Rule of Life (18 page)

This process is all natural, and you should welcome it and be glad to see the back of them. Throw ’em out early, I say, and then they’ll be back all the sooner. You can’t ruffle their hair ever again or tuck them in or read them a story, but you will R U L E 8 3

find a grown-up friend comes back, and you can share a whole new relationship with them.

Hold them back, and they’ll resent you for longer. Take it personally, and they’ll take longer to return because they’ll feel guilty.

And you can show this to your teenager: Don’t give your parents too hard a time. They are feeling just as threatened by this new relationship as you are. Give them a break. They’re making it up as they go along, just as much as you are.

T H E Y H AV E TO

B R E A K F R E E B E FO R E

T H E Y CA N C O M E H O M E

AGA I N A S S O M E T H I N G

M O R E T H A N J U S T

YO U R C H I L D .

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Your Kids Will Have Friends

You Don’t Like

“Oh no, not Mickey Brown—again!” This was my mother’s cry every Saturday morning. She hated Mickey Brown. Loathed and detested him with a vengeance. Why? I have no idea. She disliked most of my friends, but she saved up all the venom for poor Mickey Brown, whom she took against before she ever met him.

Look, your children will sometimes have friends you don’t approve of. It’s natural. Live with it. As kids, we are attracted to other kids who are different from us. It’s our way of finding out. We go for the very poor kid or the very rich kid because we have no experience of it and want to know what it is like.

We go for the ruffian or the spoiled princess or the kid from a different ethnic background to ours or the ragged urchin who smells or the autistic kid or the one from the gypsy encamp-ment or the smug middle-class one whose parents are accountants.

Whatever it is, as parents, we will be tempted to disapprove.

It’s human nature, but we mustn’t. We must be supportive, encouraging, welcoming, and open. Why? Because if our child is hanging out with other kids that test our tolerance, it’s a good thing. It shows we are bringing them up not to be preju-diced or judgmental. And if they aren’t acting this way, we shouldn‘t either.

The funny thing is that Mickey Brown’s parents couldn’t stand me either. He wasn’t allowed to play with guns, and I was always smuggling them into his house when his parents R U L E 8 4

weren’t looking. I didn’t like guns particularly—and we are talking cap guns here—but I did love getting him into trouble…

One of my own children had a birthday party and insisted on inviting a kid in his class who had serious adjustment problems (what we used to call a “naughty child” but you can’t do that any more—see Rule 73). When his parents came to collect him, they were quite tearful, as it was the first birthday party this poor kid had ever been invited to. What’s that? His behavior? Oh, he was a little angel and didn’t put a foot wrong. In your dreams. He behaved true to type, and I was heard muttering, “Never again; he never comes here again,”

for many weeks afterward. No, seriously he played up a bit and wrecked the place, but no more than any of the others did. One of the others, a supposedly good kid, was caught filling one of my wellington boots with cheese sandwiches and jelly—secondhand if you get my drift.

I F O U R C H I L D I S H A N G I N G

O U T W I T H OT H E R K I D S

T H AT T E S T O U R

TO L E R A N C E ,

I T ’ S A G O O D T H I N G .

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Your Role as a Child

So, you’re a grown-up now and probably don’t recognize yourself as a child. But you are still a child, although you’ll get strange looks if you park in a “parents with children” space if you happen to go shopping with your mother or father.

Until both of your parents are passed on and you have been promoted, so to speak, you remain a child. And you have a responsibility. You have a duty—now you are a Rules Player—

to be courteous, thoughtful, patient, and cooperative toward your parents.

Yes, yes, I know they drive you mad, but from now on you have a role and it is simply this:

• To behave impeccably with them

• To look after them if that’s what they want/need

• To back off if that’s what they want/need

• To listen to them when they chatter on, without losing your patience or sighing

• To appreciate that they have had a long and hard life and gathered a lot of experience—some of which may be of some use to you—and you won’t know if you carry on shaking your head and ignoring everything they say

• To visit, write, phone, communicate more often than you think you should—but probably not as much as they think you should

• Not to bad mouth them in front of your children but to talk them up as being the greatest grandparents in the world

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• To be pleased when they come to stay and happily let them watch whatever TV program they want without complaining

And why will you do all this? Because they gave you life, brought you up. Yes, yes, I know they made mistakes along the way but you forgive them all of them (see Rule 70) and you turned out fine. Oh yes you did.

Parents deserve decent treatment when they get old and need attention and someone to listen to them and take them seriously—and they make great baby/dog sitters (and usually free as well).

YO U H AV E A D U T Y

TO B E C O U R T E O U S ,

T H O U G H T F U L , A N D

C O O P E R AT I V E TOWA R D

YO U R PA R E N T S .

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Your Role as a Parent

Gosh, this is a tough one. You have a role and it is important, but how do we define it, make it real for you, so that you can live by it, put it into practice?

If you are crazy enough to take on the role of parent, then you are signing an invisible contract with your children to give and get them the very best of everything you can. And I don’t necessarily mean material possessions. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to be all that the very best parenting requires. You will be encouraging, supportive, kind, patient, educational, loyal, honest, caring, and loving.

You will have to make sure they eat the best food for developing children. You will supply them with the best education for their talents and skills. You will aim to develop their interests in all areas and not just the ones you are keen on. You will set clear boundaries so they know what’s what, and what they can and can’t do—and with clear and acceptable levels of disci-pline should they overstep the mark. You will adjust your degree of supervision to match their age—little ones need closer supervision than big ones. You will always provide a safe haven for them to come home to—no matter how much trouble they’ve got themselves into in the big bad world outside.

You will be firm, loving, sharing, caring, and responsible. You will set them standards and be a role model to them. You won’t do or say anything you wouldn’t be proud of them knowing.

You will stand up for them, protect them, and keep them safe.

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You will stretch their imaginations and feed them with stimuli so they grow up creative, excited about the world, and raring to go.

You will approve of them, boost their self-esteem, improve their confidence, and send them out into the world literate, educated, polite, helpful, and productive members of society.

And when the time comes for them to leave the nest, you will help them pack and keep giving that support while they find their feet (or should that be wings?).

Not much then, really.

YO U R M I SS I O N ,

S H O U L D YO U C H O O S E

TO AC C E P T I T ,

I S TO B E A L L T H AT T H E

V E R Y B E S T PA R E N T I N G

R E Q U I R E S .

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RULES

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Every day we come into contact with real live human beings—

at work, commuting, in shops, out and about—people we might have met before or often complete strangers. The world is full of people with whom we interact. Those interactions, small or large, can be life-affirming or deeply unpleasant. So, what follows are a few social Rules. These aren’t set in stone.

They aren’t a revelation. They are a reminder.

We will look at some Rules for dealing with people at work.

After all, that’s where we spend an awful lot of our time, and anything we can do to make our career more successful and our working life happier, more satisfying and productive, and most of all enjoyable, surely can’t be a bad thing?

Social Rules are the fourth circle we draw around ourselves.

(The first is self, the second is partner, the third is family and friends, and the fourth is social relationships.) It’s terribly easy to see our own group, social class, or any level of community as the right one, the important one, the better-than-yours one.

But each community sees itself as that. How much better to draw that fourth circle around ourselves so that it includes people from other backgrounds, other ethnicities, other communities, so that we feel part of the big community, the human one. It is better to include more than to exclude even one. And it is very easy to exclude for whatever reason, to assume that it is a “them” and “us” situation, when actually we are all “them,” we are all “us.”

We have to treat everyone with respect, or what’s it all about?

We have to care about everyone, or the whole thing falls apart.

We have to help each other no matter who they are, because if we don’t there won’t be anyone to help us when we need it.

We have to be the first to put our hand out. Why? Because we are Rules Players.

RULE 87

We’re All Closer Than You Think

I have a friend. Not a good friend particularly, more of an acquaintance. He’s a regular sort of a guy. Runs a computer business. Has a family. Normal, regular, 9 to 5, straight, nothing unusual about him. Or so he thought.

He is English, born and bred. He used to have a bit of a rant about immigration. Went on a bit about numbers, but you always felt it was a bit deeper than that. He found out not long back that he was actually adopted. Nothing wrong with that—

plenty are—but it set him to tracing his family. Yep, you’ve guessed it. His father was a foreigner.* Now you wouldn’t know it to look at the man, but he’s only half as English as he thought he was. Interesting.

If you trace back anyone’s history, it’s going to throw up a lot of different bits from different communities and ethnic group-ings. None of us is in any way “pure.” The whole thing has been melted, shaken and stirred, and blended until any one of us would be hard-pressed to swear where we originated. Go back far enough, and we all contain something a bit different.

Apparently half of all European males carry a line that can be traced back to Genghis Khan—and he came from Mongolia.

My point? Don’t judge others, because we are all human, all drawn from the same melting pot. We are all related if you go back far enough. There is no difference. We have to accept other communities, other cultures even if they are very different from ours because the difference between us is so very little when you wipe away the veneer we all wear.

*That’s his word, by the way, not mine.

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Yes, we may wear different clothes and speak different languages and have different customs, but we all fall in love, all want someone to hold and hug, to have a family, to be happy and successful, not to be afraid of the dark, to live a long time, die a good death, to be attractive and not to get fat, old, or sick. What does it matter if we wear a suit, a sari, or a grass skirt if deep down we all cry when we are hurt, we laugh when we are joyful, and our stomachs rumble when we are hungry? The veneer can be wiped away in a second, and then we are all the same, all quite lovely and quite, quite human.

T H E D I F F E R E N C E

B E T W E E N U S I S

S O V E R Y L I T T L E W H E N YO U

W I P E AWAY T H E V E N E E R

W E A L L W E A R .

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It Doesn’t Hurt to Forgive

It’s easy to be angry. It’s easy to get riled up and mutter or to make rude gestures and swear. It isn’t so easy to be forgiving.

And I’m not talking about turning the other cheek here or any of that stuff. I’m talking about seeing it from the other person’s point of view. And being forgiving.

I had an incident recently on vacation that basically involved a very wet cyclist mouthing off because he thought someone (no, it wasn’t me) had driven too close to him and nearly forced him into a ditch. He was loud, rude, aggressive, out of order, and foul-mouthed. I tried to speak to him reasonably on behalf of the person he was being abusive to, and he gave me a mouthful as well. Then he rode off and shook his fist at me, which made his bicycle wobble and inside I laughed, a lot. I found it easy to forgive him not in any religious sense but because I could see he had chosen the wrong vacation.

He had obviously been persuaded that the cycling vacation would be fun, but it was in hilly, really hilly, countryside, and it had rained all that day. He was tired, wet, aching, and very unhappy. How could I not forgive him? If I had foolishly chosen that vacation, I too would have been grumpy, ready for a fight, fed up, touchy, and raw. I felt quite sorry for him and could sense a great deal of his unhappiness. Yes, he was in the wrong to use such foul language—especially in front of children. Yes, he was ready for a fight and intimidating and aggressive. But he was also me or you or anyone else in that situation—cold, wet, miserable. And who is to say we wouldn’t have lost our temper if we, too, had chosen the wrong vacation?