Wolves

The daughter recently refused to sleep in her own bed on account of wolves! “Wolves”, you may cry, “but there aren’t even any wolves in South Africa – unless you count those hybrid uber-glam husky dog X timber wolf DOGS that abound of late for security purposes”. No, not those wolves – we’re talking the howling embodiment of evil kind of wolves.




The daughter was convinced, having heard it from many reliable picture books, that wolves were very bad news and were now seeking refuge and perhaps a girl-sized snack in her room. So, I trawled the web searching for pictures of wolf cubs and reports of their love and loyalty to each other and even found that awesome picture of Rama And Raksha from Jungle book (see Friday’s post) to show her how lovely and actually non-scary wolves are. You see ,I don’t want her growing up with fear, it’s part of my whole free-range effort but it is fraught with difficulty. I am very very afraid of the gheckos that live in our house – there are so many and they make me feel quite ill with fear but I have told the daughter that these lovely lady reptiles are also moms (their offspring are legion – oh happy times!) and are so concerned for her welfare that they station themselves in her room to catch all the mosquitoes before they bite her. Now if only I could convince myself to believe in the benign mommy-ness of the ghastly things. But the daughter is not afraid and so I congratulate myself. I have also managed to eradicate the fear of monkeys – despite the efforts of her pre-school to the contrary – those kids are practically hiding under the tables when the monkeys visit - but they are way too frequent callers to fear. So instead of pelting them with cooked potatoes or spraying them with the hose I talk to them in a civilised manner – suggest they move along and then point out their extreme cuteness to the daughter. These vandalizing thieving critters (who have on more than one occasion trashed our house in search of lunches) are actually JUST LIKE US and look at how the babies hang onto the moms when they run across the telephone lines – too adorable!

Okay there is a point to all this self-congratulatory bollocks and it is this: I can talk the daughter out of some of her fears but I still can’t keep her safe. I can’t stop her from watching another child at pre-school kill a ghecko for fun. I can’t stop her engaging in the doctor-doctor games or from discussing child-birth and boobs and kissing with her girl-friends and I can’t stop her from wanting to grow up quickly . Last night she told me that she is going to be a mermaid when she grows up and that she’ll also have boobs! I told her that yes, she would have boobs one day but that there are many years ahead to worry about boobs and that she should concentrate on her swimming rather if she was planning to become a mermaid. In my head of course, I’m taking her out of school and putting her into a nunnery until she’s 25. Why do they have to grow so fast? I feel like I’m spending my time with her doing damage control! And I still have to properly coach her in ‘stranger danger’ – it’s just exhausting!

Then this morning the little face looks up at me and says; “Mommy I had a bad dream”
“What happened”?
“There was a big scary snake”..



No problem!