Confessions of a bored mom

(File photo) My children are pretty good at keeping themselves busy.

(File photo) My children are pretty good at keeping themselves busy.

Published Jan 29, 2015

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London - We have five different sets of Monopoly in our house.

A no-frills one, circa 2002; a fancy electronic one without banknotes, just a mysterious calculator; a personalised one made for my son’s seventh birthday (Park Lane is Grandma’s House, so popular is she); super-quick Junior Monopoly; and a fading, ancient original, which has been lovingly taped together 1,000 times.

Monopoly is our family game of choice - the one where Mom and Dad can swap in and out of playing to get on with other stuff. It’s the game each of our four children enjoys - even the smallest, Mabel, who is three-and-a-half, takes part.

But, more importantly, whenever any of the spirited foursome wails: ‘You never play with us,’ I’m always able to fire back: ‘Rubbish, I’m the Monopoly Queen.’

And thank God for Monopoly. It’s probably going to save us thousands in post-teenage therapy because I admit there is definitely more than a grain of truth in the ‘you never play with us’ accusation, especially coming from the two last-borns.

Last week, a young stay-at-home mom wrote a controversial ‘Don’t hate me, but playing with my kids is boring’ piece, which ignited much debate.

Her two children are little and she confessed that she finds relentless peek-a-boo and make-believe so repetitive and unrewarding that she doesn’t do it.

Does this make her a ‘bad mother’, she wondered? Of course not, it just makes her an honest one.

Once you’ve kissed all their delicious fatty bits, sniffed the top of their heads and taken comedy pictures of them in adult sunglasses, babies and young toddlers are boring if you spend all day every day with them.

What was particularly great about the piece, though, was the headline for the accompanying quotes from a child psychologist. ‘Children don’t need to play with their parents,’ it said, then went on to explain how there are vital skills children need to figure out for themselves by playing alone.

‘Hallelujah!’ I muttered, before waving it under the noses of my children, aged three to 12, who were all ensconced in a DIY house made out of a blanket, playing the card game Uno. ‘See. I’m right,’ I said.

During the early days of this parenting malarkey - after I’d digested 1,000 conflicting tips on how to be a good mom from the overwhelming plethora of parenting books - I would throw myself into daft fantasy games.

I’d drag myself exhausted from bed when they woke up at 5.30am, and pretend to be the troll who lived under the bridge until CBeebies started on the telly and took over just long enough for me to brush my teeth and speedily get dressed.

I flooded the two older girls with attention and activity, often feeling like I was making up for the time I missed with them by going to work.

God, it was exhausting.

For me, it drained the joy out of being with them and made me short-tempered and impatient. Those were foolish times. When the next two arrived, I drew up a shortlist of stuff I was - and wasn’t - going to do.

I stopped being an ‘over-involved mommy pleaser’ and started being me. I like a bit of glitter-sticking, an hour or so of Monopoly and the occasional bake-off.

I do not like Cluedo, putting on a play, pretending to be a fairytale creature, or watching musicals. I loathe hide-and-seek and bike-riding.

If they want funny voices and regional accents for bedtime stories, then they must ask Dad.

We even went as far as inventing ‘DIY Sunday’, where the children were left to occupy themselves for much of the afternoon, while we got on with ticking everything off the domestic to-do list (we ignored them when they complained they were bored).

Who knows if we got it right or wrong - there is an element of human error when it comes to parenting - but, these days, I do think my children are pretty good at keeping themselves busy.

They stage fantastically imaginative movies, make up the most ridiculous card games involving cutlery and regularly set up pretend shops selling all manner of home-made tat.

This week’s retail venture was a shop on the stairs filled with outlandish exercise equipment. ‘We’ve got balloon stress balls,’ Gracie-in-the-middle told me, proudly.

‘The small one is for Dad, but you need the big one,’ she added, earnestly. They know me well.

* Lorraine Candy is editor in chief of Elle magazine.

Daily Mail

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