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Going Out In the Rain

rain‘Bye!’ said my 13-yr-old daughter cheerily as she prepared to leave the house to go for a swim in the outdoor pool. She opened the front door and was almost knocked back in by sheets of torrential rain.

‘You’re not wearing a coat’ I observed. ‘You’ll get wet’.

‘Oh it doesn’t matter mum. I’m going to get wet in the pool anyway’.

‘YOU ARE NOT LEAVING THIS HOUSE WITHOUT A COAT ON YOUNG LADY’.

She and my oldest son fell about laughing. They always do when I pretend to be a real parent and come out with one of the stock phrases from the Parenting Language Phrasebook.

‘But mum..!’ she spluttered.

‘I’m serious. You do not leave this house until you are wearing a suitable rain-resistant OUTER GARMENT’.

‘But I don’t mind getting wet’.

‘Well I mind you walking through the streets looking for all the world like you have a bad mother. You are a walking advertisement for my parenting skills and I will not have you proclaiming to the world that your mother doesn’t care enough to make sure you are clothed to reflect the weather conditions. Think about my credibility’.

‘Mum’ll lose her job, nobody will come to her courses anymore’ said Oldest Son helpfully.

‘Right!’ I said ‘Think about your responsibility to the family income’.

She’d got her coat on by then.

‘If it stops raining I’m going to have to CARRY IT!’ she said, rolling her eyes at the prospect of that amount of inconvenience in her life.

‘Yeah’ I said. ‘Bye darling, have a lovely time’.

‘Bye mum!’.

And off she skipped.

I wondered how the equation of ‘The Inconvenience of Carrying a Coat’ over ‘The Indignity of Wearing a Coat’ would play out in the head of a teenage girl and whether the working out of that calculation had taken her all the way to the pool. Or whether the coat had come off before she reached the end of the street…

3 Responses

  1. Dawn Frazier
    | Reply

    Ha ha! If she’s anything like I was at that age, as soon as I was out of sight I’d have taken it off. Then I would have got fed up with carrying it! But as a mother, I would make mine wear a coat, so I knew I’d done my job 🙂

    • Stephanie Davies-Arai
      | Reply

      Ha! That’s exactly it… as long as I know I’ve done my bit I’m not really bothered. I know she’ll survive anyway!

  2. Mumof2.com
    | Reply

    Love this! am having a chuckle and hoping (read wondering what it will be like) when the boys hit their teens they will see the error of their ways 😉 x

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