Kids' activities: the pleasure and the pain. Photo / Getty Images.
Childhood has changed, learns Ruth Larsen, for better and for worse.
Twice - and not quite two years apart - I have been handed a tiny human that I co-produced. Lying in the hospital bed with each slippery child on my chest, delighted, astounded and unworthy, I have promised to give them the best. To do it a bit differently, perhaps, than was done for me. Pledged to anticipate future disturbances. To appease my own childhood discomfort and create people with resilience, kindness and Something Up Their Sleeve. Some extra skill or knowing that might ease the path.
Thus began my pursuit of Child Activity, motivated by an equal mix of aspiration and fear.
A mere few weeks after the arrival of Child One, I saw a sign in the Parents' Room at the mall stating, helpfully, what babies need. In my head, I heard it read in a smiling Judy Bailey voiceover. Judy mentioned: food, love, appropriate bedding, and NEW EXPERIENCES.
I was panicked. We'd done toes in the water. Walks. Books. Songs. Outside. Inside. This wasn't enough? I needed more. How much had my neglect, unknowing but inexcusable, damaged Child One already? How sub-optimal was this little creature in a onesie with a ladybird on the front? To what extent was her future now compromised?
We immediately attended a Baby and You yoga session. Me, and the outrageously smiley infant with no reliable routine. Someone in coffee group had suggested it and, though I loathed yoga, I wasn't going to miss out on a single neuron-linking opportunity for the 3-month-old, not if her little peers and their bendy mothers were going to be thus extended. There was even an opportunity to learn "correct" baby massage protocol: palms upright, ask first, eye contact, "May I massage you?"
I didn't mind asking an infant for permission to touch. But I had a strong sense that we were in the wrong place and a vague sense this was for the wrong reason. We were two wriggling and unruly bodies at odds with the certainty and calm of the rest of the class.
Swimming, Jumping Beans and Toddler Toes also all followed closely after my Parents' Room revelation of deficit. There has been Wriggle and Rhyme, Soccer 4 Tots, Mainly Music and a very earnest but strange craft-and-song offering from the local Baptists. It has been fun. Often expensive, mostly exhausting, occasionally baffling, but fun. The endless welcome and goodbye songs: "Who's here today? Who's here today? Let's all welcome Portia, Sadie and Cruz …" Stickers at the end for participation; tears when they lost their stickiness and fell off somewhere in the carpark, or they weren't the right ones. The interminable "news" at the beginning, the bring-a-plate wind-up at the end of term, the awkwardly obtained mid-action photos for the social media likes, affirming little red notices of parenting approval. Judy Bailey herself nodding somewhere at the extent of my selfless engagement.
We've moved on of course, graduated in our own way, to music, two kinds of dance (a fancy and a plain) and karate. A low point, indeed the nadir of my frenetic activity chase, was using the ASB security camera to watch myself perform the first few steps of the karate kata – I can only imagine the alarm of the security guards viewing the footage of a 40-something woman attempting entry-level martial arts in woollen-blend leisure pants.
We've retained swimming but abandoned gymnastics; kept ballet but halted hip-hop and gained two instruments: I see your guitar and I raise you a clarinet.
The undeniably gendered activities in our daughter-and-son unit give us a symmetry and a cadence to the weeks and years: mid-year dance exams, windy November cricket musters, end-of-year shows, prizegivings, jubilant and sugary ends to things. December smells like hairspray and pine needles. February is brand-new uniform fabric and the first of the fees, payable in seven days, thank you in advance. Saturdays, no matter the season, smell of chlorine and damp togs.
We, the parents, sit in the back of cold old halls, snatching conversation in between dispensing water bottles and admonishing silliness. Imogen's mum on a Tuesday, Finn's dad on a Wednesday. Our conversation and currency are variations of how busy we are, who has back-to-back activities, who has yet another event to get to when this winds up. And just as I nod knowingly, laughing and lamenting at the busyness of it all – "it's nuts" we say, "yes, crazy" – I am mentally calculating, adding up the units of extracurricular advancement to make sure mine stack up.
As a Thinker on her OE, I once wrote home about the perils of parental fomo. I noted in anthropologically knowing emails how sad it was that South Korean children as young as 5had so much after-school tuition. Never mind that I was myself being generously reimbursed for the provision thereof. I lamented their little regimented childhoods and remembered pōhutukawa summers and mud pies and endless hours of Go Home, Stay Home as some vague constant occurrence that was somehow more wholesome and valid than this world of hagwon, achievement and deeply structured time.
They've changed childhood since I was there, for better and for worse. It is true that we spent hours in the garden, counting laps around the greenhouse and eating the tart wine grapes out of boredom (it's good to get bored, they said). It is also true that we cycled the breadth of Papatoetoe, unsupervised and without helmets, once mistakenly trying to fill a bike tyre with CNG. And we swam, again without a grown-up, in a polluted reserve, resting occasionally on little polystyrene boats when the heaviness and stench of the oil and whatever else was in the water became too much to bear.
If I'm aware of some hypocrisy, some confusion of intent, I can still celebrate the development of unexpected skills. Never mind the children – I am the one who can now fashion a fit-for-purpose ballet bun and apply stage makeup (with remaining uneasiness about the bright red lips). I can tie a karate belt and I know a clarinet reed is A Thing. I've kicked a ball in toddler soccer and held a child's hand as they balanced on a beam in gymnastics. I watched anxiously from the bleachers for a brief spell when one of them was promoted to extension gymnastics for promising 4-year olds but dropped out soon after because the Olympic-level aspirations of the whistle-wielding coach were terrifying. We hadn't yet bought the leotard.
Not every activity has resulted in my own upskilling. I once volunteered to be a 'Star Helper' for netball, anticipating nothing more taxing than chopping up the half-time fruit. Turns out 'Star Helper' meant coach – vaguely termed for inclusivity. When I protested my inexperience I was reassuringly told I'd be fine but I was hastily replaced a couple of weeks later when it became clear I wasn't being unduly modest.
Activities have provided us with a remarkable opportunity for joy. The night of the first show, I sat in the Glenfield College auditorium and out she came (early on in Act One so the 5-year-olds could be home by Act Two). There she was, second from right, wearing a cardboard box wrapped in candy cane-green Christmas paper, withan uncertain smile. One of the Nutcrackers' pre-primary ballet presents. We wept, of course. Eyes stinging with every not-very-pointy toe. It was as unremarkable as it was magical. The very paradox of parenting itself.
I framed the photo and ticked off something in my heart. The 30-year agony of being one of only a handful of unfortunates not to be picked for the Standard Four "Camp Granada" action song was somewhat soothed. I became a little less embarrassed about almost getting into the school choir in Form One. And it calmed the hot alarm of my 8-year-old self artfully laying the foundations of a sickness for the next day's Room Nine gymnastic bonanza with its terrifying vault horse. "Tomorrow," the teacher at my new school had said, "we will see what you can do."
Since I knew that was nothing, I did what I could do, which was to approximate a vague stomach bug and settle in for a day of cartoons and soup.
How much of this harried, status-anxious, middle-class shuffle is about preventing all such fearful soup days on behalf of our children? And does it matter if our motivations are murky, when the life lessons along the way are so numerous, for all of us, even the ones who can drive?
Several times there have been disappointments. I opened the auditions results announcement, heart racing, willing myself to see the familiar letters of the name – the one we gave her back when it seemed too big and she would never fit it properly. And it wasn't there, even though I looked, several times, wondering if my small phone screen was incompatible with their spreadsheet. Surely, surely, she had A Solo Part? Its absence hit the little dancer hard but we are confident she will dance her ensemble roles as Turkish Delight and Thunder with good grace and fewer costume changes.
We have been provided a ripe outlet for such meaty emotions. Disappointment (again): having to come down from the great ocean-princessy heights of Show Mermaidhood to become a Show Oyster. Envy: being an oyster when the other class are cupcakes. Envy with a sprinkle of spite: for the beautifully bunned Bensons, a family of three girls who all DID get parts … and for the best friend who just made it into soccer before the cut-off. Guilt: we didn't enrol him in soccer before the cut-off. Outrage: moving the dance classes to a fit-for-purpose studio across town and scheduling them for rush hour; cash for exam practice classes, extracted through gritted teeth and the ATM slot every Saturday. Stress: the perennially missing ballet sock and jazz shorts; the guitar pick that got stuck in the guitar; lateness, extreme and minor.
Time will tell if the 9-year-old becomes a professional ballerina, or if the 7-year-old finds discipline and calm pursuing martial arts for grown-ups. Hopefully we will never have to find out if the butterfly stroke really is the best and least fatiguing swimming style in an emergency. Qualities of team spirit and being-a-good-sport pop up occasionally. It becomes clear that all this activity is about more than the thing itself. If FOMO started it, at least in part, somewhere in among this there is inclusion, engagement, resilience and the opportunity for self-reflection.
I have found in the matrix of children's activities, as in the minefield of parenting itself, aspects of my own character that I would rather have overlooked; unresolved longings and a need to be in the centre of things. Pride is frequently interacting with ego and a sense of deficit as I chaperone these little people to adulthood. I do not consider myself to be ambitious and yet there I was, hopeful in the wings, as the purple tutu bounced the breadth of the stage to second and then first (yes FIRST) place. And, though I'd done no more for this than apply liquid eyeliner and read the emails, I rejoiced. As much as it would be more flattering to characterise myself as a reluctant stage mum, dragged unwillingly into this world of solos and opens, headpieces and slightly battered trophies, I am in fact a gleeful one. Give me more smiles of inclusion, more feeling selected, approved of, and equal to the puffer-vested villa mums.
Extract from Life on Volcanoes: Contemporary Essays (Beatnik Publishing, $25) beatnikshop.com
The new free open-air saltwater pool is already proving popular.