So, my darling boy has reached the final few weeks of his first decade. In May, he will turn ten whole years old. Aside from wondering just where the time went, and cramming as many 'how to cope with teenagers' parenting books as I can, something pretty rubbish is starting to become apparent.
Over the last year, total strangers have started to be exceptionally rude to him: knocking his as they pass, not apologising, telling him to "move" without so much as a please or question. And you know what? I don't think this is okay.
When he was a baby, he was beautiful (the most beautiful boy in all the world, but I'm his mum...), when he was a toddler, he was blessed with a huge pair of big brown eyes and a mop of blonde hair; beautiful then too, and so he remains. People used to treat him like the precious child he was, and still is. As the expression of all that is good in the world, when people are kind to your kid, and gaze at them with the wonder you have too, it makes you go all warm and fuzzy inside. He was utterly adorable.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago, me, the boy, and his sister, the girl, had just been queueing in a very cramped and tiny grocers, we bought a massive bunch of flowers for Mothers' Day and were making our way out, with the flowers, with the children, and a few bags of shopping to boot. The boy ran back in to get the change we had forgotten and a man who had been waiting behind us budged him and told him to "get out of the way". This was rude. Then, to compound matters, there was an old lady waiting to come into the shop who was also blocking the way out of the shop. So, there we were, we couldn't go back because of the queue, we couldn't go forward because of the old lady.
I would like to think that when I am an old lady (possibly with purple hair), I will still remember to be kind and courteous to people. Faced with a mother with two young kids, bags of shopping and a huge bunch of flowers, trying to leave a one-in-one-out shop, I would just step out of the way and let them pass as I smiled benevolently, marvelling at the consistencies of life over the decades.
This particular old lady glared at us for daring her to move an inch to the left, then snarled at my son "just get out of the way".
Because he's polite, he bottled all this inside and waited until we were well away up the street before telling me. I was really shocked. Why do supposed grown-ups think it's okay to be rude to a kid?!
My response was to state firmly that they shouldn't have spoken to him like that and reminded him that he knew what being polite was. I also expressed to his puzzled and adorable face that not all grown-ups are as perfect as me and that the two examples in the shop were horrid.
He got over it pretty quickly but it seems to me that this is connected to the teen problem. I work with older teens and though there are definitely a few students I would rather cross the street than engage with on the pavement, most of them are lovely human beings. I get that a huge herd of them can look intimidating and downright scary sometimes, but we can all remember the insecurities of the teen years.
I rather think the herd thing is a reaction against the threat of the grown-up. If from the age of nine, 'we' start treating children as though they are doing something wrong, start budging them out of the way and speaking to them like dirt, then is it any wonder that they come up with strategies designed to protect themselves? I would scowl too if people started treating me the way the customers in that grocers did to my son.
And the moral to this story? Something I try very hard to remember when I'm at work, faced with all those hooded teenagers; they're someone's utterly adorable baby too; just not so baby-sized anymore.
