A tug at the heartstrings

'Look!...look! mummy' she squealed with excitement and lead me from the bedroom where I was sorting the laundry to watch her dance to the music from Lion King. Seeing her blond curls bounce as she hopped from foot to foot, I caught a lump in my throat and had to fight back the tears. Next week she will start at nursery. How do mothers do this? How to we let go of our youngest into the arms of the big wide world for them to start the journey to independence?

There is no doubt that she is ready for it. We've had 2 years at home together and besides doing all that I need to, I can no longer give her all what she needs; the world beyond is beckoning her to step outside and join in with them. The real question is whether the world is ready for her?! She is such a determined little lady - I have every confidence that she will rise to this next chapter and take from it all that she needs, find her own path and, hopefully, make friends along the way.

Truth be told, there have been days when nursery couldn't come soon enough, when I've longed for a moment to myself again. Now that these moments are on the horizon, I know that I will miss sharing my days with my little girl. Yes, supermarket shopping will be done in half the time but on my own my shopping expeditions will not attract the smiles and small talk of older ladies when my little companion goes on the charm offensive. Hey, its been some of the best Danish conversation practise I've had!!

Well, young lady, enjoy your new routine and the life away from me that lies before you. I look forward to watching you step out on your own, hearing your happy stories and soothing your sores.

Held og lykke, my darling xxxx

The blip - when sublimity is lacking...

The recent (very) late summer-like weather inspired a couple of ritualistic purges.  There's nothing like sunlight streaming in through the windows to turn me into a spring cleaning, duster brandishing whirling dervish. I've cleared out some of the children's old clothes, some old boxes of papers and turned to my blog and to the folder of posts that I have written but never published. The italicised text below is one of them and on reflection I have decided that I do want to share it with you. It might ring true with others - I would wager that there aren't many expats out there who don't recognise 'the blip'. So here goes...this was written two weeks after we arrived in Copenhagen, in February 2011, with its cold days and long nights:

"Before we moved to Denmark, I wrote a letter to my pre-school son. I was very conscious that although we were talking about the move to Copenhagen and preparing for it in very practical ways (visiting the city to find accomodation etc), he probably didn't (and couldn't) fully understand what was happening. My fear was that the move would be too much for him. In writing the post, I also articulated some of my own fears and apprehensions.

Ending my letter, I sought to reassure him by saying that one day we would look back upon the time it would take us to settle into our new life as a mere 'blip'. In the bigger picture I know that this settling in phase has to happen and it will end. But here we are, in the 'blip'...

I have travelled and lived abroad before and being of a mixed cultural background, I am not naive to the challenges of being in a foreign land. Doing it with little children is a different story and this blip is proving to be a long haul - like childbirth and marathon running, it takes stamina.

It is at the same time both exhilarating and exhausting to be plunged into a new environment. These days, I find myself tired by the sheer hard work it takes to do the simplest things: Supermarket shopping requires a new level of concentration. Things are laid out differently, labelled in a foreign language and with two children and strange groceries vying for my attention, buying food has become a Herculean task. Trying to make meals that taste vaguely recognisable so that meal times do not descend into barely disguised rounds of bribery and negotiation - its enough to make me weep sometimes.

My son is being brave, I know he is. He misses his friends terribly - for a while the first thing he would ask when he woke up in the morning would be, 'am I going to make any friends?'. Of course, I reassure him and I am doing my best to get together with the other expat mums and to arrange trips to the playgrounds for him to look forward to. Deep down, I know that his fear is mine too. Whereas he used to be happy to walk everywhere, he now complains and whines as he has never done before. It is colder and I guess he, like me, is tired by the novelty of everything and he misses the familiarity that we all took for granted.

Only now am I learning what this 'blip' is all about; its a time of transition and it is unrelenting. There is no rest from the challenge. Now, I've started to talk about this time of 'change' with my son. We talk about food being 'different from England but its still yummy!'. I'm finding the patience not to expect too much too soon. And I remind myself that this too will pass."

And it did, it does.... Day by day and month by month things are falling into place. I no longer feel like we are living 'abroad' - this is our home now. Although things are different to before, I am learning to adjust my expectations to better suit my environment. Friendly faces and warm smiles abound and my son is settling into a new school and embracing the daily adventures inside and outside the classroom.

And looking back and reading that old post, I can't help but think it was only two weeks into the move - such early days! For anybody else out there and in the 'blip', have courage - it does get easier.

Childhood memories

This month I am taking part in a 30 day photo challenge. Each day has a theme and some have proved to be lots of fun but others are indeed a 'challenge'! On Friday the theme was 'childhood memory' and, as I noted when I posted my pictures, my life here in Copenhagen is so far removed from my childhood in Middlesbrough, I struggled to find any reminders of my early years.

In the end, I had to 'create' my memories - I bought figs to make a salad and was reminded of fig trees that grew in the garden of a summer house in Egypt where we stayed as children. The butterfly cakes that I baked for friends who came to lunch on Friday were me retracing my mother's footsteps when she had baked the same cakes for many a children's party or school cake sale. Food often does take us to places and stir up memories buried deep in our past. When I was young my father would make an Egyptian dish called 'ful' made from slow cooked beans and eaten with pita bread - the smell of the same dish when I found it in a London humus bar many years later transported me straight back to my childhood. Often though these are the memories that we seek out and the flashback can sometimes feel 'staged'. More striking are the memories that take us by surprise and catch us unaware - this is what happened to me last weekend.

On Saturday I went to a school loppemarked (a 'flea market') and as this is a great place to pick up children's books in English at bargain prices, I found myself rummaging through boxes of once loved story books. My heart stopped when I stumbled upon Richard Scarry's Best Storybook Ever (emphasis added!).

This is the storybook that I devoured as a child and although my children do have many Richard Scarry books on their shelves, nothing compares to this collection of stories, nursery rhymes, poems and pages and pages of pictures of the beloved animal characters of my childhood: the Cat family, lowly worm, the polite elephant and others.

In the middle of the school car park as I leafed through the pages of this beautiful story treasury, the world around me stopped and for a couple of minutes I was a little girl again lost in the world of those familiar words and drawings. I recognised each page and the fondness of these early reading memories has stayed with me for days. Some of the humour that had passed me by as a child made my grown up self chuckle, for example, the story of 'Couscous the Algerian detective'!!

This book is a mighty tome of 288 pages and includes much more than just stories and rhymes to  engage the young reader and feed their inquisitive minds. I hope I don't sound too old when I can't help but say that 'they don't make story books like this any more'. I don't know of another similar single volume for children where you can turn through pages and pages about colours, the alphabet, numbers, the flowers in the garden, the instruments of an orchestra, the seasons, airplanes, boats, trucks or where a child can learn about the different jobs that people do all day, about manners and being polite, about Rome, Paris and London (and a Castle in Denmark!!) and about animals and the parts of the body. Its like a paper edition of the world wide web for little people!

I'm thrilled to have this book back in my life again - it is exactly as I remembered it and not only do I keep finding my own childhood memories within its pages, I can now enjoy sharing them with my children and hopefully pass them on so they can make the memories theirs.

'Psssst...a word in your ear, Tiger Mother'

I try very hard not to judge the parenting styles of others. Someone I respect once said that when you see a parent acting in a disapproving way, before you react, remember that you don't know what they've been through to get there. Sometimes, battle weary, we pick our fights and no judgment should be made when you don't know the whole story. In keeping with this, I will try not to unleash the full extent of my spitting fury upon reading 'Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother' by Amy Chua.

For those who don't know, Ms Chua is a Yale law professor and a second generation Chinese immigrant. She has two daughters and her book is about how she parented them from birth to their tender teenage years focussing mainly on how she turned them into musical virtuosi on their respective instruments, the piano and the violin, by employing the strict Chinese parenting methods of her ancestors. To describe her as driven is an understatement, she is, putting it politely, 'a mother possessed'. Ms Chua demonises the laissez faire parenting of the West and hails (herself) as the Chinese mother who knows best and who alone can raise her children to their full potential (her husband, the girls' father, barely features). The catch is that her daughters' full potential has to be musical excellence that will take them to Carnegie Hall and top grade school marks - there is no allowance or opportunity for achievement in anything else. The following now famous extract from the book appeared in the Wall Street Journal and summarises how the Chinese way of parenting looks to Western outsiders as Ms Chua describes:

'Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

- attend a sleepover
- have a playdate
- be in a school play
- complain about not being in a school play
- watch TV or play computer games
- choose their own extracurricular activities
- get any grade less than an A
- not be the no 1 student in every subject except gym and drama
- play any instrument other than the piano or violin
- not play the piano or violin'

The detail, however, is much more extreme and the chapters of Ms Chua's book unfold into episode upon episode of the Tiger Mother in battle.

There is no doubt it is very provocative and a compelling read for it. However, for the most part, reading it was not an enjoyable experience. I faced the same dilemma as when watching a pivotal but disturbingly gruesome scene in a horror film - I feel compelled to watch but can only peek through squinting eyes from behind my hands held up to my face. It was a stressful read and I do pity the family for having its dirty laundry hung out in public.

I am left asking three main questions: Why did Ms Chua have children? What did she really hope to achieve by parenting them in 'the Chinese way'? Why did she write the book?

Her life's work, in having children, appears to have been to protect them from the inevitable decline of the third immigrant generation and to that end, I assume, she prized above all else academic and musical excellence. She seems to have been determined to take the hardest route possible to get her children there - whatever it took - nothing would be spared. If anything, the more that was sacrificed, the better. Ms Chua's parenting method seemed to depend upon her ability to reach the limits of her daughters' capacity for hard work and then push them even further, employing all manner of coercion along the way.

Within this unrelenting pursuit, there were glaring hypocrisies: for example, she accepted to keep her girls awake through the night to practise their musical instruments through tears and heartache but then scorned Western mothers for allowing children to have sleepovers because it meant letting them stay up late so that they were tired the next day!

From the outset she drew her battle lines: the Chinese mother vs the Western one. She fought apparently believing that any way but the Western way was the right way. Why I wonder were these labels so important? Why could she not define what it is that characterises a 'Chinese mother'; what does she believe in rather than what does she do? I wonder if Ms Chua ever appreciated the higher goal that she was trying to achieve in adopting the parenting style that she did? It doesn't appear so or, if she did, this isn't made clear. Ultimately, her first daughter, Sophia, was both musically gifted and compliant and her rise to excellence comes across as effortless. Yes, she practised for long hours but I can't help but wonder if she would have risen to the same dizzy heights without the extra hours but complied simply to keep her mother happy.

Louisa (or 'Lulu') on the other hand would be politely described as a 'spirited child'. She fought her mother every step of the way and how the sparks flew; threats, bribes, the lot. The Tiger Mother had to use her full arsenal of trickery seemingly on a daily basis until her daughter reached the age of 13 and declared enough to be enough.

The most surprising twist of it all is that when Louisa calls time on the Chinese mother's battle regime, the Tiger mother surrenders, admits defeat and the game is over. Did the Chinese method of parenting not have a gameplan for a 'spirited child'? Is it in fact accurate to call it 'parenting' at all?
One thing is consistent and that is Ms Chua's need for public recognition. It was important for her that her children could win public prizes on their musical instruments and the Chinese way bestows the glory for good performance upon the parents. Their public performances were lavish affairs with no expense spared and long guest lists. Was it not all in the end, an exercise in vanity?

Finally, why write a book about it all? Did she set out to write a parenting manual? But her own daughter at 13 years old stood up for herself and everything unravelled so that the Tiger Mother was left looking like a kitten playing with a ball of wool. Did Ms Chua simply want to write a memoir? But, as I hinted above, is it really fair to make public mockery of those you hold dear? Although the book has sparked debate in the US where it is reported that Asian American children, coached in the Chinese way à la Ms Chua, are snapping up coveted places in the Ivy League institutions (see Caitlin Flannagan in The Atlantic Monthly), in the UK the book is described as 'blissfully funny' (India Knight quoted on the cover!).

But there is something about the Tiger Mother that rings true for me:

I too am the daughter of an immigrant. My father moved to England from Egypt in the 60s to study for his PhD and eventually settle with his English wife. He left his country and family and sacrificed a lot so that his children could have a good education and opportunities that weren't available to his generation. My father worked hard and was frugal, we were brought up with strict discipline and academic and musical achievement were prized. My father set us homework before it was given to us at school. I was top of my class in maths and I remember asking my teacher for a new workbook one Friday morning and being told, 'No, your father will only make you fill it over the weekend'!

Like Ms Chua's daughters, my sister and I are different; she is musically gifted and practised when she was supposed to and is an accomplished cellist. I, on the other hand, am not and I hated practising and had to be coerced to play my violin. Again, like Ms Chua, I studied law and I reaped the rewards of my father's sacrifice and his hard work pushing me to do well.

Now a parent myself, I face the same dilemma as Ms Chua. How do I want my children to grow up in the privileged life that they have been born into? I am not as frugal as my parents and my children will have many opportunities that I didn't. But nothing rattles my cage more than a child with a sense of entitlement.

I hope to give my children a good work ethic and to teach them the value of money so that they take nothing for granted. I too want them to grow up believing in themselves and to reach their full potential. Yes, like the Tiger Mother, I believe in respect for authority but I don't want my children to obey me out of fear or because of bribery or threats. Ultimately, I want my children to do what I ask of them because I hope never to ask of them anything that I have not asked of myself.

Ms Chua, I must ask, isn't it both our burden and our privilege to be parents to the third immigrant generation? Can't we take the best of the two worlds that we have known: the experiences of our childhood and our pushy parents but also the opportunities of the contrasting world we find ourselves enjoying as adults? Carving out your own path as a parent is not a betrayal of your heritage - its evolution. Shouldn't we embrace progress and hope that one day our own children will too?

Celebrating my daughter on her first birthday

Today we celebrate your first birthday and the first wonderful year of your life. Your birth was everything I dreamed it would be - a miracle and so precious. The birth itself was a joy and from that first day you have been too. You sleep so well and because of you I have rested well in these early days. I've been able to do so much because you have let me; even a triathlon when you were only a couple of months old. Thank you for being such a good baby.

And here you are, a year old. How did that happen? I know its a cliché but the last 12 months have flown by - it truly has felt like the blink of an eye. At times I have been so busy with house moves and the relocation abroad that I barely noticed you - happy and content in the background; you were getting on with getting bigger and thriving. Like me, you're a happy eater - you love your food - and are happy in your own company. You engross yourself in your toys keeping a watchful eye on what is happening around you. Happy to watch but social too.

Right now its all about those little feet and being mobile. I'm fascinated to watch you crawling and cruising. Its the first step towards independence and I love to see the choices you make; you love to hang out in your brother's bedroom when he is at school as if you miss him and I like to think that you sometimes miss me too when you come crawling into the kitchen when I'm cooking.

You are an excellent communicator - efficient with the noises you make and using your hands to say goodbye, to ask 'where is it?' and to clap and your arms to hug. I take it as a sign that you are generally contented so that when you do holler, I know it means something and you want me to sit up and listen. I respect that!

Out of all of us you have most easily embraced the massive changes of the last 6 months. At only a year old you are now sleeping in your third bedroom. This ability to adapt will serve you well in life.

I know that you adore your brother and your little face lights up when he comes into your bedroom first thing in the morning. The way you watch him and listen to his (long) stories - laughing when he does and always concerned when you hear him cry. Already you care for him so deeply.

Although you can barely walk - you practically run to your daddy when he comes home from work in the evening. Your excitement is so raw, physical and contagious. I love it.

I was doing some housework when I caught you 'trying on' one of my tops - it made me laugh so hard I nearly cried. You're so clever to know that the cloth you were holding was an item of clothing and to try to put it on. Sometimes, when I watch you I get the feeling that you just 'get it'.

Embrace life, enjoy it and rise to its challenges. This is my wish for you, my darling, on your first birthday. It is a privilege to be your mother.

Danish life: Børnehave or the international pre-school

My son is going to turn 4 in July. He has been at a montessori nursery in England since he was about 2 years old and when we left in January, he was happy in the routine of spending the mornings and a couple of full days at school. For the last 6 weeks since we've moved to Copenhagen, he's been at home with me whilst we tackle the question of whether he should go to a Danish børnehave (kindergarden) or the international pre-school. Tomorrow he starts school...

Before we moved here there was no doubt in my mind that the international pre-school was the answer. I figured that with all the change that was going on, he needed to be in an English speaking environment and putting him through the Danish system would only set him up for frustration and isolation. The international school followed the British key stage 1 and so if we returned to the UK, his education would not suffer.

However, since we've moved here I have given the matter further thought. By English standards, the Danish education system could be considered 'slow'. Danish children start school at the age of 6 and until then there is no formal teaching in literacy (reading or writing) or numeracy. The focus is on developing curiosity through play, allowing children to have a childhood and to learn the skills of socialisation (a feature at the heart of Danish culture).

The Danes also prize time spent playing outdoors and in every børnehave there is a playground and a good part of the day is spent in the fresh air. I have even heard of some where children are taken to the countryside all day to play in the forests and explore nature. These are all things that seem very attractive and valuable for children but for us there is still the language problem.

It was difficult to work out whether the attraction of the Danish system was a romantic dream or whether we wanted the børnehave to be part of our Danish adventure. I have spoken to so many other ex pat mothers about the decisions they've made and I've visited the børnehave to see for myself the learning through play. After much deliberation and heartache, we've made a decision and tomorrow a new chapter begins.

I actually don't believe that there is a right or wrong answer to the dilemma but isn't this true of most decisions we make as parents? Aren't there always benefits and sacrifices? We'll see. In the meantime, I know that I am going to miss him like crazy and in these pictures I am posting, I am sharing some of the wonderful highlights of the last 6 weeks.

Don't get me wrong, having a pre-schooler at home full time is hard work and there have been lots of tears and tantrums (and I'm not just referring to the kids!!). One of the other paradoxes of motherhood is the absolute love and absolute terror that children can instil. I love being a mother and I love my children. I don't know if I've made the right decision about school but I'm 100% certain that after getting up early tomorrow morning, cajoling him into his clothes, the bathroom and then downstairs into the bike, cycling for 25 minutes to get him there on time with his running commentary on the road, finding his peg and hanging up his new school bag, kissing and waving him goodbye, I'm going to miss my munchkin...

Danish life: pram culture

On the day I first made my way from the hotel to our new flat in Copenhagen, I was pushing my 10 month old baby in the buggy and I was surprised to encounter this scene...

An apparently 'abandoned' buggy (with baby inside, I should add) outside a vintage clothing store on the main street. I looked around for anybody who might lay claim to the sleeping infant but none was immediately obvious. As I walked past the store, I saw two women inside; one trying on clothes and engrossed in conversation. Had the carer really left a sleeping baby on the street whilst going into a store to try on clothes? This made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

My mother tells the story of how, on one of her first outings with a new born baby (nearly 40 years ago),  she parked me in the pram outside the chemist and when her business was done walked home only to realise that she had left me in the pram at the shops. Whenever this story is re-told it is generally met with laughter but also a chorus of tutting and the consensus that 'you couldn't do that these days'.

In Copenhagen, it seems that there is either an epidemic of post-natal forgetfulness or things 'these days' are different here.

On the same day last week, I went out shopping for a couple of household items (actually, then began the holy grail of UK to Danish plug adaptors!!) and I struggled to manoeuvre my buggy up the steps and through the door of a hardware store. Waiting until I had accomplished this not insubstantial feat, the shopkeeper came across and pointed to a sign on the door....

No prams allowed!!! What? Is this some kind of prejudice against shopping mums (or dads, for that matter, this is Denmark after all!)? Here in Denmark, it seems to be perfectly acceptable to leave an occupied pram parked outside on the pavement. And since that first day, the sight of a buggy left on its own has become a regular feature of my new landscape.

I have struggled to adopt this local custom and I continue to prefer to overcome the physical challenge of getting my buggy and kids into a store with me (provided there are no signs on the doors prohibiting them) than the huge leap in internal wiring it would take for me to park my children alone outside.

A quick google on the subject of 'pram snatching' in Copenhagen and wondering whether such a thing is a threat led me to an article on tips for travelling with kids in this city and it reports that 'to date, no baby has ever been snatched from its pram here' and that was written in November 2010. In fact, on further reading, it seems that leaving babies outside to sleep is believed by the Danes to be good for their health, ie they get fresh air.

Now that is something I can understand. How many of us mothers have taken a restless baby out for a walk to have them fall asleep in the buggy and the minute we cross the threshold of the coffee shop, the little eyes open and the tranquility dissolves?! Sleep in the fresh air is much healthier and so maybe I will come around to the native way of doing things.

Letter to my pre-school son

This weekend we took another trip to Copenhagen to find a place to live and to visit what I hope will be your new nursery. Whilst we dragged you from airport to airport, from house to house and along the snowy streets, you hardly complained but instead found excitement in the novelty of it all; new buses, different taxis - the points of reference that provided you with some measure of familiarity. Seeing you bravely take it all in made me proud and your father and I have gone to great lengths to explain to you that we are moving to a new house and a new country, 'far far away'. You seem to understand and to embrace the adventure. But the excitement on your face when we finally came back to London and you went back to your room to play with your toys told a different story: it was all okay because it had only been temporary. We didn't stay in Copenhagen this time, we came home. Did it confuse you to take you on a reconnaissance trip?

Today it was back to business as usual; nursery and back to your 'best friends', the other little 3 year old boys whose toys you share and fight over and whose worlds are so intensely entwined with your own.

What are we doing to your world to take you away from all this familiarity? From this 'social network' that you have built up for yourself at such a tender age and with such fragile social skills? Everyone we speak to says that the timing is perfect and its best to relocate abroad with a young family when the children are pre-school. Whilst you're still a pre-schooler, there is no formal 'education' to be interfered with and you don't have to be taken out of 'the system' and to fit into another with all the challenges that that can bring.

I know in my heart of hearts that three years living abroad will enrich your life and give you an education that doesn't come from reading books or listening to someone tell you about far away places.

It might feel as though we are plunging you into the unknown without any regard for what is important to you. Believe me when I say that this is not so. We are doing this for you too. You are robust and you will find friends in new places. You will grow to love some of the things that will at first seem so alien and unfamiliar. Don't be scared. One day Copenhagen will feel like home. One day I hope you will know that we are taking you out of your comfort zone in order to broaden it so that as you grow up you will yearn to explore and discover new cultures of your own. The time it will take you (us) to settle into our new Danish environment and to find our groove is an episode we will look back upon as a mere blip.

Please know that I lie awake in bed at night and I wonder if we are doing the right thing for you. However hard you will find it to say goodbye to your friends when the time comes, it will be harder for me to look on.