Coming from a meeting at my children’s school, I decided to take my chances in creating a blog in English, in order to try to change experiences with other mums, dads and grandparents around the world and share examples of success and failure. My goal is also finding out how changes in other countries/cultures affect kids´ behavior, their feelings of happiness, security and love our how they experience victory and disappointment. Hope you may become enthusiastic about this idea too. Let’s start?
First of all I apologize for the mistakes you will find in this and other posts. I’m Brazilian and have not practiced English for a long time. Well, for those who never came here I must say the perception movies and even newspapers give about us is not quite accurate. I agree we are happy and nice people, perhaps too nice to fight against the bad politicians we have in hundreds here, but the view they show about women in sex is caricatured, to say the least. Well, hope you have the patience to find out more about us reading what goes in the lines. I would like to have the same opportunity by receiving your comments.
This being said, let’s go to the point. I’m a mother of three. My oldest is a 25 man and I have nine years old twin girls. I consider myself a very different mother for them. When I had my first son I was only 20, so inexperience was my word. Too concerned, too authoritarian, facing a divorce when he was four/five. By the time he was seven I got married again. Thanks to my husband, who did his best to become a father, I could earn a little serenity, but just a little. Now at 46 I fell more balanced and confident to allow me and my kids to make mistakes, without guilty or too much pressure. Think this is my first ‘right’.
To end this beginning, a recent example. At the meeting I referred to in the first paragraph, the teacher was happy because the students had the idea of preparing a surprise birthday party for a friend. She emphasized the fact that the pupils came to her to arrange the room, to establish time, how they grew in autonomy and developed capacity to have ideas of their own, quite different than only following orders and so on. She pointed at me to say Helen (my daughter) was one of them. It gave me a great pleasure to hear all of that because in the previous night the kids told me about the surprise party - they wanted me to buy some soft drinks, but I. did not notice, without the teacher’s help, how it was another big step of their walking towards adolescence. Now I do. Life is full of small details that, at the end, will do all the difference. Let´s have the joy and wisdom to see them.
