferred subjects are on one line ruling one of them out. That in itself was bad enough, but I understand that.

However it turns out because so many kids are in her year there will be a lottery for some of the subjects. And most of the year seem to be leaning towards biology which is one of the Young Wan’s best subjects and now she will be competing in some nonsense lottery and may not be able to take her best subject!

I understand the school is understaffed and doesn’t have enough teachers to cover all the subjects but if she doesn’t get subjects she has more interest in and is better at I will seriously be re-evaluating whether or not she can stay at that school.

After all surely it is also in the school’s interests to have their students get the highest results they can, but maybe that just makes complete and utter sense to me. I’ll keep you posted…

RM column March 28 – Fashion Full Circles

IT IS funny how fashions come back around. Back in the 1980s when I was a teenager I would have never thought that flares would come back, they were the ultimate bad taste item from the 1970s; how on earth would anyone ever want to wear them again.

Then I thought the same thing when standing in a train station in Manchester in the late 1980s and saw some teenagers walking by in some crazy flared trousers, I couldn’t help myself I laughed out loud. They were back, and with vengeance and are still to be seen in one shape/style or another how many years on from their come back.

Of course there are lovely things that come back, such as the sleek and sexy 1940s or parts of the hippy 1970s but at some stage everything comes back, no matter how much we think it never will. Who would have ever thought the 1980s was a fashion time that would be revisited with all those garish colours, back-combing and shoulder pads; yet we have seen puff ball skirts and some of the worse things being recycled in the noughties.

Some of it looks even better than it did 20 years ago, some of it is well eh better consigned to the wardrobes of the past.

From slagging me as a bit of a hippy in my teens, the Young Wan has gone turnabout and now there have been loads of clothes I see the Young Wan go mad over which I had worn something similar as a youngster.

Over Christmas Nanny bought the Young Wan a waistcoat which was practically identical to one I had in years ago. I had many at different stages and the one the Young Wan has came from a man’s suit just like my favourites did.

We went even further. From I was 13 to eh a near grown up, the most coveted item of clothing was a man’s tuxedo jacket. My pal had a fantastic silk jacket, it was black with this beautiful navy silk lining and we all borrowed it at some stage or another.

You never felt cooler hitting the town than when wearing this jacket.

So now the Young Wan has the waistcoat, all she needs is the tuxedo jacket and we would be like twins at the same age.

She hasn’t worn the waistcoat yet because she was waiting to get a large white shirt to wear under it. But she came in with one tonight. She also came in with skin-tight black and white pinstripe jeans and coloured hair extensions.

During the hour and a half it took her to get the dishes done, she had back-combed her hair madly, put in the green, electric blue and pink extensions; and I can’t help but think when she gets the waistcoat and shirt on she will look just like Russell Brand, a female red-headed version. She is better looking of course, but still she will look like Russell Brand. I’m eh so proud.