Visitors
So, as our multicultural weekend draws to a close, I have to be honest and say that I don’t think I’m a particularly good ‘sleepover Mom’. Well, maybe I should qualify that; I’m certainly not one of those ‘earth mother’ types that positively thrive on a house load of children. Firstly, there’s the discipline aspect. I find it a bit awkward to discipline other people’s children. Our household could probably be categorised as some way between shouty and sweary with quite a lot of silly thrown in. We’re very relaxed and informal, we eat well, drink too much (not in front of the children), but demand good manners and that everyone is treated respectfully. I can see that this can be a little daunting to our younger visitors and that maybe they worry we’re a bit dysfunctional when I yell ‘oh will you bugger off!’ when #2 is trying to climb all over me when I’m sunbathing in the garden. For some reason, though, my shoutiness deserts me when the children are not my own. Hubby says this works with adults too. ‘How come you can bite my bloody head off but can’t stick up for yourself with a total stranger?’ he asks, mystified. And it’s true: my tried and trusted technique with visiting children is to yell in vaguely the direction of all of them, so it looks as if they’re all getting told off and I’m not specifically targeting a visitor.
This, however, can no longer work when your visitor is a worldly-wise 13 year old French kid and his Spanish compadre who are practically as tall as I am and want to put their unfeasibly large trainers up on my couch and are still crashing around in their room at 11pm. Nope, no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t squeeze a ‘feet off the furniture please’ out of my lips, but just sat there staring at the aforementioned gargantuan chaussure getting myself really worked up. I was also shocked at what a total pansy I was with the TV. We were all sitting watching Real Madrid v Barcelona at 9.30 last night. Yep, footie on the TV and Hubby’s not even in the country. I missed half a CSI:Miami all because I was too much of a scaredy dog to ask for my own bloody telly buttons.
Before I get carried away, I must point out that they were very nice young men, who took their plates out, said please and thank you, gamely disguised their boredom at my pathetic attempts at speaking French and answered my polite dinner table conversation about Paris and Barcelona respectively with short but courteous replies. But, knocking on their door to ask them to keep it down at 11pm last night made me feel very uncomfortable. I finally steeled myself and requested some hush only to be rewarded with a polite ‘ok’ and instant silence. There, how easy was that? I think the biggest issue for me is not wanting to seem like a total dragon. That’s all #1 and #2 need, isn’t it, to have everyone in school knowing that their mother is a whingeing hag who demonises her house guests with strangled French verbs and interrogates them at the dinner table. Ah well, I won them over with my cookies (which they dunk in milk – a habit which #1 took to very quickly). I may be a pushover but I’m still Le Grand Fromage in the kitchen.
