Just because I subscribe to the Gestapo approach to motherhood doesn’t mean that I’m totally immune to the occasional bout of Accidental Parenting.
Accidental parenting refers to all those times when a lapse of good intentions create a habit so ingrained you never succeed in reversing it. The children who can’t go to sleep unless their mother’s pinky is clasped in their hot sweaty fist? Accidental parenting, stemming from one desperate night where you’ll try anything to get your baby to sleep. Those kids who drink juice from a bottle – you know, the ones you tut at disapprovingly? It’s not deliberate. Their mothers didn’t suddenly decide one day to go against the health visitor’s advice and dish out liquid E numbers via a teat. It just happened…
Accidental parenting is why my three year old daughters like a nice cup of tea, much to the horror of my caffeine-fearing friends. Accidental parenting is why my children don’t feel a meal is complete without a pudding, why we have rainbow jelly on Saturdays and why I have to give my second daughter precisely seven kisses before bed or she can’t sleep.
Over two years ago, when the babies really were babies and their brother little more himself, the children had jacket potatoes with beans for their supper. Not wanting to create unnecessary washing I stripped off the pygmies and handed them a fork. “It’s naked beans night.” I told them. As a result of my misguided actions, none of the children is now able to eat baked beans with their clothes on; in fact the mere sight of a Heinz tin triggers a Pavlovian strip tease as they race to the table, shedding socks in their wake.
As accidental parenting mistakes go, I don’t mind. They look really rather sweet, scooping up beans in their altogethers. And after all – we don’t eat beans terribly often, making naked beans nights relatively rare and easy to indulge. I’m just a trifle concerned about what will happen when the kids go to college – I seem to recall an awful lot of baked beans…