Wednesday 16 December 2009

I hate you

I had one of those out-of-body perfect-mother moments the other day. You know the ones: when just for five minutes (seconds?) no-one is screaming, no-one smells of poo, there is baby mush brewing deliciously on the stove, your children are all playing beautifully together, and in your head you're wearing white linen, miraculously uncrushed...

Anyway, L, who has recently discovered her imagination, was playing with two of her teddies.  The teddies were having a lovely time, having a party if I remember rightly, and talking about their forthcoming trip to Canada.  I watched, indulgently, thinking "isn't she cute" sort of thoughts, when one teddy turned to the other and said:

"I hate you".

I crashed out of my white-linen-festooned reverie with a bang.

L knows about hate.  And hating.  And she's heard, in her cushioned, cocooned, cushy life, someone say to someone else, "I hate you".  And she's internalised it sufficiently that her teddies are now saying it to each other.

And it made me realise that I don't want my daughter to know about hate.  I want to protect her from hate and hating and people who hate.  I want to teach her that there are more powerful, and much, much more important things than hate.

Hearing those words from L gave them astonishing force.  I felt just as shocked as if she'd sworn.  So I sat her down and we had a serious chat about not hating, and how that was not a nice thing to say, and how I didn't want to hear her saying it again.

And then this evening I found myself announcing to the world that I hate sorting out the laundry...  Whoops.

3 comments:

  1. ha ha, yeah. Being a kid though, everything is love and hate. you love everything you like, my daughter tells me she loves her juice cup, and you hate everything you don't like. At that age there is no subtle in-between. something to hold in your mind when she turns that little word on you the next time you wont give her a biscuit 5 mins before dinner.

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  2. We have words we dont use like hate and Stupid. It is so funny when I hear MaxiMad tell the radio off for saying stupid. But they do copy what we say. Mini is for ever going " for pittys sake mummy!"

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  3. It's so easy for us to use the word without using it with its real meaning. Unfortunately the kids pick up on it and it's not until then that we realise quite what we've done

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I know. I'm sorry. I hate these word recognition, are you a robot, guff things too, but having just got rid of a large number of ungrammatical and poorly spelt adverts for all sorts of things I don't want, and especially don't want on my blog, I'm hoping that this will mean that only lovely people, of the actually a person variety, will comment.

So please do. Comments are great...