Notebook
The part I’m least sure about publishing, so it moves slowly. Nothing goes in here that either of them would mind reading at fifteen.
A pound a week, paid on a Saturday, not linked to anything. We got there after two more complicated systems, one of which taught our six-year-old that kindness has a price of twenty pence.
We made a rule in January that lasted until the second week of February. The rule that replaced it is worse on paper, has no numbers in it, and has now been running for a year.
He didn’t want a party, he didn’t want a fuss, and he had specifically said, out loud, in front of witnesses, that he didn’t want anything. So we gave him something that required him to talk about himself for six months, which on paper was a catastrophic misreading.
Pooling for one present is obviously sensible and everybody says so. Nobody mentions that it means three siblings and their partners having an explicit conversation about money, which our family had successfully avoided for about twenty years.
Not a routine we designed. A routine that assembled itself over about four years, and which I only wrote down because my sister asked and I discovered I couldn’t say it out loud in the right order.
Ten minutes a night, says the school. What we had by half term was ten minutes of misery a night, four nights a week, and a child who had worked out that books were something that happened to her.
Nobody warned me about the fourth day. The first three were fine — she was fine, I was fine, everyone was fine — and then on Thursday the whole thing arrived at once, for both of us.