Being normal

It’s very easy to let Jonah play on his mini iPad all day. Truth be told, some days he needs it – and so do we. It keeps him quiet and occupied, and he doesn’t have to deal with people, only predictable pixels that he is largely in control of .

If we’ve both got hangovers  – which happens –  so much the better. He’s got better at not being stressed out when he loses a game, but from time to time, he enters into an unholy rage and we have to limit his time to say, the recommended half hour a day, which doesn’t make us all that popular.

He quite often resists doing anything that I think is ‘good for him’. He doesn’t like after school clubs, isn’t bothered about films, moans like hell about reading, and rarely gets invited for a play date (which breaks my heart, but he can be tricky). But every so often my need to be middle class gets the better of me, and I insist on doing something ‘cultural.’

It’s not just Jonah who objects. Tom blanches, and mumbles something about needing to make some home-made ketchup or something. I kinda get it. Kids’ theatre can be hit or miss, and more often is just a little bit weird. There’s very little traction with children and art galleries. They just don’t get it.  Going to a church hall to watch a happy clappy instrumental band has me shifting uncomfortably in my plastic seat, wondering whether I can legitimately escape for a rollie.

A literary festival in East London quite often means little-known authors plugging expensive books – and we’ve no room on the shelves before we move in any case. But something you have to do it, just to feel better about the benignly neglectful style of parenting that you’ve been forced to adopt by time, boredom and circumstance. This one featured Micheal Rosen, a comic poet who’d visited my own school when I was little older than Jonah. So we went.

Tom blanched again as we got there. It was in Shoreditch Town Hall, which is two bus rides away. We were handed a programme by the sort of women who populate church halls, and went upstairs to watch a happy clappy band with colourful array of parents joining in with ethnic instruments while their kids ran riot in the large conference room. Tom excused himself before I managed too, and Jonah took the opportunity to tackle Ava to the floor and drag her around with his pelvis, until other parents gave me the look that tells me I should probably intervene.

The next thing on the agenda was a drama class, which is definitely not Jonah’s thing. With an hour to kill before I revisited my childhood, and a boy from Jonah’s school sitting politely on the floor waiting for the two actors to begin, Jonah deigned to join in.

I’ve not sat and watched him in a class since he was a toddler and I would regularly torture myself by watching him not be interested in whatever class my friends’ kids were happily taking part in. I exaggerate slightly – he was fine as a toddler – loved gumming tambourines and bashing other kids over the heads with plastic maracas –  marvellous fun. It was only as a four-year old that he became more interested in the grooves on the floorboards than in Diddi Dancing or whatever I was trying to make him do.

But he joined in. It helped the actors began by playing a game that mixed words up,  making them run and stop and jump and clap, but mixing the words up, which, with his ‘spade’s a spade’ brain, Jonah found hilarious.

He even seemed to enjoy it, guiding Ava with his arm round her shoulder, because the class was for 7 to ten years olds, so she largely didn’t have a clue what was going on. Tom and I occasionally catching each other’s eyes as if to say, “Christ. He’s joining in”.

Then we saw Michael Rosen, who was only slightly more laughter lined, and every bit as energetic as when I saw him as a seven year old, and he had Jonah was rolling in the aisles. So all we surprised ourselves – and felt good about ourselves for being normal.