I will try to eat less “spicy food”
If by “spicy food” we mean anything that I tell my son is too spicy, in case he wants to eat it. Foods that I have described as spicy to his curious, salivating face include: chocolate, milk bottle sweets, mango, wine, marmalade on toast, toffees, carrot cake, pizza, and chewing gum.
I will teach my son how to swim
This year, I taught my son to ride a bike. It was the least gentle bit of parenting my neighborhood has probably seen in the last three years. While other parents took their child to the park and waited for them to show a natural interest in two wheels, I stood in the lashing October rain and shouted, “I’m sorry but you just have to learn how to ride a bloody bike. It’s how we get around. I can’t drive, you can’t drive, so this is our best option. So you can either stand here moaning and crying or just get back on and stop turning round every three seconds to see if I’ve let go.”
All of which fills me with high hopes for teaching him how to swim.
There will be less screen time
Not for my son, of course. He barely gets a look in; perhaps half an hour of CBeebies or 45 minutes watching Dr. Binocs answer fairly esoteric questions like “What Would Happen If You Never Went to the Bathroom?” on YouTube. But really, he’s not nearly as addicted as he used to be. The problem is me. The other day, I was so busy looking up old pictures of Steve Martin that I missed my son’s tooth falling out (she says, typing on her computer).
We will talk as a family about the news
Except, of course, the last family-friendly bit of news I can actually remember in the UK was maybe that whale that swam up the Thames? Since then, Liz Truss dropkicked £30 billion out of the treasury, we’ve seen the highest temperatures on record, and dealt with an immigration minister who was somehow more appalled that people had painted Mickey Mouse on the walls of an asylum seeker reception center than the fact that hundreds of unaccompanied children were being forced from their homelands by the imminent threat of death. Honestly, I don’t know how Newsround does it.
We will grow our own food
Because we no longer live in London, I actually have a garden. It’s a garden I share with a 26-year-old trainee vet who’s on Hinge, but it is, nevertheless, a garden. And I had high hopes for teaching my son the magic of plant life, the alchemy of putting a seed in some soil and, a few months later, eating the vegetables it produces. Except, in my case, the entirety of our crop has been eaten by muntjac deer, save about 30 hard, green tomatoes that never ripened, and my son spent most trips sitting on a tree stump listening to Matilda or stamping on weeds while shouting, “That’ll teach you!”
I will arrange more playdates
If, by “playdates,” we mean texting my friend an hour before school pick-up, saying: “I’m so sorry my train was delayed and now I’m sitting watching a stack of pallets get moved around a parking lot by a forklift truck while the couple next to me talks in tooth-breaking detail about their new retail strategy while wearing white plastic shoes, so I don’t think I’m going to make it back in time. Could you possibly pick up my son too and I’ll be over to get him as soon as possible? He will eat any dry snack as long as it’s beige.”
I won’t shout
I’ll snap, yell, scream, pound the floor, holler, roar, shriek, bawl, spit, bellow, and howl instead.
We will spend more time outdoors
Have you tried to entertain a child inside for a whole day? Do you have any idea how much playing, cajoling, answering, witnessing, planning, clearing up, and wiping down that involves? Do you know what it feels like to step on a hard plastic Pikachu while trying to shout over the soundtrack to Wonka, as pasta water bubbles onto the floor, a patch of bright blue paint dries on the hem of your hanging coat, and your boss politely texts to ask if you’ve remembered the Zoom meeting at 1:30 p.m. (you haven’t). Do you know how hard it is to keep drawers closed, sofas clean, glasses unbroken, and plug sockets safe while a knee-height agent of Bacchus runs half-naked through the house, shouting, “I’m a komodo dragon!!!” Have you ever tried to have a good relationship with your neighbors after seven hours of your child listening to the same musical clip from their Fisher-Price drill set? How much better, by far, to open your front door, head for the nearest patch of grass, marsh, wood, river, or ivy-clad ruin, and just let them be their own health and safety nightmare. Finding stones, hitting sticks with other sticks, weeing on electric fences; I honestly don’t care. I’ll be sitting on my coat, on my phone, as the blue paint smudges onto my trousers.
I’ll make sure my son brushes his teeth for two minutes
Or, we’ll stand at the sink for two minutes, gently dribbling minty spit onto the white surfaces until they harden into something that cannot and will never be removed by any known cleaning technique. Does it contribute to good oral hygiene? No. Does it mean that he tells his teachers and other adults that he’s done his teeth? You bet. Just don’t ask me when I last took him to the dentist.
My child will go to bed early
Because frankly, by 8 p.m., I want to go to bed. God, I want to go to bed. And as early as possible. Since becoming a parent, I have fallen asleep to the sound of ice-cream vans. I have fallen asleep to the noise of children playing hopscotch after dinner. I recently fell asleep to the soundtrack of my son reading a 1992 copy of The Beano to himself. In our house, regularly, my six-year-old son is the last person to go to bed. As he draws and chats to his toys and looks out the window and listens to an audiobook, his two parents are deep in the heavy sleep of 8:14 p.m. It’s a dream come true.
I will learn French
Not because I think it’s important to equip your child with a second language (although, obviously, it’s not a bad idea), but so my husband and I can talk about, say, “les cadeaux de Noël,” “un animal de compagnie,” “un comportement merdique,” and “le gâteau” around the house without our little monoglot catching on.
I will model good mental health
There are lots of ways to do this, of course: de-escalating confrontation, using language to describe your feelings rather than simply acting on them, modeling compromise, taking regular breaks from digital devices, practicing empathy, using motivational techniques, and, most importantly of all, setting fair expectations. Fair expectations, like: if you don’t achieve a single goal over an entire year, it genuinely doesn’t matter. Fair expectations, like: you can only do what you can do. Fair expectations, like: honestly, just don’t bother, love.