Mothers Day wishes

[RipVanLilka]

Blessings for all mothers and mothers to be here :)

I hope everyone is having at least an ok day. The build up was good here - DD2 and I sat down and made a mothers day card for her mum, which was sent on, DD1 and her DH took DD2 and DS out shopping for things yesterday

DS is very happy and helpful today! DD1 sent over flowers and a lovely card and choccies to pig out on later. Sadly, the reality of the day has been a bit much for DD2, who has been muttering to herself and shouting at me most of the day. She made me a cup of tea (nearly cold) earlier but deliberatly spilled it on me. Lucky it wasn't hot then!

On the plus side, we are going out later to eat at Frankie and Bennys yum yum... and DD1's Dh has phoned and said he'll stand outside with DD2 if she gets shouty and upset while we're there

Hopefully it'll go well

Happy Mothers day guys :)

[NanaNina]

Thank you ripvan - I'm a bit tired and fuzzy after a couple of glasses of champagne and I can't work out who all the DDs are.............hope you all had a happy day - I did!

[Kewcumber]

we had a lovely day - brother and ex wife (comlicated - don;t ask) came up with their two girls (women?!) and DS and I all had lunch with my mum. My sister and her daughter even popped over so for a brief moment we had all my siblings and mums together in a room at the same time!

Hope Frankie and Bennys goes well!

[RipVanLilka]

Well, it went well-ish! Food was lovely, so was more surprise flowers! But DD2 as predicted was wobbly and angry and so DD1's DH took her outside twice for a while, she tried to hit him the second time

Still she did settle at the end (probably the dessert!!) and DS was golden throughout! So one of my better mothers days :)

[hester]

Glad it went well(ish) for you, Rip.

We had a nice day. dd1(5) very excited and had made cards. dd2(1) excited though she didn't understand why... We went out for lunch and got seated in a tiny, dark basement, underneath a glass floor looking up into the main restaurant. dd2 completely mesmerised by watching the feet, and -oh joy - somebody dropped a bottle of chilli oil and it smashed. The clean-up operation took forever, and dd2 sat happily goggling while we ate a meal in relative tranquility.

There was a tinge of sadness, though. Making mothers day cards at school seems to have triggered some nasty teasing of dd1 for having two mums. It was already becoming an issue (I posted about it in L&G families last week) but has already got worse and dd1 is a sad little girl. I asked her how it felt to have two mums and she said, 'lonely'.

I feel so tearful and guilty, knowing that I have put my girls in a position where they can never even pretend to have a 'normal' family. And yet, yesterday was lovely: dd1 kept saying, 'Thank you, thank you for being my mums. You are the loveliest mums in the world ever' and dd2 kept throwing her arms round my neck and giving me big snotty slobbery kisses. Very complicated feelings.

[Kewcumber]

tricky isn't it Hester being the odd one out at an age where you don't really have the emotional maturity to handle it. We have a comparable situation with DS in that he is the only one in his calss without a Dad and even in the situations where there are other single parents there is quite often a Dad around just not living with them. DS is completely Dadless. He does handle it quite well but then I don't think most of his class mates have cottoned on yet and we have talked about it from when he was very little.

There does come an age when having a "normal" family just isn;t so important and having a loving family is, but in the meantime it does hurt that you can't give them what they want even for a day or two doesn't it?

Last time DS asked me about why he didn't have a daddy and I did elaborate and say to him that maybe it wasn;t so nice for him not having a Daddy - his reply? "Oh thats OK mum I am quite used to you"!

I does help that we know a couple of childrne in the same position (although not local) and that we also go camping twice a year with a single paretns group. Although it isn't helpful in his day to day life, it does help DS understand that there are all kinds of families. I'm sure that you have something similar and perhaps revisiting the "families like us" theme wiould help - could her teacher be helpful about it?

[hester]

Thanks, Kew, that's really interesting to hear. You sound so strong and sussed - your ds is a lucky boy. I grew up without a dad - well, I had more of one than your ds, but as I saw him barely once a year, and even then he tended to ignore us and just talk to my mum, it hardly seemed so. I filled the void with a fantasy, and told everyone at school that my dad was in the Beatles . I really believed it, too - I knew that he had appeared in a couple of the Beatles movies, and that was enough for me.

It's true that the conformity thing alters as we grow up. At primary school I was pretty embarrassed that I didn't have a dad, that we lived in a council flat and I had free school dinners. At secondary school, I thought those things made me rather cool. By university, I suspect I thought that they were the most interesting things about me!

dp is black Caribbean and moved here in her mid-teens, and says something similar: back in the Caribbean she was considered very attractive, and did a lot of dating in her early teens. At her overwhelmingly white secondary school here, she was considered pretty much undatable - pretty was blonde and blue-eyed, and nothing else qualified. At university, though, she was suddenly thought of as an exotic beauty, and very much in demand again.

Lord, our poor kids. A couple of friends have said to me, "You have to give her great self-esteem" which is of course true but also extraordinarily trite. After all, I don't know any (non-abusive) parents who aim to give their children low self-esteem. And you can't just pick it up at Argos and giftwrap it, can you? It's the easiest thing to say and the hardest thing to do, especially once they're at an age when their mum telling them something is good does not cancel out their peers telling them it's bad.