Tree beat music

Forget listening to the bands at the local music festival. We all end up round this tree. Yes, I know it looks like Monster's dad is up there to escape the hoards below, but he was just demonstrating a climbing technique when you have no low branches to get you started. Honest. Anyway, it worked, and a party in the tree time was soon had by all.

One person I'm not sorry to leave behind

I start today by dropping a gin bottle CRASH! on the tiled kitchen floor.

(Fear not, Mothers of the World. It is empty! Phew!)

It caught my naked toe on the way down, so only light bruising.

But I am horrified. I imagine razor-sharp, blue-glass splinters piercing the soft padding skin of my delicate enfants, so I set to, chasing the glassy wreckage around the floor with the vacuum cleaner BUZZZZ.

It's now or never: I determine to vacuum the whole floor. I resolve to leave the rooms clean for our departure and clean for Dig's arrival.

With my weight I push heavy sofa and tables SCRREEECH. I make their stout legs and reluctant feet SCRRRAAAPE and JUDDDRRRDDDD across the hard floor.

I pick up papers as I go and ball them into my fists. Better not see a child's pictures to colour, designs of outfits to make, maps of places to go. I scrunch the art they'll never compose, and stuff it without ceremony into rubbish bags stowed by the door, ready to dump. BANG! The door shuts hard with the wind.

I check the kitchen cupboards, empty and clean, and the doors go CRACK CRACK CRACK. The house is emptied, its insides ringing hollow and hard; the softening of books, fabrics, us, gone. It's all hard work, loss, shutterings, and no rewards.

With one day to go, our suitcases are mostly packed, heavy and bulging. I haul them alone downstairs with a THUMP BUMP BUMP. I line them up, like the last standing members of our travelling crew, all misshapen, battered, and bruised.

For Tiger, it's all too much.

This thing she's wanted, it's arrived. It brings goodbyes, and loss of new-made friends. Prized books have spirited away. Comforting clothes have vanished. There are spaces in the house opening, where she was sure there were drawings waiting to be painted, generous heaps of soft fabrics cut to be sewn, and half-made models, nearly finished. Nothing will be finished now.

She stops in the front room, sees the vast empty space with the sagging cases lined up, STOMP STOMP STOMP, and we fight. I HATE YOU. I NEVER WANT TO SEE YOU AGAIN.

It's the words of her displacement; the fear of being out of control in all the practical whens, wheres, hows of moving country to country.

At which moment, in all of our noise and wrong footing, there is a bang on the door with a THUMP THUMP THUMP.

I know who that is.

Stupidly, I go to the door. It's the young neighbour. Twenty-something, dark haired, slight, and with a baby. Routinely, she complains about noise. Noise of triplets playing. Noise of music. Noise of skipping games. Noise of doors. The noise. Her face is anger. She hisses, 'I have a sleeping baby'. She stabs at the word, baby, as if it should cut me.

What can I say? I'd like to spit in sarcasm, Why don't you teach me about kids? But I can't. Who knows what miseries and anxieties filled her life this past day. And sleeping baby forever trumps all. It trumps all our clearing up and clearing out, cleaning, moving, vacuuming, departing, all our normal family life.

So I stand there, the anger rising up in me too, saying like a stupid English person might, THANK YOU FOR COMPLAINING. I go to shut the door and she pulls it open, as if to say, You'll see me. I pull it back, out of her hands, and in place of argument, or a slap to the face, I slam it shut. She stands motionless outside, staring blood at me through the glass.

Upstairs, I can hear Squirrel leaning out of her bed, and retching into a bucket.

That expectation I have, of departure in haste, indignity, and covered with sick?

Why I dread the school holidays

Because isn't the language predictable?

Newspapers, magazines, radio, they've all got ideas about how parents can 'cope'. What assumptions they're making. About parents, about the role of schools, about kids.

That looking after your own children is truly horrible; it's a job for schools to do; kids are a nightmare and you can't return quick enough to the normality of packing them out the door. Apparently, two hours of Monday morning half term, and everyone must know the kids are bored already. Hot tip! Print out the accompanying voucher and treat them to a theme park!

Oh please, am I fed up now, after years of reading it and hearing it. Like every parent has a mutual shared horror or they can't be normal. In some places, I hear it's got so bad - school holidays are such a 'terror' - you can acquire a badge, proud to display that 'you survived'.

Tedious, predictable, shallow.

Roll on back to school.

Add this one: Graffiti Parenting

I grew up in the 1960s, when my mother shouted, as I hopped out through the back door, Be home by six.

She might have added, I don't mind what you do, so long as you don't cross Mansfield Road, and you don't get into trouble.

I was probably aged eight or nine. I thought I was free. She knew half a dozen people would tell her later what I'd got up to.

Sometimes I slipped the net and walked both sides. I ran with kids who had piano practice at 4, and kids with cigarette burns dancing up their arms. I learned who Mozart was and which house you avoided, unless by age ten you could handle yourself in tricky situations: there lived the old couple who would give you money if you let them take a photo of you with your top off.

These days, my mother's I don't mind would be read as I don't care. My old mum would probably be labelled a neglectful and dysfunctional parent. She might be offered a parenting course or an intervention project based around family counselling.

But isn't it true that today's only the starting point for the future? Which is why this is such a fundamentally wrong idea. Because, six years from now, my mother's grand daughters could be summed up in a graded pass, their suitability as parents marked. Even before they have children.

When did it happen? That we got to this point when an exam in parenting seemed like a good idea?

What event in my life happened to make someone else think I'd trust in them, and not me? When did they assume that I'd look to schools to tell my kids how to parent? Do they think that parenting's beyond me? That I need someone else to tell me how? That only someone else can say what's best for my kids? And that I, the grower of knuckle and bone and blood and guts, am merely here to 'reinforce' the approved learning, delivered by my wall-hung TV screen?

It speaks loud and clear about the culture we're living in. When it's believed that I'll uncritically accept someone called an Expert or a Director or a Chief Executive and never question what they say. When someone thinks that I see the word Charity and immediately assume it must be an organisation bound to be transparent, good, and honourable. When someone believes my trust in myself and my community is so low I will surely look to the authority of an examining body with an assessment criteria to tell me how to improve.

Maybe my mum taught me a great deal of parenting wisdom. Maybe my raw sixties backstreet education came in for something. Because I'm not going to nod in agreement. I won't watch passive while my language, emotion, my parenting, is stripped away from me and layers of someone else's words are slapped over my life.

Sometimes, Parenting UK, there's a space for visceral, guttural language, and it's here. Fuck off.

In this world, where all our humanity is steadily subject to someone else's judgement and control, I am standing out as a graffiti parent.

Parenting looks like shit, and it's the most profound art you ever do. That's graffiti parenting.

I run counter culture, defy your judgment, do my own thing. I get it wrong, show myself up, rage and weep. I put it right, patch up, make amends, paint it over, strip it back, celebrate the raw, experiment again. I threaten, weep and laugh with joy. I tell my kids off and praise them, ignore them and help them, deal with them unjust and fair. I'm inconsistent, contradictory, permissive, authoritarian. I'm a crap parent and the best parent. I explore all states. I'll laugh at my aspirations and my fears before you can ever find them. Because this parenting, I own it.

To my children I pass it all on, mixed with messages of culture, society, politics, books, art, energy. And only they are qualified to tell me whether I got some things right.

It's our future. I reserve that space - graffiti parents - for my kids. Not yours, Parenting UK, mine. In time, I expect they'll make graffiti of their own lives in their own ways. I want them to pass that on, down the line, to my mother's great grand children. That system works for me. It may have been working one way and another like that for thousands of years.

So I'll tell my children this. Celebrate all of your parenting. The shit and the art. Never pass your own parenting lives over to someone paid to judge you. Never give up your own self knowledges and self doubts and self beliefs to a school teacher who'll score them with a tick sheet.

That person will disempower you for life and disengage you from your children not yet born, when they peer at you and say, You must try harder. Grade D.